It has been almost exactly four years since I attended a lively conference of Irish historians under the auspices of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Hosted by David Gleeson, one of the leading scholars of the Irish in the American South, the goal was to compare and contrast perspectives on the Irish around the Atlantic littoral. In The Irish in the Atlantic World, Gleeson has brought the best of those papers together in a single volume. This book is not, nor does it claim to be, a comprehensive textbook of all things Irish around the ocean. But taken together, this excellent collection of fourteen snapshots makes a compelling case for the continued employment of transnational and comparative perspectives on the histories of Ireland and the Irish.

In the book’s introduction, Gleeson shows how Irish history challenges the notion that the Atlantic World ended in the early 1820s with the collapse of the last European empires in the Americas. From the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Irish people have crisscrossed the ocean as colonists, soldiers, indentured servants, farmers, artisans, merchants, laborers, priests, exiles, and students. Until fairly recently, however, scholars have largely been afraid to leave the national boundaries of their academic fiefdoms. As a result, the international fluidity of the transatlantic Irish experience has been underrepresented in the literature. This book’s goal, writes Gleeson, is to show that a transnational, “Atlantic perspective is still important for understanding Ireland and its people, both those who stayed at home and those who left” (7).

To organize the fourteen essays included in the collection, Gleeson divides the book into three parts. This overview of the range of contributions focuses on one example from each part, in order to give a taste for the scope of the volume. Part 1, “Ireland in the Atlantic World,” shows how networks of technology and commerce kept the Irish in Ireland in touch with life around the ocean. Paul Townend’s chapter, “Mathewite Temperance in Atlantic Perspective,” adopts a long-overdue transatlantic angle on the wildly successful crusade against alcohol consumption led by Irish Capuchin friar Theobald Mathew in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Spawned in Ireland in 1838, the movement quickly spread through the international fingers of the Irish diaspora to convert millions of Irish men and women to the practice of total abstinence. Traditional studies have tended to examine mid-nineteenth-century temperance movements in one nation or another, so the real strength of Townend’s article lies in its ability to situate Mathew’s crusade in its international context. He demonstrates how the Irish temperance movement’s propaganda, structures, and techniques were derived in part from other successful transatlantic campaigns against alcohol and slavery. Mathewite temperance, Townend reminds us, “stands dramatic witness to the significant ability of the Atlantic social and economic system … to transmit change and transform lives” (20).

People and ideas around the Atlantic littoral also influenced Irish identity, and part 2, “Irish Identity in the Atlantic World,” investigates this phenomenon. Given my own work on nineteenth-century Irish racial discourse, every chapter in this section of the book piqued my interest. Perhaps the most unique was Lauren Onkey’s “‘Blues Coming down Royal Avenue’: Van Morrison’s Belfast Blues.” As the vice president of education and public programs at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Onkey is well positioned to examine how the “blues boom” affected youth identity in Belfast in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Conceptualizing Belfast as “a fertile transatlantic crossroads where the blues took root,” Onkey argues that Northern Irish blues performers like Van Morrison and Them fostered a “transracial alliance” between African American musicians and Northern Ireland audiences (196). She concedes that there were no explicit links between the blues and the subsequent Civil Rights movement in the North, but Onkey does make an intriguing case that both were operating from the same “imaginative impulses.” In this way, she hypothesizes, the blues may have “created a sonic space for the political creativity” of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (208).

Part 3, “The Irish in the Atlantic World,” turns the tables to show how the Irish themselves affected life in the Atlantic World. The majority of works on the Irish diaspora focus on “Green” Catholics, but Donald MacRaild’s chapter, “The Orange Atlantic,” illustrates the international connections among Irish Protestants loyal to the British Crown. MacRaild persuasively argues that “viewing colonies or nation-states as discrete and disconnected entities is unhelpful in articulating a true sense of how people such as Orangemen saw their world and made sense of it” (309). Founded in Ireland in 1795, the Orange Order quickly became a transnational association that exported and imported ideas from all four hemispheres. By illustrating transnational patterns of violence and no-popery lecturing, MacRaild demonstrates that “Orangeism is a useful surrogate for examining patterns of Irish Protestant migration around the British and Irish worlds” (320). In this way, his work fits with the current trends in the scholarship on migration that stress transplantation over uprooting.

These three examples represent only a fraction of the stimulating questions and answers posed in this excellent volume. After thinking about it for a few days, however, I felt that the book implicitly raises a bigger issue that it never directly addresses. Gleeson is certainly correct in arguing that historians need to transcend the nation-state. And the Atlantic World, for many and varied reasons, offers an excellent framework. But we never learn why this wave of scholarship should stop at the craggy shores of the Atlantic. In other words, is it time for a book titled The Irish in the World?