The multiple waves of migration that poured out of Ireland during the long nineteenth century transformed the urban centres of the North Atlantic World. This spike in the transatlantic circulation of people was rooted in a profound restructuring of the region's economy, a phenomenon with important cultural implications. Irish migrants transformed the scale and demographic structure of cities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Their arrival in urban centres like Liverpool, Philadelphia, Montreal and New York ignited sectarian tensions that lingered for decades. For cities on the precipice of industrialization, these migrants became the critical mass of poorly remunerated labourers that made this economic transition possible. The impact of poverty and dislocation that ensued resulted in the social, cultural and political marginalization of Irish migrants, a reality that would take decades of intergenerational social mobility to overcome. In the meantime, Irish migrants would rely on carefully honed strategic decisions with regards to their family economies to survive in the harsh social environment of the nineteenth-century city.
While this roughly sketched narrative formed the basis of a shared experience across the North Atlantic World, the parameters of the Irish experience were rooted in the particularities of local circumstances and the unique and contentious social hierarchies and economies of the communities where they settled. With Between Raid and Rebellion, historical geographer William Jenkins provides an overview of how local conditions shaped the experience of Irish migrants to North America between the 1860s and World War I. He does so by comparing Toronto and Buffalo, two port cities in the Great Lakes that grew from trading outposts on the continent's western frontier in the early nineteenth century to thriving industrial and commercial cities by the turn of the twentieth, a transformation that owed much to successive waves of immigration from Ireland.
By comparing these two rapidly growing Great Lakes cities, Jenkins draws the reader's attention to the diversity of nineteenth-century Irish migration. The Irish arriving in Toronto tended to be Protestants from Ulster, while those who took up residence in Buffalo were almost entirely Roman Catholic. Their cultural and political experiences over this period demonstrate why, in this case, the border between Canada and the United States mattered. The Irish who landed in Toronto found themselves in a city whose public life was marked by the project of British imperialism. The political importance of demonstrating loyalty to the British empire provided Irish Protestant migrants arriving in Toronto with a familiar cultural milieu. Jenkins suggests that this same phenomena might well have prompted Catholic migrants to settle in the United States, where those who had been engaged in resistance to British imperialism in Ireland would have found comfort in the rhetoric of American republicanism.
The politics of nationalism and imperialism figure largely in Jenkins’ analysis. The study is bookended by two decisive moments that shaped the relationship between Irish emigrants of all stripes and the communities that they adopted as home during this period – the Fenian Raids of the 1860s, in which Civil War veterans of Irish descent launched a series of raids on Canadian soil as a means of attacking British interests, and the Easter Rebellion of 1916, in which Irish republicans attacked British forces in Ireland at the height of World War I. Jenkins argues throughout Between Raid and Rebellion that engagement in Irish politics remained a constant feature of Irish life in North America. Jenkins’ thorough investigation of Irish public life in the two cities reveals the centrality of politics in the lived experience of migration. In Buffalo, for example, engagement with the Democratic Party became central to the way that Irish immigrants organized their community. In Toronto, meanwhile, the Irish Protestant migrants flocked to the Orange Order for similar reasons – it became a means of making headway in the city's dominant Anglo-Protestant community. The positions that Irish emigrants in Buffalo and Toronto took on the question of Irish independence played a crucial role in their negotiation of their place in the political fabric of their adopted communities. Between Raid and Rebellion is more than a comparative study of Irish emigrant engagement with public life in Toronto and Buffalo. It places political acts in the broader context of a range of activities adopted by migrants in their efforts both to build community and achieve upward social mobility. Jenkins outlines the vibrant network of fraternal associations that Irish emigrants were involved in throughout this period, fractured as they occasionally were by political and sectarian divisions. Decisions about geographic mobility were also a crucial part of this process, and Jenkins traces social change in these two communities by looking at how Irish settled in different parts of Toronto and Buffalo as the nineteenth century continued.
Between Raid and Rebellion is an ambitious work. It combines a rigorous historical geography of Irish migrants in Buffalo and Toronto with an insightful overview of politics and public life in the two cities. It is unquestionably a ‘big book’ with regards to both scope and size. There are occasional moments when the reader feels at risk of being submerged in the details, especially when it comes to detailing the many points of convergence and divergence between Buffalo and Toronto. With that being said, Jenkins is an engaging enough writer and such occasions are few and far between. This book is an important intervention into the histories of Buffalo, Toronto and, more broadly speaking, the Irish diaspora. Perhaps its greatest contribution, however, will be in encouraging historians of immigrant communities to frame their research questions in unconventional ways. By comparing the experience of Irish immigrants in Great Lakes cities on both sides of the Canada–US border, Jenkins has raised a number of compelling questions that could spark future research on immigrant life in the city. How were cities transformed by mass migration? How did the engagement of immigrant communities in the politics of their homeland contribute to (or disrupt) the fabric of public life in their adopted home? Finally, what does the comparative approach to the historian's craft do to shed light on the impact of migration on cities and the people who live there? On this note, Jenkins’ book may prove to be an important launching pad for our continued re-thinking of the processes and politics of the city.
