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E-book Population, providence and empire : The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland
etween seven and eight million men and women left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century.1 For a country whose popula-tion has never been more than eight and a half million, that is a mind-boggling statistic, and one that might easily obscure individual emigrant lives. Historians have therefore tended to tackle Irish emigration in two disparate but complementary ways: some from the top down, with sophisticated statistical analysis, others from the bottom up, with recourse to the authentic voices of emigrants themselves. They have succeeded in breaking down that intimidating number by establishing broad patterns of who departed and when, where from and where to, and the gender and class balances amongst them. They have documented and contextualised the experiences of individual migrants as gleaned from thousands of surviving letters and memoirs.2 Consequently we know a great deal about ‘the Irish diaspora’ and its often profound impact on the countries to which it spread.
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