UW Press: Ireland's Farthest Shores

Ireland's Farthest Shores
Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World
Malcolm Campbell

“Campbell’s authoritative new book breaks ground in our understanding of the global Irish journey and affords a fresh aperture into transnational experience. His vast and diverse array of stories over the wide history and geographical range of the Pacific Ocean gives us a pathbreaking work of synthetic and comparative history.”
—Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne

Irish people have had a long and complex engagement with the lands and waters encompassing the Pacific world. As the European presence in the Pacific intensified from the late eighteenth century, the Irish entered this oceanic space as beachcombers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers. During the nineteenth century, economic distress in Ireland and rapid population growth on the Pacific Ocean’s eastern and western shores set in motion large-scale migration that exerted a deep political, social, and economic impact across the Pacific.

Malcolm Campbell examines the rich history of Irish experiences on land and at sea, offering new perspectives on migration and mobility in the Pacific world and of the Irish role in the establishment and maintenance of the British Empire. This volume investigates the extensive transnational connections that developed among Irish immigrants and their descendants across this vast and unique oceanic space, ties that illuminate how the Irish participated in the making of the Pacific world and how the Pacific world made them.

Malcolm Campbell is an associate professor of history and head of the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922.

“A comprehensive study of the ways that Irish-born and descended people have participated in the making of the Pacific world as we know it today, and the way the Pacific world has made them. . . . By introducing a new frame for scholars of the Irish diaspora, Campbell makes an excellent contribution to Irish historiography, and provides a strong foundation for future scholars.”
—History Australia

“A superb piece of transnational history. . . . Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.”
—Pacific Historical Review