Irish colonial history shaped emigrant workers’ relations with English labor

Evidence

Ireland had been transformed into a dependent sector of the English economy. Such were the historical experiences that informed Irish nationalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The psychic and intellectual characters of the Irish workers who emigrated to England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to complement the labor of the emergent English proletariat were determined to a large extent by these same events. Certainly, the social and political relations of the immigrant Irish workers with their English counterparts were severely constrained by a past consisting of almost unmitigated hostility between the interests that had come to be identified with their respective national entities. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 253