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Published Oct 2022
544 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A sweeping history of Irish emigration, arguing that the Irish exodus helped make the modern world.
When people think of Irish emigration, they often think of the Great Famine of the 1840s, which caused many to flee Ireland for the United States. But the real history of the Irish diaspora is much longer, more complicated, and more global.
In On Every Tide, Sean Connolly tells the epic story of Irish migration, showing how emigrants became a force in world politics and religion. Starting in the eighteenth century, the Irish fled limited opportunity at home and fanned out across America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These emigrants helped settle new frontiers, industrialize the West, and spread Catholicism globally. As the Irish built vibrant communities abroad, they leveraged their newfound power—sometimes becoming oppressors themselves.
Deeply researched and vividly told, On Every Tide is essential reading for understanding how the people of Ireland shaped the world.
"Sweeping history of Irish migration and the many forms Irishness took in new lands...A masterwork of Irish diaspora history and immigration studies generally." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] sweeping account...Throughout, Connolly draws on an impressive array of primary evidence, including census records, personal testimonies, and popular fiction, without getting bogged down in statistics and minutiae. This is a seamless and well-rounded study of a consequential historical trend." - Publishers Weekly
"In a sweeping historical narrative studded with original insights, Sean Connolly shows how the great migration of eight million Irish people prefigured the main patterns of international migration today. Irish migrants all over the world—roughly half of whom were women—took on the work that other people wouldn't do, served the rich, built roads, canals, railroads, and cities, and endured sustained bigotry for their poverty, their manners, and their religion. They also plundered indigenous land and reaped the benefits of being white, Christian, and English-speaking in the colonized lands where they settled. Elegantly written, compellingly argued, and genuinely global in scope, On Every Tide is a great book by one of Ireland's foremost historians." - Kevin Kenny, New York University
"Stylish and lucid, this intrepid and provocative book traces in a manner at once bold and nuanced the movements of Irish migrants across space and time over the past two centuries. Sean Connolly is alert to the complex fate of victims, exploiters, soldiers of fortune, or the merely footloose who used the wide world to explore themselves. In his analysis, imaginative audacity is tempered only by sound scholarly scruple. A work of unprecedented synthesis which is magisterial and informed, yet whose challenge to conventional wisdom will generate animated debate for years to come." - Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame
This information about On Every Tide was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sean Connolly is professor of Irish history (emeritus) and visiting research fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of five books, including Contested Island and Divided Kingdom, and was general editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Born in Dublin, he lives in Belfast.
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