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Introduction

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Shaping Ireland’s Independence

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Abstract

This book provides an analytical narrative of the prolonged negotiations that partitioned Ireland into two states and established the constitutional relationship between them, the United Kingdom, and the British Empire. The introduction outlines ways this study engages with existing scholarship by summarizing historical background, questions to be addressed, and major arguments. Additionally, Rast examines modes of political thought in the United Kingdom that impacted debates on Irish self-government, particularly attitudes toward democratic and popular politics, religion, nationalism, and the press. In this way, the introduction both sets up the rest of the book and provides insight into British and Irish political dynamics in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hansard, HC, 13 June 1912, “Clause 1,” David Lloyd George, vol. 39, column 1123.

  2. 2.

    For the quote and revisionism generally, see Ciaran Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin: Irish Academic, 1994); Robert Perry, “Revising Irish History: The Northern Ireland Conflict and the War of Ideas,” Journal of European Studies 40, no. 4 (Dec. 2010): 329–354.

  3. 3.

    Alvin Jackson, “Irish Unionism,” in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (London: Routledge, 1996), 137.

  4. 4.

    John Regan, Myth and the Irish State: Historical Problems and Other Essays (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), 72–76; John Hutchinson, “Irish Nationalism,” in Making of Modern Irish History, 101.

  5. 5.

    Tom Dunne, “New Histories: Beyond ‘Revisionism’,” Irish Review (Spring–Summer 1992): 1–12.

  6. 6.

    Keith Sewell, “The ‘Herbert Butterfield Problem’ and Its Resolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (Oct. 2003): 599–618; Richard Bourke, “Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (Sept. 2010): 747–770; Naomi Lloyd-Jones and Margaret Scull, eds., Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)United Kingdom? (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

  7. 7.

    Simon Potter, British Imperial History (London: Palgrave, 2015); John MacKenzie, “The British Empire: Ramshackle or Rampaging? A Historiographical Reflection,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 1 (2015): 99–124.

  8. 8.

    The most strikingly positive examination is Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2008). The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 1 (Spring 2002), was devoted entirely to debating David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Jeremy Black, The British Empire: A History and a Debate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

  9. 9.

    Eugenio Biagini, “The Third Home Rule Bill in British History,” in The Home Rule Crisis, 1912–1914, ed. Gabriel Doherty (Cork: Mercier, 2014), 435–437; Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910–1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 134, 357; R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (New York: Norton, 2014), 49, 187, 272; Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 25–27; Peter Hart, “Paramilitary Politics and the Irish Revolution,” in Republicanism in Modern Ireland, ed. Fearghal McGarry (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 38–39; K. T. Hoppen, Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland, 1800–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 289–320; Alvin Jackson, “Irish Unionism, 1905–21,” in Nationalism and Unionism: Conflict in Ireland, 1885–1921, ed. Peter Collins (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1994), 45; Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919–22 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), 1; Kenneth Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 262–264; Michael O’Neill, “Challenging the Centre: Home Rule Movements,” in Devolution and British Politics, ed. Michael O’Neill (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), 38.

  10. 10.

    Paul Bew, Churchill and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 180–184; Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism: Two, Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland, 1886–1922 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973), 126; Fanning, Fatal Path, 12, 61, 66, 134, 188, 352; Brian Girvin, From Union to Union: Nationalism, Democracy and Religion in Ireland—Act of Union to EU (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2002), 17–18; G. K. Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2001), 178; Graham Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 30.

  11. 11.

    Even after his “conversion,” Gladstone expected Conservatives to cooperate in home rule. H. C. G. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence, 14 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), XI:445–474.

  12. 12.

    UKPA, BL/39/5/48 and BL/39/5/50.

  13. 13.

    F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 136.

  14. 14.

    Alan Ward, “A Constitutional Background to the Northern Ireland Crisis,” in Northern Ireland and the Politics of Reconciliation, 42; Bill Kissane, “The Doctrine of Self-Determination and the Irish Move to Independence, 1916–1922,” Journal of Political Ideologies 8, no. 3 (Oct. 2003): 343.

  15. 15.

    Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.

  16. 16.

    Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 41–55; David Miller, Queen’s Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), 89–94.

  17. 17.

    John Barnes, “Ideology and Factions,” in Conservative Century: The Conservative Party Since 1900, ed. Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 315–345; Robert Self, The Evolution of the British Party System, 1885–1940 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 26–27.

  18. 18.

    TT, 17 Jan 1914.

  19. 19.

    Neal Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People: The British General Elections of 1910 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 99; David Dutton, ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’: The Unionist Party in Opposition, 1905–1915 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), 74; G. R. Searle, A New England?: Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 424.

  20. 20.

    David Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands, 1912–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 205.

  21. 21.

    Luke Blaxill, “Opposition to Irish Home Rule, 1884–1922,” in Campaigning for Change: Lessons from History, ed. Richard Huzzey and Mike Childs (London: Friends of the Earth, 2016), 97–113; Thomas Kennedy, “‘The Gravest Situation of Our Lives’: Conservatives, Ulster, and the Home Rule Crisis, 1911–1914,” Éire-Ireland 36, no. 2 (Sept. 2001): 73–76; Bill Kissane, “The Constitutional Revolution That Never Was: Democratic Radicalism and the Sinn Féin Movement,” Radical History Review 104 (Spring 2009): 77–102.

  22. 22.

    Richard Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868–1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 1–6; Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (Harlow: Longman, 1997), 17–18, 129–131; Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 18–35.

  23. 23.

    Bill Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 148; Göran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (May 1977): 21–23.

  24. 24.

    Arthur Balfour, Nottingham, TT, 16 Jan 1906; Hansard, HC, 18 June 1912, “Clause 1,” Andrew Bonar Law, vol. 39, column 1560.

  25. 25.

    P. F. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–1990 (London: Allen Lane, 1996), 67–68; Hugh Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain, 1832–1918 (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 209.

  26. 26.

    D. G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Routledge, 1995), 331; Ronan Fanning, Independent Ireland (Dublin: Helicon, 1983), 6; Garvin, 1922, 3, 131, 144; J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67–68; Robert Lynch, Revolutionary Ireland, 1912–1925 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 14, 131; Jeffrey Prager, Building Democracy in Ireland: Political Order and Cultural Integration in a Newly Independent Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 187–188, 207–209.

  27. 27.

    David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 134–157.

  28. 28.

    Kissane, Explaining Irish Democracy, 228; Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 373.

  29. 29.

    Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–5; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 29–87.

  30. 30.

    Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201; G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 380–383; D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 298–302; Chris Williams, “The United Kingdom: British Nationalisms During the Long Nineteenth Century,” in What Is a Nation?: Europe, 1789–1914, ed. Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 278–280.

  31. 31.

    Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 361; Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 131; W. J. Sheils, “Catholicism from the Reformation to the Relief Acts,” in A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present, ed. Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 251.

  32. 32.

    Stewart Brown, Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815–1914 (Harlow: Pearson, 2008), 4–5, 398–403, 446–451; David Fitzpatrick, The Two Irelands: 1912–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 316; Girvin, From Union to Union, 18; David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 150; Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 214.

  33. 33.

    Hugh Kearney, “Contested Ideas of Nationhood, 1800–1995,” Irish Review 20 (Spring 1997): 19; Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England, 1914–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5; Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions, and the Idea of Britishness (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 236–261; Kenneth Wald, Crosses on the Ballot: Patterns of British Voter Alignment Since 1885 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 250–254; John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994), 130–153.

  34. 34.

    Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Macmillan, 2007), 136–137; Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 90–93; Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), 159–160.

  35. 35.

    Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 562, 581; Boyce, Nationalism, 149, 154, 220, 364; English, Irish Freedom, 442; Foster, Vivid Faces, 328; Tom Garvin, “National Identity in Ireland,” Studies 95, no. 379 (Autumn 2006): 248; Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5, 21; Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 5.

  36. 36.

    M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 14; Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the Land League to Sinn Féin (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 330–331; Oliver P. Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 1861–75 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), xi–xiii.

  37. 37.

    English, Irish Freedom, 239; Foster, Modern Ireland, 454; John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 173; Lyons, Culture and Anarchy, 59–61; Charles Townshend, “Historiography: Telling the Irish Revolution,” in The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923, ed. Joost Augusteijn (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 11.

  38. 38.

    Patrick Maume, D. P. Moran (Dundalk: Dundalgan, 1995), 53; P. J. Matthews, “A Battle of Two Civilizations?: D. P. Moran and William Rooney,” Irish Review 29 (Autumn 2002): 28–29.

  39. 39.

    MG, 14 March 1914.

  40. 40.

    Daily Telegraph, 15 Dec 1909.

  41. 41.

    Carolyn Augspurger, “National Identity, Religion, and Irish Unionism: The Rhetoric of Irish Presbyterian Opposition to Home Rule in 1912,” Irish Political Studies 33, no. 3 (Oct. 2018): 1–7; Daniel Jackson, Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 9–12; Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 88–95.

  42. 42.

    Foster, Modern Ireland, 453.

  43. 43.

    For these and other organizations, see Machin, Politics and the Churches; Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 27, 83.

  44. 44.

    David Lindsay [Lord Balcarres, Earl Crawford], The Crawford Papers, ed. John Vincent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 162, 20 July 1910.

  45. 45.

    FJ, 30 Sept 1912.

  46. 46.

    UKPA, BL/33/6/80, Andrew Bonar Law, “Conversation with the P.M.,” 15 Oct 1913.

  47. 47.

    Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 106–142; Ward, Britishness, 14–31; Williams, “United Kingdom,” 272–292.

  48. 48.

    John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Leo Amery Diaries, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), I:92, 15 Jan 1913.

  49. 49.

    John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 197–202; Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), 168–172.

  50. 50.

    Pauline Collombier-Lakeman, “Ireland and the Empire: The Ambivalence of Constitutional Nationalism,” Radical History Review 104 (Spring 2009): 57–76; Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire; Hiram Morgan, “An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire-Building,” History of European Ideas 19, nos. 4–6 (1994): 619–625; Paul Townend, The Road to Home Rule: Anti-Imperialism and the Irish National Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).

  51. 51.

    For Ulster unionism as nationalism: Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 136. As Britishness: Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 15–17; Walker, Ulster Unionist Party, 6–8.

  52. 52.

    Jane G. V. McGaughey, Ulster’s Men: Protestant Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912–1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 26.

  53. 53.

    Gordon Hewart, Manchester, MG, 31 July 1912; R. A. Scott-James, The Influence of the Press (London: Partridge, n.d. [1913]), 211.

  54. 54.

    PRONI, D1507/A/5/15, H. A. Gwynne to Edward Carson, 20 March 1914.

  55. 55.

    Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), II:2–12.

  56. 56.

    Simon Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  57. 57.

    R. J. Johnstone, Belfast, Larne Times, 17 Jan 1914.

  58. 58.

    BMH WS 1770, part 2, Kevin O’Shiel, 152–153.

  59. 59.

    Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918–1923 (London: Lane, 2013), 358.

  60. 60.

    Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (Boulder: Westview, 2012), xiv.

  61. 61.

    Hoppen, Governing Hibernia, 297–299; David Powell, British Politics, 1910–35: The Crisis of the Party System (London: Routledge, 2004), 22.

  62. 62.

    Jackson, Home Rule, 111; James McConnel, The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Third Home Rule Crisis (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013), 223–225; Michael Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland, 1910–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 164.

  63. 63.

    Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism, 1912–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 105; Conor Mulvagh, The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 103–113.

  64. 64.

    Jackson, Home Rule, 158–159.

  65. 65.

    Bew, Ireland, 383; Fanning, Fatal Path, 162–163.

  66. 66.

    Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 177; Howe, Ireland and Empire, 41.

  67. 67.

    Jason Knirck, Imagining Ireland’s Independence: The Debates Over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 8, 91–92; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 347, 425.

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Rast, M.C. (2019). Introduction. In: Shaping Ireland’s Independence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21118-9_1

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