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This book focuses on the strand of the Irish republican left which followed the ‘alien ideology’ of Soviet-inspired Marxism. Moscow-led communism had few adherents in Ireland, but Irish and British officials were concerned about the possibility that communists could infiltrate the republican movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Another concern arose for British and American observers from 1969: would the Soviets resist the temptation to meddle during the Northern Ireland Troubles and cause trouble for Britain as a geo-political crisis unfolded? The book considers questions arising from the involvement of left-wing republicans, and what became the Official republican movement, in events before and during the early years of the Troubles. Could Ireland’s communists and left-wing republicans be viewed as strategic allies of Moscow who might create an ‘Irish Cuba’? The book examines another question: could a Marxist party with a parliamentary presence in the militarily-neutral Irish state – the Workers’ Party (WP) – be useful to the Soviets during the 1980s? This book, based on original sources rather than interviews, is significant in that it analyses the perspectives of the various governments concerned with subversion in Ireland. This is a study of perceptions. The book concludes that the Soviet Union had been happy to exploit the Troubles in its Cold War propaganda, but, excepting supplying arms to the Official IRA, it did not seek to maximise difficulties whenever it could in Ireland, north or south.

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.

This is a study on the relations between Britain and Chile during the Spanish American independence era (1806–1831). These relations were characterised by a dynamic, unpredictable and changing nature, being imperialism only one and not the exclusive way to define them. The book explores how Britons and Chileans perceived each other from the perspective of cultural history, considering the consequences of these ‘cultural encounters’ for the subsequent nation–state building process in Chile. From 1806 to 1831 both British and Chilean ‘state’ and ‘non–state’ actors interacted across several different ‘contact zones’, and thereby configured this relationship in multiple ways. Although the extensive presence of ‘non–state’ actors (missionaries, seamen, educators and merchants) was a manifestation of the ‘expansion’ of British interests to Chile, they were not necessarily an expression of any British imperial policy. There were multiple attitudes, perceptions, representations and discourses by Chileans on the role played by Britain in the world, which changed depending on the circumstances. Likewise, for Britons, Chile was represented in multiple ways, being the image of Chile as a pathway to other markets and destinations the most remarkable. All these had repercussions in the early nation–building process in Chile.

After Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, a squadron of Royal Navy vessels was sent to the West Coast of Africa tasked with suppressing the thriving transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on previously unpublished papers found in private collections and various archives in the UK and abroad, this book examines the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers at the frontline of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign in West Africa. It explores their unique roles in this 60-year operation: at sea, boarding slave ships bound for the Americas and ‘liberating’ captive Africans; on shore, as Britain resolved to ‘improve’ West African societies; and in the metropolitan debates around slavery and abolitionism in Britain. Their personal narratives are revealing of everyday concerns of health, rewards and strategy, to more profound questions of national honour, cultural encounters, responsibility for the lives of others in the most distressing of circumstances, and the true meaning of ‘freedom’ for formerly enslaved African peoples. British anti-slavery efforts and imperial agendas were tightly bound in the nineteenth century, inseparable from ideas of national identity. This is a book about individuals tasked with extraordinary service, military men who also worked as guardians, negotiators, and envoys of abolition.

This work makes an original and important contribution, both to the field of British fascist/extreme Right studies and to the Ulster question. British fascist studies have to date largely ignored Northern Ireland, yet it engaged the attention of all the significant fascist movements, both pro-loyalist and pro-nationalist, from the British Fascists and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the inter-war period to Mosley’s Union Movement, the National Front and British National Party thereafter. As a recurring site of political unrest Northern Ireland should have provided a promising arena for development, however this work demonstrates the great differences between Northern Ireland and Britain that made this problematic, especially the singularity of regional concerns and outlooks and the prominence of the constitutional issue, leaving little space for external parties to develop. Nor did framing the Ulster problem in a European context, such as Mosley’s post-war concept of Europe-a-Nation prove effective. for pro-loyalist extreme Right organisations during the Troubles a common allegiance to symbols of Britishness was offset not only the distinctiveness of regional interests but by the presence of Catholics among their leaders, while their failure to develop successfully as national movements in Britain meant they had little to offer Ulster loyalists. In focussing on Northern Ireland, this study provides insights, both into the strengths and weaknesses of British fascist organisations in the UK as a whole together with how difficult the region was for British organisations to cultivate; indeed, not just the extreme Right but mainstream parties as well.

This book examines the origins of the early French women’s press and traces the evolving representations of womanhood that appear over the first ninety years of women’s journals in France. It argues that this critically neglected medium offers a key source of information on French women’s personal and political aspirations by giving us a privileged insight into their everyday lives. The early women’s press represented an important means of allowing women to access and contribute to the key cultural, intellectual and political debates which dominated French society at the time and which directly influenced their position within it. This book highlights the political, feminist potential of this medium written by women for women. Through textual analyses of different ‘generic’ subsections, whether the literary journal, the fashion journal, the domestic press or more explicitly politicised outputs, this book challenges the critical commonplaces that have been applied to the women’s press, both in France and elsewhere. As the first comprehensive study in English of these origins, this book demonstrates the political richness of this medium and the key perspectives it gives us on female self-expression and on the everyday lives of women from across the class spectrum during this key historical period.

Jimmy Reid was probably the greatest political orator of late twentieth-century Britain. He was at the forefront of the major turning points in the history of industrial relations and politics in Britain. His story is an epic one; from a poverty-stricken background in Govan, Glasgow, he became a communist at a young age, leading a national strike of engineering apprentices while only twenty, before being pitch into the national limelight as the leading spokesperson for the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-In in 1971-2. Disillusioned with communism he left the Party for Labour and the centre-left before leaving them disenchanted with New Labour to join the Scottish National Party. His political journey from Communism, to Labourism, and ultimately to Nationalism (a political life in three acts) not only speaks of the complexities of left politics after 1945, but also illuminates and facilitates our understanding of institutions and social change in post-war Britain by showing how they were understood and negotiated by a particular individual.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the influence of former Irish Parliamentary Party members and methods in independent Ireland and the place of the party’s leaders in public memory. Previous studies of the party have concluded with its dramatic fall in 1918 and shown little interest in the fate of its members thereafter. This study uses biographical data to provide the first statistical analysis of the Irish Party heritage of each political party in the independent Irish state established in 1922. Utilising a wealth of archival material, contemporary and critical writings, it asks how former Irish Party followers reacted to the changed circumstances of independent Ireland. One chapter undertakes a case study of the Irish National League, arguing that this organisation founded and led by former MPs effectively constituted a ‘legacy party’. Analysis of party politics is complemented by scrutiny of the practice of commemoration to ask how the Irish Party was remembered in a state founded on the sacrifice of the Easter Rising. This study therefore highlights significant features in the evolution of the party’s public memory and sheds new light on how figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, John Redmond and Michael Davitt were remembered.

This book examines the role of the United States of America in the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. It assesses Northern Ireland as both an international and a domestic issue in the United States during the years of conflict there. It looks at how US figures engaged with Northern Ireland, as well as the wider issue of Irish partition, in the years before the outbreak of what became known as the “troubles”. From there, it considers early interventions on the part of Congressional figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy and the Congressional hearings on Northern Ireland that took place in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, 1972. It analyses the causes and consequences of the State Department decision to ban the sale of weapons to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, before considering the development of the US role in Northern Ireland through the Reagan administration and the onset of US financial support for conflict resolution in the form of the International Fund for Ireland. It then assesses the dynamics behind the role that President Clinton assumed following his election in 1992, before examining how Presidents Bush and Obama attempted to seize on the momentum of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers, and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston, and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies, and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history. Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.

Informed by Critical Race Theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and semi-autobiographical fiction, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980. Case studies on, amongst others, the labour market, education, the family and legal system will demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and convey that racial discrimination was a public secret – everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that after independence race and colour have lost little of their power and offers suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a striking group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by exploring matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture explores the foundations of the French and Francophone world, providing cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today.

Rank and file soldiers were not ‘the scum of the earth’. They included a cross section of working-class men who retained their former civilian culture. While they often exhibited pride in regiment and nation, soldiers could also demonstrate a growing class consciousness and support for political radicalism. The book challenges assumptions that the British army was politically neutral, if privately conservative, by uncovering a rich vein of liberal and radical political thinking among some soldiers, officers and political commentators. This ranges from the Whig ‘militia’ tradition, through radical theories on tactics and army reform, to attempted ultra-radical subversion amongst troops and the involvement of soldiers in riots and risings. Case studies are given of individual 'military radicals', soldiers or ex-soldiers who were reforming and later socialist activists. Popular anti-French feeling of the Napoleonic Wars is examined, alongside examples of rank and file bravery which fostered widespread loyalty and patriotism. This contributed to soldiers being used successfully in strike breaking, and deployed against rioters or Chartist revolts. By the late Victorian period, popular imperialism was an important part of working-class support for Conservatism. The book explores what impact this had on rank and file soldiers, whilst outlining minority support for socialism.