With the creation of the Irish Free State, the United Kingdom disposed of a greater proportion of its territory than the German Reich lost after 1918. In his The Irish Boundary Commission and Its Origins, 1886–1925, Paul Murray offers us a new account of the mechanism by which this process of amputation was—for the British, at least—managed so painlessly. In doing so, he manages the difficult task of narrating the history of a nonevent as well as demonstrating its momentous significance.

Chapter 1 sets the general tone by adopting a resolutely high-political approach to the subject, and hence a discussion of origins begins with the classic set-piece confrontation over Home Rule in 1886. That is, perhaps, a little unfortunate since it does not allow much space for consideration of how far a popular sense of an inner “core Ulster” region had already begun to develop in Ireland by then. Orange diehards predictably saw the campaigns of Jack Lawless (in 1828) and Tim Healy (in 1883) as “invasions” of Ulster. But in both cases they rallied on an imagined frontier around the Monaghan/Fermanagh county line—that is, nearer the modern border of Northern Ireland than the (essentially notional) border of the nine-county province of Ulster. This is not to say that there was any very direct line from these confrontations to the shape of the modern border as it stands today, but it is to suggest that calculations of Unionist elites in 1911–25 were (at least potentially) affected by longer-standing and more plebeian understandings of space as well.

That said, as his narrative begins to hit its stride in chapters 2–5, Murray is increasingly justified in viewing events primarily through the prism of elite politics. Indeed, in a narrow sense the Boundary Commission was simply a monument to Lloyd George’s heroically roguish interpretation of how to get to “yes” in difficult negotiations. The resplendently Delphic Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty had promised a commission to “determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographical conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland” (317)—a clause that could be interpreted as promising either cosmetic or major surgery, according to taste. One of the strengths of Murray’s book is its forensic re-creation of what different participants in the room might have thought this clause meant and how justified they were in holding the views that they did. His account further reinforces the view of an Irish shadow-state delegation that was simply as outclassed in its negotiating capacity with an established government as the Palestinians were to be during the Oslo process seventy years later. It makes for similarly uncomfortable reading. Taking the story down to its ignominious ending in 1925, Murray offers the fullest account to date of how the Irish Boundary Commission actually worked in practice. Here his examination of the inner-thought world and assumptions of the commission’s all-powerful chairman, Richard Feetham (“Feetham-cheat’em!”), to the ever viper-tongued Tim Healy is particularly careful and convincing.

All this is highly valuable. By contrast, chapter 6 represents an ambitious attempt to pan out to view the Irish Boundary Commission against a comparative backdrop of other postwar border disputes in Europe (including Upper Silesia). Murray argues that overarching communal identities of communities had proved an uncertain guide to ascertaining the national preferences of individuals in places like Upper Silesia and should therefore not have been used in Ireland. Indeed, the failure to hold a plebiscite in Ireland was a great missed opportunity. Had this actually happened, Murray writes, “there would have been no grounds for the suspicions, recriminations and long-term bitterness that Feetham’s proceedings left in their wake in Nationalist minds” (263).

This is an arresting comparative conclusion, but it is also a highly superficial one. Having written on both these case studies—I must declare an interest here—I do not find either Murray’s analysis of Upper Silesian identity politics or his advocacy of one person/one vote/one time border plebiscites convincing. It is simply not the case (as he claims) that in Upper Silesia “the majority of the population was indisputably Polish” (254). Recent work by T. Hunt Tooley, James Bjork, and Tomasz Kamusella—none of it cited by Murray, but all of it in English—has demonstrated the importance of a deeply rooted tradition of national ambiguity in Upper Silesia. Here Murray relies (uncritically) upon near-contemporary sources—a rather self-serving analysis from 1923 by Francis Bourdillon (secretary of the Irish Boundary Commission and veteran of the Upper Silesian plebiscite experiment) and Sarah Wambaugh’s classic 1933 study, Plebiscites since the World War. The results are unfortunate. He is surely misled in claiming that Protestantism was the “national religion” (259) of Silesian Germans (instead, the national question ran right through a community that was over 90 percent Catholic). But most breathtaking of all is Murray’s celebration—following Bourdillon—of the Upper Silesian plebiscite experiment as a model of conflict resolution. It bears reemphasizing that as an advertisement for liberal interventionism, Upper Silesia was an abject disaster. Around 2,300 people were slaughtered during the period of the Allied plebiscite regime, and, unsurprisingly, the longer-term legacy was anything but irenic. Indeed, it was hardly coincidental that the Nazis chose Upper Silesia for the staged border incident on 31 August 1939 that launched World War II. In short, chapter 6 convincingly demonstrates the dangers of a little comparative knowledge.

But if the attempt to consider the Irish case against a wider European context is ultimately disappointing, as a contribution to the historiographies of the British state, Northern Ireland, and British-Irish relations Murray’s book remains valuable. Indeed, Paul Murray has succeeded in writing what will surely long remain the standard work on the Irish Boundary Commission. In closing a large gap in the literature on Irish partition, he deserves our gratitude.