1st Edition

Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History

By Niall Whelehan Copyright 2015
    268 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    268 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book explores the benefits and challenges of transnational history for the study of modern Ireland. In recent years the word "transnational" has become more and more conspicuous in history writing across the globe, with scholars seeking to move beyond national and local frameworks when investigating the past. Yet transnational approaches remain rare in Irish historical scholarship. This book argues that the broader contexts and scales associated with transnational history are ideally suited to open up new questions on many themes of critical importance to Ireland’s past and present. They also provide an important means of challenging ideas of Irish exceptionalism. The chapters included here open up new perspectives on central debates and events in Irish history. They illuminate numerous transnational lives, follow flows and ties across Irish borders, and trace networks and links with Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Australia and the British Empire. This book provides specialists and students with examples of different concepts and ways of doing transnational history. Non-specialists will be interested in the new perspectives offered here on a rich variety of topics, particularly the two major events in modern Irish history, the Great Irish Famine and the 1916 Rising.

    Introduction  1. Playing with Scales: Transnational History and Modern Ireland  Niall Whelehan  2. Friend, Foe or Family? Catholic Creoles, French Huguenots, Scottish Dissenters: Aspects of the Irish Diaspora at St. Croix, Danish West Indies, c.1760  Orla Power  3. Irish Politics and Labour: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives, 1798-1914  Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild  4. "And All My Great Hardships Endured"?: Irish Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land  Hamish Maxwell-Stewart  5. Count Cavour's 1844 Thoughts on Ireland: Liberal Politics and Agrarian Reform Through Anglo-Italian Eyes  Enrico Dal Lago  6. Ireland’s Great Famine: A Transnational History  Enda Delaney  7. "The Perverted Graduates of Oxford": Priestcraft, "Political Popery" and the Transnational Anti-Catholicism of Sir James Emerson Tennent  Jonathan Jeffrey Wright  8. Irish-Polish Solidarity: Irish Responses to the January Uprising of 1863-64 in Congress Poland  Róisín Healy  9. "A Land Beyond the Wave": Transnational Perspectives on Easter 1916  Fearghal McGarry  10. Irish America Without Ireland: Irish-American Relations with Ireland in the Twentieth Century  Timothy J. Meagher  11. Returnees, Forgotten Foreigners and New Immigrants: Tracing Migratory Movement into Ireland Since the Late-Nineteenth Century  Irial Glynn

    Biography

    Niall Whelehan is a Marie Curie Fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh.

    "A transnational approach, properly conceptualized and disciplined, promises to offer the rising generation of historians of Ireland a potentially exciting intellectual and emotional escape route from the suffocating confines of ideologically inspired and conceptually vacuous perspectives.  This is no petty ambition. To derive the full potential advantage of the approach requires transcending the comfortable insular assumptions in which so much of even the most intellectually impressive historiography of Ireland remains cocooned. More power to the pioneers."
    -Professor Joe Lee, Director of Glucksman Ireland House, New York University