Agrarian Terrorism Confounds the Atlantic Community, 1870–1882

Abstract

Irish terrorism was not exclusively a Fenian vocation nor was it limited to sensational, spectacular attacks like the Clerkenwell explosion. Throughout the prolonged struggle against British hegemony in Ireland, peasantry agitation has manifested various modes and even the decline of Fenianism after Clerkenwell did not mean an end to politically or socially inspired violence. The diminishment of Fenianism and nationalist violence did not restore peace—an equally aggressive and more lethal terrorism consumed much of Irish society for over a decade occupying considerable attention of British imperial officials. By the late 1860s and intermittently throughout the 1870s Ireland endured dire economic conditions resulting from poor harvests that were compounded by intractable political grievances from the absence of local self-government among the peasantry. These conditions fostered widespread social discontent and persuaded the most desperate to implement a form of rural terrorism, commonly referred to as agrarianism. Retributive violence from personal animosities among the lower classes was certainly a component of the land agitation, but agrarianism was a broad social movement embodied by much of the peasantry and supported by a substantial portion of the Irish intelligentsia and upper-class reacting to the loss of local autonomy. The land movement included a salient political dynamic, conveyed through legal and constitutional means, but by the 1870s, agrarianism was increasingly expressed through extralegal, violent conspiracies.