In 2017, the English far-right activist Tommy Robinson was found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to prison; Robinson's supporters quickly declared that he had been transformed by suffering into a martyr for free speech. Even in Britain, often cited by sociologists as one of the most rapidly secularizing places on Earth, the language of ultimate sacrifice and martyrdom continues to animate public life. The mere existence of a “secular martyrdom” suggests something of a paradox: how can modern secularism, ostensibly devoted to maintaining a rational and bloodless public sphere, shelter a concept as ancient and religious (for lack of a better word) as martyrdom?

Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present, a volume edited by Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn, has taken the first steps toward answering this question. Assembling nine case studies, ranging from martyrs of the early labor movement to the suffragettes and Irish nationalists, Outram and Laybourn have demonstrated that secular martyrdom is a diverse and enduring concept. Beyond offering a testament to the concept's empirical range, Outram and Laybourn's book also suggests that the topic of secular martyrdom has value to disciplines across the humanities and social sciences; Secular Martyrdom contains the combined efforts of historians, a sociologist, a political scientist, and a professor of literature.

In their introductory and concluding chapters, Outram and Laybourn justify their topic and attempt to organize the volume's disparate historical cases together using a loose theoretical framework. The editors emphasize the idea that martyrdom is a weapon of the weak used in social protest. It is insinuated—though never plainly articulated—that martyrdom is a moment when nascent movements reflect on and interpret moments of repression to maintain fortitude in the face of opposition and potentially attract recruits. Secular martyrdom is therefore a potentially interesting component in broader repertoires of political contention.

Several of the chapters see weak movements turning moments of violent repression to their advantage through the ennobling language of ultimate sacrifice. The cases of the Peterloo martyrs (analyzed here by Joseph Cozens), the Tolpuddle martyrs (investigated by Clare Griffiths), and the Featherstone Massacre (handled by Outram) all see weak labor protest movements (relative to the force of the state) emboldened by violent repression as movement activists transform suffering to their advantage. This is doubly true for the case of the Easter Rising martyrs; as Mark McCarthy suggests in his chapter on the subject, the martyrdom of the Rising's leadership was instrumental in establishing popular support for the revolutionary movement.

Yet the precise mechanisms by which an instance of suffering is transformed into a case of martyrdom remain unclear. One of the great contributions of this volume is that nearly every author avoids the temptation of methodological individualism (martyrs are here generally described as socially constructed, rather than as self-sacrificing individuals). Yet why is it that some deaths are successfully transformed into instances of martyrdom and not others? Comparing the chapters on Peterloo, Tonypandy, and Easter 1916, the reader may begin to note the importance of formal organizations in successfully commemorating and creating martyrs, as well as the importance of either local history or contemporary events in generating the raw cultural materials needed to develop successful cases of martyrdom. However, such assessments are left to the reader, as little effort is made at drawing causal conclusions in the text (a forgivable omission, given that this is an edited volume of case studies).

The chapters dealing with martyrs of the nineteenth-century British labor movement, as well as McCarthy's chapter on the Easter Rising, seem unambiguous, detailing instances of violent repression met with countermobilization. But the case of suffragette Emily Davison, described here by Carolyn Collette, offers a different scenario in which the circumstances of a death are ambiguous or unknown.

Such interpretive challenges appear not only in the chapter on Davison, but also in Matt Perry's interesting chapter on the author and politician Ellen Wilkinson's work on the “martyred” town of Jarrow and Max Farrar's reflections on the murder of David Oluwale. Each of these cases sees the living fundamentally perplexed by a startling death. For suffragettes and their foes, the commemorative challenge lay in navigating the boundary between self-sacrifice and suicide. For Ellen Wilkinson, the struggle of commemoration involved both describing a place, Jarrow, in human terms, and then choosing between the descriptive traits of either martyrdom or heroism.

Max Farrar's chapter on the murder of David Oluwale is particularly noteworthy given Farrar's own position as both a sociologist and a campaigner working to maintain the memory of Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant whose death in Leeds in 1969 was instigated by police officers under circumstances that remain unclear. As Farrar analyzes the various attempts to commemorate Oluwale, he offers a vivid account of the highly emotional and often concertedly strategic decisions that are made by a commemorative community in the wake of a death. All of these cases, though most especially the case of Oluwale, seem to me to be instances of “non-martyrdom,” moments in which suffering or death might have been transformed by a community into sacrifice but, for a variety of reasons, were not. It may be, as Farrar suggests, that the creation of martyrs depends more on the deliberation of commemorative communities than on any circumstances that actually led to suffering or death.

As an account of secular martyrdom in modern Britain and Ireland, this book does an admirable job of cataloguing the range of cases (and near cases) and demonstrating that martyrdom is a social, rather than individual, action. However, if this book does have an overarching flaw, it is surely the failure to substantively address what is secular about secular martyrdom. Editors Outram and Laybourn make frequent references to early Christianity and the martyrs of the European Reformations. They are certain that modern secular martyrs are similar to their Christian forbears, and they are also aware that there are some differences as well. But the similarities and differences offered are insubstantial and undertheorized.

Secularism does not represent a mere chronological difference; scholars of various allegiances, from across the humanities and social sciences, have strained to demonstrate that secularism has its own logic. In this volume, Stephen Hopkins comes closest to appreciating this in his analysis of Bobby Sands. Hopkins writes of the seemingly blurred boundary between religion and politics during the Troubles, yet seems to conclude that the martyrdom of Sands was secular insofar as it was pliable and ambiguous. A reader who is primarily concerned with the secular nature of secular martyrdom might draw an interesting conclusion: that secular martyrdom is unique insofar as it represents a form of sacrifice without any notion of the sacred.

It is worth reiterating that this is a valuable and laudable book. The editors have collected a diverse array of cases and have created a volume that reflects the best features of interdisciplinary inquiry. Secular Martyrdom will surely be of interest to scholars of British labor history, the Irish revolutionary period, commemoration practices, and modern social movements. If the volume does not definitively answer what is secular about modern cases of martyrdom, it should inspire scholars of religion and political contention to pursue this question further; for that, the editors and contributors should be thanked.