Irish national identity was incomplete and shaped by dispersion, not territory.

Evidence

It would have been most difficult to be both precise while treating the subject at an appropriate length. One hopes, however, that such conveniences have not escaped the reader’s attention, given the consistent emphases here on ethnic and cultural conservaticisms and their importance. Though Ireland is but a small island, the integration of the Irish peoples was by no means an accomplished fact by the time of the Great Famine and the major emigrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century. … Indeed, some students of the emigrations are quite specific as to the regions, local cultures, dialect groups, and occupations from which successive emigrants were drawn and how these particularities influenced historical movements. The Irish peoples had been in the process of achieving a national identity and a national culture since the Norman-led conquest. They had not done so when the time came for the mass relocation that has marked their collective history for the past 200 years. Theirs is, then, a national identity deeply marked by the Irish dispersion. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the peculiar character of Irish national identity as one formed in diaspora, a useful corrective to territorial models of nationalism.
• XREF: Resonates with Black Atlantic identity formation - a diaspora-shaped national consciousness - a key theme the reader should track across the book.