Reviewing a volume of essays collected from refereed publications could feel very much like coming late to a party where the conversation has outlasted the libations, when everything has been said and revelers glance about awkwardly looking for a chance to go home. What a pleasure that the essays collected in Foreign Affections ease those trepidations so quickly. The decision Seamus Deane has made to group essays spanning more than thirty years (1968–2003) is bold, suggesting a kind of comfort and consistency with a subject that most scholars would envy. Deane forthrightly admits that he has rewritten and updated his work, yet the weight of these pages leaves little doubt that his sustained reflection on the myriad ways that Ireland wove its way through the life and work of Edmund Burke has been as broad as it has been deep.

Arranged in a kind of chronological order, tracing lines of influence from Burke's progenitors (Swift, Montesquieu), then following his impact on subsequent writers (Tocqueville, Acton, Newman), and then treating themes such as liberty, colonialism, and the role of religion along the way, the format of Deane's collection enables him to follow multiple lines of approach toward his subject, a strategy well suited to Burke and the “dynamic contradictions” that characterize his works. If a particular theme resounds throughout Foreign Affections it is the curious dual role of Ireland for Burke—and, for others—as at once familiar and foreign. For Burke, the Irishman at home on neither side of the Irish Sea, Ireland is a test for the possibility of colonialism and empire in an environment of liberty, and a laboratory for religious toleration in an age when Burke perceived an all-out war on religion across Europe.

The critical essay in this text is the sixth, “Factions and Fictions: Burke, Colonialism, and Revolution,” wherein Deane weaves together several of the strands that he has addressed heretofore to approach what comes nearest to gathering Burke's notions of tradition, nation, sublimity, colonialism, and otherness into an aggregate. Deane quickly strips from Burke the layers of romantic sentiment that cloud his far more practical dispositions, finding that for Burke “no representation can or should compete with the actual” (90). In this hardheaded practicality lies the root of what often is called Burke's conservatism, his devotion to what has accreted culturally and politically over time above what might be concocted by the most imaginative or benevolent social experimenters. Here Deane locates Burke's various criticisms of the “King's friends” during the 1770s and his long-standing vituperations toward the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the East India Company, and (naturally) the French Jacobins—each of whom represented not the actual state or the actual political culture of the various places wherein they were found but ruinous factions that had (to one degree or another) supplanted history to obstruct the organic operation of politics. Deane's key insight is that these factions have, in Burke's words, committed a “perversion of history” that treats their own countries as foreign territories to be conquered from within. Not surprisingly, this insight serves also to refract Burke's preoccupations with all of these factions through his youthful experiences of British-dominated Ireland.

Deane's treatment of eighteenth-century travel literature in his first essay might seem eccentric, but for the duality of Burke's relationship to Ireland. Taken in the context of British colonial ambitions there, and of the ruthless means by which the conquest of Ireland was undertaken, a look at the way in which travel literature held up a mirror to British society and challenged notions of universal values sits well in this collection of essays. If, in that mirror, in a land so nearby and so superficially similar, British liberty could not be reproduced beneficently in Ireland, could the idea of liberty survive the ambition of empire? This is the challenge Deane sets forth for the collection, one that winds throughout his pages until we reach a turnabout with John Henry Newman, the English convert to Catholicism who gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and whose conversion posited the Irish ironically as “the spiritual conquerors of the British Empire” (157). The Newman essay might be a curiosity, inasmuch as it alone in this collection does not mention Edmund Burke. Its presence is necessary, however, for the denouement it provides in its realization of Deane's themes of religion, sublimity, colonialism, and empire. In Newman's claims about the church-state relationship we hear the echoes of Burke's own claims—the survival of faith despite state persecution and the deep roots of faith within the history that also nourished culture. Newman's appearance in this volume attests to the durability of Burke's analysis, and to why he continues to satisfy readers across the ideological spectrum who yet struggle to come to terms with modernity and all it has encompassed.

Deane's choice of title derives from the Tracts Relating to Popery Laws, wherein Burke wrote that one's “home-bred connections” should be preferred to the temptation “meretriciously to hunt abroad after foreign affections.” The choice is a pregnant one, in light of Burke's affective epistemology and in view of the twofold light that Deane casts on Burke's relationship to Ireland. Its final appeal, of course, lies in Burke's own affection for the tested and the familiar. For the reader who shares that sympathy, nothing in Deane's treatment of his subject could shock or offend—Deane places Burke well within the scope of recognizable Burke scholarship, especially with the Irish emphasis of the last fifteen years. For those who seek with David Bromwich and Stephen K. White the prospects for “alternative modernity” in Burke's analysis of the events through which he lived, Deane offers solace as well, anticipating in his treatment of colonialism and liberty the challenges that face any empire of liberty.