With the vote to leave the European Union in June 2016, British commentators belatedly realized that the borders of Ireland were a pressing, contentious issue in global politics. While no resolutions have been reached, this volume of essays provides a useful starting point to highlight Ireland's vexed position within discussions of the United Kingdom, locally, nationally, and globally. Stressing the manifold movements and connections, flows, circulations, parallels and exchanges, transformations, and tensions in Irish history and society, the book, as its editor Niall Whelehan explains, “asks what new questions and perspectives transnationalism can bring to modern Irish history and aims to demonstrate some of the advantages of transnational Irish history in practice” (1). Contributors based in Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia demonstrate that wide-ranging concepts such as diaspora, empire, and the Atlantic world have transoceanic trajectories revealing discursive trends in the historiography of Ireland.
In this volume, transnational history is understood as a perspective rather than a new historical paradigm or master narrative. It is not a separate or autonomous field, but “a way of seeing” that aims to complement other forms of history, to transcend the borders of the nation-state and trace connections and parallel developments between multiple territories. Each chapter focuses primarily on the movement of people and ideas between Ireland and other territories. Other prominent approaches are transnational biographies and identities; transfer history; political, social and commercial networks; migratory circuits; and the tracing of instructive parallels between distinct cases.
Orla Power problematizes the notion of a homogenous Irish diaspora by exploring the relationships within a group of Irish merchant-planters at St. Croix in the Danish West Indies during the 1760s. Her study of various groups of Irishmen and women who sought exile in the New World ranges from merchants identified as second- and third-generation Irish Catholics to Irish-born Presbyterians of Scottish descent and second- and third-generation Irish Huguenots. Power highlights complex alignments and connections between the different groups, raising important questions regarding transnational lives and identities, diasporic communities, and commercial networks.
The complicating of diaspora is again explored in detail in Tim Meagher's wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between Ireland and Irish America in the twentieth century. He brings out the complex and shifting nature of transnational identities, looking at transnational support during the Irish War of Independence to Irish American connections to Catholicism in the 1960s. He thoughtfully concludes by stating that throughout the twentieth century, Irish Americans conceived and reconceived the significance and meaning of the homeland to fit their constantly evolving identities.
The vividly interesting story told by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart offers an insight into how diaspora communities became engaged in forced Irish labor in the penal colonies. Utilizing the extraordinary detail documented in transportation records, Maxwell-Stewart reconstructs the lives of prisoners. He brings to light a story of systematic discrimination, with the Irish in penal colonies subject to a form of paternalism reminiscent of that employed to regulate colonial subject populations.
Networks are the focus of a number of chapters. Donald MacRaild and Kyle Hughes see the movement of both individuals and organizations as exporting Irish cultures and modes of behavior, and thus contributing to the development of political and labor movements in host countries and a continuing dialogue across national boundaries. Jonathon Wright, by contrast, focuses on an individual in his chapter on the intellectual development of Belfast-born writer, parliamentarian, and colonial administrator of Ceylon, James Emerson Tennent. Wright stresses that Tennent's “anti-Catholic views were informed not just by the confessional realities of Ulster or Ireland, but also by his encounters with Catholicism in Italy, Belgium and Ceylon” (143). Similarly, Enrico Dal Lago's analysis of the Italian patriot and statesman Count Camillo Cavour's Thoughts on Ireland: Its Present and Its Future (1844), offers a biography to illuminate the circulation and transmission of Cavour's unique view of the socioeconomic and political situation in Ireland for an elite European readership.
Transfer history and the circulation and reception of a national image also feature in Roisin Healy's essay, which analyses the phenomenon of nineteenth-century Polonophilia and the perception of Poland in Ireland. Healey demonstrates how Irish nationalists interpreted the Polish cause according to their needs, while retaining a heartfelt, yet passive spirit of solidarity with the Poles, ultimately forming a useful training ground for Irish nationalists by learning from Polish successes or failures.
Irial Glynn challenges typically outward-looking accounts of Irish migration by providing an overview of movement into the country from the late nineteenth century up to the 2000s. In doing so, he underlines the large impact that immigration has had on Irish society and challenges traditional notions of Ireland as a place insulated from the wider world. The chapter highlights the striking similarities between the transnational experiences of older return migrants, “forgotten foreigners,” and the new immigrants of recent decades.
Subsequent chapters offer transnational perspectives on the classic topics of the Famine and the 1916 Rising. Enda Delaney views the Famine as a transnational event that involved large-scale movement of people, international humanitarian responses and relief efforts, global media coverage, and legacies which transcended Ireland. Delaney argues that a stoically national framework of the famine creates “only a partial and incomplete account” (108).
Similarly, going beyond the nation state, Fearghal McGarry offers biographies of those involved with the 1916 Rising to consider how the movement of people between national boundaries impacted transnational cultural exchange and concurrently the rebellion's international impact. The worldwide circulation of revolutionary texts both inspired and prevented potential nationalist revolutionaries, with five of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation having visited the United States. McGarry clearly highlights how the machinations of Easter 1916 were felt on a global scale.
This collection offers a variety of productive ways that transnational history can be written by balancing larger contexts with smaller-scale analysis at local or individual levels, fundamentally highlighting the importance of the wider world to Irish history and society. Overall, the essays make an important contribution toward the rethinking of how you can do modern Irish history and will appeal to an audience of Irish scholars and those generally interested in Ireland. The tensions of Ireland and its borders have resurfaced in the post-Brexit stage, and it will be interesting to see whether England retreats into insular lines and Ireland expands further into the transnational sphere.
