Historians of nineteenth-century Ireland have a longstanding preoccupation with violence. Above all else, they have debated the causes, meanings and consequences of violence in the Irish countryside. Scholars such as James S. Donnelly Jr. have approached this topic from nearly every historiographical angle — nationalist to Marxist, anticolonial to poststructuralist. Given the density in this field, it is fair to ask: is there more to say about agrarian violence in Ireland?
As it turns out, there is. Jay Roszman's Outrage in the Age of Reform is a careful, nuanced and insightful study that takes as its subject the agrarian ‘outrage’, a catch-all term for the myriad manifestations of violence in the Irish countryside. Roszman argues that the politics of the United Kingdom were indelibly shaped by the occurrence of, and prevailing fears about, Irish outrages — from the ‘justice for Ireland’ campaign of Whig activists in the 1830s to the reactionary resurgence of Tory crusaders in the 1840s. While it may seem self-evident to argue that Ireland was an important part of the United Kingdom during the Age of Reform, aside from Catholic emancipation, historians have largely ignored Ireland when analysing this critical period. Therefore, the importance of Roszman's work is to expand our understanding of the Age of Reform — which so rarely strays beyond the shores of Great Britain — by placing front and centre Irish issues such as violence, empire, religious strife and state versus local authority. In short, as Roszman asserts, ‘if we fail to incorporate the Irish dimension of the 1830s, we run the risk of missing an important piece of the story’ (p. 3).
To secure Ireland's place in this narrative, Roszman shows how outrages became a key political concern in the years leading up to the Famine. Contemporaries fixated on outrages because they represented a ‘countervailing sovereignty that threatened Ireland's political stability within the Union’ (p. 80). This is perhaps the most crucial claim advanced by Roszman: because Irish outrages were a form of local justice that undermined both Dublin Castle's authority and the state's monopoly on violence, their occurrence necessitated that the British government address them (chapter 2: Agrarian Violence and Irish Claims to ‘Counter Sovereignty’). The purpose of Roszman's book, then, is to show how the political forces within the United Kingdom responded to this need to manage outrage — how, during the Age of Reform, outrages determined the fates of individual politicians, their strategies, and even whole parties. For example, the Whig faction that came to power in 1835 — led by the triumvirate of Lord John Russell as home secretary, Lord Mulgrave as lord lieutenant and Lord Morpeth as chief secretary — adopted a paternalistic and interventionist approach to governing Ireland, known as ‘justice for Ireland’. This approach was, for this band of activists, the best way to solve the conditions of inequality and exclusion that produced outrages. Therefore, the Whig government granted concessions to Catholics, extended the power of Dublin Castle via a centralized constabulary and reformed antique customs using legislative authority (chapter 3: Whigs in Ireland, 1835–1840).
Likewise, the radical ‘ultra-Tories’ saw outrages as undermining the Protestant way of life and, with it, the British characteristics of liberty and freedom (chapter 4: Protestant Mobilization and the Spectre of Irish Outrages). To members of this faction ‘agrarian violence was not spasmodic, episodic, or unintelligible’, but was meant to establish a reign of terrorism in Ireland that would undermine the territorial integrity of the British Empire (p. 224). For the Tories, then, outrages were a political tool that eventually united the party and boosted it to electoral victory in 1841 (chapter 5: Ireland and the Tory Imagination). By elucidating these connections, Outrage in the Age of Reform does an expert job demonstrating how outrages determined the contours of British governing policy from the mid-1830s until the onset of the Irish Famine.
Part of what makes this book so successful is that Roszman avoids the quagmire of explaining why outrages happened, which has been debated since George Cornewall Lewis published his 1836 treatise, On local disturbance in Ireland. Roszman is less interested in rationalizing outrages than he is in seeking to place them into a wider social and political context. Thus, though Roszman expertly analyses outrages in the book's first two chapters, Outrage in the Age of Reform is neither a social history of outrage nor a history of violence in Ireland. Nor is it purely a study in high politics. Instead, in what is perhaps the most significant takeaway from this book, Roszman tells a deeper story about how highly localised violence, insecurity and empire came to dominate the Age of Reform, in turn shaping the political fortunes of not just the United Kingdom, but the entire British Empire.
