Introduction

Normal seawater contains about 2660 ppm (0.028m) of sulfur in the form of sulfate. Sulfur in this form has a valence of +6, meaning that it has six fewer electrons per atom than has native sulfur, which exists (though not in the ocean) as a yellow crystalline solid. In some parts of the ocean, however, sulfur exists in the form of dissolved hydrogen sulfide, H2S(aq). Sulfur in this form has a valence of -2, meaning that it has two extra electrons compared with native sulfur, and in this form it is a deadly poison. Those parts of the ocean containing this electron-rich form of sulfur contain no living organisms other than a few kinds of bacteria. Obviously, the number of electrons that each sulfur atom has is not a question of interest only to atomic physicists. Changing sulfate-sulfur to H2S-sulfur or vice versa involves transferring electrons from one to the other, and this electron transfer is the basic element of redox (reduction–oxidation) reactions.

Many naturally occurring elements in addition to sulfur show similar variations in their number of electrons, with similarly large differences in their chemical properties. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance to us of these variations in valence, or numbers of electrons per atom. Biochemistry, for example, is in large part a study of redox reactions. Because natural environments show great variability in their redox state, we need to develop some kind of measurement, an index, which will be useful in characterizing these redox states, much as we use pH as a measurement or index to characterize the acidity of various states, or temperature as a measurement or an index of the hotness of states. In this chapter we develop two such indexes of redox state.

Electron Transfer Reactions

You may not have noticed it, but we have considered two kinds of reactions in previous chapters. In some, such as (9.3),

all elements on the right side have the same number of electrons that they have on the left side – there is no change in valence of any element. In others, such as (9.16),

there is such a change. For example, the carbon in CH4 is C4-, and the carbon in CO2 is C4+.

Introduction

The apparent dangers of transnational terrorism have dominated public discourse in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Since 9/11, the spectre of foreign militants crossing national boundaries to launch deadly attacks on civilian populations or, latterly, the threat posed by second- and third-generation ‘home-grown’ militants, radicalised by observing, supporting or participating in far-off conflicts in their ancestral homelands, occupy places of particular dread in contemporary affairs. The social processes by which this political radicalisation has been reached have been the subject of intense policy efforts, particularly amongst Muslim immigrant communities in the United Kingdom. Yet the history of the Irish diaspora in the previous two and a half centuries, especially in the Anglophone world, provides an illuminating historical example of the social causes, effects and patterns of political violence amongst a diverse immigrant community in a broad chronological framework. Of particular importance in understanding the experience of political violence within the Irish diaspora are the global connections between the Irish homeland and the host society. In recent years, the ‘transnational turn’ in Irish historiography has fruitfully been applied to both the history of the Irish diaspora and the history of Irish nationalism. There is much of value in such an approach, and the impact of political violence in Ireland upon diaspora communities will be explored in this chapter. Yet, this chapter will also emphasise the specificities of migration in understanding the disaggregated nature of diasporic involvement in and experience of political violence across the periods in question. It will argue that the host society, not ancestral animus, provides the critical framework to adequately explain the nature and experience of political violence within the Irish diaspora.

The history of Irish migration since 1740 is deeply complex, and the pace, dynamics and composition of migration varied considerably across the period. The effect of these variations on political violence will be sketched below, but it will suffice here to indicate the broad contours of the migration narrative. By the seventeenth century, as Enda Delaney has noted, the diverse pre-existing patterns of Irish migration were crystallising in a series of overlapping circles radiating outwards from ‘old’ Europe towards the New Worlds of British imperial expansion.

Temperature and Pressure Scales

Temperature

One of the early milestones in the development of thermodynamics was the demonstration that there is an absolute zero of temperature. Nevertheless there are several different temperature scales, for historical reasons. All you need to know about this is that the Kelvin scale (named after William Thompson, Lord Kelvin) has an absolute zero of 0K and a temperature of 273.16K at the triple point where water, ice, and water vapor are at equilibrium together. The melting point of ice at one atmosphere pressure is 0.01 degrees less than this, at 273.15K (Figure 3.1). The Celsius scale (named after Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer) has a temperature of 0 ◦C at the ice point (273.15 K) and absolute zero at -273.15 ◦C. This gives almost exactly 100 ◦C between the freezing and boiling points of water at one atmosphere, so water boils at 100 ◦C (373.15 K). Thus the numerical conversion between the two scales is

T K = T ◦C + 273.15

Remember that all equations in thermodynamics use the absolute or Kelvin temperature scale, so that, if you have temperatures in ◦C, you must convert them to the Kelvin scale before using them in equations. The “standard” temperature of 25 ◦C for example is 298.15 K. Standard IUPAC usage is to refer to temperatures on the Kelvin scale as so many kelvins, not degrees kelvin or ◦K. One kelvin is defined as the fraction 1/273.16 of the temperature of water at the triple point. More detail on temperature scales can be found in Anderson and Crerar (1993, Section 4.3).

Pressure

Force is measured in newtons (N), where 1 newton will give a mass of 1 kg an acceleration of 1 ms-2. Pressure is defined as force per unit area, and a pressure of 1 newton per square meter (1 Nm-2) is called 1 pascal (1 Pa). This is a very small pressure, and older, larger pressure units are still in use. The bar, for example, is 105 Pa and is almost equal to the standard atmosphere (1 atm = 1.01325 bar).

Introduction

In this chapter we will see how equilibrium thermodynamics is used in dealing with reacting systems, rather than just systems at equilibrium. Realistically, this should mean including the science of chemical kinetics with our thermodynamics, and we should also include other factors, such as fluid flow, temperature and pressure gradients, and adsorption on mineral surfaces, to build increasingly realistic models of complex natural phenomena involving the movement and chemical reactions of fluids in soils and rocks in the Earth's crust.

That is all a bit too ambitious for this book. Computational models including all these subjects are at the forefront of research in several areas. What we will attempt in this chapter is to show how equilibrium thermodynamics simulates chemically reacting systems without using kinetics. Process modeling in thermodynamics has some points in common with kinetics, because both sciences consider the problem of chemical reactions proceeding from start to finish, and both use the extent of reaction variable. But although thermodynamics uses the extent of reaction variable it does not use a real time variable, with which it is closely connected in kinetics. The use of a real time variable is what distinguishes kinetics from thermodynamics.

Quasistatic Processes

The term thermodynamic constraint is particularly appropriate for the extent of reaction variable, because for any equilibrium state of a system which does not appear on the stable equilibrium G–T–P surface, the question arises as to what prevents that system from spontaneously changing toward the stable equilibrium state. In real systems the reason is usually that there is a kinetic barrier, an activation energy which must be overcome for the change to take place (see Lambert (1998) for an entertaining discussion of this point). However, there is no term or variable in thermodynamics for activation energy. Activation energy as well as the enthalpy and entropy of activation are variables in transition state theory and reaction kinetics, but these quantities are not relevant to the present discussion.

Introduction

Ethnic groups are made in history and Irish Americans have been no exception. Irish Americans changed over time because people came to America from an Ireland which kept changing, because new generations of American-born Irish grew to maturity, and because the United States too kept changing. The American economy soared or crashed; the nation fought new wars; political parties rose and fell; and perhaps as important as anything else, new groups arrived in America and old ones were themselves remade, and thus whom Irish Americans could count as friends and whom they might suspect as enemies continued to change too. While Ireland would remain significant for most Irish Americans over the four centuries of their history, it would be an Ireland of their own imagining, an Ireland that they constructed to meet their own needs and carry their own hopes, and not necessarily an Ireland that the Irish themselves would recognise. That is because in response to changes within their own people as well as outside them in the American environment, they were, in fact, constantly constructing and reconstructing – inventing and reinventing – themselves over time too.

The Colonial and Revolutionary Eras

The first Irish came to North America in the mid-1580s as part of Walter Ralegh's colony planted on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina, but they and the colony were gone within a few years, and over the next century or more, few Irish would follow. Perhaps 3,300 Irish-born went to North America in the seventeenth century, a tiny number compared with the 147,000 English and Welsh who went there, or even the 50,000 Irish who went to the West Indies. The majority of these Irish in North America were indentured servants. Some of them had been shanghaied and shipped west after Cromwell's wars, but others, like most of the nearly 90,000 migrants who were servants from England, came of their own accord to seek new opportunities.

Immigration from Ireland to North America would be far larger in the eighteenth century. Because records of people leaving Ireland or arriving in the colonies are so fragmentary and inconsistent, we do not know exactly how much larger that migration actually was.

1750–1914

Introduction

The Irish who migrated to Britain during the long nineteenth century were by no means a homogeneous group, for their ranks contained both rich and poor, middle class and working class, skilled and unskilled, Catholics and Protestants (and unbelievers), nationalists and loyalists, and men and women from a variety of distinctive provincial rural and urban cultures in Ireland. Nevertheless, the vast majority were poor Roman Catholics, and it was their experience, often presented in monochrome as a heroic struggle against poverty and prejudice, particularly during the early Victorian years, which dominated early historical studies of the Irish in Britain. More recently, however, within a burgeoning historiography of national, regional and local studies, the reductionism of earlier studies has been challenged, and there is now a greater awareness that Irish migration and settlement during the period was a multi-generational phenomenon and that the experiences of the Irish-born and their descendants were more complex and variable in both time and place than earlier studies suggested.

Migration and Settlement

The nature and pattern of Irish migration to Britain, prompted as it was by the interaction of a combination of influences, some ‘pushing’ the Irish out of Ireland, others ‘pulling’ them from Ireland, lacked the permanence of Irish migration to North America and Australasia owing to the short distances involved and the social, economic, political and cultural links between Britain and Ireland. There was a longstanding tradition of seasonal migration from Ireland to Britain which can be traced back to the Middle Ages, and by the early eighteenth century Irish harvesters were a familiar feature of the British rural landscape, variously reaping corn, digging potatoes, collecting turnips, picking hops and draining land in order to supplement the family income and support their domestic holdings in Ireland. This tradition was to continue well into the twentieth century, although as mechanisation advanced the number of Irish harvesters progressively declined. However, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, employment opportunities for sojourning migrants were extended by the demand for casual work in mines, docks and construction industries, and these itinerant labourers and their families put down roots in ports such as London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and, more generally, in the emerging industrial towns of south Lancashire and the central lowlands of Scotland.

Something Is Missing

We mentioned in Chapter 1 that an early idea for understanding chemical reactions held that spontaneous reactions would always be accompanied by the loss of energy, because the reactants were at a higher energy level than the products, and they wanted to go “downhill.” This energy was thought to be in the form of heat, but this idea received a setback when it was found that some spontaneous reactions in fact absorb heat. Also, there are some processes, such as the mixing of gases, where the energy change is virtually zero yet the processes proceed very strongly and are highly nonreversible. Obviously, something is missing. If the ball-in-valley analogy is right, that is, if reactions do proceed in the direction of decreasing chemical energy of some kind, something more than just heat is involved.

To learn more about chemical reactions, we have to become a bit more precise in our terminology and introduce some new concepts. In this chapter, we will define certain kinds of systems, because we need to be careful about what kinds of matter and energy transfers we are talking about; equilibrium states, the beginning and ending states for processes; state variables, the properties of systems that change during reactions; processes, the reactions themselves; and phases, the different types of matter within the systems. All these terms refer to real systems, but they also refer to the equivalent things in our models of these systems. To be quite clear about thermodynamics, it is a good idea to keep the distinction in mind.

Systems

Real-Life Systems

In real life, a system is any part of the universe that we wish to consider. If we are conducting an experiment in a beaker, then the contents of the beaker is our system. For a petrologist, a crystallizing magma could be the system. In considering geochemical, biological, or environmental problems here on Earth, the choice of system is usually fairly obvious, and depends on the kind of problem in which you are interested.

Introduction

In general, economists and economic historians have focused more on production than on consumption and living conditions, with the latter being of greater interest to social historians. This chapter broadly charts some of the major changes in the patterns of Irish consumption and living conditions across the social spectrum. It is hard to grasp the scale of the change in a little more than 250 years. For example, in rural Ireland in 1750, and even still a hundred years later, much of consumption would have taken place directly through home production of food in particular, for the vast majority of the lower-income classes. For most having shelter from the elements, a place to sleep, water to drink and a basic diet would have constituted the major elements of their daily consumption. The bulk of personal consumption hinged on acquiring the bare necessities, with subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture co-existing in the economy at large with market-driven transactions.

Living standards and living conditions are clearly closely related. Living standards are usually measured in terms of average income per head of population in a society. It is incomes that allow consumption to take place. As average incomes increase though, basic consumption requirements and living conditions can be greatly extended and for small sections of the Irish population such possibilities existed even in the eighteenth century, with some experiencing lavish living conditions in terms of magnificent houses, fine clothes, personal services provided by others such as tuition for their children and housework, travel for leisure purposes and fine horse-drawn carriages. Such living conditions, though, were still a distant dream for the vast majority of the pre-Great Famine population. In the century after 1850 rising incomes meant that the consumption possibilities rose significantly across the social spectrum and included better housing, diet, education and health services. Technological innovations impact on the composition of living conditions, such as, for example, the advent of trains, then cars and telephones, and most particularly electricity. Air travel, radio, TV, dramatic changes in medical care and the internet followed later in the twentieth century.

Introduction

The scale of Irish emigration is extraordinary. Since 1700 about 10 million men, women and children have emigrated from Ireland. That number is more than twice the current population of the Republic of Ireland (4.6 million), it exceeds the population of the island of Ireland (6.5 million), and it is greater than the population of Ireland at its historical peak on the eve of the Great Famine (8.5 million). An estimated 70 million people worldwide claim some degree of Irish descent, including about 40 million Americans who list ‘Irish’ as their primary ethnicity. In approaching Irish emigration from a comparative perspective, three principal frameworks suggest themselves: comparisons by period, comparisons with other European countries and comparisons by country of destination. The first approach has the virtue of breaking down a long and complex history into distinct chronological periods, revealing the distinctive characteristics of each period and thereby countering a pervasive tendency to approach Irish emigration as an undifferentiated whole. The second approach reveals that, although the Irish famine was unique and the late nineteenth century highly distinctive, earlier and later periods of Irish emigration had much in common with their European counterparts. The third approach uncovers the nationally specific conditions that shaped the histories of Irish emigrants in their various countries of settlement abroad, once again serving as a corrective against a tendency to homogenise. This chapter will begin by considering the first two approaches together, examining the origins and processes of Irish emigration by chronological period and drawing some comparisons with other European emigrations. A brief analysis of the main patterns in the social history of the Irish abroad will follow.

Comparisons by Period and by Country of Destination

The history of Irish emigration falls naturally into six distinct periods: the long eighteenth century (to 1815), the pre-Great Famine generation (1815–45), the famine decade (1846–55), the post-famine era (1856–1921), the twentieth century after 1921, and the early twenty-first century. Emigration in these periods varied by origin, social composition, religion and destination. Relative to the size of its population, Ireland had the highest emigration rate in Europe for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, although the broad demographic patterns are clear, detailed cross-country comparisons on the origins and character of Irish emigration are lacking.

Introduction

Housing could be described as the architecture of ordinary life: ‘home’ touches all lives in some way, creeping from the personal into officialdom and public discourse. In the period from 1740, the locations, standards and style of housing inevitably changed and this chapter attempts to chart those changes. As a history of housing by its most inclusive definition – that is, social and so-called working-class housing, as well as housing for the middle classes; urban and rural, suburban and exurban housing – this chapter considers the physical frameworks for domestic life in Ireland over 270 years, effectively becoming a history of Ireland's ‘middle landscape’. Generally the study takes a formal approach – where built fabric becomes the text – and as such, it brings in research from historical and cultural geography; from architectural history; from folklore studies and archaeology; and from social and material culture history. A key source (and approach) is the Royal Irish Academy's 2011 annual proceedings, where the editors tackled a single theme for the first time, in this case ‘the domestic’, embracing an interdisciplinary narrative and an extensive chronology (from Neolithic settlements to Celtic Tiger house extensions). The other important single source was the multi-authored volume IV of Art and architecture of Ireland, entitled Architecture 1600–2000 where housing is considered not in opposition to the ‘Big House’ (see Chapter 10, above), but rather alongside that canon, and often, as its by-product. Volume IV's comprehensive approach, grappling with the built environment in all its complexities, not as a passive backdrop but as an active protagonist in social history, made for a pioneering inclusive architectural history of Ireland across centuries and borders, in which housing plays a central role.

Underpinning our present chapter is the reality that during the period, 1740–2016, housing became an important instrument in public health and social policy. By the 1920s when the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were established, the provision of labourers’ cottages and better housing for city workers were seen as the means of counteracting social agitation and as a key tool in public health reform.

Introduction

Daniel O'Connell and the Gaelic revival helped to embed the myth that Ireland was a religiously and ethnically homogenous society with a monocultural and unchanging identity. As in other countries, this process involved social exclusion, ‘the marking out of some groups of people and places as marginal in relation to the nation's core groups and places’. When accompanied by poverty, marginality was explicitly associated with subalternity; when associated with privilege, it encouraged social envy. So, minorities are deeply intertwined with questions of class and national identity.

Ironically, while such issues were not uniquely Irish, some Irish minorities were actually ‘imported’ as a consequence of other countries adopting even more rigorous exclusionary policies at various stages in their history. This is the case with the religious refugees who arrived from the end of the seventeenth century. Likewise, the stimulus for the liberalisation of Irish attitudes often came from abroad, particularly through the international organisations of which Ireland was part. Thus, Jewish toleration was decided by London in 1656. Three hundred years later the Republic was a proud member of the United Nations and ratified the Convention on the Status of Refugees. However, this had little effect on the monoculturalism which inspired both government practice and social responses. The emphasis remained on control, containment and assimilation, as the Hungarian refugees from the 1956 USSR invasion discovered to their cost. Further change came later, when, under EEC/EU law, new standards began to be incorporated into Irish law.

The Protestant Refugees

Derisively called Huguenots – a term of uncertain etymology – by their persecutors, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), French Protestants had to choose between submission and exile. About half a million opted for the latter, seeking sanctuary in other European countries. Denmark, Poland, Prussia, the Netherlands and England received substantial numbers. They comprised a cross-section of French society, from the nobility and the clergy to merchants and artisans. About five thousand eventually moved to Ireland, settling in Birr, Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny, Portarlington, Waterford and Youghal.

Introduction

By the nineteenth century there were in the region of four thousand Big Houses of varying architectural sizes, shapes and styles in Ireland. These were the country residences of Irish landlords, the focal points of extensive landed estates, the rental incomes of which provided for their building, embellishment and annual upkeep. They had their origins in the tower houses and medieval fortified castles of the Norman era, but their architectural form had evolved over time to the semi-fortified structure of the seventeenth century, to eventually the defenceless houses which characterised the apogee of Big House construction in the eighteenth century. The most significant building boom of c.1720–40 came in the aftermath of the defeat of the Catholic threat in the wars of 1689–91, the introduction of the penal laws after 1695, and the culmination of the social engineering process that resulted in the almost complete transfer of landownership out of native Catholic hands to Protestant landlords. The construction of defenceless Classical and Palladian mansions by the emergent wealthy and landed elite signalled their confidence in the future stability and economic prosperity of the country, but it was also a powerful and symbolic signifier of their specific social and political ambitions and agendas of future control and power.

Over time, the physical prominence of the Big House on the Irish landscape became imprinted on the collective identity of the dispossessed who, especially after the emergence of Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century, denounced them as foreign and imperial, the manifestations of colonial oppression and decadence. Their high demesne walls (more characteristic of aristocratic mansions), built to offer privacy and security, were deemed further symbols of the exclusive elitist culture of those who lived behind them. The popular appeal of this orthodox nationalist representation of the Big House worked to the detriment of future understandings of the true complexities of its role in the Irish countryside. It is only in recent years that the nuances which governed the relationships between landlords and tenants have been revealed.

What is social history? In this introduction we refrain from offering an analytical and systematic concept of the discipline for two main reasons. The first is that this book is a collective endeavour and the authors whom we have gathered here reflect a variety of approaches and methods. We affirm and celebrate such plurality of voices, believing that there is much to learn from listening to one another, for the age of the ‘grand theories’ is happily over. The second reason is that, for us, social history – and particularly this book – is not a point of arrival, but a point of departure. It is open-ended, it is a programme, a springboard for the rewriting of the history of the Irish. It is methodologically eclectic, open to cognate disciplines (geography, sociology, demographics, economics), and, if not histoire totale, it is at least interested in grasping the totality of human experience in society. Its totalising quest of meaning is a project, rather than a narrative.

Why do we start with the central decades of the eighteenth century? Though any chronological starting point would be more or less arbitrary, 1740 is significant for Ireland's social and economic history because it marked the beginning of a devastating famine. It was a catastrophe. It is not as well remembered as the one which started in 1845, partly because it did not have any immediate or long-term political consequences and was never incorporated into the grand narrative of national struggle. However, it deeply affected large numbers of people in a more direct and drastic way than political events such as the 1800 Act of Union.

Irish historiography, whether ‘nationalist’, ‘revisionist’ or ‘post-revisionist’, has traditionally been dominated by a concern for political history, with a focus on the national question. To an extent, the latter has affected also the way historians have explored social and economic topics, for example by stimulating excellent research on the Great Famine, emigration and the Land Wars. While there has long been a parallel scholarly interest in less obviously ‘political’ issues – a tradition spearheaded by historians such as Connell, Cullen and Akenson – it is only in recent decades that there has been a substantial development in the study of a wider range of social and economic formations and phenomena.