The Scots in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast: A Study in Elite Migration Hardcover - 2013

From the rear cover

This is the first book to deal with Scottish migration to Ireland in the modern period. It raises fundamental questions about Scottish identity and Scotland's relationships with the other constituent parts of the UK. Scottish migrant communities closest to home are those we seem to know least about. In stressing the need for greater awareness of the vital significance of short-distance mobility for Scottish migrants, and in reversing the usual emphasis on emigration from Ireland into 19th-century Scotland, this study makes a major contribution to the history of Scotland, Belfast, Ulster and Ireland, and to concepts of the geographies, boundaries and cultures of the Scottish diaspora. The migratory routes from lowland Scotland to north-eastern Ulster which were established during the 17th century were still vital in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the modern period the movement of Scots to Belfast was facilitated not by plantation, but by its place in a regional Irish Sea industrial economy where urban-industrial societies were connected by demographic and economic interaction. Industrial Belfast was a familiar, attractive and largely hospitable destination for Scottish workers and capitalists and they made telling contributions to its economic, social and cultural development. At the same time Belfast and north-eastern Ulster was home to a unique confluence of Scottish identities which meant that sections of the host community had specific preconceptions of what constituted 'Scottishness', preconceptions to which the modern migr group did not always conform. The book thus investigates how the Ulster-Scottish relationship was more nuanced than is often portrayed. Kyle Hughes is Lecturer in British History at University of Ulster, Coleraine. Cover image: 'No. 5 Ferry, Belfast Harbour, c.1890' with Harland and Wolff Shipyard in the foreground and Workman, Clark and Co. Shipyard on the opposite side of the River Lagan. From Lawrence Collection, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com