This fine study, which originated in the author’s doctoral dissertation, advances our understanding of the nature of communal violence in the borderlands of Ulster and Upper Silesia and points us away from the twin shoals of Irish and Polish exceptionalism, the Scylla and Charybdis that have shipwrecked many unwary historians. Those who cherish more conventional traditions of historical writing will be agreeably surprised at the way in which the instruments and methods of social science have been employed to build a clearer and more coherent narrative about what actually happened—and what actually happens—when fractured populations experience severe stress.

The end of the First World War created an environment in which heretofore stifled nationalisms sought to assert their claims and counterclaims as the old order collapsed. But T. K. Wilson’s focus is on intercommunal violence rather than insurgency violence. This enables him to concentrate on the seamy underside of local violence without being distracted by high politics and attempts to make specific events conform to a broader narrative. So far, so good, but when it comes to methodology the reader is asked to assume the equivalence (for purposes of comparison) of very different kinds of intercommunal boundaries, a religious boundary in Ulster and a much more inchoate ethnic and linguistic boundary in Upper Silesia. Wilson very plausibly tells us that in Ulster, “religious identities followed national preferences very closely” (66). But he admits that “if one tries to use language usage in Upper Silesia as a guide to national identity, it largely falls apart as a category of identification” (69). For an Ulsterman to be both Catholic and Protestant at the same time was (and perhaps still is) not merely an impossibility; outside a Joycean parallel universe it is an absurdity. But many Upper Silesians were bilingual and could thus in effect choose their ethnic identity. Sometimes such choices were dictated by geography and location, and at other times by circumstance and the force of political and social pressure.

Wilson clearly recognizes this difficulty, but proceeds with his analysis anyway. Most readers (including this reviewer) will be glad that he did. In fact by commandeering the term “ethnic frontier” from Frank Wright’s pioneering 1987 study Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin), Wilson is able to present both Ulster’s religious divide and Upper Silesia’s linguistic divide as conforming to a common paradigm. Throughout the study the author evinces a commendable sensitivity to the proprietary nature of many of the terms that the historian must use in any discussion and analysis. Wilson’s refusal to accept uncritically broad assumptions by earlier writers extends deep into the historiography of the Anglo-Irish war and the origins of the Free State. Authors (Austen Morgan is one of many) who follow the traditional approach have muddied the waters by failing to discriminate between anti-British and intercommunal violence (16). The solution according to Wilson is to establish new and more coherent compartmental categories for comparative analysis.

What perhaps emerges most clearly from this study is the scale and range of differences between violence in Ulster and Upper Silesia. In Ulster, violence, so far from being “futile” or “meaningless” was directed toward the maintenance of communal boundaries. Frank Wright seems to have intuitively realized this when he described the calculus of violence in Ulster in that it required “very few people to kill enough people to frighten a very large number” (197). Of course this was also broadly true along the German-Polish divide in Upper Silesia, but the crucial difference there was that violence was uniquely directed toward boundary creation rather than boundary preservation. And this crucial difference seems to account for a much greater uncertainty about the origins and meaning of violence there. In this diffuse borderland where there were no clearly defined camps of Germans and Poles, not only were there much higher levels of violence, but in addition violence frequently divided families and communities rather than uniting them. Wilson notes that although Upper Silesia was “a noticeably less divided society than Ulster,” violence there was “commonly more diffuse and grotesque” (213). He concludes from all this that although Ulster was the more divided society, the violence it experience was “more restrained” (119). There was thus a causal relationship between types of communal boundaries and modes and levels of violence along societal fault lines.

What impresses most about this study is its forensic rigor, its attention to detail, and its balance. Four substantial chapters develop with an almost mechanical sense of inevitability. In the unlikely event that one wishes to disagree with the author’s conclusions, it would be relatively difficult to find good grounds for doing so. Nevertheless, there is an openness in the concluding (fifth) chapter that is both surprising and refreshing. National ambivalence has persisted in Upper Silesia to the extent that in the 2002 census the largest national minority self-described as Silesians. Wilson admits that “such robust regionalism has never stood much chance in Northern Ireland” (219), though of course from time to time attempts have been made to construct an Ulster identity through which to transcend the divisions of the past. At the end of the book, Wilson seems disturbed by what he has discovered: “Relative restraint in violence may on occasion derive from clearly maintained divisions between communities; more spectacular atrocity from their convergence” (222). This is indeed a troubling conclusion, but the discriminating reader will doubtless be consoled by the reflection that T. K. Wilson’s study has offered some bold new perspectives on the nature of Irish and Polish nationalism and on the contentious and contested nature of identity formation in fractured societies.