:Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool‐Irish, 1800–1939

Britain, since at least the time of Daniel Defoe, has been celebrated as a thriving hybrid society. The influx of Irish people into England, Scotland, and Wales in modern times has been the largest element in the rich intermixtures. Many families in modern Britain will have more than a tincture of Irish blood, although the reverse is less likely and Ireland is notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants. Of all the cities of England, Liverpool has been the most Irish. For more than a century it was the great distributor of the Irish diaspora, and the city itself retained many Irish migrants. John Belchem, already much published in Liverpool history, devotes his energies to the Catholic Irish presence, coolly defining away the twenty-five percent of the Irish who were Protestant since they were not “ethnoculturally distinctive” (p. xii). Irish people, rich and poor, constituted a third of Liverpool's population in 1900. Belchem's deeply documented study will appeal beyond Hibernophiles to students of modern cities containing very large and often unruly minorities in their midst. Liverpool was an early example of rapid urban in-migration serving both the needs of the city and equally the needs of Ireland. Belchem is well versed in current theories of globalization and ethnicity; he concentrates on the “essential” Irish identity and its preservation. He advertises his book as an “evidence-based multi-generational study of migrant communities” (p. 23).