William Jenkins

Capitalists and co-operators: agricultural transformation, contested space, and identity politics in South Tipperary, Ireland, 1890–1914

Abstract Technological change in the dairy industries of western Europe in the 1880s and 1890s significantly affected the human geography of dairying regions, as new butter factories or ‘creameries’ shifted the location of butter production off the farm. By way of an Irish regional case study, the paper examines the activities of two distinct groups involved in the establishment of creameries: private capitalists and agricultural reformers. The former group was represented mainly by former butter trade personnel and England-based butter retailers, the latter by organisers and supporters of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society who promoted dairy co-operatives. Other groups in Irish rural society, such as farmers, traders and the Catholic clergy, also affected the spatial outcome. Capitalists and co-operators used rural space in different ways, with dairy co-operatives becoming place-confined and susceptible to particularistic concerns, a contrast to the ‘free hand’ commerce of their rivals. Although operating within the economic realm of the dairying industry, the spaces occupied by these creameries and their competitive activities became bound into cultural and political discourses and representations of identity in late 19th and early 20th-century Ireland. Location and price wars between private and co-operative creameries presented a lens through which wider colonial relationships of economy and cultural identity were viewed and played out, and how understandings of ‘Irish’, and ‘foreign’ became naturalised locally. In these respects, the analysis offers an attempt to link the broad economic context of agrarian change with its political and cultural spheres.

Deconstructing Diasporas: Networks and Identities among the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1870–1910

With a view to contributing to recent calls for the integration of comparative and transnational perspectives in Irish migration history, this essay describes various networks established within Irish communities in two North American cities from 1870 to 1910, and explores their role in personal and group identity formation in particular. Case studies from Buffalo and Toronto are used to underscore the importance of spatial, as well as historical, contingency in appreciating the geographies of not simply one, but several, interrelated Irish diasporas. Focusing on these cities also illuminates the difference that these networks made to the everyday lives and social landscapes of Catholics and Protestants of Irish background in the United States and Canada during a period of intensified industrialisation. As this study shows, networks socially interconnected economic, cultural, religious and political spheres for these migrants, while also linking their localities to social fields operating at wider geographical scales.

In Search of the Lace Curtain: Residential Mobility, Class Transformation, and Everyday Practice among Buffalo’s Irish, 1880—1910

This article addresses social and spatial aspects of intraethnic identity transitions within an American city between 1880 and 1910. Set within a theoretical framework that views urban spaces as social and cultural creations that in turn affect the construction of identities, it focuses on Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo, New York. Evidence is initially presented on their intergenerational residential movements within the city at a time of widening social distinctions and occupational mobility. This is then supplemented by material from more qualitative sources, chiefly a diocesan newspaper and an “urban-ethnic novel.” While Irish American popular culture drew broad lines between working-class “shanty” lifestyles and those of a more respectable “lace-curtain” middle class during this era, the Buffalo evidence demonstrates these categories to be overdrawn and of almost caricature quality. In bringing the upwardly mobile portion of the group into focus, however, the article considers not simply the occupational characteristics of moving households and their destinations but also the sources and effects of place-based imaginations within the city and the relatively neglected roles of homes as sites of socialization and identity negotiation within Catholic parishes. Pursuing these latter lines of inquiry also enriches understandings of the place of women in the process of Irish American social mobility.

Migration, Historical Geographies of

Migration has long featured as an important theme in historical–geographical studies. Over the past three decades, however, perspectives on historical migration have extended beyond quantitative analyses of numerical flows between regions and their associated ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors to embrace more comprehensively the variety of human experiences associated with these movements in different parts of the globe. The sources used and methodologies deployed in these works have become more varied as a result. While the dynamics of ‘migration systems’ currently frame macro-understandings of historical migrations, regional and local studies have illuminated the often-complex exchanges that occurred between migrants and their host societies as well as the frequently uncredited contributions that migrants made to the shaping and reshaping of rural and urban landscapes. Other fundamental consequences of migration were its contribution to the progress of capitalism globally, its role in the building of empires, and its impact on discourses of nationalism in the migrants’ places of destination. In all of these contexts, migration intersected in different ways with other socially constructed categories such as race, ethnicity, class, and religion. Yet migration was about departure as much as arrival, and many migrants retained both active and nostalgic links with their ‘homeland’ under a variety of circumstances. The context, content, and impact of these ‘diasporic imaginings’ remain an important, if as yet under-researched, avenue of inquiry for geographers.