History: Donald Akenson is the eminent historian of the Irish diaspora.
Over the past 30 years he has published ground-breaking research on the Irish in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, which has revealed the complexity of Irish migration. Now, after all those decades of number-crunching census data around the world, Akenson has compiled what he calls a "micro-Talmud" of the Irish diaspora after the Famine. Some of the stories, he writes in a teasing preface, are accurate but "all of them are true".
This second volume wears its scholarship lightly and is alert to the weird, the ridiculous and the admirable. One of the most intriguing threads in the book is Akenson's exploration of the genealogy of religious fundamentalism in the US, whose origins he traces from the Co Wicklow clergyman, John Nelson Darby, and the Dublin Plymouth Brethren in the 1820s, right down to Billy Graham. Akenson's American gallery ranges from the forgotten founding mothers of the Kennedy dynasty, to Henry Ford and his anti-Semitic obsessions, to the McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice, starting their first restaurant in 1940. To Akenson, the brothers represent "The Revenge of the Potato People" and he concludes with the comment "the rest is medical history". However, Senator Joe McCarthy represented another form of revenge, the chance for alumni from Fordham, Marquette and other Catholic colleges to stick the boot into Princeton, Yale and other Wasp bastions of privilege.
North of the US border, Akenson stresses the influence which the Irish national school system had on the emerging Canadian system in the 1830s, so influential that Irish immigrant children found they were using the same textbooks in their new schools. Throughout the diaspora Akenson expresses particular animus against the snobberies of the Anglo-Irish and English gentry. This is illustrated in the hilarious story of Susanna Moodie and her family in Canada. In her book, Roughing It in the Bush (1852), Susanna's contempt for the starving Famine Irish arriving at Grosse Île was so rancid that even London Tory papers thought her a mite deranged. A later series of "sketches" was, Akenson notes, a virtual compendium of every Protestant canard about Irish Catholics. However, nemesis overtook poor Susanna in the shape of an Irish son-in-law (Protestant but still "paddy" in her eyes), her husband's conviction for bribery, the marriage of her two sons to mixed-race women, and finally her eviction from the family home by her ungrateful children. What wonderful material for a novel.
Akenson presents another vivid gallery of Irish emigrants in the Antipodes. He emphasises the importance of Irish women immigrants in keeping chain migration going by writing letters and sending money to their families back home. One of the most striking female immigrants, though hardly representative, was Daisy O'Dwyer Bates from Co Tipperary, who went to Australia and was thankfully saved "from having to marry one of the chinless wonders of the Anglo-Irish gentry". Her first husband was Breaker Morant and she worked as a governess, journalist, and drover before devoting the rest of her life to the study of the Aborigines and their culture.
But Akenson does not ignore the dark side of the diaspora. Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston owned 100 slaves at the time of the American Civil War and Irish sailors and shipowners were also involved in the enslavement of the Polynesians. As for the Irish who went to South Africa after the second World War, Akenson emphasises that most knew about, and were happy to work within, the apartheid system.
Omissions are inevitable in such a volume. Historians have recently begun to study the Irish in Latin America and India, and while Akenson has some references to India there are almost none to Latin America. To Irish readers the material in the specifically Irish chapters will be rather familiar, although there are some gems of observation, as when Akenson compares Trinity College in the 1930s and 1940s to an old lady gradually folding up the Union Jack and putting away the cooking sherry.
Why call the book An Irish History of Civilization? Akenson believes that "ultimately we are all of one stock, and what we learn of one of us tells us something about each of us". Akenson has consistently disputed the one-dimensional stereotypes of the Irish in the US, and the way those stereotypes have dominated the rest of the Irish diaspora, whose experiences were often radically different from America. His book reveals just how rich those experiences and grand adventures really were.
• Deirdre McMahon is a lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College Limerick. Her last book, Obligations and Responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations 1955-2005, co-edited with Michael Kennedy, was published last year by the Institute of Public Administration
• An Irish History of Civilization: Volume Two By Don Akenson Granta Books, 696pp. £30