Americana: The Americas in the World, around 1850 by James Dunkerley. Verso, 642pp, £29 in UK
`What do you call a Northsider in court?" Answer: "The defendant."
By way of reminding ourselves of the dark underbelly of this sort of humour, the social realities which lie behind it, a reading of the entire transcript of John Mitchel's trial, and the account of his subsequent career given in this massive work by James Dunkerley, Director of the The Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, is a useful corrective to some of the snarling sounds currently being directed at asylum seekers in this country from the ranks of the Celtic Tiger's whelps.
There was a day when for "Northsider", one read "Irishman" and the whelps' ancestors' existence fell under the tutelage of the informer, the judge, the warder, the policeman, the poor house beadle and the hangman.
That said, I hasten to add that Dunkerley's work is not solely about the Irish. In fact his canvas, depicting the Americas in the 1850s, is so gigantic that it is difficult to summarise with justice just exactly what it is about. I was reminded of J.J. Lee's, Ireland, 1912-1985. Americana, has all the pyrotechnical, self-conscious brilliance of Lee's book, the same energy and scholarship. But, like Lee's work, it is not a straightforward, beginning middle and end linear history. In order to derive the full benefits of either work, one would require some overall grasp of the subject before diving into their pages.
Dunkerley veers between continents and concepts, between space and time. His motivation in writing the book was to "emulate and honour" a revered teacher, the late Gwyn A Williams, a professor of history University of York, who espoused the "two nations" theory of the British and Irish Communist party.
Evidently his support for the proposition that "Ireland is really an American country located in the wrong continent" is rooted in those far off BICO days before The Wall Came Down and Marx was "definitively banished" by the intellectuals. For the purposes of this book Dunkerley decided to " `return to the sources', not only to the foundational texts of Marxism but also to the man himself and the times in which he lived. What was it that had been lost?"
As he says himself, the resultant text is "something of a detective story spun out of a return to the Americas of the mid-nineteenth century." It is also a very long detective story (642 pages). Perusing it I was occasionally tempted to paraphrase Cyril Connolly who remarked that in every fat man there was a thin one striving to get out.
In this case the thin book would have been a fairly simple history of an 11-year period in the 19th century, dealing with developments in the Americas (although not with Canada) and their roots on this side of the Atlantic. But the fat book does have merits and its attractions, owing something to Dunkerley's own, obviously engage out-going personality which comes through in his writing.
On slavery Dunkerley proves yet again the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words with a horrific illustration of what the lash did to one black slave's back, but he also, through intelligent selection of quotations, reminds us of a time when, along with the Irish and the blacks, women were an oppressed fact the abolitionist Frederick Douglas wrote: "many who have made the discovery that negroes have some rights as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be convinced that woman is entitled to any".
Dunkerley's book contains all sorts of quirky little associations of ideas and concepts. For example, there are sections entitled: "http://wetness, women, whitman. Feminist forepieces. Singing Sex. Marx and Bolivar."
But for most Irish readers the major focus of interest will be the contribution of the Irish situation and Irish personalities to the development of the Americas of the 1850s.
We encounter Cobden or Carlisle on the Corn Laws and famine; the O'Connor family's part both in the rise of Chartism and the development of Latin America; the role of Father Fahey, and of innumerable, long forgotten Westmeath farmers in the growth of Argentina in particular, or the tragic story of John Riley and the San Patrico Battalion during the Mexican-US hostilities which resulted in the creation of modern California and Texas, we are reminded of the Irish contribution to Americana - an often bitter sweet contribution, as the careers of John Mitchel and Francis Meagher on opposite sides in the American Civil War underlines.
These were no petty people and this is no petty book. Apart from its text, it is noteworthy for the excellence of its illustrations, both maps and photographs, and its first class index. To the question: Would it make suitable reading for the holidays? " this reviewer would reply: "Yes, (pause) provided you have plenty of them."
Tim Pat Coogan's latest book, Wherever Green is Worn: a study of the Irish Diaspora is published by Hutchinson