This article seeks to explain why sectarian street violence was relatively common in Liverpool and relatively uncommon in Belfast from the 1880s to the early 1920s, despite the fact that both cities were marked by roughly similar sectarian tensions during this period. Moreover, in the 1920s Liverpool experienced a sustained decline while Belfast experienced a resurgence of sectarian street violence.
I argue that the differences between Liverpool and Belfast in relation to sectarian street violence from the 1880s to the 1920s are best explained by the ways in which each responded to the British nationalizing processes. During this period an increasingly national imperative interacted with alternative local cultures and customs in different ways. In addition, I draw attention to the Unionist establishment in Belfast's attempts to control the principal agencies of sectarian violence.
In “dual” societiesFootnote 1 like Liverpool and Belfast, “collective violence” can be interpreted as a symptom not only of the state of intercommunal relations (i.e., Protestant-Catholic/British-Irish), but also as a form of “social protest” directed against community and national elites.Footnote 2 Violence can highlight relations within a particular community, symbolizing the vulnerability of established social and political arrangements and avenues of power and leadership.
The social-movement paradigm provides an explanatory framework for analyzing how sectarian violence, part of the “open, declared forms of resistance” characteristic of Western liberal democracies, was mobilized, sustained, and deployed.Footnote 3 In Liverpool, sectarian rioting, a contingent mode of collective social protest, was mobilized and deployed by a modern ethno-nationalist movement as part of its repertoire of contention. In Belfast, the fight against Home Rule compelled the Episcopalian-Conservative establishment to adapt swiftly to national political culture and evolving conceptions of Britishness. Therefore, despite a far greater potential for sectarian violence, in the period 1886–1920, Ulster Unionism largely integrated and controlled the more violent elements within the Protestant working class and reevaluated its relationship to popular sectarianism. The contingent outcome was a modern Conservative nationalism constructed by local Protestant elites.
The Makeup of Liverpool
The similarities between Liverpool and Belfast are many. Both cities experienced rapid urbanization and immigration. Fueled by mass Irish Catholic immigration, Liverpool's population rose from 77,600 in 1801 to 805,100 by 1911.Footnote 4 By 1851 the Irish constituted thirty percent of Liverpool's population.Footnote 5 The second generation, or Scouse-Irish, probably comprised the bulk of “upwardly mobile” Catholics, and between 1880 and 1921 a skilled working class emerged as well as a small Catholic bourgeoisie located in the retail trades and professions.Footnote 6 By the Edwardian period, Liverpool boasted the largest Catholic-Irish municipal representation in Britain, with many of these Irish Nationalist councillors being Liverpool-born and more concerned with problems of housing and employment than with the Home Rule struggle.Footnote 7 By 1900, the Irish Nationalists formed the majority opposition on the Conservative-dominated city council. For many Liverpool Protestants, this growing Catholic strength and self-confidence was perceived as a direct challenge to their “marginal privilege.”
Also contributing to the sectarian divide were the Irish-born Orange Protestants. Although Linda Colley identifies the contribution of Anglo-Irish landed elites to the formation of a “genuinely British ruling class,” she neglects the wider role of Ulster Protestants in importing and sustaining popular anti-Catholicism on the British mainland.Footnote 8 Liverpool's Ulster Protestant community, concentrated among the merchant and skilled working class, and comprising less than one fifth of the city's Irish-born prior to the 1830s, had an enduring impact.Footnote 9
Anti-Catholicism has a long history, dating back to Elizabethan times.Footnote 10 Ulster Protestants fueled this “latent anti-Catholicism” in their fellow Protestants via the imported Orange Order, which had various Liverpool lodges organized in 1807–1808. Another major factor was the immigrant Ulster Pastor, the Reverend Hugh McNeile's local “No Popery” campaign of 1841–1852.Footnote 11 McNeile, who attracted a large working-class following through his Operative Protestant Association (1835) sought to defend the Tory-Anglican establishment from both “tyrannical Catholicism and its misguided ally, radical Dissent.”Footnote 12
The city's Orange-Tory-Unionist community was a heterogeneous mix that encompassed the English Protestants, Ulster and Scots Protestants, as well as other denominations, including low-Church Anglicans and sections of Nonconformity.Footnote 13 This community was also socially eclectic, incorporating patrician Conservatives, “respectable” working-class artisans, and semi-skilled and unskilled casual workers. Although outwardly united by a shared anti-Irishism and anti-Catholicism, embodied by the slogan “No Popery,” the community experienced internal fissures over questions of class, religion, and political priorities and principles. In the early Edwardian period, these tensions translated into internal schism and wider intercommunal violence.
Initially, street violence in Liverpool was sporadic and primarily focused on individual Ritualist churches. The national campaign against Ritualism was extensive and deep-rooted and sought the eradication of “error” in the form of “Romanising practises” within the Established Church of England. From 1888, the prevalence of street violence in Liverpool increased with the arrival of George Wise.
Wise was born to humble parents in the docklands area of East London in 1855. He subsequently converted to Evangelical Anglicanism, launching his anti-Catholic Crusade in Liverpool in May 1901. This led to more generalized confrontation with the Catholic community as violence spread from the “distinctively” Catholic-Irish North End, which had emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to Famine migration, across the rest of the city. The main phase began after the Roman Catholic Eucharistic Congress held in London in September 1908. This congress was a sort of religious world's fair celebrating the Eucharist in all its forms. It attracted one hundred bishops and archbishops from across the globe and was interpreted as an act of religious aggression by ultra-Protestants.Footnote 14 In its aftermath, a series of Catholic processions was held in Liverpool during the spring and summer of 1909. These reached their climax with the St. Joseph's procession of Sunday, June 20, which resulted in fifty arrests, twenty injuries, and the death of a Protestant carter the following day.Footnote 15 Although sectarian violence continued during the June-September 1911 Transport Strike, which involved approximately 70,000 workers and effectively paralyzed the port of Liverpool, it had largely fizzled out by the First World War. Occasional incidences flared up during the interwar years, but these involved hundreds as opposed to thousands of people. Consequently, sectarian violence in Liverpool can be described as episodic and in decline.Footnote 16
The Makeup of Belfast
In Belfast, the population rose from 19,000 in 1800 to 378,000 by 1911.Footnote 17 Numerically, the Catholic community grew from 41,000 in 1861 to roughly 100,000 by 1911,Footnote 18 the overwhelming majority migrating from within Ulster.Footnote 19 By 1911, Belfast had thirty-one percent of the Ulster population, with Catholics declining from forty-one percent in 1861 to thirty-four percent by 1911. Two-thirds of Catholic losses were attributable directly to community conflict in Belfast.Footnote 20
Ulster Protestants were acutely conscious of the “colonialism of the dispossessed” represented by Catholic immigration.Footnote 21 By 1901 there was also a second-generation Catholic community in Belfast, which, unlike its Liverpool counterpart, remained at the bottom of the social scale.Footnote 22 In a labor market dominated by skilled and semi-skilled employment in shipbuilding and engineering and supplemented by the poorly paid linen and textile trades, Belfast's Catholics were overrepresented among these lower-status occupations.Footnote 23 This entrenched structural inequality and spatial segregation gave rise to deep-seated, long-lasting sectarian divisions.
As in Liverpool, the dominant Protestant-Unionist community was heterogeneous in character, encompassing diverse denominations, principally Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists. It also had a broad social base that included the influential industrial bourgeoisie, members of the traditional “fountain of privilege” in Ireland dating back to the seventeenth century, the Protestant Ascendancy landed gentry and aristocracy, and a large working-class following.Footnote 24 Politically, it accommodated Conservatives, liberal-unionists, Labour-unionists, and various Orange, Conservative, and independent Protestant factions, which were united by a shared fidelity to the Legislative Union between England and Ireland and to the wider cause of “Protestant Defence.” As in Liverpool, the Ulster Protestant community was also divided by intense internal denominational, class, and political tensions, which threatened the emergence in 1886 of Ulster Unionism as a coherent political movement.
Thus, in Belfast immigration swelled an established Catholic community, exacerbating sectarian confrontation in the social, economic, and political arenas. In addition, with the increasingly volatile question of Irish Home Rule, the fate of Ulster and Belfast became embroiled in a bitter national struggle encompassing all parts of the United Kingdom. As a direct consequence of the combined national and regional dimension to the Home Rule question, sectarianism in Belfast was expressed largely through “verbal violence” as opposed to physical confrontation, as in Liverpool.
The Interaction between the Local, Regional, and National in Liverpool
Adaptation to and alienation from conceptions of British identity were critical determinants in the relationship between Tory Democracy, Ulster Unionism, and Protestant sectarian violence.Footnote 25
Recent approaches highlight the fragmentation or deconstruction of contemporary national identities, emphasizing the complexity, diversity, and interaction between identities contributing to differing and conflicting national “imaginings.”Footnote 26 A number of highly contested “nationalizing forces” have been identified during this period of British identity formation, including the erosion of “local attachments,”Footnote 27 the spread of “religious doubt and secularism,”Footnote 28 and the emergence of a genuinely national political cultureFootnote 29 characterized by class rather than religious and ethnic allegiances.Footnote 30
Liverpool, the “least ‘English’ of the great Victorian provincial cities,”Footnote 31 illustrates that nationalizing trends did not advance at an even pace or have a uniform impact across localities. This leads us to the contested question of Liverpool's exceptionalism within the national context. While acknowledging both Liverpool's relative exceptionalism and the existence of a wider anti-Catholic British nationalism, I argue that changing national developments both exacerbated and moderated aspects of the city's sectarian “otherness.” As Protestantism declined as a central component of British identity, Liverpool experienced conflict between two evolving, locally based conceptions of Britishness.
The first, Liverpool Tory Democracy, was a modern Conservative nationalism.Footnote 32 It had evolved from a national movement emerging in response to Gladstone's Liberal election victory in 1880. Tory Democracy attempted to revive the Conservatives' political fortunes at Westminster through engagement with issues that would animate the working classes. In Liverpool this movement had a pronounced regionalFootnote 33 character with a strong but ultimately contingent Protestant dimensionFootnote 34 necessary to win over the city's majority working class.
The second conception of Britishness, Protestant Democracy constituted a potent amalgam of fundamentalist Protestantism and local class, ethnic, and national identities.Footnote 35 This local identity conflict intensified during the early 1900s, when a severe fracture occurred between the Protestant Democracy and both Lord Salisbury's national Conservative Government (1895–1902) and the local Tory-Democratic political machine.
Religious Tensions in Liverpool
Belfast's and Liverpool's reactions to the gradual erosion of the Protestant dimension to British identity would profoundly influence their differing responses to sectarian violence. In Liverpool complex and uneven secularization generated profound tensions within the diverse Protestant community, symbolized by the anti-Ritualist “crusade,” which had been fueled by the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.Footnote 36
Anti-Ritualism was initially seen by prominent Evangelical figures like J. C. Ryle, first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool (1880–1900), as part of a national “Evangelisation” strategy to rejuvenate the Established Church by reengaging with the nominal Protestant “masses” concentrated in the overcrowded inner-city areas where regular church attendance was in serious decline.Footnote 37 Soon the local battle against Ritualism was co-opted by more militant Evangelical elements.Footnote 38 After 1900, the Tory-Anglican establishment sought to control this emerging Protestant Democracy's growing autonomy, crude anti-Catholicism, and escalating communal violence. A power struggle developed between the leadership of both sides for the allegiance of the Protestant working class.
Pastor George Wise (1855–1917) proved highly effective at inflaming Protestant working-class fears of growing Catholic self-assertion. In May 1901 he launched his “Protestant Crusade” at Islington Square, a popular meeting area in the Catholic quarter of the North End. This provoked a Catholic backlash and gained him instant notoriety and acclaim.
The “disorderly behaviour” and competitive “martyrdom” of Wise and his rival Protestant street preachers led to frequent confrontations with the civil authorities.Footnote 39 Wise twice chose imprisonment for the “Gospel's sake,” arousing mass Protestant indignation and outpourings of support.Footnote 40 Protestant street preachers were also adept at demarcating and exploiting “territory,” epitomized by Wise's struggle during 1903 to secure the St. Domingo Pit in Everton as an outdoor Protestant meeting area that was within “pointing, shouting and attacking” distance of prominent Catholic institutions.Footnote 41 The establishment of “territory” led to the construction of extensive “personal empires.” Wise's was underpinned by a large associational network, which provided for “all aspects of a working life.”Footnote 42
Liverpool's Working Classes and Tory Democracy
A key determinant in the differing experiences of Belfast and Liverpool in relation to sectarian violence was their relationship to wider nationalizing forces. In Liverpool, this dynamic generated a process of community breakdown, which fueled widespread sectarian violence. Unlike the Unionist community in Belfast, Liverpool's Protestants were predominantly a locality-based community, predicated upon face-to-face group interaction and shaped largely by local economic, social, and political factors.Footnote 43
Historians have attributed Conservatism's “permanent hegemony” over the Protestant community in LiverpoolFootnote 44 and sectarian violence to individuals like Wise, the structure of “community politics,” and the development of a “commonsense” sectarian ideology. But the persistence of belligerent Protestant sectarianism is primarily attributable to the fragility of the relationship between the Tory-Anglican establishment and popular Protestantism and to the fragmented nature of power and leadership over this community, whose diverse and extensive associational culture comprised three distinct, yet overlapping, elements. These included the city's Evangelical Protestant culture, incorporating the various organizations that comprised Wise's “personal empire”; the Orange Institution, with its membership of some twenty thousand by 1909;Footnote 45 and the influential Liverpool Working Men's Conservative Association (LWMCA). This diversity, however, ultimately translated into internal fragmentation. From 1880 there was an increasing breakdown in relations within the Protestant bloc, triggered by the impact of wider secularization and by a traumatic democratization process.
In Liverpool, democratization led to the emergence of the strident “democratic forces” within local Conservatism.Footnote 46 Since its formation in 1867, the main vehicle for capturing and retaining the Orange-Protestant working class had been the “power-sharing” LWMCA. The first of its “fundamental objects” was to “unite the friends of Conservative principles in maintaining Protestantism[.]” Organized within the LWMCA, the artisanate was politically courted from the early 1880s by the architects of Tory Democracy on the basis of Protestant Defense, in the process generating friction with the Tory Anglican establishment on the issue of Ritualism. The November 1889 South Toxteth municipal election was contested by rival Conservative and Orange candidates, with the contest dubbed the “classes against the masses.” Both the ultra-Protestant Orange Order, with its working-class and shopkeeper membership, and the LWMCA were described as “seething with discontent” at their “bad treatment” by the “upper tenth” dominating Liverpool Conservatism.Footnote 47 Ritualism proved to be the issue of “principle,” which radicalized Protestant working-class attitudes toward the local and national Conservative establishment.
Following the Orange candidate's defeat, the leading Tory-Democrat, A. B. Forwood, courted Archibald Salvidge, vice-chair and later chairman of the LWMCA, in his struggle against opponents within the Constitutional Association (ship owners, brokers, and merchants with wider horizons than “Church issues”)Footnote 48 and the Conservative-dominated City Council. Forwood succeeded in outflanking the dissident Orange Order, drawing the “democratic” forces into the “official fold” and preventing the development of a dangerous independent “national Protestant campaign[.]”Footnote 49
During the 1890s frequent violent grassroots agitation against Ritualists (the rich, or “aristocrats”)Footnote 50 within the Church converged with growing working-class demands for democratization within the Conservative political machine. These demands were directed against the “patrician” Constitutional Association or “upper tenth.”Footnote 51
The divisive political “crusade” over the Church Discipline Bill witnessed the evolution of the Protestant Democracy. With roughly half of Liverpool's workingmen unable to vote, this campaign highlighted the inadequacies of conventional political action and the perceived betrayal of the local and national Conservative leadership. After the bill's defeat during 1898–1899, many working-class Protestants no longer believed the Conservative Party would “conserve and defend” their Protestantism against “Papal aggression.”Footnote 52 This locally sponsored bill had been designed to eradicate Ritualism from the established church and to discipline offending Anglican clergy. Most of “official” Conservatism, including Salisbury's Government, opposed the bill, believing that the Church of England had sufficient powers to combat Ritualism, while Salvidge and Wise preached it as a “crusade.”
This Protestant crusade was pivotal to the triumph of local Tory Democracy by 1900 and to Salvidge's emergence as Liverpool party “boss.”Footnote 53 However, the local Conservative leadership, fearing too rapid democratization, tried to reconcile with Salvidge and the Tory Democrats within the Conservative political machine.Footnote 54 Consequently, Tory Democracy lost its previous pro-working class “radical” edge, a potent concoction of Protestantism and social reform principally in the area of housing. After 1900 it sought to rein in the “Protestant Power” in the name of party unity.Footnote 55
The Independent Protestant Political Revolt of 1903–1905, in which a number of Independent Protestant councillors were elected at the expense of the Conservatives, was critical to the struggle for control of the working class. The National Protestant Electoral Federation (May 1903) challenged local Conservative hegemony by attempting to secure “Protestant objectives over Conservative priorities.”Footnote 56 In response, Salvidge took to the street corners and open spaces and succeeded in defeating this “political hybrid.” He defined a “respectable” Protestantism and a Conservatism predicated upon the defense of civil and religious liberty for all. Salvidge drew the anti-Ritualist agitation back into the “official fold” while marginalizing illegitimate and “bigoted anti-Catholicism.”Footnote 57
This bitter ideological struggle had centered upon which side constituted the “bulwark” of the Reformation, the bedrock of local Protestant communal, ethnic, and national identity. As D. G. Boyce states, “citizenship in the United Kingdom was informally, as well as constitutionally, defined by religion[.]”Footnote 58 Determined to defend their conception of Britishness, the Protestant Democracy, a popular ethno-nationalist movement comprising around 100,000 by 1909, provoked serious anti-Catholic violence in the aftermath of the revolt.Footnote 59 This core of militant Protestants, alienated from contemporary Conservatism and disenchanted with the limitations of formal political action, took their dissent onto the streets. They were a mix of evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists and included unskilled “roughs,” skilled artisans, and a sprinkling of the “high class.” They also encompassed disaffected Orangemen and members of the LWMCA. Although members of this Protestant Democracy were not of “considerable position,” they perceived themselves to be of “considerable respect” and were united by a burning desire to “assert their Protestantism.”Footnote 60
Although sectarian street violence constituted a protest against the perceived impotence of communal and national elites in countering the twin “scourges” of Ritualism and Romanism, Tory-Democracy did preserve its political hegemony. After the revolt, with its clarion call of “Protestantism before politics,”Footnote 61 a pragmatic coexistence developed between Tory Democracy and the Protestant Democracy's anti-Catholic street mobilization. Tory-Democracy continued to retain the Protestant vote by exploiting popular issues like Tariff Reform (1903), with its “patriotic flavour” of penalizing foreign competition while maintaining the security of the Empire,Footnote 62 alongside the defense of the Legislative Union and antisocialism with its slogan of “Constitution and Revolution.”Footnote 63
Liverpool's distinctive spatial patterning continued to influence the activities of its Protestant community. Protestants' popular street mobilization, involving Orange and Protestant parades, picketing of Ritualist churches, demonstrations, and outdoor religious preaching, contributed to sectarian violence where tight-knit Catholic and Protestant communities existed within a stone's throw of each other. The contesting of “territory” was linked to a struggle for symbolic control of the city. A Home Office Report concluded that “the predisposing cause of these disturbances is to be found in the fact that Roman Catholics and Protestants living in neighbouring districts, which imperceptibly shade into one another, are alike animated and at times dominated, by intense sectarian feeling[.]”Footnote 64 A. Shallice argues that one function of Protestant and Orange Order marches (thirty per year) was to serve as a “physical designation of the geographical extent … of the community[.]”Footnote 65 During the riots of 1909, repercussions were usually directed against “outsiders,” resident within territorial boundaries. Frank Neal observes that “the position of Catholics and Protestants alike who found themselves a minority in a street or neighbourhood became dangerous” and many either chose or were forced to flee.Footnote 66 Protestants, for example, regarded the St. Joseph's Catholic procession of 1909 as “illegal” because it violated the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which prevented Catholics from holding outdoor religious services or wearing the habits of their religious orders outside their churches. Additionally, Protestants saw the procession as an act of aggression because it passed along the principal sectarian dividing line in the North End of Liverpool.
Sectarian Decline in Liverpool
How did the interaction between local, regional, and national factors influence developments in Liverpool in the 1910s and 1920s? Aspects of Liverpool's “exceptionalism” were eroded by national and local events such as the city's 1911 Transport Strike, in which sustained violence aroused fears of “social revolution,” drawing unfavorable national attention to sectarian street mobilization, seen as a contributing factor in the unrest.Footnote 67 The subsequent peace conference resulted in a special Act of Parliament, the Liverpool Corporation Act of 1912, providing “limited” police powers to regulate outdoor religious meetings and processions.Footnote 68 The relative calm that characterized popular Protestant mobilization in the city against the Third Home Rule Bill (1912–14) was due not only to Unionism, traditionally a unifying force among the fractious Liverpool Protestant-Conservative constituency, but also to the transformation of popular sectarianism. Moreover, Home Rule was a critical “national” issue that transcended local politics.Footnote 69
The First World War further undermined parochialism and accelerated secularization, while local developments like mass interwar slum clearances dismantled the “cultural and community infrastructure” of sectarianism.Footnote 70 These clearances had uprooted fifteen percent of Liverpool's total population (140,000 people), relocating many of them to distant suburban estates, which became solid Labour territory after 1921.Footnote 71
The interaction between local and national developments produced the diminution in sectarian street mobilization as a “distinctive feature” of Liverpool's cultural and political identity, so that by the interwar period sectarianism remained an important but no longer pivotal determinant of political allegiance. With the decline of Irish Nationalism after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the growing threat posed by the Labour Party, Conservatives like Barbara Whittingham-Jones sought to integrate Protestants into a “broad church” so long as this did not “involve the adoption of sectarian prejudices by Conservatives.”Footnote 72
Belfast and its Relationship to Britain
In Belfast, the 1886 Home Rule struggle, with its implications for the British nation as a whole and particularly Ulster's Protestants, shattered the “local state” constructed by the Episcopalian-Conservative establishment and transformed its attitude to popular Protestant sectarianism. D. G. Boyce has identified the pivotal importance of 1886, when Irish nationality “became the major political issue of the age.” This question was “inextricably bound up with the future of the British constitution and more importantly the British nation. Home Rule provoked the slumbering genie of British nationalism[.]”Footnote 73
The emergence of Ulster Unionism as a political force in 1886 was profoundly influenced by this interaction between the regional and national. Ulster Unionism has frequently been dismissed as a reactionary “counter-movement,”Footnote 74 a “negative appendage” of Irish Nationalism caricatured by its more extreme manifestations.Footnote 75 It is, however, increasingly being reevaluated as a form of nationalism,Footnote 76 whether as a “sub-species of European ethno-regional nationalism” or as a rational expression of “regional interests.”Footnote 77
While I acknowledge the role of regionalism in the formation of Ulster Unionist identity, the Home Rule struggle also embodied conflicting national loyalties.Footnote 78 James Loughlin has characterized the Home Rule discourse as a contest between “Enlightenment and Reaction.”Footnote 79 Supporters of the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (Chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1880 to 1890) and leading Liberals like the prime minister, Sir William Ewart Gladstone, identified Unionism with “Protestant bigotry, but in particular with extreme Orangemen who had no legitimate grievances against Home Rule and who wanted merely to discriminate against Catholics. Thus Ulster Unionism was discreditable and morally reprehensible[.]”Footnote 80
The Unionist leadership was acutely aware of the negative reaction on the mainland to the disunity and violence that had characterized popular Unionist mobilization in 1886. Bloody sectarian rioting had erupted in Belfast in the aftermath of the defeat of Home Rule, costing up to eighty-six lives.Footnote 81 In light of these events, the Episcopalian-Conservative establishment deliberately set about constructing a respectable umbrella movement in order to remain a part of the United Kingdom.
From the late 1870s, Loughlin has identified a transition in British national identity, from a Northern, industrialist popular Protestant conception to a Southern, ruralist Arcadian vision. Because of this transition, Ulster Unionism was increasingly seen as marginal to the British national community. Belfast's frequently violent “integration of religion and politics” made it “no longer a British, but an Irish city.”Footnote 82 Ulster Unionism remained part of the United Kingdom because it specifically recognized this transition and adapted to changing conceptions of Britishness. This adaptation can be attributed to both regional and national factors with Belfast's Unionist culture, proving remarkably adept at mediating and concealing its many internal disputes and minimizing Protestant sectarian violence.
Religious Tensions in Belfast
In sharp contrast to the spontaneity and disorder associated with anti-Catholic street mobilization in Liverpool before the 1920s, the fractious Protestant denominations in Belfast were integrated into an increasingly centralized strategy of political resistance. Of particular significance was the incorporation of the previously marginal Presbyterians into the Ulster Unionist coalition. The Presbyterian establishment was largely pro-Unionist but anti-Orange. They were responsible, alongside other nonconformists, for injecting into Unionist rhetoric the more acceptable “liberal-humanitarian” strandFootnote 83 that focused on the defense of civil and religious liberty and was “premised on a positive identification and engagement with mainland Britain” as opposed to Protestant self-interest and Orange objections to “Rome Rule.”Footnote 84
Unlike Liverpool, the imminent possibility of Home Rule or “Rome Rule” throughout Ireland reduced the highly divisive and contentious controversy posed by Ritualism within the disestablished (1869) Irish Episcopal Church to a largely subsidiary issue within Belfast's Protestant community.Footnote 85
Community Control in Belfast
Unlike in Liverpool, in Belfast nationalizing processes proved to be a catalyst in concerted efforts by Ulster Unionism to contain and control the city's endemic communal disorder. It is remarkable that in Belfast, a city unparalleled in its “recurrent communal violence,” these sectarian excesses were largely contained during the critical Home Rule period.Footnote 86 The growing threat of Home Rule from Dublin proved the catalyst for the construction of Ulster Unionism, a movement transcending Protestant denominational tensions and rivalries in the cause of local and national Protestant defense.
Belfast's Protestants constructed an expressive community, transcending the locality and region and symbolizing a common identity, cause, or “frame of reference.”Footnote 87 With Ulster's Protestants both heterogeneous and fractious, this “imagined” communal identity was invoked, in light of overarching national political imperatives, to mobilize solidarity and to mediate and conceal internal divisions.
From its inception, the movement endeavored to integrate the Orange Order, the principal local “proletarian idiom,” and the fractious Protestant denominations into a centralized strategy of political resistance to Home Rule. They drew these strategic elements into the new political and electoral organizations of Ulster Unionism, which transcended old party divisions and underpinned the creation of a new identity. All sections of the Protestant community were encouraged to participate in the mass spectacle characteristic of Ulster Unionism.
Ulster Unionist identity was crystallized at the Ulster Unionist Convention,Footnote 88 held in Belfast's Botanic Gardens on June 17, 1892. This mass gathering comprised approximately 12,000 delegates representing Unionists of “every creed, class, and party throughout Ulster[.]”Footnote 89 After the convention, the Unionist establishment, comprising members of the Protestant landowning, business, and professional classes, exerted increasingly centralized control over Ulster's anti-Home Rule forcesFootnote 90 through the creation of an elaborate interlocking network of seemingly democratic Unionist organizations.
In the aftermath of the serious surge in denominational, class, and political tensions within the Protestant community following the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill (1893), Ulster Unionism proved extremely effective at exercising sophisticated control over the volatile Orange Order. The Southern Unionist Irish Reform Association's devolution proposals of 1904 provided a pretext for the Ulster Unionist establishment to reengineer unity. The revival of the spectre of Home Rule “through the back door” kick-started Unionist political and organizational initiatives,Footnote 91 which culminated in 1905 in the formation of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and the two hundred-strong Ulster Unionist Council (UUC). This permanent representative body drew together the constituent components of Ulster Unionism, the parliamentary party, the extraparliamentary organizations, and the Loyal Orange Institution. The Orange Order nominated fifty representatives on the Council and was granted twenty-five percent representation on all committees of the UUP.Footnote 92
This mass movement was coordinated by a popular leadership that identified a common threat, defined an ideology embracing both Orange and “liberal humanitarian” objections to Home Rule, and maintained a heightened state of political and organizational mobilization in order to conceal internal divisions and “police” its volatile sectarian support.Footnote 93
After the bloody sectarian disturbances in Belfast of June-September 1886, Unionism had sought to centralize political control by establishing seemingly democratic institutions at the local level. These initiatives included the local political and electoral Unionist Associations and the representative 170,000-strong Ulster Unionist Clubs movement. In 1912 the 90,000-strong Ulster Volunteer Force was created and in 1918 the Ulster Unionist Labour Association (UULA). This drive helped preserve the fragile “unity” and “respectability” of the Ulster Protestant coalition. Despite the real threat of an armed Protestant uprising against Home Rule, symbolized by the Larne gun-running of April 1914, which had imported approximately 25,000 guns and three million rounds of ammunition, by the Third Home Rule crisis (1912–1914) Ulster Unionism was a centralized and disciplined movement.Footnote 94 It differentiated between legitimate violence in defense of the Unionist cause and “illegitimate” violence, whether emanating from Irish Nationalists or the “irresponsible roughs” within the Orange community.
Sectarian Revival in Belfast in the 1920s
After the passage of the Government of Ireland Act (Fourth Home Rule Bill) in December 1920, Belfast became the capital of a six-county Northern Ireland by May 1921. This sectarian province constituted a “Protestant State for a Protestant People.” Now that the political struggle was over, the imperative for Ulster Unionism to project a respectable façade was reduced, and the “tight discipline” characteristic of the Home Rule era was relaxed.Footnote 95 There was an upsurge in sectarian violence costing some 498, mainly Catholic, lives between 1920 and 1922.Footnote 96 This violence occurred against the backdrop of the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921 and a growing insurgency of the Irish Republican Army in the North. In response, the Ulster Unionist Labour Association Special Constabulary was formed; this was essentially the “paramilitary wing” of the Northern Irish state and was instrumental in the July 1920 industrial expulsions of more than 8,000 within a week from the city's principal industries. This drove many Catholics into the arms of the Dublin-based separatist Parliament, the Dail Eireann, established by Sinn Fein after their resounding General Election victory in 1918.
Critical to this upsurge in violence was Britain's changing relationship to Ireland. British political parties disengaged with the Irish question during the First World War, and by 1918 no major British party “existed for reasons to do with Ireland.”Footnote 97 The war “destroyed the deep divisions between the major British parties on the question of national identity and the national interest,”Footnote 98 and “placed Ireland firmly outside the realm of British party politics.”Footnote 99 In this new political environment, the capacity and need for Ulster Unionism to restrain its sectarian support was diminished. A degree of devolution of power within the Unionist bloc led to a more “ambivalent approach” among the leadership toward “loyalist violence.”Footnote 100
Conclusion
A study of sectarian violence in Liverpool and Belfast provides insights into the complex interplay between local, regional, and national forces in British society. The decline in the Protestant dimension to British identity during 1880–1921, reflecting wider secularization, was instrumental in sustaining religious and ethnic conflict in Liverpool until the 1920s while containing and controlling Belfast's sectarian street mobilization.
Within Liverpool's sectarian environment, rioting embodied a form of cultural defense and resistance to cultural transition.Footnote 101 This mode of disruptive action coexisted alongside an expanding democratic political system, constituting a means of community influence, leverage, and power. An escalation in violent collective action, as part of a sustained protest cycle, can be attributed to the opportunities and constraints exposed by democratization and to the complex and uneven impact of nationalizing processes, particularly secularization, upon Liverpool's Protestant community. With Protestantism at the heart of local communal, ethnic, and national identity, this wider secularization process resulted in growing fragmentation and conflict within what was fundamentally a locality-based community.
This conflict centered on contrasting local conceptions of Britishness—a contingent Protestant, Tory Democratic variety and the Protestant Democracy, an extreme anti-Catholic hybrid of religious, ethnic, and class compounds. During this protest cycle, Tory Democracy lost control over popular Protestant sectarianism and proved incapable of either exerting social control or facilitating the integration of the Protestant Democracy. This loss of control resulted in the development of a pragmatic if uneasy coexistence and interaction between routine Conservative politics and sectarian violence.
Ulster Unionism, on the other hand, was characterized by a concentration of power over the anti-Home Rule movement. Sidney Tarrow has argued that protest cycles provide opportunities for elites: Whether power holders adopt “facilitative strategies” or repression or both can determine whether popular contention diverges toward violence or institutionalization.Footnote 102 The end of a protest cycle, according to Tarrow, is produced by a combination of “exhaustion, repression, and reform[.]”Footnote 103 Consequently, the absence of widespread sectarian violence in Belfast during 1886–1920 can be attributed to the capacity of the dominant social and political arrangements and avenues of power and leadership to integrate and contain volatile popular forces through primarily democratic political channels.
Under the umbrella of local and national Protestant defense, the Unionist establishment directly intervened. It constructed an elaborate, seemingly democratic machinery that succeeded in integrating and controlling the principal agency of sectarian violence, the Orange Order, while exerting effective forms of social control.Footnote 104 The Unionist elite delineated between legitimate and “illegitimate” violence—and channelled Protestant agitation away from bloody street confrontation into avenues of managed political and associational expression. This elite created, co-opted, and integrated grassroots Protestant organizations as a means of harnessing and “policing” sectarianism and also in order to emasculate alternative sources of power.
Ulster Unionism was an invented or “imagined” identity with a pronounced but contingent Protestant dimension that was juxtaposed in relation to the Irish Nationalist “Other.” Ulster Unionism was a form of religious ethnicityFootnote 105 diffused beyond the locality and region, providing a rallying point for Ulster's fractious Protestants. This sociopolitical construct was largely conditioned by developments in British political culture and identity.
Without these initiatives, Belfast would have experienced far worse sectarian disorder than that which engulfed Liverpool in 1909, and in all probability Ulster Unionism would have lost the critical “battle of politics” in relation to the wider Home Rule struggle.
Thus both national and local factors explain the differences in sectarian conflict in Belfast and Liverpool. In Liverpool, the dominant political culture was fundamentally parochial in character, feeding off local religious and ethnic rivalries. In Belfast, Ulster Unionism engaged in a national political debate critical to its very survival and was ultimately accountable to a wider British public opinion increasingly intolerant of sectarian bigotry and violence. With the decline of Liverpool's relative exceptionalism during the interwar era and Belfast's increasing marginality to British political culture and identity, sectarian violence gradually declined in Liverpool while in Belfast it exploded back into life.
