A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America by Ely M. Janis (review)

Ely Janis’s aim is to give a survey of Irish American movements in North America, and in doing so he fulfills a major gap in the literature on the Land War, which has previously concentrated mostly on the Land War in Ireland itself, with limited studies of how the Land War was radicalized by the activities of the Ladies’ Land League and in particular their activities based in New York of raising financial support from new-world Irish. A generation after the mass exodus caused by the famine, Irish Americans continued to identify with the politics of being a British colony, even as they organized for working-class unions in America or identified as upwardly mobile members of a respectable middle class.

Janis’s vision of “Greater Ireland” encompasses two ways in which Irish Americans of the 1880s came to stand for broader solidarities. First, there is a “Greater Ireland” that is of interest chiefly to historians of the Atlantic World and diaspora in general. It maps out the Irish Americans who identified themselves as Irish and continued their involvement in Irish politics from Chicago and Buffalo. Middle-class Irish Americans, gathered around the postcolonial movement for Irish independence, identified themselves with the cause of Irish nationalism. Janis identifies this middle-class Irish American politics as “conservative nationalism,” which followed Charles Stewart Parnell and the movement for home rule. By contrast, working-class Irish Americans tended to identify with a tradition that Janis calls “physical-force nationalism,” associated with John Devoy in New York City and the Fenian movement in Ireland, which looked to an armed and violent revolution, or “radical nationalism,” associated with the Irish World, a publication that argued for a sweeping program of economic and political social justice (p. 7).

The second version of “Greater Ireland” will be more compelling to other students of American history, race, and class more generally. It concerns how working-class Irish Americans, who participated at a distance in the ongoing rural incendiary actions of the Land War of 1881–1882 by sending money, came to employ a larger discourse for rethinking the state and the economy in such a way as to include those dispossessed by class and race more generally. As Janis understands, the Land War was wrapped up in charges that the economy was characterized by “landlordism”—Herbert Spencer’s term for a monopoly holding of titles to real estate by a minority elite who also control the legislature and judiciary, thus enforcing their power to charge high rents with the force of police-led eviction. Countering “landlordism” were utopian ideas about remaking the economy in the service of tenant farmers and workers who rented their dwellings, notably the “land nationalization” schemes associated with Michael Davitt and the “Single Tax” on land proposed by Henry George. Janis shows that these proposals inspired a large cohort of working-class activists who were not Irish themselves, even while the core of George’s mayoral candidacy for New York City remained Catholic. He also traces how the Irish “boycott,” originally a rent-strike tactic from the Irish Land War of 1881–1882, which involved “shunning” members of the community who paid their rent, was rapidly adopted by other members of the working class for union actions in the years after Irish American solidarity brought news of Irish boycotts to the United States. Janis also offers a new perspective by accounting for the role of women in Irish-American nationalist movements, although he follows generations of feminist Irish historians like Jane Cote, Mary Ward, Adrian Mulligan and Patricia Groves in documenting the work of the Ladies’ Land League on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 7).

The book’s narrative suffers from an emphasis on top-down leadership rather than bottom-up organizing, which underplays the extensive and impressive work that Janis has undertaken in the archives of...