In the early 1880s, a Quaker philanthropist from Yorkshire, James Hack Tuke, visited the Connemara region in the west of Ireland. Being struck by the extreme levels of poverty, he resolved to help those most in need. This aid was manifested in an Assisted Emigration scheme from the west of Ireland in which the Tuke Fund organised and financed the emigration of over 9,000 people from the region, the majority of which settled in the United States.
Underpinned by the concept of Mutative Ethnicity, this paper seeks to identify and assess the adaptive characteristics of the immigrant experience in a variety of these Tuke communities in the United States between 1875 and 1920. In so doing, economic networks, cultural exclusivity and integration, to varying degrees, will be examined.
