This is an important book on a surprisingly neglected topic: the financing of the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). As R. J. C. Adams notes at the outset, most scholarly and popular accounts of the war focus on its military aspects, giving short shrift to its funding, without which “the fight could not have been won” (1). There are a handful of excellent books on the topic: Francis M. Carroll’s detailed study of the First Dáil loans, Daniel Lanier-Vos’s comparative sociology of Irish and Zionist bond drives in the United States, Nicholas Ridley’s study of revolutionary leader Michael Collins’s role as National Loan organizer, and Patrick O’Sullivan Greene’s recent history of what he terms the revolution’s “crowdfunding.” With its breadth of coverage and analytical rigor, Shadow of a Taxman—the title is a play on Sean O’Casey’s famous drama, The Shadow of a Gunman—marks a major addition to this small body of scholarship.

The book makes several key contributions. The first is providing a detailed analysis of the actual mechanics of Irish revolutionary fundraising. Here, Dáil Éireann occupies center stage: building on Arthur Mitchell’s pioneering Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919–1922 (1993), Adams conceptualizes that body as an underground “counter-state,” with significant financial needs and an array of administrative units, including a Finance Ministry headed by the twenty-eight-year-old Collins. Irish nationalist fundraising was not in itself new, of course, and Adams begins his account by discussing precedents, such as Daniel O’Connell’s famous “Catholic Rent” and the United Irish League’s financing of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. But the establishment of the Dáil in January 1919, with its complex bureaucratic structure, created financial needs that far surpassed those of earlier political campaigns or parties. Moreover, the Dáil’s claim to legitimacy as the accepted government of Ireland made the raising of funds through supporters’ contributions unattractive; a “National Loan,” on the other hand, seemed to put the Dáil in the same league as internationally recognized governments such as that of the United States, which had raised billions of dollars through its sale of Liberty Bonds during World War I. The Dáil’s goal was not only raising money, Adams persuasively argues, but raising money from as many people as possible, providing a demonstration of its wide popular support. The decision to launch the National Loan was thus “a manifesto for a government seeking to rival the British state” (23). He describes in granular detail the ways in which the loan was organized, in the face of significant interference from the British authorities. The role of Catholic clergymen in endorsing and popularizing the bond drive in Ireland receives considerable emphasis, with their widespread approval serving to “cleanse the movement of the whiff of terrorism”—especially helpful as the guerilla war escalated in 1920 (73).

This alone would be an important contribution, but by giving substantial attention to the hundreds of thousands of people both at home and abroad (the latter subscribing to the so-called External Loan), Adams provides more than a top–down account. Cross-referencing three surviving subscription lists in Ireland and one in New York with census and other records that include information on age, gender, occupation, and religion, he paints a collective portrait of the Irish Revolution’s non-combatant supporters. Several important conclusions emerge: in the three Irish districts, the median age of bond purchasers was in the mid-40s, older than the conventional picture of the revolution’s youthful supporters might predict. Meanwhile, despite the role of middle-class second-generation Irish Americans in the organization of the External Loan, the New York subscribers tended to be young, single recent immigrants, many of them living in economically precarious conditions. An even more striking difference between Ireland and America relates to gender. In New York, nearly half of the subscribers were women, significantly higher than the average 12 percent in the Irish districts. Though Adams does not fully explain the difference, his findings should encourage more cross-national study of this important topic.

Adams’s attention to the United States and several other countries (most notably Argentina) where the bond drive was implemented is an important feature of his book. His research dovetails with that of Fearghal McGarry and other scholars who have shown how important the Irish diaspora was to the Irish Revolution and how the revolution itself was a significant global event. Given both its tremendous size and the complexity of the Irish American organizational landscape, the United States was, as one sojourning revolutionary put it, “a hell of a country to organise” (145). Especially complicated was the role of the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), an organization that, as Adams shows, sought to be a kind of gatekeeper for funds flowing from America. Éamon de Valera’s well-known break with the FOIF’s leaders during his 1919–1920 American tour takes on new dimensions when seen through the prism of the external loan drive: relying heavily on the resources and prestige of the FOIF, de Valera was only prepared to break with its leaders when the bond drive had wrapped up. It should also be noted that using the external loan as an analytical prism can on occasion lead to a somewhat skewed picture of events: the Protestant Friends of Irish Freedom, for example, was much more than simply a tool to circumvent anti-Catholicism in the American South, as Adams argues; it was rather, as Mary C. Kelly has recently shown, an important organization in its own right, drawing on a deep (if minority) American tradition of Protestant support for Irish nationalism.

Adams places his important story in a global context, providing brief but informative comparative discussions of parallel bond drives among other “new nations” of the era (Poland, Lithuania, Georgia, and West Ukraine). He also highlights the impact of Irish efforts on other diasporic communities in the United States. American Zionists, for example, began a financial campaign to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine that was partly modeled on the Irish bond drive, while Marcus Garvey, the Harlem-based leader of the pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association, launched a “Liberian Liberty Loan” campaign in 1920 that was inspired by the Irish one. Engagingly written and impressively researched in a wide range of archives in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, Shadow of a Taxman is an outstanding contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Irish Revolution.