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  • Between Two Worlds:Irish Nationalists and Imperial Crisis 1878-1880*
  • Paul A. Townend

With notable recent exceptions, questions about the nature of Ireland's place in the imperial system have long fallen between two vibrant but largely divergent historiographies.1 Scholars of British imperialism are less likely to ignore Ireland than once may have been the case, yet John Bull's other island remains marked out as frustratingly anomalous, leading all too frequently to the bracketing of Anglo-Irish circumstances within broader discussions of the empire. In the words of one scholar, 'imperial history has long treated [Anglo-Irish relations] as separate from the rest of the British Empire'.2 Whether or not the Irish experience was more distinctive than that of, say, India or South Africa, there can be no doubt that Ireland's connection to the empire was complex, [End Page 139] for reasons that many have elaborated. England's oldest colony was also her best-integrated, even if many agree with Andrew Thompson that imperial dynamics ultimately served to divide Ireland from the rest of Britain.3

The remarkable flowering of specialist work on Ireland over the past generation, meanwhile, has had little engagement with imperial history, particularly for the modern period. This is less true of colonial and post-colonial approaches to the study of history and literature. The opening of such avenues of scholarly investigation has dovetailed with traditional understandings of the Irish as colonized and oppressed, possessed of a primal anti-imperialism, leading many to see bitterness, subjugation and associated dynamics as core components of the Irish condition, essential for interpreting fundamental aspects of Irish history and culture.4 The historical complicity and co-operation of the Irish people in the imperial enterprise, meanwhile (as Members of Parliament as well as soldiers, administrators, merchants, colonists and emigrants), has been noted, and the Irish role in simultaneously 'sustaining and undermining' imperial institutions and practices has led others to wonder in what sense the term 'colony' can be properly applied to Ireland at all.5 The spirited debate within Irish studies and beyond on the subject of Ireland and empire has been accompanied by a proliferation of much theoretical smoke, but less fire of sustained historical investigation into how this fundamental relationship was actually understood.6 The result, at times, is a troubling disjuncture between the oft-acknowledged, indisputably complex historical reality of [End Page 140] a deep-rooted ambivalence, even among Irish 'nationalists', about Ireland's place within the empire, and the absence of the imperial dimension in many of the dominant themes of scholarly reconstructions of Irish history. How did the imperial shape Irish nationalism, and to what degree was anti-colonialism integral to it as a social movement?

By the nineteenth century, it was abundantly clear to Irish men and women that their realities were fundamentally bound up with English power and proximity. In that sense the Irish had long been a self-consciously and thoroughly imperial people. Exploring the historical contingencies of the Irish-imperial relationship is undoubtedly important, therefore, not only because it promotes a genuine engagement between the well-developed but all too insular field of Irish studies and the broader scholarship of the British Empire, but also because such exploration serves to push historians of Ireland back onto twin truths essential to understanding that nation's development: the first, that modern Irish identities were essentially cosmopolitan, inseparable from imperial, Atlantic and European circumstances; the second, that these identities must be analysed as relational and dynamic, not incorporated as axiomatic. Irish attitudes towards empire in particular were both fundamental and fluid, developed in relationship to evolving self-understanding, imperial events and the ideologies and imperatives of a progression of national movements. Historians must be possessed of a much more comprehensive and coherent understanding of how the Irish themselves, in a variety of times and places, perceived empire, and, even more importantly, how those perceptions were incorporated, rejected and modified by the very public processes of nation-building.7

This article participates in a move towards such an Irish history by exploring the degree to which Irish nationalists, even in a time [End Page 141] of profound domestic crisis (the pivotal...

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