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Directions in historiography: Our island story? Towards a transnational history of late modern Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2015

Enda Delaney
Enda Delaney*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
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Extract

The besetting sin of all historical writing is myopia. Large as well as small nations suffer equally from the disheartening insularity of rarely looking beyond the borders of the nation state as geographical borders mutate into mental, cultural and historiographical ones. Myopia's close relative is the unshakeable doctrine of exceptionalism: the assumption that each nation's history is, by definition, sui generis. National histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered notions of a shared identity and created the sense of an embryonic nation. A critical element in this process was stressing the exceptional characteristics, such as the tradition of liberal governance in Britain, American liberty or the revolutionary origins of the French state. That this history of nations was presented for popular consumption as a story is understandable – story-telling is the most effective method of communicating a narrative to a wide audience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 148 , November 2011 , pp. 599 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2011

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90 Doyle, David Noel, Ireland, Irishmen and revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin, 1981)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Irish Catholicism in the diaspora: the case of the United States’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Dáire Keogh (eds), Christianity in Ireland: revisiting the story (Dublin, 2002), pp 231-48; idem, ‘Irish elites in North America and liberal democracy, 1820–1920’ in Radharc, iii (2002), pp 29–54; idem, Irish Americans, native rights & national empires ; idem, ‘Catholicism, politics and Irish America since 1890: some critical considerations’ in Drudy (ed.), Irish in America, pp 191–230. As Doyle remarked about the down-playing of the work of another scholar, David Fitzpatrick, this ‘is probably the fate of radically sophisticated achievement’ (‘Cohesion & diversity’, p. 415 n. 14).

91 On the ‘social question’, see Nelson, Bruce, ‘Irish Americans, Irish nationalism, and the “social question”, 1916–1923’ in boundary 2, xxxi (2004), pp 147–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Jose, Private lives, public spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993Google Scholar), especially chps 7–8; Joyce, Patrick, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92 Bric, Maurice, Ireland, Philadelphia and the re-invention of America, 1760–1800 (Dublin, 2008)Google Scholar; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen & revolutionary America ; Durey, Michael, Transatlantic radicals and the early American republic (Lawrence, Kansas, 1997)Google Scholar; Elliott, Marianne, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Morley, Vincent, Irish opinion and the American revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whelan, Kevin, ‘The green Atlantic: radical reciprocities between Ireland and America in the long eighteenth century’ in Wilson, Kathleen (ed.), A new imperial history: culture, identity and modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), pp 216-38Google Scholar; Wilson, United Irishmen, United States.

93 The only fully integrated history is Fitzpatrick, David, The two Irelands, 1912–1939 (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar

94 Fitzpatrick, , ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, p. 563Google Scholar.

95 Campbell, , Ireland’s new worlds, pp 95–6Google Scholar; Burchell, , San Francisco Irish, p. 34Google Scholar

96 Miller, , Emigrants & exiles, p. 425Google Scholar.

97 Quoted in ibid.

98 Quoted in Delaney, Irish in post-war Britain, p. 24.

99 Mannion, John and Maddock, Fidela, ‘Old world antecedents, New World adaptations: Inistioge immigrants in Newfoundland’ in Nolan, William and Whelan, Kevin (eds), Kilkenny: history and society: interdisciplinary essays on the history of an Irish county (Dublin, 1990), pp 345–404Google Scholar; Emmons, Butte Irish; Elliott, Bruce S., Irish migrants in the Canadas: a new approach (2nd ed., Montreal, 2002).Google Scholar

100 Discussions with Kevin Kenny have helped clarify my thinking on this important point.