Название: The Irish Revolution: A Global History
Автор: Patrick Mannion, Fearghal McGarry
Издательство: New York University Press
Год: 2022
Страниц: 376
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

The Irish War of Independence is often understood as the culmination of centuries of political unrest between Ireland and the English. However, the conflict also has a vitally important yet vastly understudied international dimension. The Irish Revolution: A Global History reassesses the conflict as an inherently transnational event, examining how circumstances and individuals abroad shaped the course Ireland’s struggle for independence.

Bringing together leading international scholars of modern Ireland, its diaspora, and the British Empire, this volume discusses the Irish revolution in a truly global sense. The text situates the conflict in the wider context of the international flourishing of anti-colonial movements following World War I. Despite the differences between these movements, their proponents communicated extensively with each other, learning from and engaging with other revolutionaries in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London, and New York. The contributors to this volume argue that Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this exchange, from mobilizing Ireland’s vast diaspora in support of Irish independence to engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere. The Irish Revolution is a vital work for all those interested in Irish history, providing a new understanding of Ireland’s place in the evolving postwar world.

Harry Boland’s grandiose plans for a global revolutionary movement were not achieved, but the efforts of Irish republicans to internationalize their struggle met with considerable success, as Francis Hackett’s testimony indicates, tilting the scales of an otherwise one- sided fight. How important were international factors in shaping the revolution that took place in Ireland between 1916 and 1923? What impact did the conflict have beyond Irish shores? What role did Ireland’s global diaspora play in determining its outcome? Why did the War of Independence attract the attention of radicals, journalists, policemen, and many others with no direct connection to Ireland, across much of the world? What legacy resulted from the fleeting prominence of the Irish question as one of the most debated political issues of the day? These questions lie at the heart of The Irish Revolution: A Global History. How does a global history differ from conventional approaches? Although historians are aware of the role of outside events in shaping the War of Independence, most narratives of that conflict are confined within Irish (or British) borders. Accounts of the Irish Revolution chart a series of events centering on Ireland: the Easter Rising of 1916, the 1918 general election, the formation of Dáil Éireann, the guerrilla war against the British state, efforts to establish an Irish counter- state, and the partition of the island, culminating in the creation of a self-governing southern state in 1922. The end result is a War of Independence narrated “in a claustrophobic Anglo- Irish setting, with the global war a mere backdrop to the drama in Ireland.”

The focus on IRA violence in popular and scholarly accounts, a perspective reinforced by the release of valuable archival material from the Military Service Pensions collection and Bureau of Military History, has reinforced public understanding of the struggle for independence as a primarily military conflict. By foregrounding the impact of small- scale events— ambushes and the burning of empty barracks—over popular mobilization, elections, strikes, and other protests, this approach marginalizes the importance of nonviolent forms of resistance. Political and state commemoration in Ireland during the current Decade of Centenaries has also tended to focus on the “raids and rallies” that preoccupied nationalist accounts in the years after independence.