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Drawing upon a wide range of archival material and oral histories, this book analyses the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism since the outbreak of conflict in 1969. Examining more than 500 political periodicals and ephemera, ‘The age-old struggle’ assesses the complexity of republicanism’s composition, intellectual and ideological influences, and internal dynamics amid tactical and strategic reorientation. Moreover, engaging the perspectives of more than 250 republican activists, this book illuminates how the movement’s base experienced the conflict, and how it is remembered today. Through five thematic chapters, this book explains how class, place, and networks within the movement alternately sustained, complicated, and fragmented republican politics. Republicans experienced class and interacted with class politics differently. Activists spatialised and historicised their struggle locally, nationally, and internationally. At moments of crisis and transformation in their campaign, republicans mobilised in contrasting networks which either advocated or repudiated ‘new departures’. These competing milieux mediated individual interpretations of strategic change and power dynamics within republicanism. This book’s conclusions have implications for assessments of radical movements beyond Ireland, and for understanding Irish republicanism today.

Gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability. As a result, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone reveals its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. The gramophone, therefore, points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

This book brings together new research on loyalism in the 26 counties that would become the Irish Free State. Chapters cover a range of topics and experiences, from the Third Home Rule crisis in 1912 to the declaration of the Republic in 1949, including the revolutionary period, partition, independence, and Irish participation in the British armed forces and colonial service. Contributors examine who southern Irish loyalists were, what loyalism meant to them, how they expressed their loyalism, their responses to Irish independence, and their experiences afterwards. This collection offers fresh insights and new perspectives on the Irish Revolution and the first decades of southern independence, based on original archival research. It addresses issues of particular historiographical and political interest during the on-going ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including revolutionary violence, sectarianism, political allegiance and identity, and the Irish border. But rather than cease its coverage in 1922 or 1923, this book – like the lives with which it is concerned – continues into the first decades of southern Irish independence.

This interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, eleven chapters show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. Their analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, the suspicion towards scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from O’Connell to Catholic priests and W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume stresses that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from 19th-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.

During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irishmen and a much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the British armed forces, all were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. While many previous historians have relied too heavily on incomplete police recruitment figures, this book makes extensive use of the neglected internal British army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other important archival and newspaper sources. There has been a tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns, organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force, were the earliest and some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officials continually regarded it as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918. This book reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Ireland and Great Britain.

Upper and Lower Canada were parts of the Irish Diaspora that presented strong representations of Irish masculinities and deeply-held beliefs about Irish manliness in the decades prior to the Great Irish Famine. While histories of the famine and of the Irish in Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to garner important attention and scholarship, the aim of this history is to relate and reposition the stories of earlier Irish male migrants to the Canadas so that their gendered, violent, and loyal experiences can take their place within the larger story of gender and migration across the Irish Diaspora. Using various case studies from the period of 1798 until 1841, this book argues that Irishmen living in the Canadas were the subject of a vast array of manly constructions and representations. Their involvement in creating, sustaining, or destroying these images and stereotypes had lasting positive and negative effects depending upon one’s position within colonial society. For those who prospered because of how Irish manliness was seen and understood, the themes of gender, violence, and loyalty were part of how they embedded themselves within the fabric of the Canadian colonies and the wider British Empire. For those who were treated poorly because of presumptions made about their manhood, their capacity for violence, or their Irish ethnicity, the Canadas could be an unfriendly and dismissive space. ‘Irishness’ in this period was experienced and defined very differently by individual Irishmen and by the collective fraternities they embodied.

The presence and history of black people in Britain, going back centuries, has been obscured, forgotten and misunderstood. This book, which expands upon the Radio 4 series of the same name, uses new archival discoveries and fresh scholarly interpretations to recover the stories of some of the black individuals, groups and communities whose lives in England were shaped and restricted by slavery and racism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In eighteen chapters by different contributors, readers encounter black figures from the past who span the social and economic spectrum from domestic servants, actors, and mariners to those who enjoyed wealth, privilege and, in rare cases, power. In addition to investigating how black people of this era navigated the complex dynamics of white households and larger white British society, connections—economic and personal—to colonial slavery and the slave trade in America and the Caribbean are threaded throughout the book. In addition to scholarly work, many chapters examine how the lives of some of these black figures are being newly explored and interpreted in non-academic mediums such as television, film, fiction, art, and performance. Current events—including the Grenfell Towers fire and the Windrush immigration scandal—underscore the importance of recognizing Britain’s multiracial past and this book urges continued study of a historical black presence to better understand the past and affirm an expanded notion of Britishness.

This book reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast during the time of the city’s greatest growth, between the 1830s and the 1880s. Using extensive primary material including personal correspondence, memoirs, diaries and newspapers, the author draws a rich portrait of Belfast society and explores both the public and inner lives of Victorian bourgeois families. Leading business families like the Corrys and the Workmans, alongside their professional counterparts, dominated Victorian Belfast’s civic affairs, taking pride in their locale and investing their time and money in improving it. This social group displayed a strong work ethic, a business-oriented attitude and religious commitment, and its female members led active lives in the domains of family, church and philanthropy. While the Belfast bourgeoisie had parallels with other British urban elites, they inhabited a unique place and time: ‘Linenopolis’ was the only industrial city in Ireland, a city that was neither fully Irish nor fully British, and at the very time that its industry boomed, an unusually violent form of sectarianism emerged. Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast provides a fresh examination of familiar themes such as civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life, and represents a substantial and important contribution to Irish social history.

This is a comprehensive and nuanced historical survey of the death penalty in Ireland from the immediate post-Civil War period through to its complete abolition. Using original archival material, this book sheds light on the various social, legal and political contexts in which the death penalty operated and was discussed. In Ireland the death penalty served a dual function: as an instrument of punishment in the civilian criminal justice system, and as a weapon to combat periodic threats to the security of the state posed by the IRA. In closely examining cases dealt with in the ordinary criminal courts, this book elucidates ideas of class, gender, community and sanity and how these factors had an impact the administration of justice. The application of the death penalty also had a strong political dimension, most evident in the enactment of emergency legislation and the setting up of military courts specifically targeted at the IRA. As this book demonstrates, the civilian and the political strands converged in the story of the abolition of the death penalty in Ireland. Long after decision-makers accepted that the death penalty was no longer an acceptable punishment for ‘ordinary’ cases of murder, lingering anxieties about the threat of subversives dictated the pace of abolition and the scope of the relevant legislation.

James Watt (1736-1819) was a pivotal figure of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. His career as a scientific instrument maker, inventor and engineer developed in Scotland, the land of birth. His prominence as a scientist, technologist and businessman was forged in the Birmingham area. His pumping and rotative steam engines represent the summit of technological achievement in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries which led to future developments in locomotive and steamship design and mechanical engineering such as the steam hammer. This is the traditional picture of James Watt. After his death, his son, James Watt junior, projected his father’s image through commissioning sculptures, medals, paintings and biographies which celebrated his reputation as a ‘great man’ of industry and science. Though some academic appraisals have sought to move beyond the heroic image of Watt, there is still a tendency to focus on his steam technology. This collection of ten chapters breaks new ground by looking at Watt in new ways: by exploring his philosophical and intellectual background; the relevance of his Greenock environment; the influence of his wives, Peggy and Ann; Watt’s political fears and beliefs; his links with other scientists such as Thomas Beddoes, Davies Giddy, Humphry Davy, Joseph Black and James Keir; Watt and the business of natural philosophy; his workshop in the Science Museum and what it reveals; the myth or reality of his involvement with organ making and the potential of Birmingham’s Watt Papers for further exploration of his personality, family and domestic and business activities.