Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History

"A transnational approach, properly conceptualized and disciplined, promises to offer the rising generation of historians of Ireland a potentially exciting intellectual and emotional escape route from the suffocating confines of ideologically inspired and conceptually vacuous perspectives. This is no petty ambition. To derive the full potential advantage of the approach requires transcending the comfortable insular assumptions in which so much of even the most intellectually impressive historiography of Ireland remains cocooned. More power to the pioneers."-Professor Joe Lee, Director of Glucksman Ireland House, New York University

Auteur
Niall Whelehan is a Marie Curie Fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh.

Texte du rabat

In comparison with North American or European historiography, debates about transnational history have been slower to arrive in Ireland, perhaps as a result of the national focus that characterized the revisionist debates that dominated Irish historiography in recent decades. However, the centrality of nation-state frameworks of analysis in history and social science research is being brought increasingly into question, and some recent interventions have advanced a transnational agenda in Irish history. Building on this recent work, this book argues that there is a straightforward case to be made for adopting transnational approaches to modern Irish history, as they are perfectly suited to further explore subjects such as nationalism, empire, and diaspora, that historians have long recognized to be vitally important to Ireland's past and present.

Résumé

This book explores the benefits and challenges of transnational history for the study of modern Ireland. In recent years the word "transnational" has become more and more conspicuous in history writing across the globe, with scholars seeking to move beyond national and local frameworks when investigating the past. Yet transnational approaches remain rare in Irish historical scholarship. This book argues that the broader contexts and scales associated with transnational history are ideally suited to open up new questions on many themes of critical importance to Ireland's past and present. They also provide an important means of challenging ideas of Irish exceptionalism. The chapters included here open up new perspectives on central debates and events in Irish history. They illuminate numerous transnational lives, follow flows and ties across Irish borders, and trace networks and links with Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Australia and the British Empire. This book provides specialists and students with examples of different concepts and ways of doing transnational history. Non-specialists will be interested in the new perspectives offered here on a rich variety of topics, particularly the two major events in modern Irish history, the Great Irish Famine and the 1916 Rising.

Contenu

Introduction 1. Playing with Scales: Transnational History and Modern Ireland Niall Whelehan 2. Friend, Foe or Family? Catholic Creoles, French Huguenots, Scottish Dissenters: Aspects of the Irish Diaspora at St. Croix, Danish West Indies, c.1760 Orla Power 3. Irish Politics and Labour: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives, 1798-1914 Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild 4. "And All My Great Hardships Endured"?: Irish Convicts in Van Diemen's Land Hamish Maxwell-Stewart 5. Count Cavour's 1844 Thoughts on Ireland: Liberal Politics and Agrarian Reform Through Anglo-Italian Eyes Enrico Dal Lago 6. Ireland's Great Famine: A Transnational History Enda Delaney 7. "The Perverted Graduates of Oxford": Priestcraft, "Political Popery" and the Transnational Anti-Catholicism of Sir James Emerson Tennent Jonathan Jeffrey Wright 8. Irish-Polish Solidarity: Irish Responses to the January Uprising of 1863-64 in Congress Poland Róisín Healy 9. "A Land Beyond the Wave": Transnational Perspectives on Easter 1916 Fearghal McGarry 10. Irish America Without Ireland: Irish-American Relations with Ireland in the Twentieth Century Timothy J. Meagher 11. Returnees, Forgotten Foreigners and New Immigrants: Tracing Migratory Movement into Ireland Since the Late-Nineteenth Century Irial Glynn