"Hybrid identities and migration cultures: the Irish diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries"

Work on national identity has eschewed the search for stable, underlying entities but focused attention instead on the processes through which a sense of national belonging can be achieved. But the centripetal pull involved in this creation may overlook the simultaneous centrifugal push to isolate unassimilable elements towards the periphery of, or outside, the nation. A key area in the “forging” of British national identity could also be seen to be Ireland, and the exclusion of the obstinately heterogeneous elements, Jacobites and Catholics, which would not fit into the British story of the coming into being of a historical subject. This article seeks to focus on the phenomenon of pre-1800 Irish migration to Europe within the framework of a notion of multiple identities implicit in migration.