The opening passage of this book quotes George Gavan Duffy, minister of Foreign Affairs in the Provisional Government, recording his anxiety in January 1922 that the population of the future Irish state be seen as a nation, and not a rabble. There is no consensus that the events which had transformed Ireland constituted ‘a revolution’; what is undeniable is that the new state would be dominated by a revolutionary elite for a very long time. The momentum for change had derived its force from many processes, yet the Sinn Féin elite proved very adroit at absorbing these manifold currents, and ultimately defusing them. Diarmaid Ferriter quotes Richard Mulcahy instructing his subordinates in July 1923 that correspondence to the ministry of Defence or Army Council should no longer be of the ‘a chara’ format: the correct address was ‘I have the honour sir, to be your obedient servant’.

Ferriter’s nation or rabble theme is well-chosen. Historians of political thought have long argued that the concept of the people has been one of the basic concepts of European politics since the eighteenth century. Irish nationalists were not alone in paying lip service to the principle of popular sovereignty while resorting (in the end) to a range of stratagems that would keep the people at bay. Chapter twenty-six of the book – ‘Hearts to stone’ – has Kevin O’ Higgins compare the stock of quiet decent citizens that supported the return to stability after the Treaty, with ‘the noisy ignorant rabble’ on the other side. The next page moves on to the repression of the I.R.A. during the Second World War: Taoiseach Éamon de Valera remarking that ‘without such discipline we must inevitably degenerate into a rabble’.

Yet the main purpose of this book is not to explore the nation or rabble theme. Rather this study of more than five hundred pages, takes an omnibus approach to the revolutionary period, mixing historiography, memory and narrative. Part one, ‘In search of the rabble’ is a survey of the historiography of the period, ranging from early propagandistic material to more scholarly recent work. Part three, ‘Legacy and commemoration’, is of comparable length, and takes us up to attitudes towards the Rising during the decade of commemoration. The much longer Part two consists of many short chapters on ‘Revolutionary Ireland, 1913–1923’. It begins with a chapter on the evolution of nationalism before 1916, and ends with the consolidation of Northern Ireland. Ferriter is insightful on the personalities of the period – not participating in the lionisation of Michael Collins for example – but in place of the traditional emphasis on high politics, due attention is paid to those cultural, economic and social changes which set the scene for what Ferriter sees as primarily a military and political revolution.

The underlying premise behind the unusual organisation of the material seems to be that the totality of the past can best be reconstructed by not taking one angle of vision. Ferriter quotes with approval Fearghal McGarry’s view that ‘the complexities and uncertainties of this period of history, as illustrated by the conflicting views of those who experienced it, should defy the condescending certainty with which hindsight is employed to endorse or condemn one side or the other’. The analysis is discerning, fair-minded and generous to a wide range of scholarship on this period. Yet the question is whether the book amounts to more than the sum of its parts. One obvious shortcoming is the absence of a thematic conclusion linking the nation versus rabble discussion with the earlier material. Indeed A nation and not a rabble is as much a resource-book as a monograph; clear and well written, it will nonetheless serve as an insightful and multi-focal guide to the literature and sources of the period.

Others will be less satisfied by the cautious, indeed provisional, approach to several of the debates this material gave rise to; it is as if, at a distance of nearly a hundred years, we are still dealing with inflammable material. In ‘The perfect patriots’, a chapter on the British repression which followed the Rising, Ferriter mentions Peter Hart’s view that the Rising did not transform popular sentiment in the way advanced nationalists desired. This change did occur only among the few thousand who actually made the revolution possible. Such a statement requires agreement or dissent. Yet the following sentence moves on with ‘What is indisputable is that’. Perhaps it follows that a book that takes social history seriously would eschew some conventional political controversies. The Irish ‘revolution’ had no one source and connected a Great War with three small wars. It is no easy job to provide a narrative that respects the complex nature of that interconnection; Ferriter’s is one approach. If the price is the absence of a grand narrative, some will judge this (negatively) as a concession to the inclusivity of our times, others as a refinement of the historian’s craft.