Did the Irish 'become white'? Global migration and national identity, 1842--1877

The nation went global in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Scattered to the four corners of the earth, millions of Irish Catholics fleeing the Great Famine used the worldwide popular press to articulate a new definition of nationality that, paradoxically, transcended the nation-state. Doing so allowed them to continually re-define and re-constitute disrupted links of community and power wherever they settled. Historians have struggled to fit migrant communities into traditional theories of nationalism because they have missed the critical point---that the movement and diaspora of the nineteenth-century was a defining factor, not an uncomfortable anomaly, in the development of modern nationalism.Second, that a complicated "diasporic nationalism," sitting uneasily between what theorists of nationalism have called "ethnic" and "civic" nationalism, developed amongst the Irish abroad (and, to a degree, even at home). Uniting both grammars in a coherent yet flexible discourse, diasporic nationalism was not simply about assimilating into new worlds.Third, that this transnational identity relied, for its construction and dissemination, on the existence of a globally integrated, yet uniquely Irish, network of communication in the form of the weekly popular press. By reading, writing, editing, printing, and physically transmitting individual copies of the weekly rag to friends and family around the world, the Irish created a worldwide web of print culture where, though scattered to the four corners of the world, they could virtually assemble once a week to debate and define information and identity.This dissertation makes three arguments. First, that Irish racial discourse was predicated on the dichotomy of Celts and Saxons. While the pre-migration version of this self-image depicted the Irish Celts temporally (as unchanging through time), the sheer force of the Famine-era exodus elicited the development of a new aspect that simultaneously situated them spatially (as unchanging across space). The Irish saw themselves, in other words, as a global as much as a timeless Celtic race.