The subject of this book is how the Irish diaspora in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand reacted to the South African War of 1899–1902. Shane Lynn argues that the strong support for the Boer cause in the diaspora reflected ‘a fuzzy understanding of South African realities and a reflexive white supremacism’ (p. xi). But the force of this point is weakened by his thin account of the South African War itself, as well as the near-complete absence of any discussion of its causes, either as they were understood at the time of the war or as they have been explained in subsequent scholarship. A deeper consideration of these issues might have helped Lynn appreciate why Britain’s victory in the war ended up facilitating rather than obstructing the consolidation of white supremacy in the region through the course of the twentieth century. That does not contradict his recognition that the support of Irish nationalists for the Boers requires explanation for a modern readership attuned to associating Irish nationalism with support for the anti-apartheid cause. That switch in political alignment, mirrored in a similar shift in Irish views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, is worth underlining. But Irish nationalists were far from being alone in opposing the British Empire’s war against the Boer Republics. To use a contemporary example, the war was no more popular internationally than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. From this perspective, the extent of Irish cooperation with the imperial war effort that Lynn also describes might seem more surprising than the existence of Irish nationalist activists seeking to take advantage of the difficulties Britain encountered in fighting a guerrilla war against the Boers.

Lynn’s study is a painstakingly researched account of how Irish nationalists in the diaspora responded viscerally to the widespread coverage the war received around the world. He shows how the different political circumstances they faced in each of the four countries he examines shaped how they couched their opposition to the war or, if they stopped short of opposing the war, how they sought to use the war to further the cause of Irish self-government. It is a well-written page-turner full of entertaining anecdotes, particularly in relation to the intelligence war fought between Irish nationalist activists and agents of the British government. Particularly amusing is his account of the activities of an opera singer who went by the name of Sannie Kruger and who championed the Boer cause in San Francisco. Lynn persuasively argues that at the same time as she participated in public events to promote the image of the Boers, she was passing on information to the British that helped them thwart a plot to attack the Royal Navy base on Vancouver Island in Canada. This involves Lynn in historical detective work to establish that Agent X in the archives of British intelligence was indeed the very same person as the opera singer. Lynn also provides a detailed account of an attempt by Fenians to destroy a lock on the Welland Canal in Canada in 1900. If more expertly carried out, this would have had the potential to paralyse a large part of the country’s inland shipping. The chapter on the attack is titled ‘Physical farce’ (p. 49).

Lynn mentions the two Irish brigades that fought on the side of the Boer Republics, although he stresses, as other historians have, that these volunteers were outnumbered by the Irish recruits who were fighting on the British side. However, in keeping with his focus on the Irish diaspora in four countries, he has relatively little to say about recruitment to the forces in South Africa, how they fared, or the experience of the Irish in South Africa more widely before, during or after the South African War. Lynn is much better on the subject of the longer-term implications of Irish nationalist mobilization over the South African War. He argues that it formed a significant precursor to the Irish nationalist response to the much larger cataclysm of World War One and that ‘features of the revolutionary decade can also be seen, in part, as repetitions of patterns during the South African War’ (p. 250). The manner in which the participants in the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 invoked the precedent of the South African War in the symbols they adopted, and even in the hats that they wore, underscores Lynn’s assertion of the importance of transnational influences to our understanding of such major events as Ireland’s secession from the British Empire. I think he is also right that such transnational influences remain under-researched and that there is still a lot to be learned from studying how the Irish outside Ireland sought to influence events in their homeland. For this contribution, Lynn deserves the commendation that his study has received, despite its shortcomings from an Africanist perspective.