At the turn of the twentieth century, John Creaghe, a migrant Irish doctor, played a leading role in Argentine anarchism, one of the largest anarchist, and labour, movements in South America before the First World War. Creaghe was also a well-integrated member of Argentina’s Irish community, at least until he fully embraced anarchism. His life in Argentina coincided with a period of violent settler colonial expansion that Irish Argentine elites directly and indirectly benefitted from. This paper considers Irish migrants’ views of settler colonialism in Argentina and their place within it. It also explores the development of Creaghe’s radical activism in this context, and aims to illuminate some complex aspects of Irish migrant settlement in the nineteenth century.

Niall Whelehan is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde. He holds a doctorate from the European University Institute, Florence, and before coming to Strathclyde worked at Bielefeld University and the Universities of Galway and Edinburgh. He is presently the Head of the History Subject Area at Strathclyde. His recent book Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War (2021) examined radical networks in Ireland and Irish migrant communities in Scotland, England, the United States and Argentina. His first book, The Dynamiters: Irish nationalism and political violence in the wider world, 1867-1900, appeared in 2012. His present project is a book length study of Irish migration to Argentina and the south Atlantic world more widely in the long nineteenth century. 

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