This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

Focusing on the era in which the modern idea of nationalism emerged as a way of establishing the preferred political, cultural, and social order for society, this book demonstrates that across different European societies the most important constituent of nationalism has been a specific understanding of the nation's historical past. Analysing Ireland and Germany, two largely unconnected societies in which the past was peculiarly contemporary in politics and where the meaning of the nation was highly contested, this volume examines how narratives of origins, religion, territory and race produced by historians who were central figures in the cultural and intellectual histories of both countries interacted; it also explores the similarities and differences between the interactions in these societies. Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany investigates whether we can speak of a particular common form of nationalism in Europe. The book draws attention to cultural and intellectual links between the Irish and the Germans during this period, and what this meant for how people in either society understood their national identity in a pivotal time for the development of the historical discipline in Europe. Contributing to a growing body of research on the 'transnationality' of nationalism, this new study of a hitherto-unexplored area will be of interest to historians of modern Germany and Ireland, comparative and transnational historians, and students and scholars of nationalism, as well as those interested in the relationship between biography and writing history.

This book attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns.

Since the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. This text explores the pivotal moments in this history.

This book assesses competing modes of nation-building and nationalism through a critical reappraisal of the works of key theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Exploring the processes of nation building from a variety of ethnic and social class contexts, it focuses on the contested terrains within which nationalist ideologies are often rooted. Mac Laughlin offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of nation building, taking as a case study the historical connections between Ireland and Great Britain in the clash between 'big nation' historic British nationalism on the one hand, and minority Irish nationalism on the other. Locating the origins of the historic nation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mac Laughlin emphasises the difficulties, and specifities, of minority nationalisms in the nineteenth century. In so doing he calls for a place-centred approach which recognises the symbolic and socio-economic significance of territory to the different scales of nation-building. Exploring the evolution of Irish Nationalism, Reimaging the Nation State also shows how minority nations can challenge the hegemony of dominant states and threaten the territorial integrity of historic nations.

In an era of mass mobilisation, the Great Famine and rebellion, this book shows how the writers of the mid-19th century Dublin nationalist press were at the heart of Irish nationalist activities, and evaluates the consequences for the development of Irish nationalism.

In this important work of deep learning and insight, David Brundage gives us the first full-scale history of Irish nationalists in the United States. Beginning with the brief exile of Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irish republican nationalism, in Philadelphia on the eve of the bloody 1798 Irish rebellion, and concluding with the role of Bill Clinton's White House in the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Brundage tells a story of more than two hundred years of Irish American (and American) activism in the cause of Ireland. The book, though, is far more than a narrative history of the movement. Brundage effectively weaves into his account a number of the analytical themes and perspectives that have transformed the study of nationalism over the last two decades. The most important of these perspectives is the "imagined" or "invented" character of nationalism. A second theme is the relationship of nationalism to the waves of global migration from the early nineteenth century to the present and, more precisely, the relationship of nationalist politics to the phenomenon of political exile. Finally, the work is concerned with Irish American nationalists' larger social and political vision, which sometimes expanded to embrace causes such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, or freedom for British colonial subjects in India and Africa, and at other times narrowed, avoiding or rejecting such "extraneous" concerns and connections. All of these themes are placed within a thoroughly transnational framework that is one of the book's most important contributions. Irish nationalism in America emerges from these pages as a movement of great resonance and power. This is a work that will transform our understanding of the experience of one of America's largest immigrant groups and of the phenomenon of diasporic or "long-distance" nationalism more generally.