Michael Laffan Research Articles

‘This is a sovereign assembly’: popular sovereignty, parliament and the people in the Irish Free State

ABSTRACT The stability of Irish democracy since 1922 is often a cause for contentment with lines of succession drawn from ‘Grattan’s parliament’, O’Connell’s popular movement, and the achievements of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) at Westminster through to Dáil Éireann. The IPP certainly disrupted the Commons, yet Irish politics was also shaped by the ‘mother of parliaments’ – MPs mastered parliamentary procedure and home rule legislation drew on British and colonial parliamentary models. By 1918, the party’s machine and parliamentary behaviour were rejected as much as British rule – but as Michael Laffan suggested, Sinn Féin triumphed by beating the home rulers at their own game. However, the 1922 constitution gave generous expression to the sovereignty of the people, and for judicial review. But, within short succession, facility for popular initiative was overridden. Ironically, the Irish Free State would never be amended by popular will or judicial review but by parliamentary majority in 25 amendments as the people only voted to adopt it in 1922 and replace it in 1937. In practice then, it was closer to a vision of Dicey's supremacy of parliament dogma that prevailed, so much so, that Seán Lemass acrimoniously proclaimed in 1934: ‘this is a sovereign assembly’.

Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945, written by Michael Laffan

Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945, written by Michael Laffan

Asia. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious rites, colonial migrations, national rights Edited by Michael Laffan London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xii + 252. Figures, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

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Perdagangan Arab dan Kedatangan Islam ke Nusantara: Rekonstruksi Pemikiran Orientalis

Debating the arrival of Islam in the archipelago, many historians have their own views and arguments. Arab trade in the archipelago has left very clear traces. This trace is compared as evidence of the early emergence of Islam. Thomas W. Arnold, John Crawfurd, L. W. C Van den Berg and Michael Laffan are figures who have the opinion that Arab traders had an important role in the process of entering Islam in the archipelago. This research is a theoretical study with the concept of library research which reconstructs the thoughts and views of these figures to see the influence of Arab traders in the archipelago. Even in the 2nd century BC Arab traders traded with Sri Lanka. The trading ability of the Arabs then solidified their dominance in the West-Eastern trade world which has intensified since the 7th century AD. Although some experts doubt the ability of Arab traders and their relations in the spread of Islam, Arab trading activities have been able to contribute to the Islamic world in the archipelago.

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights. By Michael Laffan. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 272 pp. ISBN: 9781350022614 (cloth, also available as paper).

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights. By Michael Laffan. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 272 pp. ISBN: 9781350022614 (cloth, also available as paper). - Volume 80 Issue 4

The Politics of Religion in the Japanese Empire: Responses to and Reflections on Michael Laffan’s “The Forgotten Jihad under Japan”

The Politics of Religion in the Japanese Empire: Responses to and Reflections on Michael Laffan’s “The Forgotten Jihad under Japan”

Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, & Nikhil Menon. The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia

Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, &amp; Nikhil Menon. <i>The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia</i>

Michael Laffan, editor. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights.

Journal Article Michael Laffan, editor. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights. Get access Michael Laffan, editor. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights.New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. viii, 252. $114.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 2, April 2018, Pages 673–674, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.2.673c Published: 02 April 2018

Judging W.T. Cosgrave by Michael Laffan (review)

Book Reviews Judging W.T. Cosgrave, Michael Laffan (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2014), 340 pages. Introducing this well-researched, sympathetic but fair-minded biography of W T Cosgrave, Michael Laffan describes the Irish Free State’s founding father as ‘one of the forgotten figures of Irish history’. A search on the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish History Online supports this claim, despite Cosgrave’s tenure as one of the longest-serving heads of government in inter-war Europe.1 The bibliographical website lists only eighteen titles on Cosgrave as a historical subject; these include three biographical studies but – strikingly – no full-length academic biography. In contrast, it lists 238 works on Éamon de Valera and, despite his short career, 139 publications on Michael Collins. Cosgrave has also left a light imprint on the public consciousness. Laffan sees, as symbolic of his neglect, the recent discovery of a lost Seán Keating portrait of the politician among a roll of forgotten paintings. While Laffan regrets the overshadowing of a figure central to the history of the independent Irish State, his study illuminates many of the reasons for Cosgrave’s fate, including his unassuming persona, lack of charisma, intellectual and political limitations, and now-unfashionable social and ideological outlook. Indeed, some of these limitations can be discerned from Keating’s undistinguished portrait, particularly when juxtaposed with his contemporaneous heroic portrayal of firemen, hurlers and Aran islanders. Keating’s biographer, Éimear O’Connor, suggests that the artist’s depiction of Cosgrave epitomised ‘his dissatisfaction with those that he felt didn’t even have the pretence of being interested in culture’, as well as his wider disappointment at the failure of the Irish revolution to produce a more progressive society.2 Cosgrave’s modesty, even temperament and solid leadership style also counted against him, provoking little of the divisiveness or passions which de Valera’s name still conjures. An accidental leader, he had none of the will to power or self-aggrandising preoccupation with his place in posterity that renders de Valera such a tricky but compelling biographical subject. Unlike his more successful nemesis (who was aged ninety and blind when he finally departed Áras an Uachtaráin as the world’s oldest head of the state), Cosgrave appearedsanguinewhendepartingpubliclifein1944.Heturneddownappeals to run for the presidency in favour of an unpretentious retirement consisting Studies • volume 106 • number 421 113 Spring 2017: Book Reviews of simple pleasures such as reading the Irish Independent, breeding cows, equestrian pursuits and religious devotions as an altar server and member of the Legion of Mary. Born into a comfortable Dublin family in 1890, Cosgrave shared much in common with other members of the radical minority who came to form the revolutionary generation. Considered a ‘good steady boy’ at the Christian Brothers’ school where he boarded, his first display of militant nationalism came in 1900 when he opposed Queen Victoria’s visit to Dublin. A serial-joiner of nationalist bodies, and early supporter of Sinn Féin, he was elected to Dublin Corporation in 1908. Conscientious and pragmatic, Cosgrave succeeded in forging connections with the (publican and landlorddominated ) Redmondite majority in the corporation despite his advanced nationalist politics. His reputation for efficiency and integrity saw him retain a prominent role as chair of its influential finance committee following the collapse of electoral support for Sinn Féin by 1915. He was therefore unusual among the revolutionaries of the first Dáil in having considerable experience of elected office and public administration. Joining the Irish Volunteers – but not the IRB – Cosgrave fought bravely with Éamonn Ceannt at the South Dublin Union, despite personally considering the Easter Rising an act of ‘madness’. After 1916, he would pursue a political (rather than military) path to independence, even if, at political meetings in later life, he enjoyed forcing republican hecklers to admit that they had never fired a gun for Irish freedom. Reprieved from a sentence of death, he was released from prison in June 1917, and elected a Sinn Féin MP for Kilkenny City following a by-election two months later. As Minister for Local Government during the War of Independence, when he strived to reform local government and Poor Law administration, he...

The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual by Tom Garvin (review)

not appear to have provided new revelations about the period or the person. This is perhaps unsurprising given Cosgrave’s wariness about archives, history and historians: a recalcitrant subject, he left behind no personal diaries, while other personal records did not survive the destruction of the family home during the Irish Civil War. Not all readers of this biography will feel as favourably disposed to Cosgrave as its author, but Michael Laffan’s measured and scholarly study allows readers to come to their own conclusions. As is customary with the Royal Irish Academy’s ‘Judging’ series, the book is beautifully designed, with a wealth of fascinating documents, photographs, cartoons, election leaflets and other material vividly evoking the period. Professor Fearghal McGarry teaches in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics in Queen’s University Belfast. His The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916 was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Notes 1 www.irishhistoryonline.ie 2 Seán Keating, Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013), p.135. The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual, Tom Garvin (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2016), xii+212 pages. Full-length biographies of Irish scholars are relatively rare. Perhaps the delivery of lectures, interaction with students and colleagues, marking of exams and occasional forays into scholarly publication are not lively material for the biographer. The small number of exceptions such as John Pentland Mahaffey, George O’Brien and Eoin MacNeill generally had in addition something of a public persona. This is also true of Daniel Binchy, the subject of this study, who was not only a leading scholar, but also a diplomat and a perceptive public intellectual, noted for his early and clear-eyed articulation of the evils of Hitler and Nazism. He always described himself as a medieval historian, but in truth, as his friend Donal Cregan observed, he was a ‘Renaissance man’. Spring 2017: Book Reviews 118 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 Binchy was born in 1899 into a prosperous middle-class family in Charleville, Co. Cork. He was educated with the La Sainte Union nuns in Banagher, Co. Offaly and at the Jesuit college of Clongowes, before going on to a brilliant career in UCD, where he concentrated on history and law, and was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He was called to the bar in 1920. He won a travelling scholarship to the University of Munich, graduating DPhil magna cum laude with a thesis on the medieval Schottenkloster of Ratisbon. He returned to UCD in 1925 to take up the chair of Roman law, jurisprudence and legal history. The latter discipline included early Irish law, and this brought him into the world of Old and Middle Irish linguistics, without which, as Eoin MacNeill advised him, ‘your medieval and legal qualifications won’t be much use’. He set about mastering modern and older forms of Irish, study that eventually culminated in his great publication, the formidable seven-volume Corpus Juris Hibernici. This transcription of the whole body of early Irish law manuscripts commenced during his tenure of a senior research fellowship at Oxford, but was largely the product of thirty years of subsequent labour in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. Professor Thomas Charles Edward’s opinion is that the Corpus will ‘probably never be superseded, at least not for many generations’. In 1936 he collaborated with the great Rudolf Thurneysen and others to publish the discreetly titled Studies in Early Irish Law, which dealt frankly with the position of women in early Irish law and today is recognised as a pioneering contribution to women’s studies. He made a number of other notable contributions on early law and philology, including an English edition of Thurneysen’s A Grammar of Old Irish, which he published in collaboration with Osborn Bergin in 1946. Professor Garvin is good at relating Binchy to the twentieth-century Celticists, a clear-eyed, near-legendary group of outstanding pioneering scholars, with whom he has come to be included. He argues that they represented, with the Gaelic League and the literary movement, the third pillar of the Irish cultural revival. Binchy’s qualities as an exacting, evidence-based...

Specific treatment for cancer-associated thrombosis.

Mike Laffan speaks to Gemma Westcott, Commissioning Editor: Michael Laffan is Professor of Haemostasis and Thrombosis in the Department of Haematology at Imperial College, London, UK, and Director of the Hammersmith Hospital Haemophilia Centre. He trained in medicine at Oxford University and hematology at the Hammersmith and Royal Free hospitals in London. His principal research interests are the structure-function relationship of von Willebrand factor, in particular the role of glycosylation, and the mechanisms and regulation of thrombin generation. He has published extensively on hemostasis and recently edited the 11th edition of Practical Haematology. He also served on NEQAS and the British Committee for Standards in Haematology Task force on Haemostasis and Thrombosis.

Judging W. T. Cosgrave. By Michael Laffan. Pp x, 412. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. 2014. €30.

Judging W. T. Cosgrave. By Michael Laffan. Pp x, 412. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. 2014. €30.

Fear Across the Disciplines. Edited by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. viii plus 237 pp. $24.95) * Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective. Edited by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. x plus 275 pp. $39.50)

Fear Across the Disciplines. Edited by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. viii plus 237 pp. $24.95) * Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective. Edited by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. x plus 275 pp. $39.50)

Malaysia. The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market. By Johan Fischer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 186. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market By JOHAN FISCHER New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 186. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000198 This book is among a handful exploring the contemporary role of halal. The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market provides fascinating insights into the consumer choices, adaptation strategies, and pragmatic decisions among members of the Malaysian-Malay diaspora in Britain, living in the interface between revivalist Islam, the sending state's efforts to institutionalise and standardise 'halal', the recipient state's difficulties in embracing notions of halal, and global market forces which have discovered Muslims as consumers. Johan Fischer traces the encounters between the very Malaysian conceptions of halal of his informants and their navigation of the sheer endless and often challenging diversity of the British capital. The author followed his informants into 'halal restaurants, butcher shops, grocery stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets' (p. 25). Even though private homes, sadly, appear to have been excluded from his list of fieldwork sites, The halal frontier is able to provide important and fresh insights into the dynamic interaction between competing halal discourses, between producers and consumers, and between Malaysian 'state' Islam and the diasporic realities of London's Muslim minority. Locating his study in the British capital, a Western metropolis that has become an integral part of the Muslim world and whose economy profits strongly from these connections, enables Fischer to explore life on the 'halal frontier', an interesting concept he develops throughout the book. Fischer's exploration of Malay-Malaysian consumers in London focuses on a field of inquiry that has until now not received much attention from either Southeast Asianists or from students of contemporary Muslim societies. Beyond its relevance in describing at great depth the negotiation of halal among a particular British Muslim community, The halal frontier adds to the overall still equally small body of works exploring contemporary Southeast Asian diasporas, complementing recent works by Tim Bunnell, Michael Laffan and Tony Milner. It is hoped that the work may help stimulate an expansion of serious academic enquiries of diasporic Southeast Asian Muslim communities in places as diverse as Bloomington, Melbourne, Stockholm and Cairo, and of their engagement with what it means to be Malay, Javanese or Patani; Indonesian, Singaporean or Malaysian outside of the region. In that it continues Fischer's path-breaking previous work on 'halalisation' in Malaysia and the Malaysian state's role in giving rise to and fostering a group of Malay-Muslim middle-class shoppers and consumers, The halal frontier makes for a fascinating and engaging read. Most of Fischer's 14 key informants are products of, or are individuals strongly influenced by the Malaysian state's hyper-capitalist modernisation project of the 1980s and 1990s. He is able to explore well their sometimes fraught negotiation of British realities and religious discourses from their youth or from 'back home'. Two notable drawbacks, however, are that The halal frontier does not seek to locate the Malays of London and their choices, pragmatic or otherwise, in the particular historical trajectory of Islam as it emerged in the Malay world. …

The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past * By MICHAEL LAFFAN.

The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past * By MICHAEL LAFFAN.

Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Eds): Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Eds): Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Eds.): Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (Eds.): Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Is Indonesia a Model for the Arab Spring? Islam, Democracy, and Diplomacy

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—of the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia’s democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity. On 21 May 1998 Soeharto resigned after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite fits of starts and stops, the democratic transition has brought political and economic stability. Whereas academics and pundits have debated the merits of the Indonesia model for democratic transition, in this article I consider how the notion of Indonesia as a model for the Arab Spring has reconfigured transnational Muslim networks and recalibrated claims to authority and authenticity within the globalumma.An increasing body of scholarship devoted to global Muslim networks offers important insights into thelongue duréeof merchant traders and itinerant preachers connecting the Middle East with Southeast Asia. In his critique of Benedict Anderson’s famous explanation of “imagined communities” as the result of print capitalismwithinnational borders, historian Michael Laffan argued that Indonesian nationalism had important roots in global Muslim networks connecting the Dutch East Indies with Cairo’s famous al-Azhar University.

Indonesia. The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi Past. By Michael Laffan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. 287 + xvii. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Indonesia The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi Past By MICHAEL LAFFAN Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. 287 + xvii. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. This book offers an original reflection on the factors that have contributed to the faces of Islam in Indonesia today. It is fascinating, and brilliant in the lines of argument and interplay of themes that it develops, and despite the liveliness, at times playfulness of style, is dense and closely argued in its texture. Michael Laffan first outlines the global position of the great archipelago of Southeast Asia, and the first evidences there of Islam. They proved to be seeds of a religious, social and intellectual culture in the region that in a millennium was to interact with and transform its societies, and their relations with the wider world, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Individuals and the roles they play are a major part of the work. The preface at once establishes this human dimension, juxtaposing two figures with almost legendary status in the study of Indonesian Islam, Snouck Hurgronje: an Islamologist and ethnographer; and Clifford Geertz: an anthropologist-observer with a genius for theory, but not significantly informed on Islam as a religion. The range of sources the author has excavated, among them Dutch, Arabic and Malay, is wide. And out of them, from the late sixteenth century on, he has distilled a narrative that situates the diverse participants in a complex, shifting world. It was one the Dutch did not understand, and they were ill-equipped to cope with the tensions and dislocations resulting from their intrusion in it. The consequences were revealed in the evolving policies of the VOC--later the Dutch government--and the relations between the Dutch authorities and missionaries and vice versa; between missionaries and Muslims, and the responses of Muslims to both; and those of Muslims with each other, and to Muslims elsewhere, either as close as Singapore, or as distant as Mecca and Cairo. Laffan's narrative, based on local religious and literary works, and the correspondence, diaries, and government reports of the participants in these ensuing processes, reveals their personalities, thought worlds, and responses to the situations they inherited or created. There are lovely accounts of their early attempts to prepare textbooks for the study of Malay, and their bewilderment at some Muslim devotional practices--incense, beads, ceremonies at graves and prayers for the dead--which to the Calvinist Dutch appeared 'Papist'. From the seventeenth century on, the personalities of Dutch administrators, scholars and missionaries and the many-sided roles they played come clearly into view. None rivals Snouck Hurgronje, and Laffan presents a striking portrait of this giant of colonial history. He comes across as part scholar, part idealist and part shyster, successfully leading a double life in his avatars as a Dutch official and as the Muslim Abd al-Ghaffar. …

RE-EXAMINING DUTCH ORIENTALISM IN CONSTRUCTING INDONESIAN ISLAM

Book Review: Book title: The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past Author: Michael Laffan No. of Pages: xx + 301 Year: 2011 Publisher: Princeton University Press