Globalizing Irish America: An Introduction

WHAT IS GLOBAL HISTORY? Since the turn of the twenty-first century, this well-worn historiographical address has shifted from state-of-the-field agenda to existential question. Writing in 2016 in his survey What Is Global History?, Sebastian Conrad proclaimed: “global/world history is currently booming . . . given the widespread fashion for seeing ‘globalization’ as the key to understanding the present, the need to go back in time and explore the historical origins of this process seems self-evident.”¹ Three years later, amid the resurgence of nativism in the United States, Jeremy Adelman observed that scholars of global history “seemed out of step with their times . . . the logic of global history tended to dwell on integration and concord, rather than disintegration and discord.”² Discussion over the future of the field, consequently, has shifted away from binary interpretive frameworks—macrohistory/microhistory; integration/disconnection; structures/individuals—to a more reflexive reading of the global, defined by intellectual, methodological, and empirical difference.³ These new approaches to global history, in turn, have given scholars, and their historical subjects, renewed agency to chart the significance of the worlds around them: “worldmaking.”⁴ As C. A. Bayly has adjudged, “all local, national, or regional histories, must, in important ways, be global histories.”⁵

When the Journal of American Ethnic History published a special issue on “The Irish in America and the World” in the summer of 2009, its title was, admitted then-editor John Bukowczyk, “in some ways, a misnomer, as the study of the Irish diaspora remains in its infancy.” Nevertheless, Bukowczyk was pleased to note that a number of the special issue's articles engaged with “diasporic approaches, topics, or themes or [suggested] transnational research possibilities and opportunities.” Kevin Kenny, for example, reiterated a groundbreaking argument he had published in the Journal of American History in 2003, in which he provided historians of the Irish in America with a conceptual blueprint for “[transcending] the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis.” Similarly, Timothy J. Meagher was excited to see that scholars had started exploring Irish America “in the context of a broader, worldwide Irish diaspora” but acknowledged that “the difficulty of actually doing such projects is a significant deterrent to undertaking them.” In the fifteen years since that special issue was published, several historians have written important books on the Irish overseas. Sarah Roddy, Colin Barr, and Hilary M. Carey have explored the Catholic Church as an international institution. David Brundage, Patrick Mannion, and Niall Whelehan have unearthed the transnational dimensions of Irish nationalism. Others have looked at revolution, empire, and philanthropy.⁶

Although these works have made important contributions to our understanding of the Irish around the world, they have, for the most part, been generally less willing to explicitly foreground the methods and concepts of “global history” per se. This special issue of Journal of American Ethnic History takes a new tack. It begins, in this Introduction, with a detailed exploration of the concepts of “global networks” and “global cities” before showcasing two sets of authors who each, in their own ways, employ these methodologies in their research. While we, as editors, never insisted that our authors employ a narrow set of agreed-upon definitions and delineations, we do hope that by outlining our conceptual frameworks in this Introduction, we can set the stage for some new and exciting work currently afoot in Irish Studies while also suggesting possible new pathways for those working in other fields of American ethnic and migration studies.

From the eighteenth century to the present, Irish migrants have been embedded in complicated global processes of modernity, which have shaped their lives and affected how they have interpreted their experiences. The roles of global networks and global cities in the lives of migrants are well known and yet traditional histories have tended to under-emphasize webs of communication and urban settings as factors in and of themselves. This special issue demonstrates the inseparability of Irish Americans’ thoughts and actions from the global networks and cities within which they lived.

Global Networks

As denizens of the twenty-first century, we live in a world more “connected” than any other in human history. Our commodities, ideas, and information are constantly traveling the globe on complicated systems of communication and exchange. Delivery systems transport gadgets and gifts. Stocks are bought and sold in the blink of an eye. Smartphones provide minute-by-minute updates on everything from faraway conflicts to sporting events. Although the scale and speed of these networks are unprecedented, their historical roots are in some cases quite old. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that since what we now call “globalization” entered a new phase in the 1970s, scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines have become increasingly interested in understanding the ways in which these networks have shaped human life. As sociologists Ryan Light and James Moody have recently illustrated, while the number of articles published by social scientists on topics such as inequality and democracy have grown steadily over the past fifty years, the number of new essays on social networks has outpaced them. Similarly, the “transnational turn” that has characterized historiography over the past twenty-five years has often relied on analyzing how networks (whether operating at the local, regional, national, or international levels) have regulated human activities and ideas. When the Journal of Global History was founded in 2006, it dedicated itself to providing a “scholarly outlet for comparative and connective accounts of world historical significance.” Studying networks is—in other words—everywhere these days, both as a methodological practice and as a theory for understanding human society.⁷

Although they would not have used the term “network analysis” to make sense of their lives, the coterie of radical journalists known as Young Ireland recognized the power of social connection when they founded their nationalist newspaper, the Dublin Nation, in 1842. Their campaign for Irish legislative independence was, after all, built in part on the popular excitement and organizational structures generated in the 1820s and 1830s by Daniel O'Connell's populist campaigns for Catholic emancipation and “repeal” of the Act of Union. O'Connell's bold approach had brought hundreds of thousands of people together for “monster meetings” at old battlefields, ancient forts, and other sites imbued with historical significance. Inspired by the romantic nationalism sweeping Europe at the time, the Young Irelanders aimed to build on this politicized infrastructure by creating a new reading public that was “racy of the soil” and capable of constituting, in the words of one of their readers, a “permanent monster meeting.” When the first edition of the Nation appeared on Saturday, October 15, 1842, it was eagerly snapped up, with all issues sold out by noon. Part of the paper's popularity rested on local networks of reading and reciprocal exchange. Irish society was steeped in traditions of oral history and storytelling, which were easily adapted into collective readings of weekly newspapers. One of the Nation's lead editors, Charles Gavan Duffy, later recalled how tens of thousands of people would “[listen] to the ‘Nation’ read aloud around the forge fire of an evening, or in the chapel yard on a Sunday morning.” Yet there was an international dimension to the Nation's circulation too. Within weeks of publishing their first issue, Duffy and his friends sent free copies to a number of editors, including Patrick Donahoe, who ran the Boston Pilot. Donahoe was delighted to recognize this new voice in Irish affairs. He eagerly joined the Nation in an exchange agreement (whereby editors operating with limited budgets sent each other free copies of their own papers), as he had already done with several others. The Nation was, it is clear, ensconced in networks at both the local and global levels.⁸

A number of dynamics can explain why twenty-first-century historians have become increasingly interested in unearthing the social networks of groups like the Young Irelanders. In the course of her research on networks in Britain's long eighteenth century, for example, Kate Davison identifies three key factors at play. The first is obviously the rise and widespread availability of digital technologies to historical scholars. This trend, which has precedents in cliometrics, has enabled historians to find and store data in ways that would have taken excessive amounts of time and energy in the past. For example, a quick search in digitized databases of historical newspapers demonstrates that an influential letter by Irish ethnologist John McElheran, which was published in the Dublin Nation on October 7, 1852, was subsequently reprinted in the Boston Pilot and Freeman's Journal of Sydney, Australia. Fast and affordable digital research now shows how nineteenth-century networks of print culture could give an obscure antiquarian like McElheran an international audience. Another factor in historians’ interest in social networks is the academic trend toward interdisciplinary research. Whereas historians working fifty years ago might have been perfectly content to analyze the Young Irelanders strictly as Irish versions of mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary fervor in Europe, the discovery and analysis of their networks of printed words fits with concomitant research in related fields such as anthropology, sociology, and political science. Third, the very popularity of the phrase “social network” in today's world has a role to play as well. “A society keenly aware of its own ideal of connectivity,” Davison writes, “is likely to be one interested in identifying and studying analogous relationships in the past.” This is especially true for historians of the Irish diaspora. As digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter foster connections between the Irish at home and abroad, scholars are increasingly interested in the ways in which emigrants, their friends, and families stayed in touch in the years before the Internet.⁹

It is also becoming increasingly evident, however, that it is not sufficient to merely identify the existence of (and then to describe) these historical networks. In fact, the networks themselves need to be understood as dynamics that shape the messages they are transmitting. In Reassembling the Social, his key work on actor-network theory (ANT), the French philosopher Bruno Latour insists that social relations are the result of long-standing interactions between human and non-human actors. These “actants” can be abstract (colonialism) or concrete (a stirrup) but they must, Latour playfully argues, “do something and [not] just sit there.” Latour also distinguishes between two kinds of social structures: “intermediaries,” which convey messages without impacting them, and “mediators,” which transform ideas even as they transport them. His point is that while it may be tempting to think of non-human networks as merely “intermediaries” that move information and ideas around the world, the truth is that they can often serve as mediators and thus “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.” Historians have, in recent years, begun to explore this idea in some detail. Christopher B. Balme, for example, has studied the international theatrical circuit created by Maurice E. Bandmann at the turn of the twentieth century. By tracing networks of family, business, and law, Balme illustrates “the connectivity the Bandmann Circuit exerted on the social fabric of the many communities it interacted with on a regular basis.” Similarly, Roland Wenzlhuemer analyzes the media storm surrounding the flight and capture of the suspected murderer Hawley Harvin Crippen in 1910. According to Wenzlhuemer, the very tension between the flurry of news transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean via telegraph and the relative isolation of the ship on which Crippen was a passenger affected how his attempted escape was experienced and understood. Connective networks, Wenzlhuemer concludes, “do not merely bring their endpoints in contact; they interject themselves as mediators and thereby gain a strong bearing on that which is connected.”¹⁰

This dynamic relationship between networks and their societies is also thrown into sharp relief by the Young Irelanders and the international popular press they played a role in developing in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the wake of their failed rebellion in the summer of 1848, several escaped to the United States but others were arrested and ultimately exiled to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, in southern Australia. As “gentleman prisoners,” not common convicts, the men were allowed to live freely on separate parts of the island. Friends and supporters regularly kept the men apprised of what was going on by sending them newspapers from Ireland and around the world. Indeed, one of the leaders of the prisoners, William Smith O'Brien, even boasted to his wife that he operated “a sort of circulating library” of international newspapers for his fellow prisoners and friendly neighbors. In so doing, these exiles were not alone or unique. Indeed, the circulation of second-hand newspapers was a common practice among the world-scattered Irish in the mid-nineteenth century. Men and women of all stations and classes regularly sent each other copies of their local newspapers. Sometimes they did so to share information, but at other times, the practice was merely, as one Young Ireland exile explained, “the hasty tying up of a newspaper and dispatch of it, addressed in my hand, as a message that I was living and remembering you.” Beyond such highly personal transactions, there was also a constant exchange of copies amongst the newspapers’ owners, editors, and journalists. It was along these kinds of reciprocal relations that an article by a person such as John McElheran could find its way to audiences in Ireland, America, and Australia. But, in line with Latour's notion of the mediatory nature of networks, this international circulation of newspapers did more than keep the emigrants in touch. In fact, by creating a global Irish reading public in the mid-nineteenth century, this “empire of the press” laid the intellectual basis for Irish people's self-identification as a world-scattered “global nation.”¹¹

All three articles in the “Global Networks” volume of this special issue further interrogate this relationship between messages and their mediators. They do so by considering how the words and ideas of three very different groups of Irish people (radicals, nuns, and activists) operating in three different centuries (the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth) were shaped by the very networks that transmitted them around the world. In “Petitions, Pamphleteering, and Thomas Paine: The International Networks of the Exiled United Irishmen, 1798–1800,” Muiris MacGiollabhuí considers the ways in which the process of creating and distributing print culture impacted Irish revolutionaries in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. He demonstrates that these Irish writers reinterpreted Painite cosmopolitanism in ways that deradicalized their overall message in America. Histories of Irish religious missionaries are often dominated by the words and actions of men such as priests and bishops communicating through formal channels, but Sophie Cooper's “Blue Sunglasses and New Habits: Female Correspondence Networks and the Irish Religious Diaspora” takes an entirely different and refreshing approach. By concentrating on the epistolary “whisper networks” that kept Irish nuns in touch during the mid-nineteenth century, Cooper argues that manuscript international networks fostered “a global imagination of many women” and were critical dynamics in the development of the women's religious, ethnic, and institutional communities. The third and final article in the “Global Networks” volume focuses on the transatlantic conversation that paved the way for American involvement in the peace process that brought an end to the Troubles in the north of Ireland in the late 1990s. “Networks between Ireland and the Irish American Diaspora during the Northern Ireland Peace Process” by Timothy J. White shows that late-twentieth-century changes in communication and transportation technology opened new opportunities for the exchange of fresh ideas based on shared governance and lasting peace rather than winning or losing.

Taken together, these articles offer new perspectives on “globalizing” Irish America. They do so by reminding us that transnational networks of communication and exchange never simply convey ideas and information. Through the very process of communication itself, these webs of transmission alter how humans understand the world they live in, for better or for worse. Decades after escaping Van Diemen's Land and fleeing to New York, exiled Young Irelander John Mitchel founded a new weekly newspaper called the Irish Citizen. Mitchel used the columns of his new paper to keep his largely Irish readership in touch with news and opinion from home but warned them to handle such transmissions with care. While many people on both sides of the ocean were celebrating the recent establishment of a permanent transatlantic telegraph cable, Mitchel remained suspicious of the “cable canards” sent back and forth. “The chief use of our Atlantic cable,” he told his readers in 1870, “is in the very rapid transmission of Lies.” In our twenty-first-century atmosphere of digitized fear and ignorance, Mitchel's critical perspective on the networks themselves is worth pondering.¹²

Global Cities

The correlate of ethnic nationalism in spatial terms has often been the study of the nation-state. Global histories, and their transnational approaches, challenge such a conventional teleology. “Territory,” scholars of global history have proposed, is a spatial construction, created to demarcate political control or advantage.¹³ “The history of territoriality,” Charles Maier has advanced, “must remain an investigation into the activities in which territory has a formative presence . . . territory is a decision space . . . territory has also constituted an identity space or a place of belonging.”¹⁴ The proliferation of scholarship on “territoriality,” in the context of transnational history, has led to an emerging view of “territory” as a space defined less by established political boundaries and more by contingent power flows in “a permanent dialectic.” As Lauren Benton recently concluded in a special issue of the journal Global Intellectual History, entitled “Global History and the Spatial Turn”: “the spatial relation of authority and political community will remain a key analytical lens for future research on space and political thought.”¹⁵ The concept of “territory,” as formulated by scholars of global history, belies the linear equation of “Ireland” and “sovereignty” with an island fixed in space and time.

“Global cities,” in particular, have been understood as paradigmatic to the intellectual development of “world making” in the field of global history, framing a theoretical dialectic between the conceptual spaces of the “global” and the empirical case study of the “local.” In a pioneering study on the subject, Saskia Sassen characterized “global cities” in terms of twentieth-century American globalization: “they are specific places whose spaces, internal dynamics, and social structure matter . . . global cities are not only nodal points for the coordination of processes, they are also sites of production . . . we may be able to understand the global order only by analyzing why key structures of the world economy are necessarily situated in cities.”¹⁶ Such cities, scholars of global urban history have argued, offer a window onto the world of economic transformations, transnational social processes, and international political movements, grounding theoretical formulations of the “global” in the lived realities of the “local.”¹⁷ Scholars of early twentieth-century anti-colonialism, most notably, have examined the global impacts of revolutionary movements by navigating the transnational political campaigns, social worlds, and communication networks of activists in a single “global city.”¹⁸

Locating the epicenter of an “Irish world,” consequently, is not an exercise in learned geography, but, rather, an exploration of an evolving transnational cartography. Charting the historical coordinates of “global Ireland” with accuracy requires attention to historiographical alignments of space and time. While the establishment of the Irish state in 1922, and the creation of Irish Historical Studies in 1938, has foregrounded the reading of Irish history through a national archival tradition, modern Ireland cannot be adequately understood as an “island story.”¹⁹ Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the salience of “Ireland” internationally was to be found in the experiences of Irish emigrants, most notably in the major cities of North America. Removed from the hierarchies of island-based historical narratives (and sources), a generation of internationally based scholars have examined Irish experiences in American and Canadian urban centers.²⁰ Situating these spaces at the intersection of American, Irish, and global history, in turn, would offer new transnational perspectives on the cosmopolitan dynamics of Irish ethnic nationalism. As Timothy Meagher has enjoined of future scholarship in Irish American history: “Is there a way to talk about ethnic cultural legacies in more multiethnic places, not as cultural foundations laid down early by one group and persisting in shaping local norms and customs thereafter, but as cultures made and remade by many groups over time, as the product of multiple ethnic groups fighting, borrowing, sharing, and collaborating with one another over time? In short, is there a way to rethink the melting pot, not as an iconic metaphor, but as an actual process?”²¹ “Global cities” offer invaluable spaces in which to interrogate the scope and significance of Irish American experiences across the Atlantic and beyond, from the “village” to the “world.”

Read transnationally, the Irish Revolution offers a capacious historical conjuncture within which to assess the potential import of “global cities” to modern Irish history. While the formation of a revolutionary Irish parliament at the Mansion House on January 21, 1919 has made Dublin the lieu de mémoire of the Irish Revolution in Irish historical memory, metropolitan centers such as Paris, New York, Rome, and London constituted key “identity spaces” and “decision spaces” in attempts to secure international recognition of Irish sovereignty. By the summer of 1919, Irish political authority was focused on the United States. “It is there,” Arthur Griffith advised the new Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, “that the centre of gravity of the whole political situation is for the present fixed.”²² Approval was granted by the Dáil for Irish consulates in Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Boston. On the proscription of Dáil Éireann by the British government, seven members of the revolutionary Irish parliament relocated from Dublin to New York to advance the cause of the Irish Republic in the United States. Chief among them was Dáil Éireann príomh aire (prime minister): Éamon de Valera.

On June 23, 1919, Éamon de Valera was unveiled to the world's media as the “President of the Irish Republic” at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on New York's Fifth Avenue; over a thousand journalists thronged the hotel's Astor Gallery. The New York media would prove instrumental in shaping the “presidential” profile for de Valera. Meetings in his Waldorf Hotel suite were characterized by news outlets such as the New York Times as interviews with the “President of the Irish Republic” in the “Irish White House.”²³ The international cachet attached to the position of “President of the Irish Republic” attracted the publicists of Madison Avenue. De Valera was approached by the Nation's Forum Record Label to contribute to its celebrated “Great Speeches” LP series: “thus making it possible to project the voice and words of the President into every town, village and hamlet of the United States.”²⁴ De Valera later recorded three speeches in the Nation's Forum's 38th Street studio, joining John D. Rockefeller and Franklin D. Roosevelt among America's foremost contemporary recording artists. Offers of up to $50,000, meanwhile, were made from New York directors for the motion picture rights to de Valera's life, leading to drafts of a screenplay and discussions of a potential acting career.²⁵ New York City made the “President of the Irish Republic” political box office.²⁶

The principal aim of de Valera's eighteen-month campaign in the United States was to secure recognition of the Irish Republic from American President Woodrow Wilson. The central spaces of Manhattan spotlighted public and political interest in the Irish Republic. On July 10, 1919, the Irish-American Friends of Irish Freedom hosted de Valera at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Fifteen thousand people packed the “Garden” to see the “President of the Irish Republic,” while a further ten thousand waited outside, bringing the traffic on Seventh Avenue to a standstill. De Valera's arrival on stage was met with a ten-minute standing ovation. “This,” he proclaimed, “is New York's recognition of the Irish Republic!”²⁷ His award of the Freedom of New York City on January 17, 1920, further, bestowed upon the Irish nationalist leader a political citizenship and civic respectability, which belied his revolutionary career. “It is a privileged honor, personal as well as official, to greet most cordially the President of the Irish Republic,” Major John Hylan proclaimed at City Hall; “I do so officially as Chief Executive of the City of New York . . . [which calls] on me as Mayor to convey to him the welcome, in addition to the freedom, of the metropolis of the Western World, the City of New York.”²⁸

Manhattan's melting pot of ethnic communities, radical causes, and revolutionary activists, meanwhile, embedded the Irish Question in a postwar anti-colonial counter-culture. De Valera would develop close ties with the Friends of Freedom for India during this period, exchanging political proposals with Indian nationalists such as Lala Lajpat Rai. In a February 1920 lecture later published by that organization, de Valera declared: “patriots of India your cause is identical with ours . . . you must act as we have tried to act . . . present [facts] in a form in which they can be readily grasped by the busy American.”²⁹ Irish nationalists, further, would share ideas with revolutionaries from China, Egypt, Korea, Persia, Russia, and Syria at New York's Lexington Theatre on the formation of the League of Oppressed Peoples.³⁰ New York served as a “cosmopolitan thought zone” for Irish revolutionaries in the postwar world.

The “Irish Question,” meanwhile, was foregrounded by Irish American nationalists in New York municipal politics. The Irish issue was integrated into the public spaces of Brooklyn's social and political life. Block parties in aid of the Irish Victory Fund were co-hosted by the New York–based Friends of Irish Freedom and the local Democratic Party throughout the summer, featuring sidewalk lectures and pop-up clinics on the Irish Republic.³¹ Over 100,000 Brooklyn residents participated in block parties for “Irish Night” on August 12, 1919.³² The attempts of Irish American nationalists to secure recognition for the Irish Republic in New York were grounded in the specific public spaces, and practices, of municipal politics.

Irish nationalists, moreover, were dependent on Irish American financial networks in New York. From the fall of 1919, de Valera had planned to undertake a bond drive in the United States to support the continued functioning of the underground Dáil government in Ireland. Irish American concerns that a republican “bond” drive would contravene US “Blue Sky” laws (protecting the American public from fraudulent investment), were highlighted by the Wall Street Journal: “sold as bonds, the de Valera issue is nothing more or less than a swindle.”³³ Support for the loan, however, was buttressed by the Friends of Irish Freedom's legal connections—forty thousand city solicitors endorsed the bond drive.³⁴ New York residents, consequently, subscribed $1.5 million ($20 million in today's money) to the loan. Investment in the Dáil loan, ultimately, underpinned popular support for the Irish Republic in America.

New York constituted the “swing state” to Irish nationalist success in the United States. The metropolitan institutions and media networks of Manhattan were invaluable in cultivating Éamon de Valera's presidential profile. While the “President of the Irish Republic” was unable to secure recognition of the Irish Republic in Washington, New York elevated the Irish Question to an issue of moment in the American political consciousness between 1919 and 1920. The Friends of Irish Freedom successfully integrated the Irish Question into the public spaces, social environments, and cultural practices of daily politics, while the political freedoms of New York enabled Irish revolutionaries to make anti-colonial connections in the Empire City. The financial support generated by New York subscribers to the loan, meanwhile, facilitated the continued administration of the now illegal revolutionary assembly in Dublin. The relocation of seven members of the Dáil to New York signaled the strategic transfer of Irish political authority to “the capital of the world.” New York constituted an “identity space” and a “decision space” of the Irish Republic. To paraphrase Joe Lee, former Director of Glucksman Ireland House at NYU: no New York, no America, no recognition of the Irish Republic.

Charting the evolution of Irish ethnicity, cultural formation, and political agency in the spaces of America's “global cities” will open the “Irish world” to new areas of historical enquiry. How did representations of Irish ethnicity function in the mediated spaces of the metropole? How did the competing claims of nativism and cosmopolitanism impact immigrant associational cultures? How did racial solidarities or tensions between Irish and other ethnic groups in these spaces inform wider campaigns of nationalism, imperialism, and internationalism? The three articles in this volume address these questions in diverse “global cities” across the Americas: San Francisco, Havana-Santiago-Cienfuegos, and Toronto.

In “Global San Francisco and the Irish of the New Pacific,” Malcolm Campbell tracks the migration of Irish communities toward, and settlement in, the “Golden City” from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The onset of the California gold rush established San Francisco as a “critical hub” in the rapidly modernizing oceanic space: the “New Pacific.” The Irish community, Campbell advances, served as a “charter population” in the expansion of San Francisco as a key node in the Pacific market economy. The article also explores the cultural formation, and consolidation, of Irish ethnicity in the city. Roman Catholicism, Democratic Party politics, and Irish nationalism served as the three pillars of an Irish community in San Francisco. The visibility, and racial respectability, of the Irish in San Francisco was most clearly exemplified, perhaps, by the erection of a statue to the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet in one of the city's most significant cultural spaces: Golden Gate Park. While the Irish successfully negotiated the social challenges of American nativism, the experience of the comparable Chinese population in San Francisco was that of racial “other.” Irish migrants, in some notable cases, were complicit in anti-immigrant political campaigns. In its economic orientation, cosmopolitan disposition, and ethnic alignments towards the Pacific, Campbell concludes, San Francisco was a “global city” like no other in continental America.

Margaret Brehony and Giselle González García take us in a different direction—toward the Hispanic Caribbean—in their examination of “Irish Immigrants in Colonial Port Cities of Cuba: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos.” In a wide-ranging study, the authors position these cities as important geo-strategic “gateways” to global capitalist markets in the trade of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and, most significantly, enslaved peoples, in the colonial period. Descending on Cuba from the British West Indies, the Spanish metropole, and globally connected cities in North America, Irish immigrants were key interlocutors in these processes. Drawing on extensive research in the colonial archives of Cuba, Brehony and González García profile generations of Irish Cuban planter elites who amassed enormous wealth through their investment in transatlantic trade, plantation slavery, and “white colonization strategies.” The social status of Irish immigrants in colonial Cuba, this research makes clear, was predicated on hierarchies of wealth, family genealogy, religion, race, and gender. Reading against the archival grain, the authors note that women of Irish extraction (among them Creole Irish) were also agents of economic and social development in Cuba, through the procurement of slave labor. The multi-ethnic urban spaces of Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, this study concludes, facilitated immigrant Irish investment in the transnational economic processes of slavery.

From the cosmopolitan enclaves of Cuba, William Jenkins takes us “North” to Toronto. In his article, “Locating Irishness in the ‘Belfast of this Great Dominion’: Toronto, 1841–1926,” the author traces the intersection of ethnic Irish identities in Toronto across the long nineteenth century. The city, Jenkins contends, was a space of both Irish diasporic and British imperial importance, signified by the mobilization of political loyalties from the Famine to the First World War. His study explores the social and cultural dynamics of ethnic “group making” in a “global city.” Taverns (“mini melting pots”) are identified as sites of ethnic contestation—the titles and tastes of different locales representing the identities of Irish and British constituencies respectively. Ethno-political entrepreneurs such as the newspaper editors of the Irish Canadian, meanwhile, attempted to communicate the values and virtues of Irish Catholic identity in their columns, counterbalancing the “WASP-ish” commentaries of the Toronto Globe. The city, the article concludes, ultimately, was a significant theater of British-Irish political conflict. “Ulsteria,” in particular, was a visible presence on the streets of Toronto in the form of associational culture. The platforming of Irish nationalist and unionist political leaders; the parading of Ancient Order of Hibernians and Orange Order societies; and the high-profile presentation of Irish harp and British crown at public meetings attributed Toronto a transnational significance to the Irish Question at the turn of the twentieth century, which belied its distance from the island.

Collectively, these articles offer new directions of travel in the study of Irish America. This volume on “Global Cities,” it is hoped, will encourage scholars to realize the transnational potential of their fields: American/Irish/global history. In any future study of an “Irish world,” writing on “global cities”—beyond Dublin—must be of capital importance.³⁵

Notes