Review: Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World, by Malcolm Campbell

Abstract

Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World is a superb piece of transnational history. For the last two decades, Malcolm Campbell’s work has stood at the vanguard of a historiographical movement to expand the focus of Irish diasporic history beyond the dominant case of the United States to consider other locations around the globe. Ireland’s Farthest Shores marks a fitting culmination to this research project.In his previous work, especially Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States, 1815–1992 (2008), Professor Campbell questioned a prevailing framework among Americanists that traced the social problems of Irish people abroad to their pre-migration culture, in particular a deeply rooted predisposition to see departure from Ireland as exile rather than opportunity. Irish immigrants struggled economically and encountered considerable animosity in the American Northeast, to be sure, yet Professor Campbell found little evidence that they did so in Australia, or for that matter in the American Midwest and West. Using tightly focused trans-regional comparative analysis, he emphasized networks of chain migration, the timing of Irish immigrants’ arrival in settler-colonial societies, the fluid and dynamic character of these societies, patterns of rural settlement, and racism against Chinese immigrants as the dominant themes in Irish American history beyond the Northeast. Exchanges of people and information between California, Australia, and New Zealand, Professor Campbell concluded, took place in the context of a Pacific Irish culture that could be analyzed through cross-regional comparisons as well as transnational interactions. This insight led to Ireland’s Farthest Shores, his broadest and most ambitious work to date.In Ireland’s Farthest Shores, Professor Campbell sets out to explain how Irish migrants shaped the Pacific World and how that world shaped them. Historians have been asking similar questions about the Atlantic World for many decades, but Professor Campbell’s geographical focus is new. He is careful and sensitive in avoiding Eurocentric myopia and bias in defining the Pacific World. Whose world was it, who defined it, and how? He is equally careful in establishing his chronological boundaries so that they do not coincide simply with the age of European incursions, even if Irish migrants were both products and agents of that process. Breaking, like his earlier work, from the nation-state paradigm that shapes many studies of immigration and ethnicity, Ireland’s Farthest Shores places its subject within the dual context of expanding empires and specific regions in the Pacific World, especially in the American West and present-day Australia and New Zealand. The first half of the book examines the process of migration, arrival, and settlement from the early sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century. The second half analyzes how Irish migrants and their descendants engaged with the host societies—principally in Anglo-Pacific regions, as that is where most of them settled—with a focus on religion, radicalism, ethnic nationalism, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and eventual integration into the host societies, in forms notably different from the dominant pattern in Irish America.Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.