The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (review)

In her influential 1992 book, Britons, Linda Colley lamented the comparative absence of work on the modern history of British patriotism and nationalism. Given the richness and depth of scholarship devoted to various permutations of British identities over the past twenty years, such a complaint could not be made now. While only a relatively small number of these works have examined Ireland's place in the formation of British nationalism—Colley famously excluded Ireland from her study—recent years have seen the publication of increasingly sophisticated studies of the history of Irish unionism. John Bew's The Glory of Being Britons certainly stands among the best of the new scholarship.

Bew's book is an ambitious study of Irish unionist politics from the revolutionary tumult of the 1790s to the height of the Victorian age in the mid-1870s. This longer chronological framework is key to Bew's argument, which centers on the notion that nineteenth-century unionism was a much more deeply rooted, positive, and complex phenomenon than has been hitherto understood. The sectarian and conservative elements of Irish unionism, he contends, have been consistently overemphasized by historians too focused on the conflicts of the Home Rule era. By reexamining the careers of a coterie of Belfast politicians and placing them in their broader British and European contexts, Bew charts the existence of a strong liberal and reforming unionism (a civic unionism tied loosely but by no means exclusively to the incremental reformism of Edmund Burke and Robert Peel), from the 1810s to its defeat amid the hardening populist sectarianism of the 1870s. While his summaries of the existing historiography are often so reductionist as to approach caricature—a "straw man" approach is surely not needed in a work of this quality—he is largely persuasive and successful, particularly for the period between 1790 and 1848.

Bew's central contention is that Irish unionism is a more positive and complex set of beliefs than historians acknowledge. As he puts it, "the central argument of this book is that unionism had more complex origins than has often been assumed. It was more than a simple reaction to Irish nationalism, a pan-Protestant alliance manipulated by elites, an all-encompassing Orangeism, or the outgrowth of a settler mentality" (xiv). He begins provocatively by asking a question that has long vexed Irish historians: why did so many former members of the Society of United Irishmen become solid supporters of the Union by the early years of Victoria's reign? In answering this question, historians typically have argued that the ex-United Irishmen changed their politics, abandoning their reforming credentials to benefit from the surging commercial growth of Victorian Belfast and to face down a rising Irish Catholic nationalism. Closely examining the careers of well-known but too-often-ignored figures like William Drennan, Henry Montgomery, James Emerson Tennant, and William Sharman Crawford, Bew argues that their unionism was a much more positively constructed identity, and that what had changed was context, not belief. In short, these civic-minded unionists came to see that the reforms they desired could be pursued and achieved in this new United Kingdom.

The years between 1829 and 1838 loom large in this account. In these years, of course, the British Parliament passed Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Reform Act (1832). While radicals were understandably disappointed by the terms of the latter bill, the British state had proven itself capable of substantial reform. With Catholic emancipation achieved, it is clear that liberal Presbyterians felt betrayed by the direction of O'Connellite politics in the 1830s, when Daniel O'Connell used the political leverage he had gained through mass mobilization to fight for the increasingly mild reforms of the Lichfield House Compact (northern reformers were particularly upset at his approach to tithe reform) and then the Repeal of the Act of Union (a campaign that very few of O'Connell's Presbyterian...