Irish Protestant Research Articles

"Disremembrance": Joyce and Irish Protestant Institutions

"Disremembrance": Joyce and Irish Protestant Institutions

TOM PAULIN'S POETRY OF TROUBLES

This paper is part of my PhD thesis. It examines contemporary Northern Irish Literature written in English with the help of the theoretical approach of Irish Studies. It aims to introduce and make a critique of poetry written by Tom Paulin, a contemporary British poet who is regarded one of the major Protestant Irish writers to emerge from Ulster province. The thread pursued in this analysis relates to an investigation of how ideological discourses and the issues of identity are represented in the poet’s work. The author’s critical evaluation of existing ideologies and identities and his attempt to respond to them will also be analyzed. Four poems from three different collections are investigate. Paulin’s poems function as testimonies, denouncement and criticism of the Irish history.

Nano Nagle. The Life and the Legacy , by Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney, Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck (review)

working class’ – not least Seán O’Casey’s redoubtable tenement dwelling unionist, Bessie Burgess. The volume is not without its lighter side in the contributions of Caleb Richardson on ‘the nature of humour and the Southern Irish Protestant’ in the work of Patrick Campbell (‘Quidnunc’ of The Irish Times) and Felix Larkin’s fine (illustrated) piece on the depiction of Southern Irish Protestants in Irish Cartoons (especially C E Kelly’s classic ‘Ceilidhe in the Kildare Street Club’ from Dublin Opinion). In truth, Campbell’s cool, detached style very much mirrors that of the editors in their relaxed approach to the essays in their care, as they chart the complex journey of southern Protestants to their ‘place in the new dispensation [in which they] are now more or less “uncomplicatedly Irish.”’ As Roy Foster notes in his preface, the various contributions in Protestant and Irish reflect ‘a certain vibrancy and combativeness … within the ostensibly dusty and downbeat image of Southern Irish Protestantism’. As the editors conclude, the sixteen essays speak for themselves; they also speak for their authors and for the editors, as well as for the minority under review – and they do so with much eloquence. Declan O’Keeffe is Assistant Archivist and College Historian, Clongowes Wood College. Nano Nagle. The Life and the Legacy, Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney, Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck (Newbridge: Irish Academic Press, 2019), xix+294 pages. In the course of the Second Vatican Council, religious congregations were encouraged to return to the original inspiration of their founders, to study how this inspiration was articulated in the course of their histories. This was a vast, long-term project of accessing and cataloguing archives, in particular for those congregations whose archives were situated in different areas, either within individual countries or dispersed in various corners of the world. It required on-going planning in order to find a balance between centralising archival material internationally and retaining local archival material in parts of the world. This continues to be a work in progress. In their book, Nano Nagle. The Life and the Legacy, the authors have made Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies • volume 108 • number 431 353 Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 121 21/08/2019 09:14 a truly significant contribution to the history of the Presentations Sisters. They based their research on the archives of the congregation in Ireland and in those parts of the world where the congregation is located. A daunting task in terms of time and travel, research and writing. The book begins with the life of the founder of the Presentation Sisters, Nano Nagle, 1718–1784. She was born into a prosperous Catholic gentry family, a family which had long roots in Ireland, indeed from Norman times. Down the centuries generations of the Nagles had been shaped by successive events, the Tudor and Stuart Plantations, the Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation. More closely to Nano’s lifetime, the Nagle family was directly impacted by the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and his subsequent exile in France, in St Germain-en-Laye. Nano’s granduncle , Richard Nagle, was Secretary of War to James II and after the defeat joined the Court of James II in France. There he married and had a large family, which in time provided welcome space for visits from Irish members of the family. This included Nano, when she was sent to France to further her education. There she was brought into contact with several religious communities of women, among them the Ursulines. In time she would invite this community to Cork. Life for the Nagle family in Ireland was burdened by the restrictions of the Penal Laws. Nano was acutely aware of the dire poverty in the Catholic community and wished to address this. From 1750, using her personal family wealth, she determined to provide schools for the poor girls and boys in Cork city. By 1769 she had set up five schools for girls and two schools for boys. This initial commitment to work with poor children in Cork led in time to her founding a new community, the Presentation Sisters. And yet, as Nano Nagle. The Life and the...

A Nova Scotia Scheme and the Imperial Politics of Ulster Emigration

AbstractEarly in 1761, a land promoter of Ulster origin named Alexander McNutt brought before the British Board of Trade a proposal to settle several thousand Ulster Scots in Nova Scotia. The board enthusiastically approved, but when McNutt returned the following year with promising news, the board forbade him from continuing the scheme, citing fears of losing Protestants in Ireland. This episode has generally been explained as evidence of the British government's ambivalence about Ulster emigration. However, rather than expressing merely a tension between two equally desirable but conflicting goals—peopling the American colonies with Irish Protestants and protecting the Ascendancy by preventing their emigration—the board's change of mind reflected the changing political environment. The board that approved McNutt's scheme strongly favored settling Nova Scotia quickly; the board that shut it down a year later included new members who viewed settling Nova Scotia as a waste of precious funds. The case of Alexander McNutt demonstrates the profound ramifications of party politics for Ulster migration during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. It further affirms that studies of Ulster migration must be imperial in scope.

In Search of the Hidden Irish: Historical Archaeology, Identity and “Irishness” in Nineteenth-Century South Australia

Dominant historical models for conceptualizing the Irish in Australia emphasize their ordinariness, characterizing them as largely indistinguishable from their British counterparts except in religious terms. In contrast, archaeological analyses of architecture, land use, graves, and personal items from three colonial sites in South Australia demonstrate forms of “Irishness” that distinguished the Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish as a collective from the non-Irish around them, while at the same time indicating the existence of sectarian tensions within the Irish community. Moreover, material markers created different forms of identity depending on their relative degree of fluidity and the context in which interaction took place. Markers associated with the close interpersonal territory of the body, such as buttons and jewelry, signaled conformity to a new, common habitus of capitalism, while more stable and less mobile markers, such as architecture and headstones, signaled abiding forms of both individual and group difference.

“The Industrious Exiles of Erin”: Irish Immigrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century St. Stephen, New Brunswick, and Calais and Baring, Maine

ABSTRACTIn the mid-nineteenth century, St. Stephen, New Brunswick, and Calais, Maine, Irish cultural institutions developed earlier on the New Brunswick side of the border, but until the late 1860s, nativism was more public and organized in Maine. Census returns linked to parish assessments show that although Irish immigrant men were poorer than men born in Maine or New Brunswick, differences between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants within the youngest and oldest age groups were much narrower than has sometimes been assumed in popular cultural memory.

Tudor Brexit: Catholics and Europe in the British and Irish Reformations

Tudor Brexit: Catholics and Europe in the British and Irish Reformations Peter Marshall Brexit and the Tudor reformations: the parallels, of course, are irresistible and the script seems almost to write itself. We begin with a large international institution, straddling western and central Europe, and promoting the idea of a pan-European cultural identity (though one whose claims to jurisdiction have never been accepted by a rival cultural and political authority based in Moscow). At the same time, we see an institution that, even to many in its own orbit, appears overly hierarchical and top-heavy, and riddled with endemic corruption. Within England – and for the moment I think we do have to say England – a political crisis brings long-standing dissatisfactions to the surface. As the crisis escalates, the arcane rules and complex doctrines of the institution prove no match for the punchy vernacular slogans and eyecatching propaganda of its critics. Appeals to shared values and history, and dire warnings of the dangers of disturbing the status quo, are trumped by a potent blend of nationalism and reformist rhetoric, fuelled by visions of an older history of proud independence and imperial greatness. There is probably no need to go on: the sixteenth century break with Rome looks a lot like the twenty-first century bust-up with Brussels. And that’s even without having to make laboured points about where the treaty founding the European Economic Community was actually signed, or invoking the theory that the blue flag with its circlet of twelve stars, adopted by the Council of Europe in 1955 on 8 December, feast of the Immaculate Conception, is a blatantly popish reference to the Virgin Mary as the Woman of the Apocalypse.1 The idea that Brexit, in the words of the Anglican priest and journalist Giles Fraser, ‘recycles the defiant spirit of the Reformation’, has very rapidly become something of a journalistic and pop-history cliché, and a favoured recent theme of the popularising (and avowedly Eurosceptic) historian, David Starkey.2 Nonetheless, I come to this question with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with some of the limitations of this superficially pleasing Studies • volume 106 • number 424 417 Tudor Brexit: Catholics and Europe in the British and Irish Reformations historical analogy. The Reformation-as-Brexit idea is not an especially helpful one if it is intended to identify withdrawal, separation and isolation as the keynote themes of Reformation in the North Atlantic world – of a Europe henceforth forever cut off by the proverbial fog in the Channel. On the contrary, it is possible to make a powerful case that the era of the Reformation represents a time of intensified engagement with what might broadly be called ‘the European question’, and that it brought with it a new and sharper focus on how national identities might conjoin, contrast or coexist with international ones. In an accompanying article in this volume, Alec Ryrie addresses the issue with regard to the experiences of British and Irish Protestants.3 In this short paper, I attempt to consider the matter for the case of Catholics in these islands. On the surface of things, I would seem to have drawn the short, if more straight-forwardly upright, straw. Catholics, it might well be thought, were the ‘left-behinds’ of the Reformation in Britain and Ireland. As people who regarded themselves as part of the very same international structure, before and after Henry VIII’s breach with the papacy, they were the representatives of continuity in a changing world. They were also, increasingly, the isolated remnants of a broken past – though one that was in the end to be considerably less broken in Ireland than in England or Scotland. Yet, what I want to argue in this article is that it is a significant error to regard Catholics merely as bystanders or observers with respect to the patterns of religious identity-formation engendered by the break with Rome and the reformations of religion that followed from it. Indeed, I would go so far as to assert that Roman Catholicism – as a confessional and political identity – was just as much a new creation of the Reformation process in Britain and Ireland as were...

Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Rising by Valerie Jones (review)

in paperback at a more reasonable price. It offers a more nuanced reading of the history of modern economic development, showing the links between inventors and innovators and those willing to support innovation with their seed money. The ‘industrial revolution’ didn’t just happen. Kingston offers a realistic appraisal of the role of financial and commercial interests in democratic politics and shows the vulnerability of politics to manipulation by those pursuing sectional interests instead of common goods. The book is frightening for this very reason. It does not seem to offer any solutions. The final chapter asks if anything could have saved capitalism, and suggestions are made about what might have been done. There is little, however, by way of suggestion as to what might be done now. Capitalism seems to have destroyed itself, or to be well on the way to doing so. Do we just wait to see what replaces it? Will it be a new hegemony from China? Or perhaps a wave of protectionism reversing all the developments of globalised markets in capital leading to new forms of mercantilism? Or perhaps the ingenuity and imaginative creativity which has led the various stages of capitalism’s development will come to the rescue once more and offer a new opportunity. This is the whisper of hope at the end of the book, but Kingston finds the hope in the writings of Deirdre McCloskey, an advocate for a kind of capitalism which she calls ‘market-tested betterment’, and not through his own analysis. Perhaps Kingston’s call for greater attention to the public good, renewed emphasis on the moral and cultural conditions for economic success and greater advocacy for the liberation of the imagination and the generation of ideas might swing the balance away from demise and towards the recovery of capitalism from its self-inflicted injuries. Dr Patrick Riordan SJ is Fellow in Political Philosophy and Catholic Social Thought at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is a member of the Heythrop Institute of Religion and Society. Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Rising, Valerie Jones (Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2016), 387 pages. The late Dr Valerie Jones (1943–2014) served as lecturer at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines and also as the Communications 386 Studies • volume 106 • number 423 Autumn 2017: Book Reviews Officer for the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough. Her book, the product of more than a decade of research, was nearly complete at the time of her death and was ‘brought to fruition’ by her daughter, Dr Heather Jones, an Associate Professor of History at the London School of Economics, and her son, Mark. Its publication was supported by the Church of Ireland’s Historical Centenaries Working Group as one of its several contributions commemorating the events of 1916. Irish Protestants, like British Catholics in the period since the Reformation, have a convoluted history. Both groups have often been perceived as possessing mixed loyalties, dedicated to their native land but with an additional connection to a ‘foreign’power. This complex identity makes their respective histories fascinating. Among Irish Protestants different members of the community have worked out their Irish identities in quite different ways. At no time was this more apparent than during the turbulent decade of the modern struggle for Irish autonomy, 1912–22. While most Irish Protestants during this period were unionists, particularly in the North, a few remained loyal to the democratic nationalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party tradition, for example, Stephen Gwynn (1864–1950), Captain Henry Harrison (1867–1954) and John Gordon Swift MacNeill (1849–1926). A small but noticeable minority sided with the republican movement and Sinn Féin. While the relatively few ‘big name’ Protestant radicals of this era, like Erskine Childers (1870–1922), Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) and Constance Gore-Booth (‘Countess’) Markievicz (1868–1927) have been much celebrated by republicans and discussed at length by scholars, it was Dr Jones’s goal to dig deeper into nationalist history and highlight the lives of a diverse group of about ninety less-known revolutionary Protestant nationalists who also were active during the later years of the home rule movement, the period...

‘It is Not Good for the Man to Be Alone?’ Irish Protestant Missionary Bachelorhood and Changes in Missionary Marriage Trends in the Late Nineteenth Century

‘It is Not Good for the Man to Be Alone?’ Irish Protestant Missionary Bachelorhood and Changes in Missionary Marriage Trends in the Late Nineteenth Century

"Strange Imagination": Valentine Greatrakes's Healing Aura and the Autobiographical Impulse

The controversial Irish Protestant healer Valentine Greatrakes's 1666 autobiography is an under-appreciated text in the history of anglophone life writing, one that invites us to rethink the early history of a genre that has long been linked to a spatialized, specular, and mimetic model of the self. In contrast to the post-Lockean texts that posit that model, A Brief Account of Mr Valentine Greatrak's and Divers of the Strange Cures by Him Lately Performed incorporates Greatrakes's unorthodox method of healing by touch over time into the process of literary self-representation. As it plays between poles of distance and proximity, objectivity and contingency, shadow and substance the resulting textual perform[ance] may be historicized in terms of late-seventeenth-century conceptions of what Greatrakes's implied reader, the pneumatic chemist Robert Boyle, called the little atmospheres that surround human bodies—atmospheres that anticipate Walter Benjamin's modern notion of the aura but treat aura as a uniquely communicative aspect of the person. Greatrakes's shamanistic practice binds his readers to his patients, thereby developing a therapeutic form of transpersonal, transhistorical, transgeneric personal identity uniquely realized in the literary text.

The Irish abroad: Better questions through a better source, the Canadian census

A considerable body of writing on the Irish abroad now exists and it is possible from this literature to identify certain patterns of inquiry. For the most part the British studies of the Irish abroad are confined to actual emigrants and little attention is devoted to the issue of acculturation of second and third generation Irish in Britain. It is apparent, also, that many of these studies treat only the Catholic Irish. In the Canadian context, however, it is possible, using religious and ethnic census data, to identify the relative fortunes of Catholic and Protestant Irish emigrants in both the first and successive generations. A method of analysis is described and it is suggested that, employing alternative sources, a similar approach might be feasible for studies of the Irish in countries other than Canada.

Book review: Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795

Book review: Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795

Why the Reformation failed in Ireland

AbstractThe Reformation failed comprehensively and absolutely in Ireland before the end of Elizabeth’s reign: contemporaries estimated the number of Irish Protestants at between forty and 120 individuals. The debate about that failure has been long running, yet inconclusive. After a short historiographical review, this paper considers a range of factors which may have been pertinent in shaping Irish responses to the Reformation policies of Henry VIII and his Protestant children. It shows that Elizabeth’s Reformation in Ireland was stymied by the absence of indigenous support, which meant that religious change was neither propagated by local clergymen nor enforced by the local elites in Irish parishes. It points to the strength and persistence of Catholic resistance to the Reformation in different forms from the very start of Elizabeth’s reign in Ireland, contradicting the unsubstantiated notion that passive ‘church papistry’ was general. Nonetheless, it argues that it was only from the 1580s, when the Catholic church in Ireland was reorganised as a disestablished ‘people’s church’, and infused with the confidence inspired by the Counter-Reformation, can it be stated that the Reformation had failed in Ireland definitively.

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–55: The Politics of Enchantment

State formation in seventeenth-century Ireland: the Restoration financial settlement, 1660–62

SUMMARYThe Irish Restoration financial settlement formed an integral part of the deal that was struck between Irish Protestants and the restored Charles II in the early 1660s. Driven by a desire to retain lands acquired in the 1650s, the Protestant-dominated Irish government crafted a set of financial bills that granted the Crown a perpetual and hereditary revenue in Ireland in return for security of tenure. Based on innovative Cromwellian reforms, the royal government retained many elements of Cromwellian fiscal policy, which transformed the Irish economy into a net contributor to the English Treasury by the 1680s. The customs and excise acts also laid the basis for the emergence of an embryonic state bureaucracy that emerged in Ireland during Charles II's reign. This article examines both the rationale behind the Irish Protestant interest's policies in the early 1660s and the political negotiating that saw them secure favourable land legislation at the expense of those Catholics who had served the monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s.

Citizens of Nowhere: longing, belonging and exile among Irish Protestant writers in Britain, c.1830–1970

Since the 1970s, the literature on the history of the worldwide Irish diaspora has become increasingly sophisticated, with scholars employing a range of innovative techniques to capture aspects of the migratory experience. Many challenges remain, however, in charting the multifaceted experiences of the Irish in Britain. This article makes the case for a cultural study of Irish Protestants in Britain. It examines the contours of the Irish Protestant migratory mind-set, focusing on the writings of a number of creative émigrés, temporary and permanent, such as W.B. Yeats, Denis Ireland, Nesca Robb, and John Hewitt. Of particular relevance are articulations of longing, belonging and exile, which shaped the literary perspective of these writers, and complicated their relationships with Ireland and Britain. Attitudes regarding emigration within Protestant Ireland are also probed to tease out cross-channel ideals and fears.

A ‘Fair Chance’? The Catholic Irish Brigade in the British Service, 1793–1798

The Irish Brigade in the British service, formed in the 1790s, was composed of Irish Catholic soldiers, who had recently regained official permission to serve in the British armed forces, and Franco-Irish émigré officers. The British government believed that the brigade offered Catholics a ‘fair chance’ to participate in the armed forces, but the reality was quite different. This paper examines the brigade’s origins, difficult formation, and arduous service in the West Indies and Nova Scotia, where it was consigned because of Irish Protestant distrust and political manoeuvring, and explores the changing nature of Irish military identity.

Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950 ed. by Colin Barr, Hillary M. Carey

Reviewed by: Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950 ed. by Colin Barr, Hillary M. Carey Oliver P. Rafferty S.J. Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950. Edited by Colin Barr and Hillary M. Carey. [McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion, Series 2, vol. 73.] (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 456. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-7735-4570-0.) This is a fascinating study of Irish religious experience as this found expression in America and the British Empire in a 200-year period. The idea of “Greater Ireland” is not simply a synonym for the Irish diaspora. The Irish in “Greater Ireland” continued to be linked by emotional, cultural, and symbolic ties to the old country. Unlike other studies of the global Irish, the sixteen essays in this work emphasize the centrality of religion in Irish Catholic and Protestant culture, at home and abroad. The editors freely admit that this is not a comprehensive study of the topic; some geographical areas are neglected such as the West Indies, Argentina, Western Australia, and Britain, where the complexities are such as to merit individual volumes. Nor is there a chapter on Irish Jews, but John Stenhouse does indicate cooperation between Irish Catholics and Protestants with some leading Jews over social issues in New Zealand in the late-nineteenth century. There is a sense in which many of the characteristics of the Irish in the diaspora are a mirror image of the Irish at home. Sectarian differences were a plague with the expansion of the Orange Order in Canada and Australia that served to keep religious rivalries alive. Diane Hall, however, illustrates the centrality of Orange Lodges in identity formation in Australia. She also warns against the dangers of subsuming Irish Protestant experience under the predominantly English character of mainstream Australian Protestantism. Similarly, Michael Gladwin shows the importance of Irish ministers for the development of Anglicanism in Australia despite what is often regarded as the “quintessentially English” nature of the church there. Irish religious experience could never quite escape the tension produced by Irish political realities. Thus Myrtle Hill, in her chapter on Irish women in Protestant female missions between 1870 and 1914, points out that the Female Association for Promoting Christianity was founded in Belfast at a time when the issue of Home Rule was beginning to come to the fore. Such political tensions also raised questions of imperial loyalty, which, in turn, served to sharpen sectarian animosities. Were the Catholics loyal to the Empire? Whatever the experience at home, the irony is that, by and large, Catholics served imperial interests. In Canada, [End Page 847] according to Mark McGowan, they were consistently imperialistic, but this was facilitated by the fact that the Constitution Act of 1791 gave them religious and political freedoms not available in Ireland. Carolyn Lambert demonstrates that, so far as Newfoundland was concerned, Irish Catholics were marked by both patriotism for Ireland and loyalty to the British Empire. Upon his death in 1914, Archbishop Michael Francis Howley of St. John’s was described as a “true son of Empire” (p. 129). This is despite the fact that he was distinctly muted in his approval of the British side in the Boer War of 1899–1902, quite unlike his wholly Irish Episcopal colleagues at the Cape, who supported Britain against the Boers (Colin Barr, p. 267). Barry Crosbie reminds us that the peoples of the United Kingdom viewed the Empire differently and had varying interactions with indigenous peoples. This gave rise to trouble for Irish priests and bishops over issues of caste in India. But this may have been part of the process of negotiations with local realities that Mia Cowan identifies in her study of Catholic participation in the public school system in Chicago in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. But there were other problems for the Irish in “Greater Ireland.” Squabbles at home over “New Light” and “Old Light” theology within Presbyterianism were exported to colonial America in the eighteenth century. Irish Catholics competed with French Catholics in British North America for dominance of the Church, and ultimately the...

Celebrating the Battle of the Saintes: Imperial News in England and Ireland, 1782

Celebrating the Battle of the Saintes:Imperial News in England and Ireland, 1782* Jennifer McLaren (bio) The same wind that wafted on one of its wings the defeat of the French fleet in the West Indies, attended with a slaughter and carnage hitherto unknown, conveys the happy tidings of ireland’s emancipation on the other, balanced in the calm air of steadiness and unanimity. English valour has triumphed over French pride, and Irish perseverance has broken England’s stubbornness. Freeman’s Journal, 21 May 1782 As news of Admiral George Rodney’s stunning victory over the French fleet at Les Saintes in the Caribbean in April 1782 broke in Ireland, so too did word of Westminster’s repeal of the Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act (6. Geo. I, c. 5, also known as the Declaratory Act of 1719). The ebullient pronouncement in the Freeman’s Journal illustrates the apparent contradiction between the applause by patriotic, antigovernment newspapers for Rodney’s imperial victory, and the celebration of Dublin’s independence from Westminster. As Stephen Conway has noted, this enthusiasm for British success seems “odd,” particularly as the Irish Protestant minority had been pulling away from Britain over the course of the American war.1 Yet this paradox, placed against its contemporary networks that passed information from the margins of empire to the metropole and to Ireland, provides an opportunity to examine how imperial news interacted with local politics and shaped imperial sensibilities. Relying [End Page 34] on a comparison of the newspaper coverage of the Saintes and the ensuing celebrations in a selection of London, Dublin, and Belfast newspapers, this essay thus takes the battle—a largely forgotten event in the American war—as a transnational case study in the history of imperial news. The victory at the Saintes has received little scholarly attention. Military historians have analyzed the innovative tactics that Rodney and his captains employed during the battle, but few historians have paused to consider the wider significance of the events of April 1782.2 Until Conway’s essay on the Saintes in a British context and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s reexamination of events preceding Yorktown, American and British historiography had largely overlooked the battle. Conway reviewed the celebrations that followed Rodney’s victory in his investigation of the ways in which the American conflict stimulated and redefined a popular sense of Britishness. He argued that the “enthusiastic celebrations of the Saintes … are explicable only when one recognises that Britishness itself was both reconfigured and given a great boost during the American war.”3 O’Shaughnessy examined Rodney and the Saintes in his scholarship on the American Revolution in the context of the British Atlantic. His work has focused on the strategic and practical impact of Rodney’s victory and on other British activities in the Caribbean as they related to developments in the fledgling United States.4 Most recently, Brad Jones included the Saintes in his doctoral thesis on popular loyalism in the British Atlantic during the American revolutionary period. Jones examined how the war and revolutionary ideology affected the ways in which Britons living throughout the Atlantic world understood and articulated their loyalty to Great Britain. According to his assessment, the victory at the Saintes was “constructed as the defining [End Page 35] moment in the American war for Britain’s Atlantic world inhabitants,” who celebrated the victory as exuberantly as those in Britain.5 The Saintes has thus been considered—if minimally—from diverse historiographical perspectives spanning military history, the identity politics of Britain during the American war, and the context of the revolutionary Atlantic. This case study adopts a different approach that is transnational in nature—placing the Saintes and the ensuing celebrations within the framework of new imperial history and “British world” scholarship—two methodologies that have recently begun to converge.6 As Zoë Laidlaw has noted, recent works influenced by new imperial history “range far beyond dissections of metropolitan society and culture, focusing on interactions between widely separated colonial sites, juxtaposing micro and macro, and questioning the relationship between the remarkable and the everyday.”7 In relation to Ireland Niall Whelehan has recently argued that “transnational approaches overlap with...

Descendancy: Irish Protestant histories since 1795

This book examines Protestant loss of power and self-confidence in Ireland since 1795. David Fitzpatrick charts the declining power and influence of the Protestant community in Ireland and the strategies adopted in the face of this decline, presenting rich personal testimony that illustrates how individuals experienced and perceived 'descendancy'. Focusing on the attitudes and strategies adopted by the eventual losers rather than victors, he addresses contentious issues in Irish history through an analysis of the appeal of the Orange Order, the Ulster Covenant of 1912, and 'ethnic cleansing' in the Irish Revolution. Avoiding both apologetics and sentimentality when probing the psychology of those undergoing 'descendancy', the book examines the social and political ramifications of religious affiliation and belief as practised in fraternities, church congregations and isolated sub-communities.