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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.

Based on extensive primary sources, this study brings historical perspective and context to debate about race and immigration in Britain. The focus is on Liverpool and its pioneer but problematic race relations as the once proud Edwardian cosmopolitan ‘second city of empire’ transmogrified into the shock city of post-colonial, post-industrial Britain. As the gateway of empire, the great seaport of Liverpool attracted significant numbers of ‘coloured’ colonials long before the arrival of West Indian migrants on the ‘Empire Windrush’ in 1948. Their legal status as British subjects in the ‘motherland’ notwithstanding, Liverpool's ‘coloured’ community of transients, sojourners and settlers were the first to discover that ‘There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack’. Their struggle against prejudice and discrimination serves as foundation narrative in the making of the black British, an identity obscured and misunderstood by conventional concentration on recent immigration. The warnings emanating from Liverpool's troubled pattern of race relations went unheeded in Britain's uneasy transition to a multi-cultural society, as the empire ‘came home’ following decolonisation. Instead of serving as object lesson, Liverpool was by this time marginalised and denigrated, condemned as an internal ‘other’ at odds with positive developments elsewhere in enterprise Britain. For agencies seeking to regenerate and rehabilitate the city, measures to address racial discrimination and disadvantage were seldom a priority (or even included) in a succession of ill-fated projects to tackle multiple deprivation. In the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981, once proud ‘cosmopolitan’ Liverpool stood condemned for its ‘uniquely horrific’ racism.

The riots that broke out in various British port cities in 1919 were a dramatic manifestation of a wave of global unrest that affected Britain, parts of its empire, continental Europe and North America during and in the wake of the First World War. During the riots, crowds of white working-class people targeted black workers, their families, and black-owned businesses and property. One of the chief sources of violent confrontation in the run-down port areas was the ‘colour’ bar implemented by the sailors' trades unions campaigning to keep black, Arab and Asian sailors off British ships in a time of increasing job competition. The book sets out the economic and social causes of the riots and their impact on Britain's relationship with its empire and its colonial subjects. The riots are also considered within the wider context of rioting elsewhere on the fringes of the Atlantic world as black people came in increased numbers into urban and metropolitan settings where they competed with working-class white people for jobs and housing during and after the First World War. The book details the events of the port riots in Britain, with chapters devoted to assessing the motivations and make-up of the rioting crowds, examining police procedures during the riots, considering the court cases that followed, and looking at the longer-term consequences for black British workers and their families. It examines the violent racist conflict that emerged after the First World War and the shockwaves which reverberated around the Empire.

During the Age of Sail, black seamen could be found in many shipboard roles in the Royal Navy, such as gunners, deck-hands and ‘top men’, working at heights in the rigging. In the later Age of Steam, black seamen were more likely to be found on merchantmen below deck; as cooks, stewards and stokers. The navy was possibly a unique institution in that black and white could work alongside each other more than in any other occupation. This book examines the work and experience of seamen of African descent in Britain's navy, from impressed slaves to free Africans, British West Indians, and British-born Black sailors. Seamen from the Caribbean and directly from Africa have contributed to both the British Royal Navy and Merchant Marine from at least the Tudor period and by the end of the period of the British Slave Trade at least 3% of all crewmen were black mariners. Black sailors signed off in British ports helped the growth of a black population. In spite of racial prejudice in port, relationships were forged between sailors of different races that frequently ignored expected norms when working and living together in the isolated world of the ship. Black seamen on British ships were not only to be found working in both the foreground and background of naval engagements throughout their long history, but helping to ensure the supply of foodstuffs and the necessities of life to Britain. Their experiences span the gamut of sorrow and tragedy, heroism, victory and triumph.

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 brings together new research from established and emerging scholars whose work focuses on Britain’s history and memory of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade. These chapters focus on the ‘small stories’ of slavery and abolition within the ‘local’ experiences of individuals and communities who were nonetheless part of the ‘national sin’ of slavery. Broken down into two parts, Part One considers some small scale specifics of Britain’s history of slavery and the slave trade, and Part Two considers how this history and its legacies has been remembered (or not) through individual people and in particular places. The book contains chapters which consider how people became involved in the slave trade, slavery and the campaign to end it, and covers such places as the Channel Islands, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Buckinghamshire and Portsmouth.

Since the onset of the troubles in the late 1960s, people in Northern Ireland have been working together to bring about a peaceful, non-violent end to the conflict. In doing so, they have used their efforts as a means to support the transition to a post-conflict society in the wake of the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement. This book examines the different forms of peace and reconciliation work that have taken place. It brings together an international group of scholars to examine initiatives such as integrated education, faith-based peace building, cross-border cooperation and women's activism as well as the impact that government policy and European funding have had on the development of peace and reconciliation organisations. This book demonstrates the contribution that such schemes have made to the peace process and the part they can play in Northern Ireland's future.

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 book presents for the first time a visual cultural history of the 1840s Irish Famine, tracing its representation and commemoration from the nineteenth century up to its 150th anniversary in the 1990s and beyond. As the watershed event of nineteenth-century Ireland, the Famine’s political and social impacts profoundly shaped modern Ireland and the nations of its diaspora. Yet up until the 1990s, the memory of the Famine remained relatively muted in public space and heritage. The Famine commemorative boom of the mid-1990s was therefore unprecedented in scale and output, with more than one hundred monuments newly constructed across Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. Drawing on an extensive global survey of recent community and national responses to the Famine’s anniversary, the book explores both popular and official Famine commemorations – the process of their making, the iconography they draw from and create, and their narratives of meaning and becoming. In outlining why these memories matter and to whom, this book argues how the phenomenon of Famine commemoration may be understood in the context of a growing memorial culture worldwide. It offers an innovative look at a well-known migration history whilst exploring how global ethnic communities redefine themselves through acts of public memory and representation.

The study of crime and violence in all its multifarious forms remains one of the most productive areas of enquiry for Irish historians. Considered an inordinately violent and unruly society by many contemporaries, nineteenth-century Ireland was notorious for sectarian unrest, agrarian disorder, alcohol-fuelled casual fighting, the seditious activities of various illegal underground organisations, as well as a host of other ‘outrages’. The image of an Ireland in an almost perpetual state of tumult during the nineteenth century, however, is a false one, invariably pedalled by partisan observers with a particular political or religious agenda to satisfy. Modern historical scholarship has corrected many lingering assumptions about the extent and character of Irish violence, but much work remains to be done. This important collection of essays, based on original research delivered at one of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s most successful annual conferences, draws together some of Ireland’s leading historians as well emerging talents to examine a broad range of topics under the banner of crime and violence. Irish secret societies, agrarian disorder, security and the law, sectarian violence, and a host of similar topics benefit from innovative methodological perspectives and advanced historical scholarship.

The book is essentially a ‘home front’ study of Ireland during the Crimean War, or more specifically Irish society’s responses to that conflict. It complements the existing research on Irish servicemen’s experiences during and after the campaign, and also substantially develops the limited work already undertaken on Irish society and the conflict. It primarily encompasses the years of the conflict, from its origins in the 1853 dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over the Holy Places, through the French and British political and later military interventions in 1854-5, to the victory, peace and homecoming celebrations in 1856. Additionally, it extends into the preceding and succeeding decades in order to contextualise the events and actors of the wartime years and to present and analyse the commemoration and memorialisation processes. The approach of the study is systematic with the content being correlated under six convenient and coherent themes, which are analysed through a chronological process. The book covers all of the major aspects of society and life in Ireland during the period, so as to give the most complete analysis of the various impacts of and people’s responses to the war. This study is also conducted, within the broader contexts not only of the responses of the United Kingdom and broader British Empire but also Ireland’s relationship with those political entities, and within Ireland’s post-Famine or mid-Victorian and even wider nineteenth-century history.

This is a study of Catholic and Protestant Irish in a neglected centre of historic Irish settlement where communal violence and Irish-related antipathy bore the hallmarks of the Liverpool and Glasgow experiences.

Between the foundation of the new Irish state in 1921–22 and the early 1970s approximately one-and-a-half million people left independent Ireland, the vast majority travelling to Britain. This book offers an analysis of the twentieth-century Irish exodus to Britain and provides a detailed examination of the many ways in which migration shaped twentieth-century Irish society. It focuses on a number of themes: state policy in Ireland; official responses in Britain; gender dimensions; individual migrant experience; patterns of settlement in Britain; and the phenomenon of return migration.

Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and her diary provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth's father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The book includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written retrospectively as life histories by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare first-hand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the emergence in Liverpool of a unique vision of what it might mean to be a citizen in an urban democracy. This owed its inspiration to the coming together of the idealism of the academics at the young University with the practical morality of the City's merchant philanthropists. Infused as both were by the passion and urgency of the women's demand for liberation, the result was a totally fresh approach to the problems of the day. This found expression in a commitment to the principle that the right to share in the responsibility for the management of the common affairs of a society must be a universal attribute of citizenship, regardless of gender, religion or class. How this has developed down the years into a demand for the empowerment of the community itself is the focus of this book. Ironically the Welfare State has resulted in an assumption of control by the executive that has deprived the people of their right to responsibility for what is done in their name. The Disinherited Family of Eleanor Rathbone's classic book on child allowances has become the Disinherited Society of today. Using history as a launching pad for future planning, this book concludes with a forthright Tract for the Times. This challenges the communitarianism popularised by Amitai Etzioni as lacking in relevance to either the social or economic realities of today.

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.

The book examines the careers of six men from three generations of the Earle family, all merchants in Liverpool. These are John Earle of Warrington (1674-1749) who came to Liverpool as an apprentice in 1688, his three sons, Ralph (1715-90), Thomas (1719-81) and William (1721-88) who flourished in different branches of overseas trade, such as that with Italy, Russia and the West Indies, the slave trade, and the shipment of cured fish from Newfoundland and the Shetlands. The third generation are represented by another Thomas (1754-1822) and another William (1760-1835), the two sons of William senior. Overall, the book provides an original account of Liverpool’s economic history in the 18th and early 19th century as well as a portrait of the key members of one of the port’s most important mercantile families. Not very much personal or social material has survived but, where this exists, it has been used to provide biographical background to the careers of the merchants.