Death in the Diaspora: British and Irish Gravestones
Nicholas Evans and Angela McCarthy
Abstract
As the British expanded their empire from near colonies such as Ireland to those in remote corners of the world, such as Barbados, Ceylon and Australia, they left a trail of physical remains in every parish where settlement occurred. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, gravestones and elaborate epitaphs documented identity and attachment to both colony and metropole. This collection by leading migration historians and archaeologists seeks to explore what this evidence tells the twenty-first century reader about the attachment remote British and Irish migrants had to ‘home’ in life ... More
As the British expanded their empire from near colonies such as Ireland to those in remote corners of the world, such as Barbados, Ceylon and Australia, they left a trail of physical remains in every parish where settlement occurred. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, gravestones and elaborate epitaphs documented identity and attachment to both colony and metropole. This collection by leading migration historians and archaeologists seeks to explore what this evidence tells the twenty-first century reader about the attachment remote British and Irish migrants had to ‘home’ in life and death. As well as making public statements about imperial allegiance, the bereaved carved in stone the reunification of disparate families in death. Such mourning left an important seam of material culture that has hitherto received scant comparative analysis by scholars. Focusing on nodal areas of British and Irish trade around the world, each chapter reveals the social, religious, political and personal milieu of remote migrants in all continents where the British and Irish lived, worked and ultimately died.
Keywords:
British and Irish,
migration,
diaspora,
imperialism,
identity,
culture,
cultural hybridity,
remembrance,
memorialisation,
death studies,
mourning
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474473781 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2021 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474473781.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Nicholas Evans, editor
University of Hull
Angela McCarthy, editor
Otago University
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