In recent years historians have joined scholars in a range of other disciplines in seeking to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to understand the human condition. Studies that compare and contrast differing patterns of settlement and responses to economic, social, and political change across boundaries and borders are becoming increasingly popular with academics and our students.

Malcolm Campbell's important new book on the experience of Irish immigrants in two “new” societies on opposite sides of the Pacific in the nineteenth century is an excellent example of the genre. This study of Irish immigrants and their families in the “new worlds” of the United States and southeastern Australia across more than a century of settlement, adaptation, many successes, and some failures is told in a deft, sensitive, and evocative style that both confirms and overturns a number of accepted truths about the Irish at home and abroad.

The book is divided into seven chapters, five of which are essentially chronological. These chapters detail the major economic, social, and political issues that confronted the two societies (and Ireland) in various decades of the century and analyze how these affected the Irish and Irish life in the host countries. The other two chapters are more localized case studies comparing and contrasting the Irish experience in Minnesota and New South Wales and in California and Eastern Australia. The book takes an overtly economic and political focus and seeks, in the author's own terms, to highlight “the importance of the timing of the onset of industrialization and urbanization and their relation to large-scale Irish immigration as critical determinants of the newcomers’ experiences” (183). While the book's major emphasis is on macropolitical and macroeconomic forces, throughout there is a pleasing series of localized studies of individuals and communities adjusting, successfully or otherwise, to their new environments. The two case studies and the different trajectories of the Irish experience remind us that we must always be wary of grand statements about national or ethnic traits, and that differences can often be as illuminating as similarities when we study peoples and nations.

The Irish experience in the much more urbanized and industrialized United States is of necessity different to that of the then largely rural and agrarian Australia. So too is the experience of the first generations of migrants to those of the second and subsequent generations. The perennial question of who gets counted when discussing an ethnic group is a subtheme throughout the book that to my mind is never satisfactorily resolved. Who actually were the “Irish” in these societies—the immigrants, their children and grandchildren, or simply anyone who claimed Irish ancestry, whether Catholic or Protestant? When does one cease to be Irish and simply become American or Australian? The Californian case study is particularly important in this regard, as it recognizes that this was a site of secondary settlement and that most of the Californian Irish were “experienced New World settlers by the time they reached the Golden State” (95), fully versed in the attitudes and attributes needed to succeed in the New World. I suspect the same was true in Australia, and that many of those who came to Victoria and later Western Australia seeking gold and land were able to draw upon many years’ experience of settler life to help them on the road to prosperity. These issues of belonging and acculturation are all hinted at throughout the book, but perhaps a more nuanced study would require a much a bigger book than the 200 or so pages here.

While comparative history is an important new field for historians, offering us the chance to break out of our national straitjackets and allowing us to challenge the sometimes parochial nature of historical enquiry, it too can easily become something of a straitjacket. The perceived need to always compare and to roundly balance word counts across the two subjects can become quite restrictive. Sometimes one subject is simply more interesting or important than the other, and sometimes the comparator might better function as a contrasting example rather than the subject of half a chapter. Chronology is of course the staple of historical writing, but perhaps a structure that emphasized theme over chronology rather than the other way around, as is the case here, might have produced a more satisfactory outcome. One possible overarching theme might have been the nature of “Irishness” in these two New World societies, and perhaps whether ethnic affiliation was (is?) more important in one society than the other. It might be that it was not so much the timing of industrialization that marked the major differences between the Irish experience in America and Australia, but perhaps more the extremes to which the market model was followed in each. It could be that in America ethnicity mattered more than in Australia because, even in the nineteenth century before the institution of a formal welfare state, economic survival depended more on the group than on the State. Australia's higher wages and more controlled labor conditions may have meant that ethnicity was a cloak worn lightly, except perhaps on those relatively rare occasions when sectarianism bubbled to the surface.

Having noted these minor criticisms, I reiterate that this highly readable study is an important addition to our understandings of nineteenth-century Irish, American, Australian, and, indeed, world history.