Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The essays in this useful collection had their origins in a conference held by the Anthropological Association of Ireland, their stated purpose being to provide a “building block in an anthropological history of Ireland and point up the significance of Ireland as a case study for the emerging social sciences in the nineteenth century” (ix). To this end, editor Séamas Ó Síocháin has assembled a set of analyses that consider Ireland’s treatment by individual nineteenth-century intellectuals, mainly English or writing in England, along with two essays on period attitudes toward race and ethnicity in Ireland.

The intent of Social Thought on Ireland is thus to clarify the Irish social sciences, but the book is at least as effective as an aid to Victorian studies. For Victorian writers in England, Ireland had great rhetorical significance as an all-too-visible reminder that not all was well. While the English presided over a growing British empire abroad and relative political stability at home, Ireland refused to grow or stabilize, falling prey to poverty, famine, and rebellion despite its long-term rule by the supposedly civilizing nation next door. Why, asked the nineteenth-century commentators, couldn’t English governance drag a backward Ireland forward?

Social Thought on Ireland’s essays on Gustave de Beaumont, J. S. Mill, Harriet Martineau, Henry Maine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and J. A. Froude describe these writers’ wide-ranging answers to this question: because the Irish were racially inferior, because they were Catholic, because there were too many of them, because they resisted a mishandled English rule, because their landlords were indifferent, because their land was boggy, and many other hypotheses. Whatever the answer, it illuminates each writer’s understanding of history and the place of England and Ireland within it. Some essays are sketchier than others: this book may be only the beginning of a conversation. But it’s a good beginning, demonstrating the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectuals expressed their own anxieties about failure in the face of opportunity through reflection on the foreigners next door.

One of the strengths of Social Thought on Ireland is the diversity of the commentators it considers. It offers the liberal Mill, the socialist Marx and Engels, and the Carlylean Froude; it evaluates sociology, economics, political science, history, and even a couple of attempts at the novel (by Froude and Martineau). Further, the writers analyzed are carefully positioned in their intellectual, political, and historical contexts. This work is a good introduction to the field it surveys: an opening chapter on “Ireland’s Nineteenth Century” covers some of the issues on which the nineteenth-century commentators weigh in, and the authors of the subsequent chapters offer brief biographies for some of their less-familiar subjects (Beaumont, Maine, Martineau) or summaries of the historical issues that moved them (Ó Síocháin’s outlining of the Irish Land War is particularly helpful). The authors also consider the ways in which Ireland was viewed “within a broad comparative context (empire/India/Anglo-Saxons)” (viii), and they excel at this. We see that both the United States and India were regularly compared to Ireland as countries also working through a legacy of English influence, and we see as well the growing role that Irish-American emigrants played in the question of Irish independence.

At times the collection seems a little too far-ranging. Though the essay on Beaumont is well-written, and Beaumont himself is clearly significant to Irish studies as “Ireland’s Alexis de Tocqueville” (9), he feels out of place among so many English writers. The essay on Marx and Engels is similarly frustrating because its most developed discussion is on India rather than Ireland, which it seems to reserve for future exploration. In another departure, the essay on race theory admits that popular attitudes toward race in Ireland have already been covered well elsewhere (notably by L. P. Curtis) and directs...