The fact that large-scale sectarian riots between Catholic and Protestant crowds regularly rocked mid- to late nineteenth-century Belfast is widely known. Indeed, over time ritualized clashes of the “sepoys of Sandy Row and the Pound” almost became synonymous with the city itself, an association reinforced by the violence of the contemporary Troubles. Reacting against the confining power of these sectarian narratives, historians have tended to steer clear of Ulster's modern tradition of communal violence in recent years, constructing portraits of the northern experience that challenge the binary categories that long have dominated Northern Irish historiography. For all its many virtues, however, this approach has created something of a scholarly gap in the literature, as few have attempted to show how sectarianism fits into these new more complex portraits of Ulster life. This is what makes Mark Doyle's monograph so welcome, for Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God is a well-written and sophisticated examination of the sectarian riots that plagued mid-Victorian Belfast, a timely reminder that sectarianism is a complex and legitimate subject of historical inquiry.

Doyle's book examines what he terms the origins of Belfast's tradition of sectarian violence, which he locates in the mid-1850s and 1860s. While this argument deemphasizes critical developments in the 1830s and 1840s, Doyle's tight focus on the riots of 1857 and 1864 and their shifting contexts is one of the book's real virtues. Eschewing the monocausal arguments that he believes have too long dominated the literature, Doyle focuses on the northern capital's plebeian social networks to explain why violence became the medium through which communal opposition was expressed. Combined with a sensitive appreciation for Belfast's shifting urban landscape, this approach allows the author to feature proletarian voices too often marginalized in nineteenth-century histories. This is particularly noteworthy in Doyle's treatment of Belfast's Catholic working-class politics, largely ignored in British and Irish historiography (outside of the pioneering work of the late A. C. Hepburn). While Doyle's examination of Belfast Ribbonism outstrips its scarce source base at times, his creative construction of Catholic life in mid-Victorian Belfast greatly advances our understanding of this critical population's historical experience.

This type of methodological creativity is another of the hallmarks of Fighting like the Devil. Utilizing Glasgow as a comparative case study, Doyle shows how the Scottish city featured a number of restraining factors (cross-class alliances, government legitimacy) that were simply not present in mid-Victorian Belfast. Moreover, the author displays a theoretical sophistication rarely seen in Irish historical studies, using figures like Pierre Nora to sharpen his analysis of Belfast's tradition of sectarian violence. This is particularly important for Doyle's final chapter, where he analyzes popular representations of sectarian rioting in late nineteenth-century illustrations and street ballads. For Doyle, these types of popular cultural production are central to understanding how narratives of sectarian violence became embedded into working-class community life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belfast. By marking certain spaces as sensitive flash points and recycling sectarian narratives, popular representations of violence helped to make sectarian riots an expected part of working-class life in Victorian Belfast, confrontations made more likely by the ritualized provocations of the sectarian calendar.

There are certainly aspects of Doyle's argument that are less convincing. His treatment of evangelical Protestantism, while often quite nuanced and persuasive, relies on binary categories (political and moral evangelicalism) that are far too rigid to describe evangelical Protestantism's complex location in the rapidly industrializing city. This leads to reductionist portraits of key players like the Reverend Thomas Drew, who is caricatured here as a strictly political figure, an interpretation that overlooks critical social and religious components of his influential ministry. One of the more controversial aspects of the book will doubtless be Doyle's description of the imperial nature of British rule in Belfast, but it strikes me that his treatment of the “colonial” aspects of British administration is both careful and productive, underlining the importance of state violence in sectarian rioting and the absence of legitimacy enjoyed by both local and national governments among the city's working-class population.

In short, this is an excellent book and will doubtless become one of the standard works on sectarian violence in mid-nineteenth-century Belfast. Fighting like the Devil brings a much-needed seriousness and sophistication to the study of communal violence in nineteenth-century Ulster and certainly deserves to be placed alongside the most insightful work on the history of violence in divided societies across the world (much of it on South Asia and associated with the Subaltern Studies project). It can only be hoped that Doyle's book reflects a broader determination to treat Ulster's tradition of sectarian violence as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry and, as such, generates the productive and dynamic conversation that the subject so clearly demands. Only time will tell, but Mark Doyle's book is certainly a step in the right direction.