IVe performed, with much activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Sky has occasioned. They call it America. Each of the couples, after the common involutions and evolutions, successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat.
James Boswell, Jowmit/ of a Tour to the Hebrides with
Samuel Johnson (1785)
There are today on every continent people who regard themselves as Celts or who at the very least are proud to claim a Celtic ancestry. The Celtic identity has been globalised as a result of the worldwide emigration of millions of Irish, Scottish Highlanders, Welsh, Bretons, Cornish and Manx over the last four centuries. Although it is convenient to call this remarkable mass movement the Celtic diaspora it is a moot point how many of these emigrants actually consciously regarded themselves as Celts - probably, before the later nineteenth century at any rate, very few of them indeed because the revival of Celtic identity was still confined largely to an educated elite. However, the emigrant communities formed by this movement, to a greater or lesser extent, resisted complete assimilation by their host communities and maintained family and cultural ties with their homelands. These ties ensured that as consciousness of Celtic identity was popularised in the Celtic countries in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries it would also spread widely abroad.
Although most emigrants eventually achieved significantly higher standards of living than they would have enjoyed had they stayed at home, emigration from the Celtic countries is nearly always portrayed in a negative light as enforced exile from the homeland with emigrants playing the role of victims of hunger or oppression. Although many emigrants from the Celtic countries had little choice in the matter, in reality most were not desperate refugees but modestly ambitious people who saw an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families. The negative image of the Celtic diaspora has come about mainly because of the prominent place that events such as the Irish Famine and the Highland Clearances have achieved in folk history. Traumatic events provide comfortably simple explanations for far from simple phenomena. The Celtic diaspora is often thought of as a largely nineteenth-century phenomenon, but it continued for much of the twentieth century. Emigration from Scotland actually reached its peak as late as the 1920s and it is only in the last few years, with the development of the booming ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, that Ireland has ceased to be an exporter of population.
The worldwide diaspora of Celtic peoples was a by-product of English and, to a lesser extent, French colonial expansion. In the sixteenth century the French and English watched the growth of the Spanish and Portuguese New World empires with undisguised envy and determined to emulate them if they could. Both countries made more or less disastrous attempts to found colonies in the New World in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the early seventeenth century that either enjoyed any success, the French in Canada and the Caribbean, the English in New England, Virginia and the Caribbean. By 1700 England and France had laid the foundations of global empires and the rivalry between them had become intense. Between 1689 and 1815 England (Great Britain from 1707) and France fought their ‘Second Hundred Years War’. Though it lost its 13 most populous American colonies along the way, Britain emerged victorious to enjoy a century of global dominance. Commerce and sea power contributed greatly to this success, but the key factor was England’s success as an exporter of population. In 1700 England had a colonial population approaching half a million compared with a home population of 5,000,000; France, with a home population of 20,000,000, had only 70,000 colonial subjects. This disparity became steadily greater in the course of the eighteenth century. When France ceded Canada to Britain in 1763 it had a population of only
60,000 Europeans - by this time Britain’s North American colonies had a population of 2,000,000 Europeans, fully one quarter of the home population. Emigration surged in the nineteenth century: around 17,000,000 people left the British Isles, a little over half of whom came from Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
World History
