Theo Hoppen sets out in this book to assess British governance of Ireland under the union of 1800–1921, largely excluding Irish political challenges to British rule on the periphery except when these directly impinged on the politics of the British core. His intention is not to compile a comprehensive and minute account of twelve decades of political manoeuvring, policy formation and state formation, but to distil his encyclopaedic knowledge of these into an interpretive schema, highlighting what he identifies as the principal patterns of union politics. Eschewing postcolonial approaches to modern Irish history as tending towards solipsism, Hoppen's approach is robustly empiricist. A lengthy list of private and public manuscript collections is included; the publisher has not included a full bibliography, and the reader will have to scan the voluminous footnotes to locate the wealth of printed primary and secondary sources that inform the book.

The principal argument is that British responses to the perennial ‘Irish question’ can be located on a policy spectrum located between the poles of ‘differentiation’ and ‘assimilation’; the former denying the possibility of Irish social or political integration into a unitary British state or body politic and hence seeking governing solutions that acknowledged Irish ‘difference’, the latter more optimistically aspiring to bring Ireland and its people within what were seen as the norms and behaviours of the metropolitan centre. While such a spectrum of governing ideas and strategies was by no means new in 1800, the union brought the dilemmas of Irish governance more directly home to Westminster. The centre of balance of this spectrum shifted significantly between what Hoppen characterises as three largely distinct phases of union governance: that of administering a ‘faraway country’ in c.1800–c.1830, followed by a period of sustained integrationist initiatives in c.1830–c.1868, and finally the era of ‘dancing to Irish tunes’ in c.1868–c.1921. Party political, factional and individual disputes and divisions over Irish policy within the British political elite can be located in each of these periods, but, Hoppen argues, these tended to focus more on tactics and non-Irish policy objectives than on their location on the underlying differentiation–assimilation spectrum, which was characterised by a broad consensus during each of the three eras.

Part I, covering the union's first three decades, contrasts the ‘hot air’ of assimilationist union propaganda with the ‘hard facts’ that British governments were preoccupied with security, imperial ambition and keeping Ireland tolerably quiet under an Irish executive little modified from that inherited from the eighteenth century. Occasional reformist initiatives went nowhere and, when they could be constrained to consider Ireland at all, administrations tended to reflect broader English prejudices against the Irish (Protestant and Catholic alike) and look first to coercion to deal with manifest Irish unrest.

Hoppen's second period saw the high water mark of assimilationism, driven partially by reactions to the successful Catholic emancipation campaign, but more importantly by the hegemony of the ideas of utilitarian universalism and growing optimism about anglicising Ireland's society, economy and political culture. Approached cautiously at first by both parties, after 1835 Whig-Liberal ministries actively pursued the integration of Ireland into a non-sectarian ‘national’ U.K. community, at least in part, Hoppen insists, with the pragmatic co-operation of Daniel O'Connell. Paradoxically, the instruments of this policy included new governmental agencies unique to Ireland (such as the National Board of Education and the centralised Irish Constabulary), but the direction of travel, later also adopted by Peelite Conservatives, was to replace the ‘garrison principle’ with attempted conciliation to undermine demands for repeal of the union. Paradoxically also, for a policy initially heralded as seeking to win Irish hearts to the union principle, economic assimilationism drove the catastrophic policy failures of the great Famine, with enforced agrarian anglicisation providing, as Hoppen accurately puts it, ‘a kind of ideological rolling bass underscoring relief policy’.

It was not the Famine, but the combination of the shock of the 1860s agricultural recession, the challenge of Fenianism to the status quo, and the rise of historicist economics which ushered in the final phase from the 1860s. Increasingly Ireland's anomalous condition now pointed towards the replacement of universalist with particularist ‘solutions’. This was most obvious in land policy, where Gladstone's 1870 demarche heralded a new departure opening the way for more popular concessions to mass pressure. Liberals and Tories now differed (Hoppen repeatedly insists) not on the principles of recognising Irish social difference in law, but on dealing with the costs of doing so; Gladstonian parsimony saw the ‘joint ownership’ land compromise of 1881 as the cheapest option while Conservatives were prepared to be much more liberal in using Treasury funds to buy off Irish agitation through land purchase loans. Similarly, Hoppen stresses Gladstone's preoccupation with fiscal rectitude as a leading cause of his adherence to home rule (a policy gradually approached through a ‘crab-like shuffle’ rather than simply the result of a conversion experience in 1885). While Liberals overtly acknowledged Irish ‘nationality’ in constitutional terms from 1886, the Conservative-Unionist leadership under Salisbury and Balfour also tended to regard Ireland as a place apart from the U.K., manifest in both the ready resort to modes of coercion that had mostly been set aside in mid-century and interventionist socio-economic policies rationalised as necessary to address Ireland's unique circumstances.

The book concludes rather abruptly with a discussion of the febrile politics of the third home rule crisis and partition that Hoppen sees as manifesting a cross-party tendency towards pragmatism, grounded in a shared perception of Irish differentiation. This finale feels a little rushed and fits less well with the themes set out with brio and insight in the rest of the book, and it's a pity that there is no conclusion pulling together the book's arguments over the union era as a whole. Nevertheless, this is a scintillating work of interpretation based on a lifetime of deep study of British and Irish politics and is likely to provoke lively and prolonged historical debate among historians of Britain and Ireland alike.