In Nation and Migration, Juliet Shields seeks to break the binary paradigm that has governed studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anglophone transatlantic literature. Emphasizing the “instability of British identity as much as the formativeness of American identity” (2), she sets out “to demonstrate the robust impact of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migration on the literatures and cultures of both the early American republic and Great Britain” (4). The stakes of such a project include alterations to British and American literary history, with overlooked genres brought to the fore, and with a more nuanced understanding of how networks of book distribution, intellectual influence, and migrants shaped both nations.

The first chapter sets forth the basic terms of analysis by contrasting two approaches to British empire: the “Metropolitan English” viewpoint of Samuel Johnson, the consummate Londoner, versus the “peripheral Celtic perspective” (24) of Edmund Burke, Irish Member of Parliament who “had witnessed first-hand the injustices of British colonial rule” (25). Both figures marked similarities between North American colonists and the residents of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, although with different understandings of England's relation to those peripheries. Such contrasting visions played out after the American Revolution, when Federalists and Anti-Federalists drew opposed lessons from the complex composition of Britain as they vied for centralized versus distributed systems of government.

The following chapters explore Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as areas from which people and texts moved across the Atlantic, shaping the United States and Britain. Irish migrants figured in Gothic literature as “symbol[s] of displacement and alienation” (64). Scots acquired near-mythic status as successful migrants even as, with their dual origins in the fertile Lowlands and rugged Highlands, they activated climate-based theories of race. Wales was important as a supplier of stories, particularly the legend of Prince Madoc, who sailed to the Gulf of Mexico in the twelfth century. One of the book's most satisfying aspects, seen in a deft reading of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), is its account of how Celtic identities facilitated the selective appropriation of Native American skills and stereotypical qualities while providing ballast for hierarchies of race.

Nation and Migration builds a strong case for seeing the literatures of Britain and the United States as mutually influencing each other beyond the sway of England and especially London. The dimensions of this book are spare, but the analysis is substantive. Shields is careful in defending the boundaries of her analysis, explaining in appealing detail why she does not include Canada in her study, but closing with a brief contrast between her “archipelagic Atlantic” and a British Atlantic that would include Canada along with the West Indies.

There is little to quibble with in this insightful book, but there may have been a missed opportunity in the discussion of the 1830s as its terminus. Shields's rationale for ending there, that “the literature of migration … acquired different characteristics as settlers headed for new regions of the globe” (146), while in the United States “debates over migration were overshadowed … by profound disagreements over slavery” (11), is persuasive. This was also the decade, though, of watershed moments for the rights that Britain and the United States granted to or withdrew from nonwhite peoples. Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was incomplete, but it constituted a dramatic step away from race-based chattel slavery. The United States’ President, meanwhile, defied the Supreme Court by enacting Indian Removal, especially of the “Five Civilized Tribes” who were so named because they were farmers, Christians, and slaveholders. Both events entailed assumptions about what rights were attached to race, how race intersected with membership among the civilized, and what qualities defined race. Considering the role of Celtic migrants in the formation of national identities would also seem to entail an exploration of whiteness as it relates to a range of ethnicities in Britain versus the United States. What exactly was whiteness in this era? Such topics are large enough to merit their own books, and some of those books already exist, but the conclusion to this one might have gestured productively to a consequential set of questions about how attitudes to peoples from Britain's Celtic periphery inflected Britain's and the United States’ decisions about the literary and legal treatment of peoples understood to be not white. This is less a criticism of the book than a wish that it had signaled the broader implications of its argument, linking itself to a bigger story. The revisionist literary history presented by Nation and Migration is perceptive and compelling; it will also be influential.