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  • The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874
  • John Newsinger (bio)
The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874, by Brian Jenkins; pp. xvi + 439. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, $95.00, £65.00.

Brian Jenkins situates his new book on the British response to the Fenian movement within a terrorism studies paradigm. Contemporary concerns regarding international terrorism influence his approach, and it seems clear that the book is intended to make as much of a contribution to the burgeoning and, it must be said, very dubious academic industry of terrorism studies as it is to historical understanding. This is unfortunate because it weakens a work of exemplary scholarship.

Jenkins’s concern is to examine “the problem” that the Fenians’ insurgency and terrorism presented for the British liberal state. Here we encounter the first [End Page 468] problem posed by the terrorism studies paradigm, because Britain was not just a liberal state, but also more properly an imperial state. Jenkins’s account signally fails to put the Fenians and Ireland into this imperial context. The Empire is acknowledged, of course, but it is very much a matter of off-stage alarums, and what it might reveal about the nature of the liberal state is never really explored. Moreover, treating the Fenians as a problem inevitably tends to delegitimise their struggle.

His failure to come to grips with the Empire is demonstrated by his brief discussion of Hugh Rose’s conduct during the Indian Rebellion. Here he expresses some surprise that Rose’s career survived the scandal of his mass execution of prisoners at Sehore; indeed, Rose was actually promoted. Jenkins considers this episode from a liberal rather than an imperial standpoint. In fact, the ferocity of British repression in India was positively celebrated rather than condemned by British public opinion, with the clamour being for more severity rather than less. According to Jenkins, the Fenians tried to damage Rose’s reputation by alleging that he had prisoners “blown” from the guns (52). While Rose does not seem to have utilised this particularly gruesome form of execution himself, it certainly was used by the British in the suppression of the Indian Rebellion. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that Rose disapproved.

Such ferocity was not just the British response to the Indian Rebellion. The uprising at Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865, in which twenty-nine whites were killed, was put down with completely disproportionate force. While many suspected insurgents, both men and women, were killed out of hand, another 353 were executed after court martial, with some actually being used for target practice to try out the new Enfield rifle.

What is interesting here is that the liberal state responded with such violence in India, Jamaica, and elsewhere, but behaved with comparative restraint towards the Fenians. It is also worth noticing that only seventy-odd years before the British had put down the United Irish Rebellion with considerable ferocity. What had changed was that Ireland had been incorporated into the liberal state, and while it could live quite comfortably with frightfulness in the colonies, the use of such methods at home was far more contentious, indeed was effectively prohibited.

One other aspect of the terrorism paradigm compromises Jenkins’s approach. He writes of Ireland’s “tradition of violence,” “ambivalence towards violence,” “acceptance of the mystique of violence,” and “belief that violence can lead to great material change” (329). To be fair, some of these phrases are quoted from other writers, but they are quoted sympathetically. This smacks more of British propaganda than it does of serious historical analysis. How does Ireland’s “tradition of violence” compare with that of the British Empire between the 1840s and 1870s, for example? As Richard Cobden put it, the British “have been the most aggressive, quarrelsome, warlike and bloody nation under the sun” (qtd. in Stephen Hobhouse, Joseph Sturge [J. M. Dent, 1919], 119). The catalogue of colonial wars waged in these decades and subsequently, often little more than one-sided massacres, conducted on the most disgraceful and fraudulent pretexts (as was pointed out by critics...

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