AS STUDIES OF DIASPORAS, migration and identities proliferate, the need for a full-length historical survey of the Irish in Liverpool, the ‘floodgate of the old world’, becomes more urgent. The most significant ‘ethnic’ group in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pre-multi-cultural Britain, the Irish in Liverpool were also one of the most sizeable and pivotal Irish formations within the Irish diaspora. Based on extensive archival research, this book highlights the complex interplay of cultural and structural factors experienced by migrants who remained in the port of entry, ‘the nearest place that wasn't Ireland’, as they acquired a distinctive hybrid hyphenated identity as Liverpool-Irish.

At the hub of the Irish diaspora, the Liverpool-Irish cannot be studied in isolation from their migrant compatriots who continued on their travels. Remaining in the ‘last seaport of the Old World’, the Irish in Liverpool jostled in cosmopolitan (if not always harmonious) inter-cultural action alongside a range of other ‘moving Europeans’ as well as innumerable seafaring and trading groups from across the ‘black Atlantic’ and the oceans beyond. Hence, in line with the best practice commended by historians responding to the challenge of globalisation theory and transnational sociology, this study of Irish migrants offers some ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ comparative reflections: it recognises the need for migration (or mobility) history that ‘combines the diasporic or transnational with the comparative or cross-national’. Liverpool itself, proverbially a city apart in British historiography, needs to be considered in international comparative perspective. Famously described as ‘a sort of sunless Marseille’, it is perhaps best understood within the kind of socio-economic and demographic analysis applied to other world port cities characterised by dependent labour markets, long-distance in-migration and exposure to infectious disease – in this case, ‘Irish fever’.

Such comparative cross-reference notwithstanding, there is perforce an exclusionary aspect to the history of the Liverpool-Irish. This book charts the contingent historical process by which Irish and Catholic became synonymous in Liverpool, an ethno-sectarian formulation which served to exclude the considerable number of Protestant migrants, some 25 per cent or so of the total who arrived from across the Irish Sea. Recent studies of the ‘Orange diaspora’ have drawn long-overdue attention to the considerable contribution of Protestants, in particular those Irish migrants who sailed on from Liverpool, the gateway of empire, out to the colonies.