Barry Crosbie's Irish Imperial Networks is a welcome contribution to the fields of both Irish and imperial history. Much of the recent scholarship on Ireland and empire, and Ireland and India more specifically, has sought to define Ireland's relationship with nineteenth-century Britain. Crosbie moves beyond the debate surrounding Ireland's colonial status and, instead, adopts a “four nations” approach to emphasize Ireland's distinct experience with the British empire. Ties to Britain and ties to the British empire, he argues, were not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor were they always competitive. Occupying both a metropolitan and a colonial position in the nineteenth-century British empire, Ireland provided a crucial subimperial center for expansion into South Asia. Furthermore, this position allowed the Irish to play an integral role in empire building by developing networks that simultaneously bypassed London and bound the empire together.

Crosbie embeds his analysis in recent scholarship that applies the study of networks to examine disparate colonial locations in one analytical framework. While he draws from this recent literature, he also adds to it, providing the first detailed and contextualized study of the Irish role in imperial expansion in South Asia during the long nineteenth century. Crosbie unpacks the development of Irish networks in detail—how and why they were forged, who they involved, and their lasting impact on both Ireland and the empire. To reconstruct these Irish imperial networks, he turns to the private papers of Irish migrants and settlers as well as to manuscripts from the Oriental and India Office Collection housed at the British Library. Crosbie examines a wide array of military, political, and intellectual connections—including the religious, medical, and nationalist networks that allowed the Irish to play a vital role in the development of imperial rule.

Irish Imperial Networks is organized both thematically and chronologically. Crosbie seamlessly moves his reader from the development of military centers and merchant agencies in the eighteenth century to the collaboration between Irish and Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century. Along the way, he fleshes out this intricate study of networks with individual stories. For example, Laurence Sulivan, the Cork entrepreneur who worked his way up the ranks of the East India Company to the board of directors in London, both established and relied on Irish patronage. These Irish connections provided Sulivan support as he navigated the broader networks of the East India Company and London politicians. Thomas Oldham and his network of Irish geologists reorganized and restructured the Geological Survey of India into a “thoroughly modernised scientific institution” (118). Oldham's efforts as superintendent of the Geological Survey of India permitted the field of geology to play an increasingly important role in colonial administration during the 1860s and 1870s. Finally, C. J. O'Donnell, l'enfant terrible of the Indian Civil Service and the brother of Irish MP Frank Hugh O'Donnell, drew upon his Irish background to critique British rule from within the folds of the colonial administration in India. In particular, he employed Irish nationalist tactics to promote the idea of Indian Home Rule and intervened in issues of famine and land policy in Bihar. These examples demonstrate the ways in which the empire provided the Irish a multitude of opportunities—from the economic benefit seized by Sulivan to the intellectual currents developed by Oldham to the nationalist possibilities advocated by O'Donnell. These examples also demonstrate the lasting implications of Irish imperial involvement. Through their engagement with the empire, Irish individuals influenced British rule in India; however, they were also well positioned to stimulate nationalist criticism globally.

Crosbie's examination of Irish and Indian networks is both ambitious and impressive, and it is difficult to identify weaknesses in the monograph. The expanse of the project coupled with the detailed narrative may prove difficult for the nonspecialist reader. Some chapters do not advance the argument as well as others. For example, Crosbie's discussion of Fenianism sits awkwardly in a chapter that examines the growing desire of Irish Catholic clergy to participate in and even challenge British politics in India. He argues that the politics of religion merged with new languages of nationalism to encourage tensions between the Irish Catholic community and the colonial state during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Crosbie is certainly correct to acknowledge that the mid-nineteenth century witnessed resurgence in revolutionary and republican nationalism, which ultimately resulted in Fenianism as well as other strands of Irish nationalism. He relies on the term “Fenian,” however, to describe Irish Catholic nationalists operating during the 1840s and 1850s. The precursor to the Fenian organization was not founded until 1858 and the term itself not widely adopted until the 1860s. Not acknowledging the nuances in this development creates a potentially misleading conflation of mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist sympathies.

On the whole, Crosbie's work is thoroughly researched, well grounded in historiography, and clearly written. Irish Imperial Networks expands our understanding of the global nature of imperialism—highlighting the ethnic diversity of the people involved and the lasting repercussions of this involvement. As such, this is a book that will appeal to and should be read by historians of Ireland, Britain, South Asia, and imperialism.