Violent Loyalties

Upper and Lower Canada were parts of the Irish Diaspora that presented strong representations of Irish masculinities and deeply-held beliefs about Irish manliness in the decades prior to the Great Irish Famine. While histories of the famine and of the Irish in Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to garner important attention and scholarship, the aim of this history is to relate and reposition the stories of earlier Irish male migrants to the Canadas so that their gendered, violent, and loyal experiences can take their place within the larger story of gender and migration across the Irish Diaspora. Using various case studies from the period of 1798 until 1841, this book argues that Irishmen living in the Canadas were the subject of a vast array of manly constructions and representations. Their involvement in creating, sustaining, or destroying these images and stereotypes had lasting positive and negative effects depending upon one’s position within colonial society. For those who prospered because of how Irish manliness was seen and understood, the themes of gender, violence, and loyalty were part of how they embedded themselves within the fabric of the Canadian colonies and the wider British Empire. For those who were treated poorly because of presumptions made about their manhood, their capacity for violence, or their Irish ethnicity, the Canadas could be an unfriendly and dismissive space. ‘Irishness’ in this period was experienced and defined very differently by individual Irishmen and by the collective fraternities they embodied.