British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (review)

Eugenio Biagini's impressive work of historical revisionism picks up where his previous book, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform (1992), left off. He moves the story forward in time but also reevaluates the importance of Irish Home Rule in developing a new focus for the Liberal party, popular radicalism, and by extension British democracy. He writes, "this book is mainly an intellectual history not of the Home Rule crisis as such, but of its consequence and impact on the development of popular ideas of liberty and democracy" (7). In this, Biagini succeeds admirably. He convincingly demonstrates that, far from being simply a personal obsession of W. E. Gladstone's, Home Rule was the most singularly pressing issue of the day to a large portion of the United Kingdom's electorate and thus needed to be addressed directly. Furthermore, Biagini seems to evoke Mark Twain in arguing that reports of Liberalism's demise after 1886 were greatly exaggerated. Instead, he demonstrates the resilience of Liberalism's central ideas, paraphrasing John Dunbabin's observation that "while before 1914 Britain seemed to have two liberal parties, one of which chose to call itself Unionist, after 1918 it had three, one of which chose to call itself Labour" (3). Finally, Biagini asks his readers to look at Home Rule in the broader contexts of popular radicalism in Britain; class antagonisms across Europe; and contemporary debates about the nature of imperialism, liberty, and democracy. Party politics aside, the ideal of justice for Ireland coalesced with other trends in Victorian and Edwardian Britain—late Chartism, abolitionism, anti-imperialism—to create a new understanding of liberty and citizenship, based on moral imperatives, that came to define popular radicalism after 1885.

To make this case, Biagini examines a number of diverse groups who saw their own causes reflected in the Irish one. For example, as the class-based antagonisms between Chartism and Liberalism began to fade, a common ground developed emphasizing "freedom," a Victorian version of democracy, and overseas humanitarianism. The Irish cause—far from being imposed on the Liberal party's working-class base, which included a significant number of Irish and Irish-descended workers—fit squarely into the wider parameters of this consensus. Indeed it was the unexpected success of the Nationalist party in the 1885 elections, the first to be held under the near-democratic franchise, that led Gladstone to surmise that Home Rule was the new "crisis of public conscience" that could rally an enlarged electorate to Liberal policies. To that end, after Gladstone's government was defeated in the Commons, the Grand Old Man took the issue to the country in July 1886 only to suffer a decisive defeat at the hands of Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists. Despite this setback, Gladstone introduced a Second Home Rule bill in 1893 after he returned to power, and although this bill passed the Commons, it was killed by the Lords.

The main concern for Biagini here—and perhaps the most interesting part of the book—is not parliamentary maneuvering, but how various groups employed this rhetoric to further their own interests. He seeks to explain, for example, "how the socially inclusive language of Nationalism could be used to foster the class interests of the better-off farmers and yet, at the same time, galvanize landless labourers into claiming their 'rights'; or how political women—another subaltern group—could adopt and adapt the Gladstonian or Unionist ideas of liberty" to their own particular vision of citizenship (20). He likewise moves the discussion past the insularity that can dominate this historiography to approach old questions in new and invigorating ways. Moving beyond an emphasis on what the Parnellites opposed, for instance, Biagini illustrates how their rhetoric aligned with their British counterparts in popular liberal circles in Wales and Scotland. A focus on the liberal aspects of Irish Nationalist politics provides valuable counterweight to the popular and historiographical emphasis on the physical force tradition of the Irish Republican...