In the taxonomy of drinking saloons, Irish pubs tend to be classified (in accordance with their present-day vogue) as ‘universals’ rather than ‘ethnocentric’, catering for a mixed clientele in prime thoroughfare sites. Publicans in the Liverpool-Irish enclave of the early nineteenth century, however, often chose to accentuate their ethnicity, to concentrate their efforts (in a notoriously competitive market) on the rapidly growing migrant clientele. Their methods differed from the linguistic and dietary provision – the ethnic (and autarkic) catering – undertaken by their Scandinavian, Italian, Bohemian and Polish counterparts in immigrant urban America. Without such cultural boundary markers, Irishness was asserted through promotion of various imported (or improvised) forms of convivial and bibulous male-based collective mutuality. The continuum extended from ‘Hibernian’ burial and friendly societies, legally approved and sanctioned by the Catholic Church, to secret ‘Ribbon’ branches linked to networks across the Irish Sea. The centre for collective mutuality, the Liverpool-Irish pub offered services and benefits that extended further than either the saloon-based ‘padrone’ operations on which Italians and other migrants in the new world depended, or the craft-based labour organisations (increasingly located away from the pub in specialist premises) privileged in conventional British historiography. As this study of ‘migrant’ Ribbonism shows, the pub and the publican were important proactive forces in the construction of a national or ethnic awareness among Irish Catholic migrant workers, initiating the process by which ethno-sectarian formations came to dominate popular politics in Liverpool. Nationalism took a variety of forms and meanings in Liverpool, but in most inflexions the pub was the centre of operations, the prime (but not uncontested) location for (male-based) political activity, from Ribbonite insurrectionary planning to home rule electoral canvassing.

As this study will show, nationalism – a consciousness of being Irish – was implanted through Liverpool Ribbonism, a multi-functional movement attending to the manifold needs of migrants. Support for nationalism and the extent of alcoholic consumption – both higher in nineteenth-century Liverpool than in Ireland itself– were not symptoms of dislocation and exile, but mechanisms of migrant adjustment, convivial means of mutual support. Beyond the male-based pub-centred frameworks studied here were informal female networks of mutual aid and migrant adjustment in which those who gave expected to become recipients themselves when the wheel of fortune – or the family cycle – took a turn for the worse.