Abstract
In February 1881, just days after the first the Irish nationalists’ bombings inaugurated a half-decade dynamite war in Great Britain, in his essay on the Irish land question Henry George wrote,
the civilized world is on the verge of the most tremendous struggle, which, according to the frankness and sagacity with which it is met, will be a struggle of ideas or a struggle of actual physical force, calling upon all the potent agencies of destruction which modern invention has discovered, every sign of the times portends. The voices that proclaim the eve of revolution are in the air. Steam and electricity are not merely transporting goods and carrying messages. They are everywhere changing social and industrial organization; they are everywhere stimulating thought, and arousing new hopes and fears and desires and passions; they are everywhere breaking down the barriers that have separated men, and integrating nations into one vast organism, through which the same pulses throb and the same nerves tingle.1
George’s words, composed during the sanguineous agrarian Land War in Ireland, presaged a novel breed of terrorism confronting the Western world. Various strains of Irish-American nationalist groups utilizing technological innovations to attack the British Empire introduced significant challenges for the Atlantic community.
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Notes
Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (orig., 1987; Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1991), chapters 2–5.
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© 2010 Jonathan Gantt
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Gantt, J. (2010). Clan-na-Gael Terrorism Challenges the Atlantic Community, 1881–1885. In: Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250451_4
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