This impressively interdisciplinary collection of essays is a welcome contribution to the relatively untilled field of Irish intellectual history. It is presented both as in apostolic succession to R. D. Collison Black's pathbreaking volume, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960) and as a prolegomenon to any future history of Irish anthropology. As Peter Gray acutely remarks in his “Afterword,” the agricultural crisis of 1859–63 provides the context for many of the book's discussions, and he notes that a connecting theme is the significance of the 1860s as a decade of change in thinking about Ireland. In general, it could be said that by the nineteenth century the Irish had moved from being considered as ontologically inferior to being merely historically backward.

Tom Garvin and Andreas Hess provide a well-contextualized account of Gustave de Beaumont's Ireland: Social, Political and Religious (1839). In 1862–63 Beaumont wrote a new introduction to the seventh edition of the text, giving, as Garvin and Hess put it, “a brilliant, impassioned and moving description of the Great Irish Famine” (11). Beaumont frequently stressed, in a dialectical formulation worthy of Marx, “that, through English colonisation, Ireland had also been given all the constitutional tools to free herself from colonial oppression” (20). Graham Finlay writes insightfully on John Stuart Mill's lifelong engagement with Irish affairs and argues that his views on Ireland exhibited more continuity than change. In his controversial 1868 pamphlet, England and Ireland, Mill advocated “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas.” For Mill, England and Ireland were “the completing counterpart of one another” (39), and Finlay correctly identifies the almost ubiquitous trope of the gendering of nations, with the Union figured as a national marriage, a “Union of Hearts.” Ireland was frequently represented as diseased body in need of external cure and a female body in need of a husband.

Harriet Martineau, the subject of Brian Conway and Michael Hill's chapter, visited Ireland on two occasions, the first, in 1832, yielding a didactic novel, Ireland: A Tale, part of her Illustrations of Political Economy, and the second, in 1852, resulting in her sociological Letters from Ireland. Ireland had been and remained “misgoverned” (55), she wrote, though she tended to blame the natives, their antipathy to law and truth, their clannishness, their servility toward Catholic priests, and their general backwardness. In his chapter on Sir Henry Maine, Séamas Ó Síocháin is the first scholar to study Maine's unsigned articles on Ireland in St James's Gazette. Maine famously stated that the movement of progressive societies was from status to contract. His great fear was that in Ireland the movement was in the opposite direction with property and contract under relentless attack. Ireland needed “unflinching legislative surgery” (75). We were, Maine wrote, “succumbing to a disease of modern origin which is enervating our fibre and softening our brain”; it was “really a deadly virus: lues philanthropica,” which was “governing Ireland by Irish ideas” (78). Legislation such as Gladstone's land acts was killing Ireland with kindness, ensuring, according to Maine, the “survival of the unfittest.” It is grimly ironic that Maine had a powerful indirect effect on Gladstone's 1870 and especially his 1881 land acts through his methodological influence on the economic thought of Cliffe Leslie, George Campbell, A. G. Richey, and W. N. Hancock, whose writings influenced Gladstone to, in effect, valorize “custom” at the expense of “contract.”

In their nuanced reading of Marx and Engels on Ireland, Chandana Mathur and Dermot Dix see both flexibility in their views and a “solid grasp of the material underpinnings of the colonial relationship” (106). Mathur and Dix are surely right in drawing attention to the lack of focus on material factors, especially economic ones, in much subsequent analysis. Indeed, postcolonial theory tends to be excessively culturalist. This chapter considers, inter alia, the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Ireland. In 1888, Engels wrote that a “purely socialist movement cannot be expected in Ireland for a considerable time” for people will first want to be peasants owning a plot of land. But, he added, “this should not prevent us from seeking to help them to get rid of their landlords, that is, to pass from semi-feudal conditions to capitalist conditions” (98). As late as 1891, Engels noted the impossibility of making the Irish peasant grasp the idea of modern bourgeois property. Marx and Engels offered critical support to the Fenians and generally defended anti-imperial nationalisms. Mathur and Dix make some intriguing comparisons between Marx's views on Ireland and on the colonial situation of India. Ciaran Brady speaks of James Anthony Froude, author of the controversial historical work, The English in Ireland (1872), and an “Irish” novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889), as crusading against not only Irish independence but “even the mildest aspirations to Home Rule” (108). For Froude, the native Irish were incapable of self-government, and the Irish temperament was “unstable as water” (112). The Irish were, in effect, “feminine,” “without the manliness which will give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of their disposition” (112). He condemned English leniency toward the Irish.

In his chapter, “Race Theory and the Irish,” Peter Bowler argues that the role of science in creating simianized stereotypes of the Irish has been exaggerated. The anti-Irish component of race science was directed not against the fair-skinned Celts but at the darker-skinned Iberian race that survived in Wales and especially in the west of Ireland. Robert Knox's Races of Man (1850, 1862) focused on the Celts but provided no anatomical evidence or argument. For Knox, Celts were “natural Catholics who could be ruled only by force from above” and were characterized by “furious fanaticism, a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits, restless, treacherous, uncertain: look at Ireland” (138). In “Macpherson, Matthew Arnold and Ireland,” George Watson, now sadly deceased, argues that the “Celtic note” played its part in the growth of cultural nationalism in Ireland, especially in the works of Yeats. James Macpherson's celebrated Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) was its foundational text. Watson sees the rudeness of the primitive epic as leavened by enlightenment “taste.”

Gray sees Arnoldian “otherness” as “positive” (168), a view shared by Watson, who concludes that “some stereotypes are less damaging than others” (158). It could be argued that positive stereotypes are more dangerous than negative ones. The necessity of severity toward the Irish advocated by Maine, Froude, and Knox would scarcely attract much popular support in Ireland, unlike Arnold's seductively feminized Celt, though disqualified from political power. Arnold himself, quite logically, opposed home rule. “Feminine” kindness was an alternative strategy of empire and not in the interest of separatism or even home rule. In “killing home rule with kindness,” the kindness is usually emphasized, not the killing, just as a focus on “good landlords” is in the ultimate interest of defending landlordism.