Irish Land War Research Articles

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

A Free Market of Morals: Boycotting, Liberalism, and Property

The development of the practice of boycotting during the Irish Land War (1879–82), and its subsequent spread beyond Ireland to the United States, sparked outrage and concern. This was prompted by the specific intellectual challenges the practice posed for liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. In relying on a liberal defense of free speech and freedom of association, early boycotters in the 1880s were able to demonstrate the dependence of property rights on social sanction while also remaining initially impervious to legal censure. As a result, the definition and extent of property rights came under scrutiny because of the ease and simplicity by which they could be curtailed through social force. It is observed here that consequent legislation to insulate commercial wealth from boycotting’s parallel moral economy required the reinforcement and development of political justifications of the state’s right to manage economic interactions in the name of social stability and public welfare. The paper argues that boycotting was so threatening to classical visions of liberal individualism precisely because it was so firmly grounded in individualistic premises. It observes not only that boycotters used the language of “free trade” to defend the practice but also that the practice itself contained latent political assumptions about social organization. The argument also suggests that, contrary to much current academic opinion, rights-based popular resistance can be directed toward egalitarian ends.

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War, by Niall Whelehan

<i>Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War</i>, by Niall Whelehan

Changing land: diaspora activism and the Irish Land War. By Niall Whelehan. Pp 216. New York: NYU Press. 2021. US$30.

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The Right to Life, the Right to Nature, and the Impact of Irish Land on Political Thought in the 1880s

AbstractThe Irish Land War was a pivotal conflict in the history of liberal political thought. With significant impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, events in Ireland were about more than Irish self-determination. Heavily reliant on a discourse of natural right, and asserting a relationship between land ownership and democratic-republican citizenship, the Land War provided a vehicle for popular radical opposition to an increasingly positivist liberalism. This article examines the rationales and political assumptions underlying the demand for land, and how such arguments catalysed an intellectual response among liberal political thinkers. Particular moral and metaphysical ideas about the distinctiveness of land allowed agrarian and labour radicals to reassert individualized but non-possessive rights to natural resources. Rooted in a materialist politics of the human body, this purposive conception of land posed a significant threat to claims for private property, social order, and the ameliorative authority of the state, pressing both liberal and conservative thinkers away from unstable notions of individual rights. The crisis over Irish land helped to shift the terrain of political argument away from questions of participation and popular power, and toward amelioration and public welfare.

Re-staging the 1916 Rising: Eugene McCabe’s Pull Down a Horseman (1966)

ABSTRACT The essay addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

‘Ireland is not going to take her orders from Rome’: Leo XIII, Thomism, and the Irish political imagination

ABSTRACT This article explores the extent to which the traditional Catholic philosophies of Thomas Aquinas influence the Irish political imagination in the nineteenth century. It looks first to Pope Leo XIII, one of the leading proponents of restoring Thomism into mainstream Catholic political thought, and the author of the influential encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The article examines how the Irish Land War during the 1880s influenced the development and audience of the encyclical. Finally, it analyses how the Thomistic principles which served as the foundations of Rerum Novarum were used by the lower-class Irish Catholic laity to legitimize incidences of protest and resistance which were considered morally illicit by the Catholic Church. In doing so, the article demonstrates how Catholicism and Thomistic philosophy influenced the way in which Irish Catholics perceived their relationship with the state and their rights as citizens.

“The Surging Tide of Pauper Democracy”

AbstractNamed and developed during the Irish Land War, boycotting quickly spread beyond Ireland and became a favored tactic for labor organizers in Britain and the United States. This article traces its emergence and growth, as well as the reaction generated by the novel aspects of the practice. It argues that boycotting constituted an intellectual challenge to late Victorian-era liberals, and had profound implications for the conceptions of freedom, rationality, and individual autonomy that underpinned Anglo-American liberalism. By examining the difficulties faced by British and American legislatures and political thinkers in proscribing the practice, the boycott can be more clearly conceptualized both as a political philosophy and as democratic praxis.

Mobilising for land, nation and class interests: agrarian agitation in Finland and Ireland, 1879–1918

AbstractThis article explores the comparative history of land agitation and how it evolved and intersected with nationalism and socialism in Finland and Ireland between the Irish Land War and the Finnish Civil War of 1918. Drawing on current scholarship as well as contemporary newspapers and official records, the article shows that an organised land movement developed later and was markedly less violent in Finland than in Ireland. Moreover, while in Ireland the association of landlordism with British rule helped to fuse the land movement with nationalist mobilisation during the Land War, in Finland the tie between the land movement and nationalism remained weak. This was a consequence of Finnish nationalists’ strong affiliation with landowning farmers, which hindered their success in mobilising tenant farmers and agricultural workers. Consequently, the Finnish countryside witnessed a remarkable rise in the socialist movement in the early 1900s. The socialist leanings of the Finnish land movement were greatly influenced by the Russian revolutions, whereas in Ireland militant Fenianism, often emanating from Irish America, affected land agitation more than socialism. As to transnational exchanges, the article also indicates the influence of Irish rural unrest and the related land acts on Finnish public debates and legislation.

A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America by Ely M. Janis

Reviewed by: A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America by Ely M. Janis Jo Guldi A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America. By Ely M. Janis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 279pp. $34.95 (paper), $29.95 (ebook). Ely Janis’s aim is to give a survey of Irish American movements in North America, and in doing so he fulfills a major gap in the literature on the Land War, which has previously concentrated mostly on the Land War in Ireland itself, with limited studies of how the Land War was radicalized by the activities of the Ladies’ Land League and in particular their activities based in New York of raising financial support from new-world Irish. A generation after the mass exodus caused by the famine, Irish Americans continued to identify with the politics of being a British colony, even as they organized for working-class unions in America or identified as upwardly mobile members of a respectable middle class. Janis’s vision of “Greater Ireland” encompasses two ways in which Irish Americans of the 1880s came to stand for broader solidarities. First, there is a “Greater Ireland” that is of interest chiefly to historians of the Atlantic World and diaspora in general. It maps out the Irish Americans who identified themselves as Irish and continued their involvement in Irish politics from Chicago and Buffalo. Middle-class Irish Americans, gathered around the postcolonial movement for Irish [End Page 340] independence, identified themselves with the cause of Irish nationalism. Janis identifies this middle-class Irish American politics as “conservative nationalism,” which followed Charles Stewart Parnell and the movement for home rule. By contrast, working-class Irish Americans tended to identify with a tradition that Janis calls “physical-force nationalism,” associated with John Devoy in New York City and the Fenian movement in Ireland, which looked to an armed and violent revolution, or “radical nationalism,” associated with the Irish World, a publication that argued for a sweeping program of economic and political social justice (p. 7). The second version of “Greater Ireland” will be more compelling to other students of American history, race, and class more generally. It concerns how working-class Irish Americans, who participated at a distance in the ongoing rural incendiary actions of the Land War of 1881–1882 by sending money, came to employ a larger discourse for rethinking the state and the economy in such a way as to include those dispossessed by class and race more generally. As Janis understands, the Land War was wrapped up in charges that the economy was characterized by “landlordism”—Herbert Spencer’s term for a monopoly holding of titles to real estate by a minority elite who also control the legislature and judiciary, thus enforcing their power to charge high rents with the force of police-led eviction. Countering “landlordism” were utopian ideas about remaking the economy in the service of tenant farmers and workers who rented their dwellings, notably the “land nationalization” schemes associated with Michael Davitt and the “Single Tax” on land proposed by Henry George. Janis shows that these proposals inspired a large cohort of working-class activists who were not Irish themselves, even while the core of George’s mayoral candidacy for New York City remained Catholic. He also traces how the Irish “boycott,” originally a rent-strike tactic from the Irish Land War of 1881–1882, which involved “shunning” members of the community who paid their rent, was rapidly adopted by other members of the working class for union actions in the years after Irish American solidarity brought news of Irish boycotts to the United States. Janis also offers a new perspective by accounting for the role of women in Irish-American nationalist movements, although he follows generations of feminist Irish historians like Jane Cote, Mary Ward, Adrian Mulligan and Patricia Groves in documenting the work of the Ladies’ Land League on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 7). The book’s narrative suffers from an emphasis on top-down leadership rather than bottom-up organizing, which underplays the extensive and impressive work that Janis has undertaken in the archives of...

Matt Harris and the Irish Land Question, 1876–1882

Abstract:The land question concerned all classes in Ireland in the nineteenth century. A series of grassroots leaders played an important role in local politics that served as a major building block for future generations of politicians and nationalists. Yet the role of these regional personalities has generally been neglected in historiography as attention is paid to a ‘top-down’ approach to the Irish Land War. This article aims to address a lacuna in research by paying attention to one of the more significant regional personalities during the Irish Land War: Matt Harris. It will explore the ideas that he expressed on Land League platforms, pamphlets, newspapers and the Parnell Commission, as he sought a solution to the social malaise that was perpetuated thanks to an imbalance in land legislation that favoured stronger farmers while also giving a voice to the subaltern classes in the west of Ireland.

Matthew Arnold, Edmund Burke, and Irish Reconciliation

Matthew Arnold's readings of Irish politics are heavily influenced by his reading of Edmund Burke. This essay examines his career as a commentator on the state of Ireland as he turned his attention to separate issues such as: (1) Fenianism and the disestablishment of the Irish Church in the late 1860s; (2) the Irish University Question in the 1870s; (3) the Land War in the late 1870s and early 1880s; and (4) Home Rule in the mid-1880s. Despite these differences in immediate object, Arnold continued to take what he considered to be a Burkean approach to Irish politics. In fact, he considered Burke's Irish writings so important that he edited a collection of them for popular consumption during to the Irish Land War. The major ideas Arnold took from Burke's Irish writings were, first, an emphasis on a rhetorical/ethical model for colonial government; second, a critique of the Protestant Ascendancy; and third, an insistence that a failure to reconcile Ireland would threaten the British Constitution itself. This essay will track Arnold's series of “Burkean” interventions into an evolving Irish political crisis, demonstrating along the way that there were persistent slippages between the opposing vocabularies of organicism and mechanization in all of proposals for Irish reconciliation, and that Arnold's Burkean approach to Ireland was integral to his larger thinking about culture and politics.

&lt;em&gt;Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin

Reviewed by: Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century Julie M. Dugger (bio) Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin; pp. xiii + 178. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009, £24.00, $52.95. The essays in this useful collection had their origins in a conference held by the Anthropological Association of Ireland, their stated purpose being to provide a “building block in an anthropological history of Ireland and point up the significance of Ireland as a case study for the emerging social sciences in the nineteenth century” (ix). To this end, editor Séamas Ó Síocháin has assembled a set of analyses that consider Ireland’s treatment by individual nineteenth-century intellectuals, mainly English or writing in England, along with two essays on period attitudes toward race and ethnicity in Ireland. The intent of Social Thought on Ireland is thus to clarify the Irish social sciences, but the book is at least as effective as an aid to Victorian studies. For Victorian writers in England, Ireland had great rhetorical significance as an all-too-visible reminder that not all was well. While the English presided over a growing British empire abroad and relative political stability at home, Ireland refused to grow or stabilize, falling prey to poverty, famine, and rebellion despite its long-term rule by the supposedly civilizing nation next door. Why, asked the nineteenth-century commentators, couldn’t English governance drag a backward Ireland forward? Social Thought on Ireland’s essays on Gustave de Beaumont, J. S. Mill, Harriet Martineau, Henry Maine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and J. A. Froude describe these writers’ wide-ranging answers to this question: because the Irish were racially inferior, because they were Catholic, because there were too many of them, because they resisted a mishandled English rule, because their landlords were indifferent, because their land was boggy, and many other hypotheses. Whatever the answer, it illuminates each writer’s understanding of history and the place of England and Ireland within it. Some essays are sketchier than others: this book may be only the beginning of a conversation. But it’s a good beginning, demonstrating the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectuals expressed their own anxieties about failure in the face of opportunity through reflection on the foreigners next door. One of the strengths of Social Thought on Ireland is the diversity of the commentators it considers. It offers the liberal Mill, the socialist Marx and Engels, and the Carlylean Froude; it evaluates sociology, economics, political science, history, and even a couple of attempts at the novel (by Froude and Martineau). Further, the writers analyzed are carefully positioned in their intellectual, political, and historical contexts. This work is a good introduction to the field it surveys: an opening chapter on “Ireland’s Nineteenth Century” covers some of the issues on which the nineteenth-century commentators weigh in, and the authors of the subsequent chapters offer brief biographies for some of their less-familiar subjects (Beaumont, Maine, Martineau) or summaries of the historical issues that moved them (Ó Síocháin’s outlining of the Irish Land War is particularly helpful). The authors also consider the ways in which Ireland was viewed “within a broad comparative context (empire/India/Anglo-Saxons)” (viii), and they excel at this. We see that both the United States and India were regularly compared to Ireland as countries also working through a legacy of English influence, and we see as well the growing role that Irish-American emigrants played in the question of Irish independence. At times the collection seems a little too far-ranging. Though the essay on Beaumont is well-written, and Beaumont himself is clearly significant to Irish studies as [End Page 573] “Ireland’s Alexis de Tocqueville” (9), he feels out of place among so many English writers. The essay on Marx and Engels is similarly frustrating because its most developed discussion is on India rather than Ireland, which it seems to reserve for future exploration. In another departure, the essay on race theory admits that popular attitudes toward race in Ireland have already been covered well elsewhere (notably by L. P. Curtis) and directs...

Power, politics and poor relief during the Irish Land War, 1879–82

Between 1879 and 1882, large amounts of relief were dispensed in Ireland by a range of state, private, clerical and political organisations and agencies. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, £800,000 in private charity and up to £2.4 million in government aid was expended in an attempt to alleviate the extreme distress of the period. That expenditure was greater than the £1.2 million in rent reductions secured by the 275,525 tenants who entered the courts of the Land Commission in 1881, factors that are seen as central to the deflation of the Land War. In the historiography of the period, the distribution of this relief is usually only mentioned in passing: R. V. Comerford and R. F. Foster have outlined the high politics of private charities such as the Duchess of Marlborough and Mansion House Funds. The administration of relief at local level has also received limited attention, and much of this scholarship concentrates on structural causes of poverty and the effectiveness of various measures adopted.

John Ferguson, Michael Davitt and Henry George—Land for the People

At the now famous meeting held in Irishtown, Co. Mayo, in April 1879—generally recognised as the first major public demonstration in the Irish Land War—John Ferguson, Ulster-born and de facto leade...

Landlord Responses to the Irish Land War, 1879–87

In his magisterial study, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland, William Vaughan redresses imbalance of John Pomfret's pioneering work, Struggle for Land in Ireland, 1800-1923 (Princeton, 1930), that depicted Irish landlords as so many alien and absentee predators who positively relished rack-renting and evicting their tenants. Vaughan's demolition of Pomfret orthodoxy epitomizes best kind of archivally based revisionism. Although he exonerates landlords from charge of social vampirism, Vaughan stresses their manifold failures as estate managers, preservers of and role models for their tenants. While giving them credit for having survived fallout from Great Famine, he deplores their inertia or lack of enterprise as well as their inability to exploit full value of their lands. In decades following famine they extracted about 80 per cent of available rents annually and spent paltry sums on agricultural improvements. To make matters worse, they to curb their appetite for an aristocratic lifestyle, to bridge great social divide between themselves and their tenants, and to resist--let alone support--the forces of political democracy led by an assertive Catholic middle outside Northeast Ulster. No longer masters of their fate, they had lost their ability to influence British state. But then, as Vaughan puts it ever so pungently, European landed elite crowed without challenge on its own dunghill. Vaughan also contends that because they lacked the protection of tough state, versed in ways of bullying peasants, landlords looked to Dublin Castle and Royal Irish Constabulary for their salvation. In short, they had ceased to make themselves useful by providing law and order; they allowed their tenants to rebel in 1879; they no longer dominate[d] constituencies or parliament, and they were at best quixotic paternalists who could not protect their people from vicissitudes of outside world. Having failed to build up reservoirs of informal power, they were increasingly peripheral to land system. Not only did they fall far short of what Disraeli considered a real but they had also abdicated their position as most knowing class in Ireland to lawyers, policemen, and priests. Their failure to inspire an entrepreneurial spirit in their tenants, to take on responsibilities of proper rentier class, and to use their estates as sources of power and wealth, as did English aristocracy, meant that they had no chance of surviving as ruling class. (1) In sum, if Vaughan had to grade their performance, they would be lucky to attain gentleman's C. Such strictures may seem ironic coming from historian whom some critics have seen as letting landlords off lightly when it came to abuse of their social and economic power. After all, Vaughan's book provoked one reviewer to write landlords off as so many fossilized parasites. (2) Ironically, noted nationalist Alexander M. Sullivan, M.P., would have heartily agreed with Vaughan's verdict except for issues of under-rented farms and evictions. In two long letters to Times in 1880, this latter-day Young Irelander accused gentry of having achieved little over course of three centuries despite their monopoly of privilege, and wealth. He pointed out that one hundred landlords had just held crisis meeting in Dublin to discuss country's long-term smouldering civil war, and all they could recommend was repression. The sum of all their statesmanship, all their counsel, all their reforms, all their conciliation, he declared, bald demand on England for more coercion. After all, a landlord or gentry is meant to be something more than so many rent-spenders, fox hunters, and grouse shooters. And if they were not, then they had no right to complain about being heartily despised. …

The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War

The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: A Guide for Cultural Analysis of the Irish Land War

Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the “culture as structure”/“culture as practice” divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.

The constabulary agitation of 1882

For two weeks in late July and early August 1882 newspapers in Ireland and London carried accounts of discontent among members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.), which policed the whole of Ireland except Dublin. The Irish land war of 1879–82 was ending, and the R.I.C. had burnished their reputation for stolid loyalty among British officialdom and the Irish public at large. Problems among Ireland’s police may have been disquieting, particularly at Dublin Castle and in landowner circles, but in the news accounts and other papers that survive there were few expressions of surprise that, at the end of three years of often intense duty during the land war, the men of the R.I.C. were tired, restive and eager to draw attention to their concerns. By mid-1882 the morale and financial resources of individual members of the R.I.C. were drained. The problem of unreimbursed expenses incurred on land war duty, a special problem for married men with families, impinged on policemen’s living standards. Fatigue, frustration and, in individual cases, actual hardship compelled members of the R.I.C. at stations throughout the country to adopt the unusual expedient of public agitation. The excitement among the Irish police during the summer of 1882 resulted in remedial legislation and changes in working conditions that proved to be a defining point in the development of the R.I.C. as a career for young men in Ireland, rather than a stopover on the way to emigration.

Theorizing Meaning Construction in Social Movements: Symbolic Structures and Interpretation during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882

Though the process of meaning construction is widely recognized to be a crucial factor in the mobilization, unfolding, and outcomes of social movements, the conditions and mechanisms that allow meaning construction and cultural transformation are often misconceptualized and/or underanalyzed. Following a “tool kit” perspective on culture, dominant social movement theory locates meaning only as it is embodied in concrete social practices. Meaning construction from this perspective is a matter of manipulating static symbols and meaning to achieve goals. I argue instead that meaning is located in the structure of culture, and that the condition and mechanism of meaning construction and transformation are, respectively, the metaphoric nature of symbolic systems, and individual and collective interpretation of those systems in the face of concrete events. This theory is demonstrated by analyzing, through textual anlaysis, meaning construction during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, showing how diverse social groups constructed new and emergent symbolic meanings and how transformed collective understandings contributed to specific, yet unpredictable, political action and movement outcomes. The theoretical model and empirical case demonstrates that social movement analysis must examine the metaphoric logic of symbolic systems and the interpretive process by which people construct meaning in order to fully explain the role of culture in social movements, the agency of movement participants, and the contingency of the course and outcomes of social movements.