Much has been written in recent years about Ireland and the British Empire, and of the transnational and global shape of the late Victorian Irish world-view. We are now well beyond seeing Ireland’s international perspectives as shaped only (or mostly) by the emergence of a forceful diaspora, mostly driven from the U.S., both in terms of money and radical personnel. This book is one of the latest to extend Ireland’s purview beyond its own shores and the usual suspects in North America, and, importantly, to demonstrate how the world influenced Ireland. It is a telling contribution in this regard.
In this new study, Paul Townend, searches for an Irish perspective on the British Empire, in keeping with the new historiography of Britain and its empire, which (argued Richard Price) sees the British homeland and its imperial possessions as ‘mutually constitutive’. Integrated histories have rightly become more common; the way in which the empire affected the home countries has come more under the historian’s gaze. Empire is no longer a separate sphere. Ireland is, however, a tricky case in respect of empire. It may just be impossible to wrestle Ireland free of this ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship for solo analysis, given that Ireland was so closely interwoven with both, and given that the nationalist thinking which dominates this book is not the only perspective which Irishmen had on empire or imperialism. What is unarguable, however, is that British rule in empire gave traction to Irish nationalist critiques both of imperialism overseas and closer to home, in Ireland itself.
Townend explores an evolving anti-imperial sentiment in Ireland through the prism of social theories, which view nationalisms as social movements. His canvass is primarily a short period in the 1870s and 1880s. The introduction sets out the array of Irish views of empire, not only at home, but also among Irishmen deeply enmeshed in the colonies. The book is framed as a series of chapters that unite episodic, imperial conflicts during Gladstone’s second ministry (1880–85) with key moments in the development of Irish nationalist thought. The approach works well, allowing the writer to both build momentum and to delve deeply. Though the book focuses on the first home rule period, there is a good discussion (in chapter 1) of the eighteenth-century roots of Irish anti-imperialism, and of the limits of Butt’s vision of Irish home government in the context of the colonies of settlement, notably in relation to Canada in 1867.
Scholars have long recognised that the period of the New Departure, the Land League and the Land War, is a turning point in which organised Irish political nationalism engendered new levels of viability under Parnell, Davitt and others, thus usurping Butt’s vision of imperial partnership and loyalty. The Irish diaspora also became politically stronger in this same period. Fenians, writing to Parnell at the dawn of the New Departure in 1878, made ‘advocacy for all struggling nationalities in the British Empire and elsewhere’ (p. 11). Works of increasing vehemence became common. Although only published thirty years later as a pamphlet (The criminal history of the British Empire, (New York, 1915)), Patrick Ford’s 1881 letters to Gladstone set out savagely critical Irish-American views of British imperialism. Throughout his book, Townend points explicitly to the ways nationalists at home and in the diaspora integrated varying, critical visions of the empire into their political thinking.
The book’s main sources are the press, political writings, cartoons, and nationalist thought. The cartoons offer an especially fascinating complementary narrative across the work. Townend recognises, as others such as Michael de Nie have done, that the press is a rich source for pinning down the notoriously slippery concept of public opinion. The stress on nationalist writers – old Fenians, M.P.s, and others – presents us with the difficult conundrum that such people would have held a view of Britain as an imperial power in Ireland even if Britain had held no territorial possessions other than Ireland. That Britain did accrue the largest overseas empire the modern world had known, gave plenty of fuel for nationalist fires. And yet, nationalists could abhor British treatment of Africans, whilst demanding that Irishmen be treated differently from indigenous peoples. Charles Stewart Parnell certainly did so.
Equally, Townend recognises the issue of imperialism also divided Irish opinion. Unionists were closely bound up with the empire, and, he argues, gained confidence from it; whereas nationalists drew negative inspiration from its expanding excesses, and celebrated British military reverses. One part of Ireland saw its interests strengthened by Britain’s expanding empire; the other perhaps hoped that, as in Gibbon’s Rome, the huge size of the imperial edifice would cause it to implode under its own weight. Empire strengthened both sides of Irish politics and marked their distinctness from each other. Ireland became a source of some of the most vocal criticisms of British imperialism. Denouncing expansionist wars in Africa, the Irish were especially stern opponents of Britain’s wars with the Dutch descendants in southern Africa. As Donal McCracken has shown in the case of the second Anglo–Boer conflict (1899–1902), as well as being political critics at home, some Irishmen and Irish Americans fought alongside the Boers. Townend, here, focuses on the first Boer War (1880–81), thus providing a fascinating accompaniment to McCracken’s account of the later war.
Overall, what Townend does, which no one previously has done, is to bring together the sheer mass of opinion and thought that clearly shaped an anti-imperial dimension of the home rule movement. He does this well. All of the main Irish nationalist players in Ireland, Westminster, and Irish-America, evinced strong views on this subject, and Townend shows, in a rich, closely-argued work just how this was so, and what effect it had.
