The Irish Empire

The story of the Irish diaspora represents a great historical triumph of the human spirit.Ireland has a present population of about four million, but it can claim seventy million descendants worldwide-seventy million people whose families turned tragedy into triumph, by fleeing poverty, hunger, and political and religious oppression to start a new life in far-flung lands.But for the Irish emigrants the pain of exile was muted by the acquisition of wealth and influence unimaginable back in their homeland.Over centuries, successive waves of Irish emigration have established an extraordinary spread of Irish communities and power bases from London to New York, from Australia to Argentina-a phenomenon which makes it possible to talk in more than just a metaphorical sense of an Irish empire. Wherever they went, Irish emigrants took with them a strong sense of nation and ancestry, a notional empire that sustained them and shaped them in exile, despite exposure to the host culture, one which was imbued with a sentimentalized image of the society they left behind.At the same time their presence created in the minds of their hosts an idea of Ireland and 'Irishness' that has become universal.In The Irish Empire Patrick Bishop looks at why, in the last four hundred years, to be brought up in Ireland meant being prepared to leave it, an Irish cultural mindset that has persisted almost to the present day.In doing so, he examines the Irish notion of separateness that goes as far back as the ancient Irish Gaels; the impact of the nineteenth-century Potato Famine on the pattern of Irish emigration; the early colonization of America and how the Irish provided the muscle that built the infrastructure of a new nation; the transplanted tension between Protestants and Catholics in their new lands; the enduring power of the Catholic Church; and the popular identification of British oppression as the engine that drove so many Irish abroad.From the origins of the scattering of the Irish over the centuries to the dreams of a mythical home nurtured by so many Irish migrants today, The Irish Empire is a penetrating exploration of the Irish diaspora, and of how the Irish succeeded in turning exile abroad into opportunity and, finally, worldwide recognition.