Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

Abstract

Bruce Nelson's expansive approach to the history of Irish nationalism and race updates older, formulaic attempts to chart the nationalist course by framing the topic within tides of imperial expansion and racial identity constructed between the mid-1800s and the 1920s. His study challenges revisionist ratifications of Irish nationalism as “sectarian and ethnocentric, backward-looking, and stubbornly antimodern” and confirms the internationalist turn of the past decade as an important progression in the writing of Irish nationalist history (p. 49). Nelson begins with British images of Irishness as “the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon virtue,” rooted in the 1100s and contested throughout Ireland's history (p. 17). Modern incarnations of Irish nationalism rising in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and shepherded to the 1850s by Daniel O'Connell generated international awareness of domestic Irish struggles. According to Nelson, O'Connell's solicitation of Irish American support for abolitionism, in association with his signing of the 1841 Address from the People of Ireland to Their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America (the “Irish Address”), revealed liberal, transatlantic currents within the burgeoning nationalist agenda. Recapitulating Angela Murphy's recent arguments, Nelson shows that although O'Connell failed to convince Irish emigrants who were struggling against powerful American cultural and political imperatives, his efforts expanded nationalism's transatlantic base.