In this major study of the origins of unionism in Ulster, John Bew sets out to restore the intellectual dignity of an ideology that has long been derided as bigoted and reactionary. Arguing against the view advocated by Kerby Miller and others that unionism was “a simple reaction to Irish nationalism, a pan-Protestant alliance manipulated by elites, an all-encompassing Orangeism, or an outgrowth of a settler mentality,” Bew contends that unionism was, in fact, a “genuinely held British national identity” that looked outside of Ireland—to Britain, Europe, and the empire—for its ideas (xiv–xv). These ideas (and Bew is emphatic that unionists, contrary to the stereotype, did have ideas) emerged from “a shared heritage of British constitutional discourse” and “an emotional attachment to the role of the British nation as an enlightened and progressive force on the world stage” (xv). Instead of seeing unionism as an unimaginative Protestant response to the movement for Irish Home Rule that began in the 1870s, Bew shows it to be a political philosophy with deep roots, paradoxically, in the Ulster radicalism of the late eighteenth century.

One of the great problems faced by historians of Ulster Protestantism has been to explain how Ireland's most radical province—the home of the United Irishmen revolutionaries and the seat of the failed 1798 rebellion—became, within a few decades of the Act of Union in 1801, the cockpit of loyal unionism. A further problem has been to explain why some of the Union's most vigorous early opponents, such as the plebeian Orange Order, soon became its most committed defenders. Many historians have solved this problem by suggesting that in the Union's aftermath, Ulster's gentry and clergy constructed a conservative hegemony (through the churches and the Orange Order) that instilled in workers and radicals a sort of false consciousness. This false consciousness, it is asserted, eventually became the unionism of the late nineteenth century. Bew's solution is both more subtle and more convincing. First, he shows that Ulster's eighteenth-century radicalism was not nearly as radical as many have assumed; like their American contemporaries, Ulster republicans were animated by a desire to restore what they believed to be ancient British liberties, and some moderates, such as William Bruce and Henry Joy Jr., recognized that separatism was not the only way that this could be done. Second, Bew shows that the unionism that emerged after 1801 was not a monolithic conservative ideology. Just as there were proto-unionist strands within Ulster radicalism, so there remained radical (or at least liberal) strands within Ulster unionism. Radicalism and unionism, it turns out, were not so very far apart—indeed, for many Ulster liberals, unionism simply represented a new way to pursue the same goals they (or their fathers) had pursued as republicans. What had changed was the political calculus: after 1801, many Ulster liberals came to see the Union, rather than separatism, as the best way to achieve positive change for Ireland.

This was especially true during the reform era of the 1830s, when Belfast's “civic unionists”—as Bew calls these liberal Protestants—looked to Britain as a progressive force not only within Ireland, but within the world at large. The title of Bew's book comes from an ecstatic 1834 speech given by the mercurial James Emerson Tennent, one of the book's central characters, who saw in the Union an opportunity for Irishmen to influence the affairs of “the most opulent and powerful empire in the universe,” an opportunity that a Dublin parliament could never offer (136). The Union, from this perspective, was not to be valued because it guaranteed Protestant dominance in Ireland—indeed, by the 1830s it was quite clear that the trend was in the opposite direction—but rather because it amplified the influence of Irishmen on the world stage. Bew also explores the more reactionary side of unionism, such as the Orange populism headed by William Johnston of Ballykilbeg, but it is this progressive strand of unionism (which remained viable, says Bew, until the Home Rule debate polarized politics after 1870) that is the most revelatory.

As an intellectual history of Ulster unionism, Bew's book succeeds remarkably, but readers lured by the book's subtitle into expecting a history of the civic culture of Belfast itself will be disappointed. While it is true that most of the thinkers and politicians Bew examines were based in Belfast, this is a study of national, not municipal, politics. This is unfortunate, as closer attention to Belfast politics would have strengthened Bew's argument about the complexity and progressive potential of civic unionism. In Bew's story, for example, Catholics (with one or two exceptions) figure only incidentally, but for much of this period, leading Belfast Catholics actively embraced the civic unionist model. Catholic participation in loyal demonstrations—for instance, the popular celebrations that greeted victory in the Crimea during the 1850s—showed that this was indeed a period of considerable ideological flux in Ulster. The same was true of the lawsuits brought by local Catholics, in alliance with liberal Protestants, against the Belfast Conservative Party, which systematically disenfranchised all liberals, Protestant and Catholic, from local elections in the 1840s and 1850s. For a certain sort of wealthy Belfast Catholic (and there were a few), loyalty to, and reliance on, the institutions of the British state seemed just as capable of bringing about positive social change for Ireland as did nationalism.

This, however, may be asking Bew to have written a different book than he has, and what he has written is important enough. From time to time, his story does get tangled in the intricacies of nineteenth-century legislative and political battles, and nonspecialist readers unfamiliar with names like Daniel O’Connell or concepts like tenant right will be lost for much of the book's midsection, but on the whole, Bew does an admirable job connecting these discussions back to his central thesis about the complexity and intellectual integrity of pre–Home Rule unionism. This is an important contribution to the history of Irish political thought that should fundamentally alter how historians view Ulster unionism.