There is a great deal to admire in Colin Barr's hefty tome on the development of an Irish Catholic, or in his term, ‘Hiberno-Roman’ infrastructure across the globe in the nineteenth century. His third monograph, following previous studies of the Catholic University and the Callan schools controversy, Ireland's empire is certainly his most ambitious yet in terms of its scope, and is a fitting companion to the volume he edited with Hilary Carey on Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish global networks, 1750–1950 (Montreal, 2015).

The concept of ‘Greater Ireland’ is also at the heart of Barr's analysis here. Despite the sub-title referring to the ‘English-speaking world’, Barr conceives of ‘Ireland's empire’ as something not quite contiguous with either the British equivalent or the more expansive British world, to which historians of this period often refer. There is, as he explains in his admirably clear introduction, not a lot to be said on some obvious parts of the Anglosphere: barring South Africa, little on a continent which was rapidly (and forcibly) adopting English as a lingua franca but would see Irish religious flood in only after Barr's 1914 cut-off date; not much Scotland; and, strikingly, no England. The fact that both Scotland and England had some of the largest Irish populations outside Ireland, often as fervently Catholic as any at home and routinely served by Irish-trained clergy, is not enough to merit inclusion in this iteration of ‘Ireland's empire’. The reader quickly gathers that it is, quite specifically, the places where English was spoken with an Irish accent not only in the pews and in the parochial houses but in the episcopal palaces that most interest Barr.

The book is divided into seven chapters that deal with, in turn, the United States, Newfoundland, India, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In each unfolds a meticulously documented story of organisational intrigue, in-fighting and, usually, Irish success. ‘Success’ here is essentially measured by how many jobs for Paul Cullen's boys could be secured. Cullen, archbishop of Armagh, then Dublin, first Irish cardinal, and arch-ultramontane who had an almost unrivalled influence in Rome, is the principal great man at the centre of this story of, inevitably, mostly men. He was, Barr contends, ‘the United Kingdom's most enduringly successful imperialist’ (p. 12), placing scores of Irishmen in episcopal seats across the world — men who shaped their national churches in the ‘Hiberno-Roman’ image of Cullen's own and fomented an institutional culture that was strong enough to outlive the physical presence of Cullenite bishops. As Barr notes of Australia, by the twentieth century, ‘Hiberno-Romanism had long since gone native’ (p. 402). Barr's is a thesis of institutional capture, then, played out in broadly similar fashion — ‘It all began with a row’, as chapter one starts (p. 22) — across several jurisdictions.

Among the book's obvious strengths are, first, an unparalleled documentary foundation, encompassing material from more than a hundred Catholic and other archives in Ireland, Britain, continental Europe, North America, Australasia and South Africa; even the Falkland Islands get a rare outing in the manuscript bibliography. (One wonders how, in the era of a global pandemic that has stopped access to even the lending library down the street, such international research can ever again be done.) Second, Barr weaves together his multifarious threads of bishops’ correspondence with notable skill. Organising the chapters geographically rather than thematically or chronologically is perhaps the simplest way to tell this enormous story, but it is nevertheless far from a simple task, and, while doing a service to scholars of those individual places, Barr also makes some transnational connections between chapters. Third, Barr peppers his elegant prose with well-told gossip and black humour. Stories like that of the Newfoundland bishop who ‘died of shock when his chair caught fire’ (pp 79–80), or of Cardinal Newman acidly calling Propaganda Fide's powerful Cardinal Barnabò ‘a mere clerk’, presumably because of his propensity to ‘read every letter’ (p. 10), enliven the text.

For this reviewer, however, the book is not without some omissions and points from which to demur. First, Barr makes some allusions to phrases familiar from the new imperial history — such as ‘absence of mind’ and ‘nodal points’ (p. 7) — which never quite amount to substantive theoretical engagement with that literature; this seems a missed opportunity given the impressive scale of the imperial phenomenon with which he is dealing here. Secondly, there is the question of why all of this high political intrigue over the positioning of bishops should concern us. I agree heartily with Barr when he notes at the outset that ‘What really mattered was not the machinations of bishops, or the recruitment of nuns but the lived experience of the millions of people who organised their lives and identities around the Catholic Church’ (p. 21). But nuns, ordinary clergy — at least those not vying for mitres — and the laity are bit-part players in the book's narrative, the lay experience coming to the fore only in the conclusion. Here we get a neat run-down of all of the ways in which a shared Irish Catholic culture reached across the globe, but beyond assurances of the social control that bishops could impose via an undoubtedly hierarchical church, no clear line of reasoning as to how Cullenite bishops brought this about where others may not have. Irish lay emigration was so gargantuan and the supply of surplus vocations of ordinary male and female religious overseas from Ireland so enormous that one could certainly posit, using parishes in Glasgow or Lancashire as evidence, that Greater Ireland would have been a deep green regardless of the allegiances of those who presided over dioceses.

Moreover, in referring to ‘social control’ as a key mechanism, Barr may be too quick to dismiss lay agency in all of this. In noting his agreement with Patrick O'Farrell's admonishment that historians should avoid imposing ‘the contemporary role of the laity into the past’ (p. 19), Barr not only joins him in ignoring older work by S. J. Connolly and J. H. Whyte that would tend to suggest that, however hierarchical the Irish church was as an institution, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century hierarchy and clergy could only ‘lead people in the direction they wanted to go’, but also overlooks more recent work by Cara Delay, Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Eugene Hynes and others which has amply shown the agency Irish laity exercised in both overt and, more often, subtle ways.

Nevertheless, Barr has rendered a valuable and necessary exposition of the high politics of ‘Ireland's empire’, and an exhaustive documentation of a cadre of men who certainly exercised significant and lasting institutional power on a global scale. It will be vital reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of Irish Catholicism, at home and abroad.