This study explores the effects of ethno-religious tensions on the dynamics of fraternalism in nineteenth-century Montreal. With the Irish "national society" as its focus, it relates the internal politics of the Saint Patrick's Society of Montreal to broader narratives of the cultural, intellectual and institutional evolution of civil society in Lower Canada. Beginning with an overview of sources and a discussion of early Irish migration, it proceeds to explore the effects of emerging social and political patterns and ethno-religious identities on a middle-class fraternal project from the early nineteenth-century to the dissolution of the Saint Patrick's Society in 1856.

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