More than three decades after the publication of his magisterial Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885, Theodore Hoppen has produced another major study of nineteenth-century Irish politics. Governing Hibernia is, however, a different sort of book. In Elections, Politics and Society, Hoppen gave us Irish politics from the bottom up, examining factors that influenced voters at the constituency level. Governing Hibernia, in contrast, offers political history from the top down, analyzing “the attitudes and intentions that informed the ways in which those in charge of … the United Kingdom … approached and conducted the government” of Ireland under the Union (1). And, whereas in his earlier book, Hoppen played the role of the “splitter,” employing his solvent intellect to overturn the accepted verities of Irish electoral history, in Governing Hibernia he appears in the guise of the “lumper,” identifying broad trends in Anglo-Irish relations over time and across party lines. Here, Hoppen's thesis is that “ministers and cabinets” alternated between “policies of differentiation,” which emphasized Irish distinctiveness, and “policies deliberately conceived to assimilate Ireland into the norms and behaviour patterns of a larger metropolitan (that is, British) centre” (2). The main British parties, Hoppen contends, oscillated between these approaches more or less synchronously, so that a thirty-year period of differentiation was followed by four decades of assimilation, after which policy makers reverted to a program of divergent treatment for Ireland.

The Janus face of British politicians, Hoppen maintains, was already apparent during the debates on the Union in 1799–1800. The idea of Union was itself ambiguous—capable of being understood in terms of either “calm and comprehensive uniformity” or “intrusive and coercive control” (11). British advocates of the measure did little to clarify its nature, blending offers of equal partnership with chauvinistic assertions of cultural superiority. The terms of the Act of Union itself, however, suggested “that all the fine talk about assimilation had been nothing more than that, fine talk” (17), with Britain's wartime security needs trumping a more emollient approach to Irish governance. British politicians, consequently, continued to treat Ireland as a discrete entity in the first decades of the Union's existence, ruling through the instrument of a quasi-autonomous government with a distinct administrative apparatus, and pursuing their policy agenda (law and order) via separate legislation (coercion).

By the late 1820s, Hoppen claims, the policy of differentiation was in retreat. The pivot to an assimilationist governing strategy stemmed from a variety of causes, including a recognition that coercion had failed to produce order, mounting anxiety over nationalist agitation, and the increasing influence of utilitarian universalism. Though Conservative administrations accommodated themselves to an assimilationist agenda, the Whig-Liberal ministries of the 1830s and 1840s did the most to advance this approach. The underlying assumption of assimilationist policymakers was “that Irish problems were similar to English problems … and that therefore they demanded similar, perhaps even identical, solutions” (67). Some of their measures were “unambiguously assimilationist,” while other initiatives “genuflected to perceptions of Irish distinctiveness by adopting what might be called Hibernian means to deliver ultimately ‘English’ goals” (93). The upshot of such policies—with the Famine acting as a powerful accelerant—was the emergence of a more Anglicized Ireland by the 1860s.

Yet the assimilationist drive was ultimately not sustained. Economic depression, agrarian disaffection, and militant nationalism in Ireland, along with an embrace of historical relativism and cultural pluralism in Britain, encouraged politicians to revisit the policy of differentiation. Gladstone, with his nostrum of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, proved to be the most influential exponent of this view, and his Land Act of 1870 “marked the real beginning of the process of Irish differentiation that was to dominate the next fifty years” (192). However much the Conservatives might protest Gladstonian interference with private property and freedom of contract—and despite their abhorrence of his 1886 Home Rule bill—by the mid-1880s Conservatives were equally committed to a set of policies (land purchase and coercion) predicated on notions of Irish difference. The “real gulf” between the parties, Hoppen suggests, was thus fiscal rather than constitutional, with Liberals hoping to govern Ireland “on the cheap” and Conservatives “throwing money about” (209, 251). In the long run, he observes, the policy of differentiation pointed both to the dissolution of the Union and to the recognition, via partition, of regional distinctions within Ireland.

Governing Hibernia offers a compelling framework for understanding the Anglo-Irish relationship during the Union from the perspective of the British ruling class. Hoppen's mastery of the sources testifies to a professional life devoted to scrupulous archival research, and his command of the material is evident in his sparkling, often irreverent prose, which makes this study that rara avis, a work of serious scholarship that is also a pleasure to read. At the same time, Hoppen's book is perhaps more useful for its insight into the mentality of Ireland's rulers than as a guide to how they actually governed. Often, as the author acknowledges, legislation and executive action were powerfully conditioned by the pressures of circumstance. This is not to deny the role of ideology in shaping policy, but it is to suggest that the balance between ideology and exigency in generating action was dynamic rather than static. An alternate model might, for example, posit that British politicians adopted a broadly integrationist attitude toward Ireland into the 1880s, and were prepared to employ strategies of either assimilation or differentiation as domestic opinion permitted and Irish developments required. Such a view would suggest that 1886, rather than 1870, represented the decisive disjuncture in Anglo-Irish relations under the Union. But Governing Hibernia is a work that cannot be easily dismissed. Grandly conceived, closely argued, and carefully executed, this book will oblige Irish historians to engage with it for decades to come.