I researched this book in the glum depths of the pandemic. I wrote the first draft as the world started to move again, splintered by the cabin fever and desocialisation of lockdown. Although history is solitary work, historians work in communities of friends and families and colleagues. For this book, especially in its early days, the ways I accessed that community were not through the same conviviality and talks and drinks and lunch on the benches outside the archives that marked anything I had ever done before. I’m grateful to the many people who helped me to write this book, in weird and enervated times.
At Robinson, thanks to Duncan Proudfoot (who has moved on to another shop), who championed my first book for a general audience and was game to take a chance on a second one, and to Emma Smith and Tamsin English, who saw the project through to publication. At Basic, Brian Distelberg and Michael Kaler provided superb guidance, editorial feedback, and notes. Kelley Blewster provided adroit copyediting, catching all kinds of embarrassing mixed metaphors and orphan quotation marks. Melissa Veronesi, Annie Chatham, and the production team at Basic did excellent work turning a manuscript into a book. Before I turned the book over to its publishers, I had the pleasure to work again with Pamela Haag, an editor with a gift for cutting through the tics, ellipses, and clichés of academic writing. I am very grateful to my agent, Michael Dean, of Andrew Nurnberg Associates, for his enthusiasm, support, and guidance on this and other projects. My research assistant at the University of Toronto, Jasmine Martin, did spectacular work, digging through digital mountains of documents and handwritten folktales, finding patterns and chasing down leads (my favourite: a parallel Jasmine noticed between Sinéad O’Connor’s 1998 song “Skibbereen” and motifs in famine folktales).
My colleagues in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and in the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies have been very supportive. Rafael Gomez and Kevin Lewis O’Neill provided professional and material support, including some timely releases from teaching. Special thanks to my colleagues in the CIRHR for sharpening my understanding of political economy and tolerating my suspicion of the quantitative social sciences. I presented versions of the argument of this book at the Princeton University Eighteenth-Century Seminar and the Queen’s University Department of History. Thanks to those audiences for their questions and feedback on earlier versions of the talk, and to David Bell, Sandra den Otter, and Amitava Chowdhury for invitations. Thanks, as always, to Linda Colley for her support, mentorship, and unequalled historical insight. Thanks also to Christopher M. Florio and Imaobong Umoren for their generosity in reading and commenting on the whole manuscript. Any remaining errors are mine (they were also mine to begin with, to be fair).
My father, Lawrence Scanlan, died in 2019; my mother, Elizabeth Therrien, in 2021. They are missed, and I hope they would have liked this book. Thanks to them, and especially to Larry for the scraps of lore and Irish Catholic diasporic cultural pathologies that, in part, prompted me to begin this project. In a decade working on British antislavery, I had seen enough references to Irish labourers in writings on the Caribbean after emancipation to know there was a knot to unpick, but it was my father’s death that pushed me to start a book on Ireland and the British Empire. Thanks also to my brother, Sean Scanlan, for giving me access to his Ancestry account; we were both struck by the same morbid curiosity about our forefathers and foremothers as our parents ailed and died. Sean’s research on our family history made me think more about my own place within the history of the British Empire.
Above all, thanks to my family. To Catherine Evans, the sharpest historian under our roof, for her love, for the wonderful life we have together, and for shaping and refining this book in uncountable ways (including the title!). I started out as a historian of the eighteenth century, and Catherine has pulled me into the Victorian world—and very few people understand the neuroses of the Victorians as well as she does. Thanks finally to my children, Rafe and Moira Jane. Rafe’s potato questions set me on all kinds of unexpected paths, and I treasure his effervescence, curiosity, and openheartedness. Moira, adorable, sweet, and precocious (and tyrannically two as I write this), came into our lives while this book was in the offing. The world is an uncertain place, but our house is full of love. This book is for them.