During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries large-scale migrations affected parts of Britain and Ireland. No class, religious, regional or national group was entirely excluded from the swirl of human traffic. First the English, and then the Scots, comprised the bulk of leavers till the 1710s, with heavy migrations to Ulster, North America, and Europe. Thereafter, the Scots Irish of Ulster assumed centre stage. Along with migrants from the German territories they utterly dominated British colonial traffic till the American Revolution. Benjamin Bankhurst’s fine book, which won the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books from the American Conference of Irish Studies, deserves a place alongside classic works on Ulster by R. J. Dickson, Patrick Griffin, and Kerby Miller et al. His sustained foray into a field marked both by excellent studies and a legion of populist potboilers is both important and original. Consequently, what he has to say needs to be integrated into our thinking about the transnational people who connected Scotland, Ulster and the colonies, both demographically and culturally. In terms of its framework, this is a contribution to the study of Ulster’s Presbyterians and America’s Scots Irish within the context of the British Empire; it is also a work at home in the historiographies of the Scottish diaspora and of the colonies.
Bankhurst is primarily interested in exploring the transfer back to Ulster of news from the colonies, and how such news affected people at home. In this sense, it is one of the best books I have read for engaging with how diasporas shape homelands. Bankhurst acknowledges a debt to Vincent Morley’s study of the effect of the American Revolution on Irish politics and society though he focuses on an earlier period when the war for mastery in America (the French and Indian Wars, 1754–1763/Seven Years War, 1756–63) was affecting the homeland via regular news and propaganda. The period was one where the factual connections of Scots, Ulster and colonial populations (through family and friendship networks) were maintained and strengthened by the sheer volume of information charting the violence of the colonial frontier. In Ireland, associations were formed to support the cause in the Americas and folk fasted in the hope that an angry God would rescue a situation, which, till 1759, was marked only by bad news and defeats. Reports and pamphlets relayed the brutality faced by colonials in the Americas – colonials who included the Scots Irish. Consequent upon digesting such news, the Presbyterians of the north coalesced in a collective psychological union with their peers and families over there. In 1759, that British imperial annus mirabilis, however, New Englanders and New Yorkers, who were at the front line of conflict with the French and their Indian allies, expressed happiness and relief on hearing that Quebec had fallen. The Scots Irish in Ulster shared this joy. Why, though, did we not already know much more about this aspect of the Atlantic frame of reference for northern Protestants? Bankhurst says it is because ‘we are trained to think of the Irish as victims of British imperialism not as active agents in the maintenance and expansion of the Empire’ (p.7). He therefore tackles manifestations of pro-imperial sentiment in Ulster, whereby emigration was just one facet of a trans-oceanic connection.
Chapter 1 frames the migration patterns of the Ulster Presbyterians who headed to America, exploring patterns, reasons and timing. The second chapter explores the way the Belfast News-letter portrayed America, Empire and war. Being the only newspaper in Ulster at the time, points to one of the limitations Bankhurst faced, though he does use the Dublin press, pamphlets, and personal archives to thicken the narrative. Chapter 3 looks more generally at reportage of the Seven Years War as a religious struggle between Protestant and Catholic empires. Rituals such as fasting, we learn here, marked a transnational communalism – experiences shared by Protestants all over the Empire. Chapter 4 departs from the global war and religious identity to explore extensive reports on settler-Indian conflict contained within the Belfast News-letter. Bankhurst says these reports, which were framed in terms of Irish struggle and victimhood, were the most detailed and numerous consumed anywhere in Britain or Ireland. If this created a further line of closeness between the Scots Irish who had left for America and their kinsmen at home, these connections were cemented by two further elements. First, awareness of a transnational world that was enhanced by the fundraising efforts of those seeking to acquire funds to help dispossessed frontier folk, particularly in Pennsylvania, in the 1750s and 1760s. Secondly, by subsequent migrations to America, which remained heavy between the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, which also further enhanced this question – this time literally and personally.
The book begins and ends with John Moore, Carrickfergus man, who left for America in 1760. On arrival in the interior of New York he found a world of wild wonder, but also gloom, since it was ‘without the Lord of creation; Man’. Wonderment faded and experience took hold. Three years on, Moore was denouncing the murderous ‘Spanish spirit’ that the British evinced towards the Indians – a policy of killing and clearing that caused the current wars in the first place. For Moore, Christian duty was also being eschewed, for there was a failure to spread the gospel among the original people who were regarded with a ‘cultural chauvinism’ that nevertheless ‘did not exclude their humanity’ (p. 136).
Bankhurst’s careful, innovative study significantly extends our understanding of the nature of information and how its spreading and disseminating shaped the identities of the northern Presbyterians. We certainly have here an excellent example of the manifold localities occupied by the Scots Irish population. The Scots Irish maintained hardy connections to Scotland and developed new ones with the American colonies, and these form focal points here. As well, the same population had a curious relationship with Ulster and therefore the Plantation project, marked by both permanence and transience. This is so much the case that we find ourselves searching for different ways of assessing identity over and above a single locality or regional affiliation. Indeed, Bankhurst’s study causes us to think that, for a large portion of those who came to Ulster in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, what McBride called their ‘transatlantic subculture’ (something Bankhurst closely acknowledges) fundamentally shaped how they saw their world. But the way they saw that world changed. It was moulded by knowledge, sustained by news, and shaped by personal experience.
