A Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Young Ireland and the Risorgimento

Abstract

For many years, since the pioneering work of historians such as Kevin Nowlan, it was assumed that Mazzinian nationalism had a direct and potent impact upon the romantic nationalist movement that emerged in the 1840s around the Young Ireland movement and its mouthpiece, the Nation newspaper. In 1960, Nowlan, Robert Dudley Edwards and Thomas Desmond Williams published a series of lectures under the title Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. In the introduction to the volume, Edwards stated bluntly that the Irish movement ‘had been strongly influenced by the ideas of Mazzini and their gospel of Irish Nationalism was largely based on his theories’. While positing a more qualified relationship between Mazzinian ideas and Young Ireland in the 1840s, Nowlan nevertheless averred that ‘the Young Irelanders in their newspaper, the Nation, came close enough to Mazzini’s position’.1