In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women, and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Potato Famine. Tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. Though still a young province within the British Empire, Canada would be marked permanently and in significant ways by this mass migration.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how people confronted, experienced, and remembered the famine migration. Essays consider the transatlantic voyage; the collection of donations and organization of aid; the challenges encountered by the cities of Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and Hamilton and their public debates over the impact of so many new arrivals; the accompanying problems of disease, destitution, mental illness, death and burial; the stories of orphaned children; and expressions of famine memory. The worst demographic catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe inspired generations of political writings, artistic and literary endeavours, and commemorative practices, and it was woven into narratives of Irish nationalism and the founding of Canada.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine provides a new perspective on the social outcomes of Ireland’s famine migration as well as on the resilience and adaptability of the receiving communities and the migrants themselves.

A comprehensive and groundbreaking collection, Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how Ireland’s famine migration was confronted, experienced, and remembered in a receiving country.“Canada and the Great Irish Famine provides a rich and long-overdue reassessment, offering yardsticks with which to measure the Atlantic Canadian and Western experiences.” Kevin James, University of Guelph"Leading historians illuminate the Famine Irish experience in Canada in discerning and profound ways. An enduringly important contribution." Mary C. Kelly, Franklin Pierce University and editor of Navigating Historical Crosscurrents in the Irish Atlantic: Essays for Catherine B. ShannonWilliam Jenkins is associate professor of history at York University and the current president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. He is the author of Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916.

Series One: Donald Harman Akenson, Editor
Series Two: John Zucchi, Edito

This series was launched in 1987 as a response to the growing field of ethnic and immigration history in Canada in the generation following the rise of multiculturalism. Although the original intent was to publish historical works on ethnicity in Canada, the international nature of ethnic studies has led to the series becoming truly international in its scope and authorship.

The series has therefore gone beyond Canada's borders to examine cultural history in Guyana, racial conflict in New Zealand, West Indian Blacks in Costa Rica, Syrian refugees in Sweden, and Italians in Paris and London. Books in the series have been written mainly from a historical perspective but works by specialists in geography, folklore, sociology, literature, material culture, and Indigenous studies have also been included. We firmly believe that successful and sophisticated studies in all of these fields deserve to be called to the attention of the scholarly community and all those with an interest in ethnicity, immigration, and integration.

With an extensive list of published titles, many of them award-winning, McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History demonstrates what future volumes in the series should be: original, meticulous but accessible scholarly investigations in an exciting field.