The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 by Niall Whelehan (review)

Far too often, studies of Irish politics, and certainly of Irish nationalism, have remained largely isolated from broader historiographical discourses—seemingly irrelevant in the search for a useable past in the twenty-first century. No longer. Niall Whelehan’s Dynamiters offers an opportunity for scholars worldwide and specialists in Irish history to reconnect.

Addressing global discourses on political violence, The Dynamiters tackles a concept familiar to Irish historians: the “insurrectionary tradition” that inspired militant nationalists between 1798 and 1916. Using an array of newspapers and archival materials, Whelehan argues that the dynamite, or “skirmishing,” campaigns of the late nineteenth century—“the first urban bombing campaign in history”—make much more sense when studied in a transnational setting. From this vantage point, the Easter Rising of 1916 was more a “symbolic gesture” or an “aberration”—a “step backwards” that “strayed from the strategical progression evident in the path from skirmishing to the War of Independence.” If any “insurrectionary tradition” emerged out of nineteenth-century, it began with the dynamiters.

Whelehan begins his analysis in 1867 with the blasts at London’s Clerkenwell prison and the invention of dynamite, and concludes in 1900 with the explosion at Thorold, Ontatio, near Niagara Falls. Most dynamite attacks occurred, however, between 1880 and 1885, when fifteen explosions rocked government buildings, press offices, and railway stations, taking the lives of three bombers and one civilian. While the skirmishers focused on high-profile targets in Britain and Ireland, they traced their ideological and financial support to the United States. At the forefront of these efforts stood such well-known Irish-American nationalist organizations as Clan-na-Gael and the Fenian Brotherhood. Whelehan contextualizes their efforts in a larger Atlantic milieu of anarchist movements, revolutionary struggles, international labor strife, liberal reform, the rise of the modern state, and the advent of “scientific warfare.”

This contextualization is crucial for a study in political violence, especially one dedicated to a period noted for the rise of globalization, modernity, and Pax Britannica. The author challenges rigid Weberian interpretations of state formation, instead arguing that competition over the legitimacy of violence was the rule, rather than the exception, during the nineteenth century. The dynamiters represented “a political movement in a violent age rather than a violent movement in an age of peaceful politics.” Attuned to public debates and to constitutional politics, they employed the use of explosives rationally, as a “means of political negotiation,” and refrained when it was prudent—as they did during the struggle over Home Rule legislation in 1886. Both the dynamiters and successive British governments, meanwhile, recognized that they were waging a war for public opinion—the former succeeding as long as their “infernal machines” destroyed property rather than people, and the latter recognizing that unwarranted internments or executions would bring them defeat. The cycles of political violence during the skirmishing campaign reflected a growing sense that the risks of employing force could easily outweigh the benefits.

The dynamiters may have targeted interests in the United Kingdom, but their means and mentalities were Irish-American. From a historiographical standpoint, this is one of Whelehan’s most significant accomplishments. Scholars have long emphasized how French ideologies influenced Irish nationalists, while virtually ignoring republicanism in the United States—which, he argues, “contributed to the worldview of Fenians and Land Leaguers in Ireland and Britain as well as in Irish America during the 1870s and 1880s.” His examination of Patrick Ford’s newspaper, the Irish World, is illustrative. A co-founder of “skirmishing,” Ford published articles anticipating the union of physical-force nationalism and land reform in Ireland. The newspaper’s motto, “The Land for the People,” reached 20,000 American subscribers long before the establishment of the Land League. And still, contributions abounded elsewhere. In 1875, after the dynamite campaign had been proposed in Brooklyn, Patrick Crowe and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa founded the “Skirmishing Fund” in Peoria, Illinois. In 1878, John...