In Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879–1920, Heather Laird produces a stimulating examination of agrarian conflict in Ireland. Laird is influenced by the recent work of Donald Jordan (“The Irish National Land League and the `Unwritten Law': Rural Protest and Nation Building in Ireland, 1882–1890,” Past and Present, no. 158 [1998], 146–71) and Margaret O’Callaghan (British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour [Cork, 1994])—both have explored the relationship between land agitation and law—but her analysis is guided by postcolonial and subaltern theory. She characterizes land agitation during this period as a manifestation of subaltern resistance to the alien imposition of colonial property law. More particularly, she rejects the poststructuralist turn, which some within the Subaltern Studies collective have taken, and adheres to a Marxist perspective, insisting upon the revolutionary nature and transformative potential of the struggle from below. This approach has elicited a warm reception from practitioners of Irish cultural studies such as Declan Kiberd and Luke Gibbons (both offer effusive endorsements on the attractively produced cover) but is likely to provoke less effusive responses from historians of Ireland schooled in the dominant revisionist outlook.
The book takes the form of five overlapping—occasionally repetitive—chapters. The first and third chapters set out Laird's fundamental arguments. She is unequivocal in characterizing nineteenth century Ireland as a colony where the British state and its allies, the landed interest, used official law—ordinary and emergency—to further the colonizing process. The Land League is presented as a movement of the “rural poor,” which challenged the colonizing process by not only resisting official legislation but opposing it with “unwritten” or “subversive” law. This resistance, she claims, was sufficiently systematic and powerful in certain areas during the land war to amount to an “alternative state” (15).
There are passages where diligent research and theory combine wonderfully. Among the most enlightening is a section in which the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin are deployed while analyzing the carnival atmosphere around the communal harvesting of the crops of interned Land League members. The use of antihunting agitation as a weapon against the landlord class receives attention; this builds significantly on the work of L. P. Curtis and Roy Foster. Innovatively, Laird points out that the peaks and troughs in antihunt agitation seem to mirror patterns in the traditional calendar and popular festivals of rural Ireland; however, Laird can be disconcertingly one-eyed in pursuit of her thesis.
This tendency is especially evident in that aspect of her work that is most original. Laird offers a new and important emphasis in stressing the subaltern characteristics of much Land League activity. She is certainly correct in arguing that the nationalist leadership often reacted to rather than generated grassroots activity and tactics, but to concentrate on the subaltern character of the Land League at the expense of other facets of the movement is to shirk complexity. Samuel Clark's seminal study, The Social Origins of the Land War (1979), appears in the bibliography but is referenced only once. Is this because Clark's analysis of the social origins of Land League members does not sustain a predominately subaltern image of the movement? Similarly, neither Paul Bew's Land and the National Question in Ireland (1978) nor Andrew Orridge's “Who Supported the Land War?” (Economic and Social Review 12, no. 3 [April 1981]: 203–30) are cited. Even if one believes that as an intellectual approach the “privileging of data … is clearly flawed” (146), it might have been wise directly to address the questions raised by these nuanced and informative studies. Admittedly, the authors were so old-fashioned as to regard facts and statistics as of heuristic value.
In a section that examines the methods used by the rural community to disrupt sheriff 's sales (sales at which stock seized from tenants in lieu of unpaid rent was auctioned), Laird makes interesting comparisons with “subaltern” insurgency in India and earlier Whiteboy tactics in Ireland. Further fruitful comparisons might have been drawn with conflict around the sales of seized cattle during the economic war of the 1930s. Of course, from a Marxist standpoint this association may be troubling as these protests were often organized by Ireland's pseudo-fascist movement, the Blueshirts.
Although the chapters are linked by an evident unity in theme and intellectual approach, the book's structure remains rather incoherent. The reasoning behind the order in which the chapters are presented is not always evident. The final chapter on “Theories of Resistance” has the appearance of an introductory chapter that has been relocated to the end, perhaps due to an anxiety not to frighten away those intimidated or repelled by an unashamed theoretical approach. The fourth chapter “‘Consequences and Conclusions,” has the shape of two short chapters uncomfortably harnessed together, while the fascinating second chapter—in which she reads Emily Lawless’ novel, Hurrish (1886), as a commentary on the crisis of law during the land war—is somewhat at a tangent to the rest of the study, making its seamless integration difficult. For Laird Hurrish is fascinating because it offers a story in which formal, subversive, and feudal law are all tested and found wanting and because this novel illustrates the difficulty in satisfactorily representing a colonial society using a metropolitan literary form.
The implication in this book's title that the study explores the years 1879–1920 verges on a slight of hand. The majority of the book is very effectively focused on the three years at the height of the land war, 1879–82, exploring the various responses to this conflict. The significant agrarian unrest that accompanied the Ranch War (1906–8) and the War of Independence (1919–20), is covered in a cursory thirteen pages, relying on secondary sources supported by evidence from one national and one local newspaper. The space devoted to these conflicts allows Laird to point to some continuities and discontinuities with the land war but does not amount to a rigorous application of her arguments to the later events. Nonetheless, this study is provocative and brave and is a significant addition to scholarship on Irish agrarian conflict.
