Irish revolutionary historiography has, until recently, been a self-contained affair, marked by discrete demarcations between Irish and Irish diaspora histories, and between Irish and other historiographies. Emerging against and in critical dialogue with the discourse of national commemoration on the decade of centenaries, new research on the transnational contestation of the ‘Irish question’ — including by Brian Hanley and Maurice J. Casey — has begun to disturb the comfortable bounds of earlier, state-centric historical narratives. In a major intervention into this transnational turn, Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry have produced a new edited collection that traces a range of previously overlooked connections, transfers and analogies between Ireland and the world.
The Irish Revolution: a global history opens a range of new lines of enquiry that radically expand the spatial bounds of Ireland's revolutionary history beyond ‘island’ stories. Its various contributions converge around a common orientation towards exploring the Irish revolution as a ‘fundamentally transnational’ historical moment that both emerged against and shaped a world of imperial crises. The imperative to expand the bounds of Irish history is, in part, born out of a post-revisionist moment in an Irish historiography exhausted with the nationalist/revisionist dispute. In one of their more cutting critiques of earlier scholarship, the editors argue that ‘whether imperialist or anticolonial’ (p. 8) these contemporary actors of the Irish revolutionary period ‘had a more integrated worldview than their later historians’.
Challenging the late David Fitzpatrick's claim that we are ‘all’ transnational historians, the volume largely lives up to its ambitions of carving out a methodologically distinctive global Irish historiography. Each section explores a different vector by which the Irish Revolution was constituted as a ‘global’ event and is rendered in a different mode of enquiry. Part one, ‘Revolutionary worlds’, traces political analogies and intellectual exchanges between Irish and other revolutionary movements — Korean, Russian and Algerian — during the ‘Wilsonian moment’. Part two focuses on Irish diaspora and long-distance nationalisms. Part three, on ‘Imperial perspectives’, explores connections between imperial governance in Ireland and other parts of the Empire. Part four, on ‘Radical lives’, devotes substantial attention to multiracial and anti-racist solidarities.
The location of the ‘global’ is by no means a matter of consensus in this volume. Is ‘global’, a throwback to the optimistic positivism of the Celtic Tiger ? Is it a metonym for ‘diaspora’? Several contributions, including McGarry's comparative study of the Irish Revolution and the March First movement in Korea, are positioned within Erez Manela's framework of a Wilsonian moment. Other chapters, including Martyn Frampton's account of connections between Sinn Féin and the Swadeshi movement in India, emphasise alternative temporal scales. Elsewhere, ‘global’ designates a foregrounding of cultural exchange and translation. In a detailed intellectual history of long-distance nationalist networks, Darragh Gannon traces the circulation and staging of the ‘Irish race’ during the Irish Race Conventions of 1919–22 as pivotal moments in the making of a global Irish nationalist modernity.
The conceptual specificity of global history, here, lies partly in its provincialisation of Irish and of Irish diaspora history. ‘Diaspora’, conceived in substantialist terms as an ‘entity’, certainly appears in the volume, but only as one of several boundary-crossing historical frameworks rather than a master narrative. Among the most intellectually adventurous chapters of the volume are those concerned with forms of political alliance that transcended the putative self-identity of ‘race’ and nation. A highlight is David Brundage's intellectual history of race and solidarity in W. E. B. Du Bois’s engagement with the question of Ireland.
At other points, the language of ‘global history’ might equally reproduce existing foreclosures of relationality when conceived as a conjoining of nationalist histories. Beyond its engagement with settler-colonialism in Algeria, the volume largely refrains from extending the conceptual framework of the ‘colonial’ into its treatment of North America and the South Pacific. If recent calls to ‘decolonise’ Irish historiography have urged a greater engagement with Ireland's implication in racial modernity, the imperative to inscribe ‘race’ into Irish history ought not to be conflated with an empiricist reification ‘from inside’ of race or nation. It is, perhaps, questionable as to whether the Irish Race Convention's rhetoric of ‘racial solidarity’ can be historicised in isolation from white racial citizenship or the necropolitical differtiations this enjoyment entailed in settler societies.
Like the parameters of ‘the global’, Irish whiteness in the Pacific remains a subject of ambivalence in the volume. Nuancing a critique of ‘whiteness’ as an analytic category, Patrick Mannion's study of the Friends of Irish Freedom in the Panama Zone broaches the question of racial fantasy in the (white) American Irish nationalist imaginary. Working through the unavoidability of race in this archive, Mannion highlights that ‘White Americans, whether Irish or not, were deeply invested in maintaining their privileged status’ (p. 187) in political locations circumscribed by racial hierarchy and exclusionary difference. Such tensions constitute a site of ongoing negotiation in future research on this period. This collection marks a turning point in the historiography of the Irish revolution that will challenge the field in years to come.
