‘Pestilence on their backs, famine in their stomachs’

The Racial Construction of Irishness and the Irish in Victorian Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID20062991
AuthorsJim Mac Laughlin (corresponding author)
Year1999
Pages50-76
Publication date1999-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueIreland and Cultural Theory (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-27149-8_4
OpenAlexW2470131823
ISBN9781349271498
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited13

The category ‘race’ was widely used not only to ascribe social inferiority to entire sections of the global population (particularly overseas colonial societies in the nineteenth century) but also to ethnic minorities in nation-building Europe and ‘internal colonies’ on the Celtic fringe of Victorian Britain.1 As such, however, it was a category that was quite distinct from ‘ethnicity’, which signified a sense of belongingness and fostered quasi-biological constructs of peoples as self-conscious ‘imagined communities’ and nations in the metropolitan world.2 Both these categories shared a common geography and a common history. They originated in Western Europe, particularly in Britain and France, and entered European academic and political discourse in the Darwinian half of the nineteenth century. There are, nevertheless, important distinctions between them which merit more detailed treatment, which they shall receive here. These distinctions are worth bearing in mind in any discussion on the position of Irish emigrants in their host societies since the nineteenth century. For present purposes, however, it is important to contrast the ‘exclusiveness’ of ‘race’ and the ‘inclusiveness’ of ‘ethnicity’

Ancient history · Belongingness · Celtic languages · Colonialism · Emigration · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Famine · Genealogy · Irish · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law

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