While the five volumes of the original Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE) each provided a survey of imperial history, focusing individually on different periods, the Companion Series concentrates on particular themes (such as race and gender) and specific countries. Kevin Kenny's edited collection on Ireland and empire is one of the first volumes in the new series and is part of a growing body of work that shows how an imperial perspective can allow us to move beyond the national focus of much earlier Irish historical writing. All of Kenny's contributors bring a transnational element to their work: interestingly, however, they tackle the task in quite different ways, revealing much about current trends in writing about Ireland's past.

Most of the contributors acknowledge that different parts of the world were tied into the British imperial structure in quite different ways and that we thus need to explain specifically how Ireland experienced empire. Some go about this by examining the island's role as an early-modern laboratory for British overseas expansion: this interpretation is advanced in Jane Ohlmeyer's contribution, and it is one that situates early-modern Irish history in the context of a wider “Atlantic world.” For, as historians such as Nicholas Canny (who contributed the foreword to this collection and edited the first volume of the original OHBE) have argued, if Ireland was an imperial laboratory, then Irish history becomes bound up with that of colonial North America.

Although this view is controversial (see, e.g., the work of Steven Ellis), more debate has been generated about subsequent periods. Although the process of colonization was complete by the end of the seventeenth century, Ireland's status was subsequently modified by repeated attempts to integrate the colony into the imperial center. This was not tried elsewhere in the empire, and it resulted in a highly distinctive situation, for attempts at integration were often halfhearted and never entirely successful, and Ireland never fully escaped colonial subordination. As Thomas Bartlett, Kenny, Alvin Jackson, and Deirdre McMahon acknowledge in their contributions to this volume, this makes it difficult to gauge Ireland's precise status within the empire. For example, as Kenny points out, Irish participation in British overseas expansion, as soldiers, administrators, settlers, and missionaries, partly reflected Ireland's colonial status: indigenous populations across the empire were similarly recruited for imperial service at home and overseas. However, we should also note that Irishmen and Irishwomen pervaded the higher levels of military, administrative, and missionary work: Asians and Africans typically did not. As Robert Bickers has pointed out in Empire Made Me (2003), English policemen in early twentieth-century Shanghai were often jealous of how Irishmen monopolized senior posts. They seldom envied the Chinese and Indian men who worked under them.

Two other contributors to the book, Vera Kreilkamp and Joe Cleary, meanwhile offer a third and quite different transnational perspective, seeking to write Ireland into a broader academic corpus of postcolonial studies. Like the idea of an Atlantic world, this approach originated on American campuses. Here, however, the similarity ends. Many historians have deep reservations about how those working in the sphere of postcolonial studies approach the past: some of these are voiced by Stephen Howe, in his essay on “Historiography” in this volume, and in his book Ireland and Empire (2000). Canny also has his doubts, as expressed obliquely in his foreword to the Kenny collection and more directly elsewhere. Much of the case presented by Kreilkamp and Cleary rests on the assertion that Ireland's relationship with Britain was substantially colonial: the degree to which Ireland was integrated into the imperial center is downplayed. Cleary is perhaps more successful than Kreilkamp in finding evidence to back up this assertion, although even in Cleary's chapter some of the connections drawn (e.g., the claim that Northern Ireland's “gradualist aspirations towards independence” [280] resembled those of Canada and New Zealand) seem a little superficial.

Such limitations in part reflect broader difficulties that are also encountered by the historians represented in the volume. Several contributors argue that despite the peculiarities of Irish development, an imperial perspective does shed light on Ireland's past. This is undoubtedly true. However, as Keith Jeffery has pointed out elsewhere, Ireland was in the unique position of being both a colony and part of the mother country. Even in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where substantial sections of the population claimed to be British, integration into the imperial center was never more than an aspiration. In Ireland, it was a reality and a doubly confusing one: for while many Irish people benefited from and accepted the imperial connection, many others would have preferred it to have never existed.

As a result of this uniqueness, the connections and comparisons between Ireland and other colonies highlighted in this volume often seem to lack substance. For example, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contemporaries of all political persuasions proposed analogies between Ireland and other parts of the empire: especially India, Canada, and South Africa. Comparisons could illustrate the rights and wrongs of the administration of Ireland: connections asserted comradeship with nationalists and loyalists elsewhere. For historians, it is tempting to make much of this. However, it is important to note that the analogies frequently shifted according to the necessities of domestic politics and were almost always drawn in order to forward particular local agendas. It is doubtful whether either contemporary nationalists or loyalists felt that colonial connections or comparisons were of primary importance. So, more generally, while Ireland was part of the empire, and needs to be viewed as such, its unique position means that comparisons with other British colonies are of limited usefulness. Perhaps, as Canny, Ohlmeyer, and Howe suggest, the similarities and contrasts with other European states and empires might indeed prove more fruitful.

The original five volumes of the OHBE were criticized for their conservatism, for not giving enough space to new approaches to the study of the imperial past. Kenny has in contrast sought to recruit contributors representing a wide range of views. The result is a disparate collection of essays that summarizes rather than advances debate: the volume nevertheless provides a useful introduction to what has been, and is likely to remain, an area of marked controversy.