Christine Kinealy's Black Abolitionists in Ireland is a frustrating book to review. Kinealy's premise—that Ireland was on the transatlantic circuit for Black abolitionists before Emancipation—is correct, and there is a strong case to be made for a book addressing this fact. The lives, activism, writing, and political and other relationships of Black abolitionists to Ireland are points of historical, literary, and political significance. Their emancipatory work sheds light on the operations of transatlantic antislavery and Irish and British abolitionist networks, helps unpack insular ideas about the shape and limits of Irish literature, and opens up productive routes of enquiry around race, politics, and the intersections of antislavery and empire, among other things. An address to any one of these aspects of the matter, or indeed others not possible to mention here, would have made a coherent and important contribution to scholarship. Regrettably, Kinealy falls short of this goal, potentially retarding rather than advancing knowledge in an area of critical consequence for African American, Irish, or Irish American history and literary studies.
The book is organized into chapters providing “a brief overview of the lives of ten black abolitionists . . . and their interactions with the anti-slavery movement in Ireland” (ix) in the period stretching from the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the American Civil War, a run that begins with Olaudah Equiano and ends with Sarah Parker Remond. The more problematic aspects of the book become evident in the introduction, in which she provides an overview of the emergence of antislavery in the United Kingdom, leaning heavily into the British context, but cites very little secondary material of any kind and none of the scholarship relevant to the topic at hand. There is no mention of the work of Richard Blackett, Alan Rice, Nini Rodgers, Lee Jenkins, Douglas Riach, Martin Crawford, Martha Cutter, J. R. Oldfield, Daniel Ritchie, or any of the other scholarship produced in this area over the past forty or so years. It is almost as if this research had never been undertaken or published, an effect consolidated by the snowstorm of primary references that proliferate throughout the book. This produces an impression that Black Abolitionists and Ireland has taken shape as an empiricist project worked up from scratch and breaking new ground, with even important primary finds by other scholars—for example the letter from Frederick Douglass to Richard Dowden, the mayor of Cork discovered by Lee Jenkins and cited in her early work on this area (1999)—going unattributed (chapter 4).
An important framework for any discussion of Black abolitionist engagement with Ireland is the broader antislavery movement and the political contributions made by individual campaigners. The Hibernian Anti-slavery Society receives attention here as perhaps the most significant facilitator of abolitionist activity across what is now the Republic. Some of the regional and religious distinctions in approaches to the question of Black freedom in Ireland are usefully outlined. Richard Webb is mentioned, though the significance of his writing and publishing does not receive detailed attention. There are references throughout to Daniel O'Connell, whose steadfast antislavery stance and activism made him the most notable institutional voice in Irish antislavery advocacy from the 1830s until his death in 1847. O'Connell is a subject on which Kinealy is well positioned to comment, but his presence here sometimes threatens to displace the primary object of study—Black abolitionists—with whom, Douglass included and C. L. Remond excepted, O'Connell had little to do. The work of one of the most internationally influential Irish antislavery figures, Richard Robert Madden, who translated and published the work of the Cuban poet Jean Francisco Manzano for presentation to the Anti-slavery Convention in London in 1840, goes unnoted.
The book covers eight major figures and two lesser-known activists, Edmund Kelly and Benjamin Benson, making for a nice mix of those already acknowledged as historically significant and those whose stories are less visible. Kinealy does not claim to be comprehensive, but a rationale for those chosen for discussion would help anchor the book, which contains some notable omissions. For example, John Jea, the African preacher who visited Ireland toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, goes unmentioned. Little research is presented on several of those who are included—Moses Roper, Henry Highland Garnet, Edmund Kelly, and Benjamin Benson are from the outset described, respectively as “one of the most enigmatic abolitionists to visit Ireland” (60); “largely unknown” (162); “one of the more puzzling figures in regard to his personal history” (188); and “an enigma” (226). As a result, the chapters, largely biographical sketches compositing well-rehearsed material, contain little that is new and little directly pertaining to Ireland or casting light on historical, literary, or political questions that the encounter between Black abolitionist activism and Ireland might raise, which is a pity. Kinealy does present new facts and contributes to knowledge by establishing Benson's residence in Marlborough Street in Dublin, with the work on Benson providing the possibility of further research in this area. Likewise, some details of Charles Lennox Remond's visit in the early 1840s are presented, though important work by Angela Murphy on the debacle over the Jamaica Emigration Scheme is not engaged.
Overall, the combination of limited relevant primary material and the absence of historiographical or other frameworks of analysis means that the book has restricted relevance to the field. As noted, it also contains significant errors of fact, giving the impression that Kinealy is unfamiliar with the subject area. These errors are too numerous to list, but they include an assertion in the introduction that a quotation from a speech by Daniel O'Connell appears on the frontispiece of the narrative of James Williams, A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, published in London in 1837, when that quotation in fact appears on the title page of Narrative of James Williams an American Slave, Who was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama, published in Boston in 1838. In chapter 2, Moses Roper's first visit to Ireland is noted as occurring in 1854 rather than in 1838; Roper's wife's name is incorrectly noted as Rice (rather than Price); and the book notes that ten editions of Roper's Narrative were published (there were fifteen).
The difficulty that these errors present in a book that claims scholarly jurisdiction is that they risk becoming embedded and proliferate in teaching and scholarship, setting the field back rather than advancing it. While there is clarity around the basic idea guiding this book, it is not clear what rationale underpins it, either within an African American or Irish historical context. More seriously, although the subject matter is such that it could be of considerable interest to those teaching undergraduate courses on Irish or African American transatlantic history or to scholars researching in these fields, the work appears to present research in its very early stages, the exposition is unreliable, and publication seems to have been premature, raising questions as to whether the normal processes of peer review were followed by the publisher.
