The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland is a groundbreaking work—in its scope, in its range of contributors, and in its exploration of an area of Irish historiography that has long existed in the shadow of political and cultural studies.
It is not as though Ireland missed the “social turn”: Conrad Arensberg's most influential works (1937's The Irish Countryman and 1940's Family and Community in Ireland) were about County Clare, after all. But social history arrived in Ireland at just the wrong time. As historians in Britain, the United States, and Europe were starting to embrace the potential of this new approach, Irish historians were overwhelmed by the Troubles. Eugenio Biagini and Mary Daly, the editors of this new volume, are correct to assert that pioneering mid-century works by K. H. Connell and L. M. Cullen, among others, were never quite able to gain the “momentum” that similar works in other countries did in the 1960s and 1970s. In Ireland, the “concern for political history, with a focus on the national question,” dominated the discussion (1).
But if this volume is four or five decades late, it is no less welcome for it. Biagini and Daly have brought together nearly fifty scholars to produce a comprehensive survey of the social history of Ireland from the early 1700s to the present. The thirty-three essays that make up the majority of the book are organized into three sections: “Geography, Occupations and Social Classes,” “People, Culture and Communities,” and “Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World.” Although the section divisions seem somewhat arbitrary—one might ask why “Catholic Ireland” falls into the first section rather than the second—the overall movement of the analysis from the general, to the personal, to the transnational makes a good deal of sense. At times, too, chapters that might seem somewhat redundant actually end up highlighting important distinctions: not all “Protestants” (chapter 6) belong in “The Big House” (chapter 10), for instance.
The essays’ diverse authors approach their topics differently, as one would expect. What unites them is the ability to survey their fields of expertise while also highlighting potentially fruitful areas of future research. This is true whether the author is treading a well-worn path or striking out on a new one. Daly's chapter on famine is the one to give to an undergraduate interested in the Great Famine; it is also the one to recommend to a graduate student trying to identify new ways of approaching this heavily explored area. At the other end of the spectrum, Irial Glynn's “Migration and Integration since 1991” is both a definitive summation of the research up to this point and a provocative exploration of what remains to be done, on topics ranging from the effect of immigrant “clustering” in Irish cities (580) to the idiosyncratic position of Sinn Féin in European politics as a populist and nationalist party that is also pro-immigrant (582). Sometimes collections on general topics such as this one narrowly target one demographic—undergraduates, for instance—to the exclusion of another. This collection serves students and professional academics alike.
Moreover, because the essays are clearly and engagingly written, this is also a collection that people in either group will actually want to read. It may sound strange, to twenty-first century British or American ears, to describe social history as a “new” field, but this collection—full of provocative, exploratory, and occasionally combative insights—certainly makes it feel like one. Twenty years ago, Paul Rouse's quip that “patriotism is rarely more sharply displayed than when founded in acute self-interest” would have marked him as an “arch-revisionist”; today, thankfully, we can appreciate it as a useful insight into the land agitation of the early twentieth century (134). And Andrew R. Holmes's and Biagini's application of the sociologist Samuel Heilman's concept of “cosmopolitan parochialism” to Elizabeth Bowen will, almost certainly, be a phrase that will launch a thousand conference papers (104).
In a work of this size and ambition, there are bound to be some flaws. First, although the editors have done the big things well, they seem to have overlooked some more mundane concerns. It is unclear, for instance, why one entry—Patricia Lysaght's otherwise engrossing examination, “Old Age, Death and Mourning”—employs parenthetical citations rather than the footnotes common to the rest of the contributions. The index, too, is scattershot. Second, the largely empirical approach of most of the contributors might strike some readers as somewhat old-fashioned: those scholars who never use the word “social” without the definite article will feel, with some justification, that many of these essays are “under-theorized.” Enthusiasts expecting the obligatory nods to Stuart Hall, Mary Poovey, or Pierre Bourdieu will find them referenced only sparingly in the text (and not at all in the index).
Third, although in their introduction Biagini and Daly declare themselves opposed to the “insular, introspective paradigm of an Irish Sonderweg,” the evidence presented here confirms, as much as challenges, that paradigm (3). In his chapter, “Occupation, Poverty, and Social Class in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Peter M. Solar suggests that Ireland's reliance on the potato really was unusual: it “had no counterpart in Europe” (34). Ciaran O'Neill, in his chapter, “Literacy and Education,” argues that “the topography of Irish education differs from much of western Europe owing to its persistent denominational division” (252). Even in the explicitly outward-focused part three, Kevin Kenny's survey, “Irish Emigrations in a Comparative Perspective,” concludes that during the second half of the nineteenth century “the Irish case was anomalous” (413). Although this tone is by no means universal—several authors highlight similarities between Ireland and other European nations, particularly in the experiences of childhood, rituals and celebrations, and death—the volume would have benefited from a more explicit critique of Irish exceptionalism, such as that found in the work of D. H. Akenson.
Nonetheless, the editors and contributors should congratulate themselves on a work that fills an important gap in Irish historiography. Irish social history may have gotten off to a late start, but this volume suggests that the field has legs.
