While it is a truism to say that memories of the Great Famine in Ireland remain contested, the question of education has been a particularly vexed one. Nationalist stereotypes and celebratory studies of missionary societies have not been conducive to dialogue, let alone productive debate. Two words in particular tend to raise the argumentative temperature. One is ‘souperism’: the allegation that Protestants exploited hunger by using food or the promise of employment to coerce starving families into converting. The other is ‘colonialism’: the assumption that, because Ireland was subordinate, Protestant missionaries should be understood simply as agents of imperial domination. Although there are, of course, important truths to both of these perspectives, it may well be an advantage to come at this question as an ‘outsider’. Karina Bénazech Wendling is a senior lecturer at the University of Lorraine, and her first English-language monograph shows that, if we restrain ourselves from reductive sloganising, we will find much that should interest us.

Converting Ireland focuses on ‘The Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of their own Language’ – the Irish Society, for short – founded in 1818. ‘Souperism’ is a freighted word in the history of the society, for it first emerged in the press in stories surrounding its activities, in the early 1840s. The radicalisation of educational missions in the 1830s and ’40s, Wendling acknowledges, followed a predictably depressing script. Fears that the established churches were in danger fuelled fervid anti-Catholicism and apocalypticism across the newly minted United Kingdom, and it did not take much to persuade touchy Irish Evangelicals that the non-denominational National Educational System put in place by the Whigs in 1831 was a Trojan horse for Catholic machinations. Yet the journey to this point, as Wendling notes, is more surprising. Although it was pushed largely by Dublin-based Protestants, the Irish Society had a genuine interest in the Irish language, one that stemmed from its interest in getting the Bible into people’s hands and homes. And it was unusual in this: the state, the established Church and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Catholic church, too, all thought that education in English was a more integrative or perhaps simply more useful way of doing literacy. The Irish Society was also notable for its pragmatic ecumenism, employing both Protestant and Catholic teachers, for instance. Wendling writes movingly about how missionaries and priests worked alongside one another to feed the hungry, bury the dead and look after families amid the devastating effects of famine in Dingle in 1847: ‘[a]ccusations of souperism were replaced by common declarations of Christian charity’ (p. 227).

This is not, however, an exercise in whitewashing. Over six main-body chapters, Wendling leads us surefootedly through the tangled educational landscape of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first chapter examines the development of a patchy fabric of charity and parochial schools, showing how the London-based industrial philanthropy of the British and Foreign Bible Society turbocharged the efforts of local individuals such as the Dissenter Thaddeus Connellan. The second chapter lays out how and why the society came to emphasise the Irish language: a reflex both of local concerns and of the awesome ambition of British Evangelicals, who aimed to provide every inhabitant of the globe with access to a Bible in their own tongue. Chapter iii describes the gradual swing from ‘scriptural education’ to proselytism, as government policy and orchestrated Catholic resistance to the Irish Society forced changes of direction. Chapter iv, a micro-study of the Dingle ‘colony of converts’, explores what this looked like on the ground, bringing vividly to life a world in which to change one’s faith was to face community ostracism and possible family breakup. One strength of Converting Ireland is its reluctance to lapse into moralising about cultural imperialism, though it could sometimes be more robust in offering alternative explanations: for this reviewer, the embattled ‘colony’ quite obviously smacked more of utopian schemes like the Chartist Land Plan than it did of subjugation. The final two chapters address in detail allegations of souperism, which was as much a Catholic rallying cry as a description of reality, and the hardening of Protestant attitudes between 1847 and 1853 towards what they now regarded as a recalcitrant populace.

Converting Ireland deploys a vast range of sources: pamphlets, newspapers, society records, government papers, ecclesiastical records, correspondence and memoirs. (To read the footnotes thoroughly is to realise the possibilities for further research in the gargantuan archives of the burgeoning bureaucracies of the early nineteenth century.) It uses this material to cut gently but firmly through inherited half-truths and cherished confessional grievances. Lurking half-articulated behind its account is the subtle but important revisionist point that there was nothing inevitable about the making of an independent Catholic Irish nation-state. The uprising of the United Irishmen was within living memory for most of this book’s protagonists, whose language tended towards an older pan-Irish patriotism that was at least theoretically compatible with the practical-minded aims of the young United Kingdom. As in much of contemporary Europe – in Prussia, say, or Austria-Hungary – education was a rickety attempt at multi-ethnic state-making that had little to do with racial chauvinism. Nor was it a grand project. Religious bodies were necessary auxiliaries because their resources enabled cheese-paring governments to do things on the cheap. Yet religion was never easy to harness to anyone’s imperatives. Catholicism sometimes played into nationalist projects, but it also stood against them, as Bismarck knew very well. The Bible society’s codification of languages and encouragement of vernacular literature sparked nationalism and ecclesiastical revanchism alike in Greece and Russia. Converting Ireland deals with a moment when intolerant Protestantism and Catholic resistance were neither of them quite the forces they would become. Wholesale conversion was never on the cards: we as readers know how the story ends. Nevertheless, the end point was far from inevitable. This unsensationalising account explores a fascinating world of alternative possibilities.