In this new work, Eugenio Biagini traces the development of popular radicalism in the United Kingdom through 1906. In so doing, he finds that Home Rule was the “single most important catalyst in the remaking of popular radicalism after 1885” (4). Amid the flurry of recent debate over the applicability of colonial models to Ireland, Biagini instead chooses to put the Irish issue primarily in a metropolitan and European context, confessing to having “some reservations about the heuristic value of emphasizing Ireland's ‘colonial’ status and affinity with other parts of the Empire” (25). The crux of Biagini's book is that Home Rule mattered to ordinary Britons, not just to vote-seeking politicians. Unlike many previous historians, who have argued that Home Rule was an electoral albatross and met with disinterest or antipathy from the working classes, Biagini claims that British radicals embraced the Irish cause, and the issue “fired the public imagination of the peoples of the United Kingdom and came to dominate their understanding of liberty and citizenship” (4). Ireland mattered in domestic politics, not just because of its influence on the fate of the empire but because of its influence on the fate of British democracy. Ordinary people, particularly grassroots radical leaders, saw Home Rule as a test of civil liberties and participatory politics. The antithesis of Home Rule was thought to be coercion—anathema to radicals and liberals alike—and the grant of Irish self-government would be a significant step toward achieving broader democracy in Great Britain.

Home Rule was therefore central to post-1885 radicalism, having the potential to forge a broad-based and long-term radical alliance around democratic values, hostility to coercion and imperialism, and grassroots democracy. Irish issues offered the opportunity to appeal to radical urban workers and dissenters (each of whom remembered his or her own experiences with governmental coercion), while still invoking traditional liberal themes such as hostility to empire and suspicion of big government. Home Rule also allowed Liberal leaders and radical activists another chance to inject morality into politics (a technique that Biagini refers to as the “politics of emotionalism” [34]) and present Irish coercion as a threat to the moral standing of the government and the health of British democracy. This politics of emotionalism was a common Gladstonian tactic, and Gladstone presided over this coalition with more skill than his Liberal successors.

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism is a treasure trove of information about the coalescence of late-Victorian British radicalism, and the sheer number of sources used for this work is truly impressive. More important, the book is a necessary corrective to what has perhaps become an overemphasis on empire in recent work on Ireland. Biagini reminds us that Ireland was also an important part of the metropole, and the integration of Ireland into “English” domestic politics, particularly at the level of mass politics, is as welcome as the recent integration of Ireland into imperial historiography. Biagini also successfully attacks Irish exceptionalism. Claiming that most historians of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) have focused on what the party was against, Biagini instead looks at what the IPP supported, discovering that the IPP and its leaders shared notable similarities with British and continental liberalism (with certain exceptions, particularly the IPP's top-down structure and Parnell's protectionism). The attempt to place Irish politics within larger British and European trends (even if the comparative European references largely disappear after the first chapter) is a welcome approach to the study of the period. Biagini also incorporates all regions of the United Kingdom, giving significant attention to England, Scotland, Wales, Ulster, and “southern” Ireland.

There are a few points that could have been explored in more detail. First and foremost, the question of why Ireland mattered could have been teased out a bit more. Biagini offers a number of possible reasons for this: the specter of coercion, nonconformist and worker memories of English repression, the ways in which the Home Rule issue “came to be identified with democracy, constitutional freedoms, and ‘the claims of humanity’” (377). But why Ireland? Or, rather, why did the issues of Australian and South African Home Rule not invoke such passions and interest? Presumably, this was because of the physical proximity of Ireland to Britain, the presence of Irish MPs at Westminster, and the belief that the Irish were part of the metropole or at least more analogous to Scots or Welsh than to Indians or Egyptians. This assumption of Ireland's integration is itself an important point and could have been emphasized more strongly in the text. This ties into another small issue: the work glosses over the difference between non-Irish radicals being willing to use the discourse of Home Rule as a way of promoting their own interests (16, 355) and those same people genuinely caring about the Irish cause for its own sake. Further analysis of that distinction (admittedly difficult to get at historically) would have aided the analysis of whether most British radicals truly saw Ireland as a part of the metropole.

More seriously, the book needed some significant editing. The breadth of sources is impressive, but the density of the work at times obscures as much as it illuminates. Too often, the analytical thrust is buried amid a series of shorter narratives, and the overall point gets lost. The chapter on radical unionism is not particularly well integrated (and probably would have been better as a separate piece), and a number of small and less-important subsections (the analysis of the Weekly Times in chap. 6 being one of many examples) give the book a sense of being less than tightly organized. The book's important thesis would have been easier to digest if there was greater attention to the overall analytical thread. Nevertheless, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, in contesting Irish exceptionalism and demonstrating the centrality of the Home Rule issue to non-Irish radicals and liberals, makes a significant addition to our knowledge of the period.