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In Chapter 2 of David M. Emmons’s “Irrepressible Conflicts” Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, religious conflicts seem to show a main theme. The chapter discusses that a unified protestant religion held the British together, and even more so, their hate for Catholicism. They created for themselves an identity, and those of a different identity were outsiders, flawed, and even defective. The xenophobia was strong. The Irish Catholics received the brunt of this hatred and discrimination. At some point, the author explains that the British remapped and renamed Ireland and everything in it. This left the Irish confused and lost in a place that was so familiar to them. The Irish can be referred to as cultural immigrants in this instance because their physical surrounding are similar, but unidentifiable to the histories of their people. All I could think about when reading this was the Native Americans. They also became cultural immigrants in their own land when Europeans came and drew new territory lines, introduced a new religion, new language, and new names for places that had already existed for the Native Americans. To make matters worse, the Europeans used Natives in order to familiarize themselves with this strange land, just to familiarize the Natives with it in the near future.
Americans who came from Britain to the United States held onto their protestant beliefs and hate for Catholicism. According to Parker, Europeans believed the Celtics possessed a defective gene that predestined them for Catholic beliefs. This type of pseudoscience has been used for centuries as an attempt for imperial powers to explain their superiority. Another example would be the pseudoscience that revolved around the inferiority of African Americans in the late 1800’s. The Irish Catholics had a difficult time in America because of the strong beliefs brought from Britain. Yet, they were accepted in the United States because it proved socially and economically beneficial for Europeans. The Irish laborers were seen as god’s gift to America because their apparent inferiority as a race elevated the status of European men in America. This was also true for African slaves, who were also an inferior race, giving even the poorest white man a higher status than a black man in the period of slavery in the Americas. David Zamarripa-Shippey says that, “The central thesis in Atlantic History, Chapter 14 is that economic factors ultimately proved decisive in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century”. One of these economic factors was the proof that slaves were not actually essential to cotton production globally as previously thought. It was economic factor too, that largely determined the outcome of Irish immigrants. It was the economic need for them that allowed them to slowly move upward in American society. Civil tolerance and change in equalities has often come out of economic necessity or of lack to prove economic necessity.