It is now hard to believe that it was once ideologically daring to describe Ireland as being “in transition.” In 1864 the Irish political economist, John Elliot Cairnes, reviewed some works on the economic and social condition of Ireland for the Edinburgh Review. He titled his review “Ireland in Transition” but the editor, Henry Reeve, objected to the title and changed it to “Ireland.” However, the following year, Cairnes entitled his powerful series of articles in the Economist, focusing mainly on land ownership and tenure, “Ireland in Transition.”

Perhaps the most significant indication of an Ireland in transition by the mid- to late 1860s was the waning assumption that “English” conditions, crucially in the question of land, had any necessary relevance to Ireland and the waxing doctrine of “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas,” especially with regard to religion, land, and education. This identification of Irish “difference,” though frequently ascribed to historical backwardness, was often used to justify increased state intervention in Irish social and economic affairs, leading to a radical critique of private property in land.

Boyce and O’Day claim correctly that at this time Ireland was for the most extended period at the forefront of British political life. The main themes of this collection, which assesses the shifting nature of Irish identities, are home rule, separatism, and questions of reform or revolution. In 1860s it was “folly” to suppose Ireland would be separated from Great Britain, but in 1869 the Church of Ireland was disestablished, the 1870 land act was the beginning of the end of rural landlordism, there were changes in local government, and the rise of the Catholic middle class coincided with the decline of the prosperous Protestant middle class outside of Ulster. There was increased state intervention in religion, land, and education in obedience to the “new” doctrine of “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas.” This was the era of home rule (and the killing of it by kindness), of the union of hearts, a feminizing of England's relationship with Ireland. As the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones remarked, the mistake “masculine” England had made traditionally was the ravishing of “feminine” Ireland rather than her seduction.

Alan O’Day, pondering on whether historical change is structurally determined or the product of Carlylean “heroes,” discusses the transition of nationalism in terms of leadership, finding Butt, Parnell, and Dillon to have embodied a Weberian trajectory from the respected, to the charismatic, to the bureaucratic. James Loughlin sees monarchy as the preeminent symbol of Britishness, so a separate Irish identity had to be defined against it. Yet Parnell was the “uncrowned king,” and this essay explores the significance of monarchy in the formation of national identities at the time. The charismata of kingship enabled Parnell to operate in Nietzschean fashion beyond good and evil. Lord Spencer, the Viceroy, disturbed by what one might call Victoria's absenteeism, believed that a closer “personal” connection between the Irish masses and the royal family was vital to consolidating the Union. He believed that the Catholic Irish were “peculiarly susceptible to personal authority,” Ireland being, in Spencer's view, “an image worshipping country” (42). According to Augusta Goold, the Irish were “inherently aristocratic and monarchical” (43), clearly more amenable to seduction by the trappings of viceroyalty than by repression by Dublin Castle. Michael Wheatley writes on popular nationalist opinion in the south, represented by five counties in the midlands and east Connacht, before the home rule crisis of 1909–13. His focus is on sixteen provincial weekly newspapers from this area. Because of economic constraints, local newspaper owners and editors, though often fancying themselves in the political vanguard, were, Wheatley argues, more often in the rearguard. He finds a general sense of apathy about the situation in Ulster and the perceived threat to home rule.

According to Ian Sheehy, writing on T. P. O’Connor and The Star newspaper, 1886–90, in the Parnellite heyday of the 1880s there was “no better Irishman” living than O’Connor. But in W. P. Ryan's view, which was typical of the revival attitude to the home rule generation, O’Connor had been corrupted culturally by English ways. Sheehy briskly dismisses Ryan—the editor of the Irish Peasant (suppressed by Cardinal Logue), the author of The Pope's Green Island, and The Irish Labour Movement, a socialist and radical land reformer—as a “zealot” (76), taking the conventional Roman view of the Zealots, who were a revolutionary group dedicated to the expulsion of the Roman occupiers of Palestine. The “radical” aspect of O’Connor's politics (really a modest reformism) that Sheehy explores in this essay is, one might argue, a poor thing in comparison with Ryan's revolutionary politics. Certainly O’Connor was no radical in his view of empire, and his “wider democratic vision” did not extend to it. As the first British film censor, one of his “governing principles” for judging a film was the outlawing of scenes “in which British officers are seen in a discreditable light in their relations with Eastern peoples” (The Times, 21 February 1922). Sheehy chooses easy targets in Arthur Griffith and D. P. Moran, though he cannot be displeased by the fact that Griffith, at least, was well disposed toward empire. Neither must it be forgotten that “British Radicalism,” like the suffrage movement, was often as jingoistic as any other section of British society. For example, Karl Pearson, an advanced socialist, wrote of “inferior races” and defended the empire. For D. George Boyce, like Sheehy, home rule offered Irish nationalists dual or multiple identities, unquestioned boons in their view, while Sinn Féin separatism was narrow and exclusivist. However, by and large, this separatism was also anti-imperial, a theme not extensively addressed in this volume. And the Irish Citizen Army, lest we forget, declared that “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.”

James H. Murphy focuses on the 1902 production of Cathleen Ní Houlihan as a key episode in the relationship between the revival and the Irish Ireland movement. The Ireland of which Standish O’Grady, Yeats, and Lady Gregory dreamed was a heroic, aristocratic, ancient Ireland, an alliance of “hard-riding country gentlemen” and beggar men (presumably, nature's gentlemen), opposed to the emergent “hot-faced bargainers” of the Catholic bourgeoisie. A central question concerned the possibility of an Irish literature in the English language, a very familiar postcolonial problem, and the related question as to whether the preconquest Irish were “savages” (whether noble or ignoble) or civilized. Murphy demonstrates how Cathleen Ní Houlihan was both a critique of British monarchy, as the focus of British imperial unity, and an unintended tribute, rather than an alternative, to it. Before the revival, Ireland had been lacking in theater, though Irish public life was intensely theatrical. In terms of nationalism, to use Blake's terminology, the Abbey Theatre was both a fountain that overflowed and a cistern that contained. The “crowd,” representing militant nationalism had to be tamed into a nation.

Nicholas Allen, concentrating on George Russell's (Æ) relationship with the Irish Convention (1917–18), writes persuasively on Æ's efforts to renovate Irish nationalism, by means of culture, to make for a more inclusive Irish identity. The mystic and prophet who worked sleeplessly for unheroic agricultural cooperation had a vision of Ireland that married the modern industrial north to the traditional agricultural south, an internal Irish application of the gendered distinction between Saxon and Celt. Advocating civic virtues for Irish nationalism, both his cultural and agricultural evangelism sought to transform subjects into citizens for a new, independent (if partitioned) Ireland. Matthew Kelly's essay attempts to deconstruct the binary division of Irish nationalism as constitutionalist or separatist, viewing it rather as a spectrum. There were differences within both Parnellism and Sinn Féin, and Parnellism had enabled both extremes to work together. Separatism, here as elsewhere in this book, is dismissed as evangelical, a “faith,” and as “romantic,” an airy chimera but also as “physical force,” though the central role of the same physical force in the formation and maintenance of the British Empire is passed over in silence. Kelly says that Sinn Féin's main achievement before World War I was in fashioning a wide-ranging if fragile nationalism.

Margaret O’Callaghan, using, among other sources, two poetry notebooks Roger Casement wrote as a young man, challenges the view that his political evolution was a late development. Casement saw himself as both having “gone native” in Africa but also as a conventional imperialist. At this time he was an imperial home rule nationalist but he became strongly anti-imperial; indeed, there was a complex relationship between his nationalism and imperialism. As a child, pondering on Carthage, he was haunted by the idea of destroyed civilizations leaving no record but that of their conquerors. In his youthful poetry he identified with the “hunted people” of Tudor and Stuart Ireland. Casement's critique of empire, O’Callaghan argues, was based on, but not reducible to, his Irish experience. Antiquarianism, she remarks acutely, “provided the affective and intellectual basis of a new critique of imperialism and a vital and neglected strand in the construction of a new nationalism in the late nineteenth century” (173). Thoroughgoing anti-imperialism was in short supply in Victorian Britain, and Casement deserves to rank with Wilfred Scawen Blunt and William Morris in this regard. Not only was Casement's nationalism not in conflict with his internationalist anti-imperialism, it was its vital source. His anti-imperial nationalism is now routinely depoliticized as “humanitarianism.”

According to Janet Nolan, the national schools served as unintended “preparatory schools for female emigration” (181), a matter facilitated by the virtual absence from the curriculum of Irish language and history. The female teachers in these schools also served as role models for their young charges. Virginia Crossman writes on how Conservative ministers and their supporters saw Liberal Chief Secretary Morley's grant to relieve distress and also empower local bodies as, on the contrary, discrediting nationalist Poor Law guardians for squandering public funds and thereby confirming racial stereotypes and proving Irish unfitness for self-government. Few nationalists challenged the unionist charge of maladministration but put it down to the incurable provincialism of local politics. Emmet O’Connor, charting the rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI; 1917–21), argues that the “affirmation of national rights through internationalism was the hallmark of the party” (212). He tells us intriguingly that the Bolshevik revolution was initially acclaimed in Ireland as a blow to imperialism and a boost to the rights for national self-determination. The SPI, though virtually forgotten, had influence both in the Labour Party and in Sinn Féin.

Writing on the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, 1906–21, N. C. Fleming notes that he was caught up in the gulf between the patrician landed gentry of southern unionism and their bourgeois-led but working-class northern counterparts, the large imperial concerns of the one as against the parochial regionalism of the other. In his maiden speech in the House of Commons he was sympathetic to the idea that Ireland should be governed according to “Irish ideas” but was adamant that these ideas should be consistent with the unity of the empire. His federal solution to the Irish question was also quintessentially in the interests of empire.

This is a fresh and stimulating collection of essays, wide-ranging yet focused, addressing a diversity of issues but perhaps from perspectives not as multiple as the editors lead us to believe. A few minor matters: “Westland Road railway station” should be “Westland Row” (51), and Ernest Blythe was not a member of Fianna Fáil, “prominent” or otherwise (105), but of Cumann na nGaedheal, which, after 1933, morphed into Fine Gael.