Childbirth, Cash and Culture

Donald Akenson has produced many fine works on the Irish diaspora. His arguments are complex, but generally Akenson asks us to respect the Irish by avoiding stereotypes of them as an especially blighted, impoverished or sectarian people. Instead, Akenson has argued, there were only minor differences between the experiences of the Irish and of the other peoples who fanned out from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Akenson offers another version of this position in Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914. The Irish and Swedes, he suggests, were part of a general European pattern—a “larger Great Migration.” Akenson’s insistence that there was nothing exceptional about the Irish experience will surely provoke the ire of the merchants of the Great Famine industry and of cultural fantasies like St. Patrick’s Day parades or the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Furthermore, his argument about the overall similarity of Swedish and Irish migration is...