In recent years, historians have devoted increased attention to the state in nineteenth-century Ireland. The most influential of these works doubtless is K. Theodore Hoppen’s Governing Hibernia, which details how British governance in Ireland shifted between coercion and assimilation across the long nineteenth century. Ciaran O’Neill’s ambitious new book both builds on and extends this work, closely mapping the complex networks of power that shaped union Ireland (his term for the period) and outlining how some Irish men and women experienced life in a palliative state. O’Neill uses this latter term in multiple ways. On the one hand, he argues that government officials, increasingly convinced they could never secure legitimacy in Ireland, ‘gradually adopted a palliative position’, attempting to sustain Ireland without hoping to fix its problems (4–5). The state that emerged by the middle of the century was a hybrid one, staffed by significant numbers of Irish men and featuring innovative (if ineffective) political technologies, but retaining a stubbornly colonial aspect that limited the possibilities of forging effective ties with the Irish people. But this is not predominantly political history. As O’Neill puts it, he is interested in both the nature of the palliative state and the condition of the people who were governed by that state. To get a better sense of this, he sketches the lives of men and women rarely featured in nineteenth-century histories: civil servants, lobster fishermen, prisoners and suffrage activists, tracking their relationships to various centres of power. The result is an important and stimulating book, an often persuasive and always rewarding effort to recast the history of nineteenth-century Ireland.

One of the book’s striking features is O’Neill’s use of a widespread array of theoretical frameworks rarely seen in Irish historical studies. Readers will be divided on the results. At its best, O’Neill’s use of theory provides both a conceptual precision and a basis for global comparison that strengthens his analysis. A good example occurs in the first two chapters, where Aníbal Quijano’s ideas about the ‘coloniality of power’ (21–2) and Michael Mann’s notion of ‘infrastructural power’ (22–3) are used to examine the vexed question of who governed Ireland. Surveying what he terms the three overlapping systems of power in union Ireland (executive, modern and local), O’Neill details how local landowners lost political power across the nineteenth century, their authority gradually stripped away by successive London governments. He further underlines the coloniality of power by detailing the frustrations faced by a talented cadre of British officials in Ireland, scientifically-inclined managers whose often sincere efforts to bring reform to Ireland were undermined by the fact that the fundamental power to bring change lay in London rather than Dublin (a similar dynamic curtailed the development of civil society). As ever, however, this is not a simple story, and O’Neill makes an effective case that historians should pay closer attention to state bureaucratic power in union Ireland, examining Dublin Castle as a site of government and spotlighting unheralded policy centres like the Irish Office in London. This discussion is sharpened throughout by his judicious use of recent work on the Hapsburg state.

O’Neill’s exploration of how power operated in nineteenth-century Ireland is not confined to the political world. In an insightful chapter, he examines union Ireland’s prison system, showing how Ireland’s ‘architectures of containment’ developed across the nineteenth century. Contextualising developments with colonial and European references, he charts how officials made extensive (and much needed) reforms from the 1820s, using (as he does throughout the book) visual material to good effect, in this case an 1826 unexecuted plan for Newgate Gaol in Dublin. O’Neill then turns to the Irish prisoners themselves, subjected to modern disciplinary efforts to make them more productive. He makes good use of the memoir of Charles Gibson, a Presbyterian prison chaplain at Spike Island, and the diary of Patrick Murtagh, governor of Drogheda Gaol, sources that allow O’Neill to open windows into these everyday sites of prison labour, designed to control bodies and improve character. Poignant accounts of Irish male prisoners on treadwheels, picking oakum and, more idiosyncratically, yoked to wagons to do the work of horses underline the social costs of the misdiagnoses that defined state power in Union Ireland.

O’Neill also emphasises the transnational nature of the nineteenth-century Irish experience, showing how Irish people, rich and poor, participated in a variety of global projects. Looking at the Irish experience from these different vantage points provides new perspectives on some of the most controversial historiographical debates on nineteenth-century Ireland. Two excellent examples are his discussions of absenteeism and the Irish diaspora. After briefly surveying the ways that Irish elites (Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian) used imperial opportunities to strengthen their positions at home, O’Neill details some of the other networks in which they circulated, including their holidaying. When viewed from a Caribbean plantation or spa towns like Baden-Baden or Bath, absenteeism becomes a more complex phenomenon, a perspective that doubtless made little difference to Irish tenant farmers. In the most provocative chapter in the book, O’Neill challenges historians to pay greater attention to the key roles played by Irish migrants in the displacement of indigenous peoples in Australia and North America. He then examines the differing ways the diaspora was viewed as a threat (particularly the Irish Republican Brotherhood) and as a resource. The latter allows O’Neill to explore the complex positions of Irish female emigrants in the settler-colonial diaspora. Class is central to his portrait. Some women — educated, middle-class and white — were able to take advantage of their relatively privileged positions ‘to exploit the opportunities provided by colonial expansion’ (226). Other women, the ‘Bad Bridgets’ of the diaspora, faced more challenging conditions, epitomised by the disproportionate numbers of Irish women imprisoned in Liverpool, Boston, New York and Toronto. Restrictive sexual norms were wielded with particular power against Irish working-class women. As O’Neill puts it, unmarried Irish women were the most pathologised white female population in North America and the United Kingdom. Given this portrait of women’s liminality, it is clear that future research must resist generalisations that cast Irish migrants as strictly privileged or as victims.

Power and powerlessness in union Ireland is a book designed to raise questions about some of the central issues of nineteenth-century Irish historiography. It succeeds on these terms and is essential reading for anyone interested in modern Irish history.