John Cunningham’s and Terry Dunne’s anthology Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from below 1917–23 aims to reverse the erasure of popular nonmilitary action from the dominant narrative of the Irish revolution. The editors’ introduction sets out the premises concisely. Across Europe, the dislocation caused by the First World War led to the titular “spirit of revolution,” encompassing broad attacks on social, political, gender, economic, and colonial norms. In Ireland, a variety of popular movements expressed frustration at the current order, but Spirit of Revolution argues that much of this unrest has been neglected by historians in favor of a near-exclusive focus on Dublin-centered high politics, the military activities of the IRA, and the nationalist metanarratives of the period. Even the rise of Irish revisionist history several decades ago merely interpreted the nationalist revolution differently, rather than significantly broadening its scope. The authors note the growing inclusion of women into the revolutionary narrative in recent years but argue that labor and popular agitation have remained unexamined, with historians replicating the revolutionaries’ own desire to avoid a division of the revolutionary movement by classes. Spirit of Revolution had its origins at a conference on “Labour, Gender, and Class in the Struggle for Irish Independence,” so it is unsurprising that the trade union movement and the ghosts of James Connolly loom large in many of the chapters.

Spirit of Revolution makes several significant contributions to the study of the revolution. First, it undoubtedly succeeds in taking the focus away from Dublin, largely through the lens of microhistory. The reader takes in a variety of contexts not often covered in works on the Irish revolution: miners in the Castlecomer coalfields; maritime workers in Liverpool and New York; agricultural laborers in Maugherow, Co. Sligo; and independent socialists in Belfast. Taken together, these case studies indicate some themes that elevate our understanding of the Irish revolution. First, several chapters indicate that a sort of moral economy functioned in many of these revolts, with radicals seeking a fairer status quo. For example, in Johnny Burke’s chapter on “Bolshie” agrarian mobilization in Galway, the rebels were less interested in land confiscation and more interested in forcing landowners to sell at a fair price. Similarly, the Co. Meath agricultural workers discussed in Terry Dunne’s chapter worked to preserve access to garden plots and grazing land that had been commonplace in earlier iterations of rural housing policy. One activist even traced this back to the communal land policies of precolonial Gaelic polities (93). Moira Leydon’s chapter on labor agitation in Maugherow demonstrates that the workers striking against the Lissadell estate owned by Countess Markiewicz’s brother demanded only the wage that had been approved by the Agricultural Wage Board. These examples throughout the book demonstrate the complexities of bottom-up agitation, not all of which can be categorized neatly as either purely nationalist or Bolshevik internationalist.

Another common theme that emerges is the now-common story of class tensions leading to revolutionary outcomes that benefited those who already possessed some degree of economic and social power. As Anne Boran argues in her chapter on the Castlecomer miners, “those with least bargaining power in the social hierarchy tended to have their interests marginalized and unresolved by the “freedoms” offered in post-independence Ireland.” (21) The miners’ strike in north Kilkenny collapsed because the miners and carters had far less socioeconomic power than the small farmers and business owners. Dominic Haugh’s chapter on Munster soviets also details that the anti-Treaty IRA—usually seen as more radical and left-wing than its pro-Treaty opponents—suppressed activities on behalf of worker-run “soviet” creameries in Clonmel in 1922. Similarly, Liam Alex Heffron concludes that the Volunteers in Maugherow were a fairly conservative lot who enforced the Belfast Boycott but protected the property rights of graziers. Theresa Moriarty’s chapter shows that women at the Irish Trades Union Congresses were forceful in asserting their desire for equality but fell victim to the ingrained patriarchy within the unions and internal disagreements on the need for separate women’s industrial organizations.

Each chapter in this volume provides rich local detail in service of a more nuanced study of the revolution. One relatively minor concern is that the introduction, while setting up the book’s themes quite well, passes rather lightly over some existing historiography in asserting that labor and local radicalism has been neglected almost completely by historians. There has been considerable discussion about whether the revolution was conservative, counter-revolutionary, or potentially radical. In fact, several authors tackle Fergus Campbell’s Land and Revolution specifically, a work that merited some attention in the introduction perhaps. There is also much new work on the Labour party and trade unionism. Spirit of Revolution’s contribution is to tie together several threads in Irish revolutionary historiography quite well: local history, agrarian radicalism, labor history, and women’s history. The best chapters in the volume explicitly query the connections between their subjects and the nationalist revolution. Anne Boran concludes, for example, that the Castlecomer miners did put their cause within a framework of national independence (25). Other groups, such as the United Irish Plotholders’ Union studied by Mary Forrest, seemed to have no immediate link to the revolution, merely changing the focus of their activism from the British government to the Free State ministry of agriculture after 1922. This suggests perhaps the most important question raised by this work: should our goal be to expand the notion of the Irish revolution so as to include popular mobilizations such as those covered here, or should instead we recognize that many mobilizations of the period in fact had little to do with nationalism and that the Irish revolution was not a totalizing, all-encompassing force as its adherents claimed?