Lindsey Flewelling has written a readable and empirically rich account of Ulster unionists’ ambivalent ideas about the United States in the period of successive crises over Home Rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As she notes in her introduction, “Irish unionism is typically considered to be a very insular movement compared to Irish nationalism” (2). Two Irelands beyond the Sea will not necessarily change that assessment, though Flewelling's aim is rather to explore the extent to which Ulster unionists engaged intellectually, rhetorically and (to a lesser extent) materially with American politics and society in order to further their own ends.

After a helpful introduction, chapters 2 and 3 deal primarily with high politics, and develop a number of ideas important to the unionist worldview: that it was specifically Irish American nationalists who are responsible for the increasing radicalism of Home Rule agitation, that this perceived radicalism was used to legitimate unionists’ turn to militancy during the third Home Rule crisis, that Parnellites had no independent support base in Ireland and were therefore dependent upon American money, and that the graft of Tammany Hall offered a reasonable guide to what might be expected of a future Dublin legislature. Countervailing efforts to mobilize American popular opinion in support of unionism mostly failed. Early in the period, the New York Times baldly stated that Ulster Protestants were “not entitled, by their numbers or by any other fact about them, to be treated as a separate people with national or quasi-national rights” (33). Flewelling might have done a little more to explore these ideas, particularly as we might think of this as a period in which “small-nationality” movements flourished, and claims for national self-identity were up for grabs.

Chapter 4 explores the institutional expressions of Scotch Irish identity from about 1880 onwards. Flewelling is surely right to note the social and political diversity of this constituency but it begs the question of what exactly organizations such as the Scotch-Irish Society of America were for, beyond tired recitations of assumed virtues and an antiquarian obsession with their forefathers’ contributions to American public life. Chapter 5 documents three visits to the United States made by unionist statesmen between 1886 and 1920 and notes a shift in rhetoric towards a celebration of Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon kinship. Does this inventive racecraft have anything to do with the Jim Crow South? Or fears about Matthew Frye Jacobson's “new immigrants”? At least the anti-Catholic guys – and everyone here is a guy – who feature had a clear direction of travel, even if Orangeism in the United States was less well established than its Canadian counterpart.

The penultimate chapter explores the religious dimensions of this transatlantic unionist community but again concludes that the provision of moral support was the main payoff of US Presbyterian engagement with the anti-Home Rule campaign. The final chapter examines unionists’ use of the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Constitution as a means of strengthening their case against the British government's concessions to nationalist demands. As elsewhere, Flewelling convincingly demonstrates the ideological utility of the United States to this constituency, though the extent to which we can convincingly talk of a transnational community remains debatable.

To be blunt, this is not necessarily a book that will have wide traction with Americanists. The payoff seems most obvious in rendering more clearly the nature and limits of American influence on Ulster politics, and in shaping Ulster identities at a time of acute political dislocation. At various points it seems as though unionist propagandists wished that the titular “two Irelands beyond the sea” existed, but the evidence for historically significant material or ideological exchange is pretty slim. Flewelling is clear throughout that unionists felt a great antipathy towards Irish American nationalist organization in the United States. Their response was to denounce external interference in British imperial management, which in turn made it nearly impossible to mobilize any significant transnational network of support, had one existed. The book's broadest claim – that the period “sparked a theme of United States involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland which endured to the end of the twentieth century and beyond” (11) – doesn't quite stand up, and it would have been helpful to introduce a broader North American context by expanding on the good work of chapter 5 in considering the Canadian dimension to the story. That said, this will be a useful primer for anyone interested in the international imagination of participants in the Home Rule crises, as well as those interested in the formation of Ulster identities in the period.