The writing and study of history, no less than transformations in clothing and appearance, have been and still are subject to dramatic changes in fashion. At one time the ‘national’ reigned supreme, now it is the transnational and the comparative. The reasons behind this are not much easier to understand than why in 1810 women wore dresses resembling nightgowns, while in 1860 they appeared equipped with enormous bustles or why in 1810 men were clean-shaven, but in 1860 sported impressive, even intimidating, beards. And lest historians see themselves as occupying more ‘serious’ territory, they should remind themselves that the reasons for shifts in their own ‘fashions’ rarely move much beyond the inexplicable modishness of the times.

That said Shane Nagle has written an interesting study of two national entities that might not obviously press themselves to the forefront of comparative analysis. Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was ostensibly an integral part of a single polity – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. ‘Germany’ long remained a concept rather than a political reality, so much so that, even after the foundation of the second Kaisereich in 1871, individual kings remained on the thrones of Hannover, Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg, while Bavaria also continued to maintain what legally amounted to its own army and general staff. What, indeed, Germany and Ireland had, above all, in common was local particularism, with the Rhinelander Konrad Adenauer recording, as late as the 1950s, that, on crossing the Elbe in a sealed train bound through the D.D.R. for Berlin, he would wake and tell himself ‘Jetzt bin ich in Asien’ (‘Now I am in Asia’).

Nagle, however, makes little of this transnational equivalence of localism. Rather he looks to parallels in historical and political understanding and most of all, and most pertinently, to the rather different ways in which religion and sectarian divisions echoed interestingly between Ireland and Germany. ‘Religion or confessional allegiance’, he writes, ‘became comprehensively nationalized’ in both countries ‘and in this respect the historical writing of the relationship between nation and religion played a dominant role’. As one German historian put it in 1882, ‘our history writing, Protestant as well as Catholic, considers the past from the political and religious viewpoint of the present, and finds in them weapons for current battles’. And it is with regard to these analogies in historical analysis that Nagle makes his most important contribution, notwithstanding the fact that history as a technical discipline was making more substantial strides in nineteenth-century Germany than in Ireland. Even so, as Nagle points out, in both countries from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards ‘politico-religious conflicts were fought within historiography, historiographical arguments reflecting not just the confessional division within each society but the contemporary political significance of that division for each country’.

Important insights undoubtedly lie at the heart of Nagle’s comparatively short text (158 pages plus end notes). At times a somewhat excessive schematisation reveals that the work owes much to the procrustean categories beloved by political scientists, with a good deal of talk of ethno-symbolism and obeisances to the writings of Anthony D. Smith and Adrian Hastings. There are also a great many references to the ‘Other’, surely by now a trope that has enjoyed too long a place in the historical sun.

Yet, all in all, this is undoubtedly an interesting and useful study. And the fact that it raises as many questions as it answers is a measure of its importance though at times theory simply gets too complicated and space too limited for Nagle’s arguments to emerge with translucent clarity. Thus the crucial German understanding of terms like ‘Heimat’ and ‘Volk’ (which have no precise English-language equivalents) could have done with more nuanced explication. The same is true of the term ‘Sonderweg’ so often applied to the path taken by Germany as both a political concept and a political reality. More too might have been made of Daniel O’Connell’s undoubted popularity among German Catholics or of the crucial contribution to Irish historical and linguistic studies made by German celticists in this period.

There can, however, be no doubt that this pioneering book is full of useful insights and arguments. It is to be hoped that a high price will not prevent its being read by those interested, not only in the historical development of modern Ireland and modern Germany, but in the various political and cultural paths taken by modern Europe as a whole.