Ulick Burke, fifth earl of Clanricarde, presents a compelling character. His connections crossed the sectarian boundaries as well as the national borders of the Stuart kingdoms. He was the half brother of the earl of Essex, a prominent English noble, and later a general for the parliamentary cause. In fact, Clanricarde was one of very few of Charles I’s subjects who had gained footing in more than one of the Stuart kingdoms. He had significant landholdings in both England and Ireland, inheriting not only the Clanricarde and St Albans earldoms from his father, Richard Burke, but also following in the fourth earl’s footsteps as an important figure in the court of Charles I. The foundation was laid for many of his achievements by the fourth earl’s unwavering commitment to establishing himself as an English noble. However, the fifth earl eclipsed his father’s success at court when appointed an English Privy Counsellor in 1641.

When John Bramhall arrived on the shores of Ireland in 1633 to begin his new job as chaplain to the (also newly appointed) lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, he was probably not yet forty years old. He immediately set about his role with the type of energy and ruthless devotion that came to characterise the Laudian regime that sent him. As John Morrill has indicated, nothing in the previous reign had prepared the Irish Protestant establishment ‘for the onslaught on their church to be mounted by William Laud.’ Historically, one of the problems with the Laudians is that while it is clear what they did, it is less clear why they did it. Typically, and shrewdly, they did not tend to be verbose concerning their motives.

Demarcated to the north by the Shannon and its estuary and to the south by the Kenmare river and the Caha mountains, the south-western territories of Kerry and Desmond provide a microcosm of the tensions and interactions characteristic of early modern Ireland. Although historically divided into roughly two corresponding halves representing the outcome of thirteenth-century Gaelic/Anglo-Norman conflict, the area approximating to the modern administrative division of Kerry was defined by Gaelic cultural ascendancy and by the similar (though differing in scale) seigneurial ambitions of successive Fitzgerald and MacCarthy magnates. Significantly, a territorial division configured along ethnic lines was not replicated at a cultural level, where a remarkable level of homogeneity prevailed in terms of the currency of Gaelic language and literature. However, the defeat and execution of the fourteenth earl of Desmond and the distribution of his lands among English settlers under the auspices of the government-sponsored Munster plantation inaugurated profound political, social and religious turmoil in the province. In Kerry, also, consolidation of the New English military, social and legal presence in the wake of the redistribution of the earl of Desmond’s lands precipitated levels of political and cultural dissonance unparalleled since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Contributions to this special issue of Irish Historical Studies come under the dedicated theme of ‘Ireland and the British Empire-Commonwealth’. The papers originate from a workshop entitled ‘Ireland and empire’ that took place at the University of Leeds in March 2005. One of the key objectives behind the organisation of this workshop was to bring together specialists in British, Irish and imperial and Commonwealth history with an interest in the wide-ranging debates linked to the issue of ‘Ireland and empire’. At the workshop, the papers presented a range of topics within the context of literature and the arts; agriculture and industry; metropolitan politics and diplomacy. The overarching theme was the ‘Irish experience’ within an ‘interconnected British world’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The structure and nature of the electoral system in Hanoverian Ireland remains an under-explored aspect of Irish political history. A number of older works remain influential, partly because they have not been superseded by modern studies. Of these, Edward and Annie Porritt’s The unreformed House of Commons stands out. In a section on the parliamentary representation in Ireland, the Porritts examined the differences between the British and Irish systems, contrasting the more open and generally progressive British system to that of a closed and restricted Irish one, where the Protestant political elite maintained a firm grip on local power and preferment. While now superseded for England, the Porritts’ thesis remained -and to some extent remains - popular among Irish historians.

The title of this article is consciously provocative, and thus cries out for immediate explanation and perhaps, in some sense, for the provocation to be disarmed. Why, then, is ‘Was Ireland a colony?’ a bad question - or rather, a question often badly posed? Reasons include the fact that the question is so intertwined with other disputes, including directly political ones, and because there are problems with the term ‘colony’ itself, which has in so many varied contexts been overworked, under-theorised and even under-defined. The oversimplified, stark ‘either/or’ nature of the question is also problematic, when it would be more productive, and perhaps more precise, to think in terms of colonial features in combination with others, if not, indeed, of graduations and degrees of coloniality.

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, hundreds of Catholic priests and religious were forced into exile on the Continent, with many seeking refuge in France, Spain and the Spanish Low Countries. For some, refuge was temporary while awaiting political developments and toleration in the home country; for others, it was permanent. The sheer numbers involved – in the hundreds (see below) – mark this as a new phenomenon in the migration of Irish Catholics to France. Although large numbers of Irish soldiers arrived there in the late 1630s and again from 1651 onwards, as Ireland was cleared of regiments connected with the Confederation of Kilkenny, the volume of priests and seminarians migrating to France had hitherto been on a much smaller scale than that of the military.

Discussion of the relationship between Ireland and colonialism has often revolved around similarities and differences between the Irish situation and other, more iconic, examples of colonised societies. This tendency has been partially encouraged by the prominence within Marxian scholarship of dependency theory, which contends that the underdevelopment of colonial societies is due primarily to their integration into the capitalist world economic system. In this analysis, all colonised societies can be characterised by this integration into world capitalism, and consequently share a common source of exploitation and disadvantage. This perspective has often located its source in Marx’s writings on India and, crucially for our current concern, Ireland. This article explores a different perspective on colonialism which the authors believe can be found in Marx’s consideration of the Irish situation.

In an influential article, William Lowe and Elizabeth Malcolm have argued that the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) became ‘domesticated’ between its formation in 1836 and its disbandment in 1922:

During the budget speech of 1830, Henry Goulburn, the chancellor of the exchequer, announced: ‘On the people of that country [Ireland] the same stamp duties will be imposed as are imposed here.’ The government planned ‘to assimilate the laws relating to the stamp duties in different parts of the empire to place the management of the whole of that branch of the revenue under the Stamp-Office in England.’ This proposal was one of several announced by Goulburn to counter the economic slump that the United Kingdom was experiencing after a number of poor harvests. Along with specific measures designed to relieve distress, the Wellington government aimed at ensuring there was no loss of revenue in order to prevent further government borrowing.

The 1886 general election found Parnell at the helm of a well-disciplined nationalist party. In its struggle for home rule, the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) had been helped along the way by the newly formed Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (I.P.H.R.A.), which in July 1886 had no fewer than six M.P.s in its ranks. Jeremiah Jordan, nationalist Member of Parliament for West Clare, was one of the six. Born in 1830 at Tattenbar, near Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, the son of a tenant farmer and a Wesleyan Methodist, he was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. He started a grocery and provision business in Church Street, Enniskillen, and the town’s Young Men’s Society served as a training ground for his intellectual and oratorical skills, as did his appointment as a part-time Methodist lay preacher. Jordan had a passion for the sport of hunting and an intense dislike of idleness.

Twenty-four years ago, Terence Brown raised very few eyebrows when he portrayed the Irish Free State in the 1930s as an insular society obsessed with self-sufficiency. The theme of insularity has dominated most narratives of the period, with emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Economic War, the Censorship Board and the 1937 Constitution. The de Valera government’s intention in the Economic War, after all, was to create native industries behind high-tariff barriers and to favour agricultural labourers by shifting the tillage/pasture ratio in Ireland in favour of crop production. This protectionist programme was insularity writ large. Likewise, the government’s censorship of domestic and imported literature ‘concelebrated’, according to J. J. Lee, ‘the intellectual poverty of the period’.

In the history of the modern world, it is well known that the British Isles have exercised an influence entirely disproportionate to their size. In the history of modern police, Ireland’s contributions are little known. The time is long overdue to recognize the importance of this small island in the development of police in the British archipelago and beyond.

Trotsky of Russia knows Francis McCullagh. So does President Calles of Mexico. Peter, the King of Serbia, was McCullagh’s friend. The headhunters of the upper Amazon list Francis McCullagh as one of their principal deities. The warring tribes of Morocco call him blood brother. A room is always ready for him in the imperial palace of Siam. The latchstrings of hundreds of Siberian peasant huts are out in anticipation of his coming.

This article examines the establishment and development of Na Fianna Éireann, or the Irish National Boy Scouts, in the period 1909–16. It also assesses the contributions of the organisation’s two founders, Countess Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson, in the early years of its existence. Bureau of Military History witness statements, a key source for the history of the Fianna, indicate that a degree of controversy surrounds the relative importance of the pair in the foundation and control of the Fianna movement.

The relationship of Irish unionists to the Empire presents opposing views. Hugh Shearman claimed that Irish unionists were ‘progressive imperialists’. Alvin Jackson disagreed, writing that they were more focused on local matters, and had little interest in the Empire except as a resource to suit their own agenda. The career of the leading Irish and Ulster unionist, James Craig, in the period 1903–14, can be used to test these competing theories and to illuminate such topics as the influence of Joseph Chamberlain on Craig, how local, national and imperial issues were dealt with by Craig, and the part played by Orangeism in Craig’s imperialism. This author shall argue that imperialism was a strand within Craig’s Protestantism and Orangeism that allowed him to deal with local-constituency problems, the demands of party at Westminster, and the national issue of home rule. As such, Craig provides evidence for what Keith Jeffery calls the ‘irrelevance’ of the Empire for Ulster unionists. From the early part of Craig’s political career, the Empire was a means of making Ulster-unionist arguments relevant to a particular audience, local or British.

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was quite unusual in comparison with other western European nations in its exclusion of women from policing. By the time women were allowed to join the national police force, the Garda Síochána, in 1957, women were already established in the police forces of Britain, Germany and France, as well as that of Northern Ireland. Further afield, women were already employed in police forces in Poland, New Zealand and the U.S. The appointment of women police was a major demand of feminists, moral campaigners and social reformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of whom sought better protections for women. As in the U.K., U.S. and many European countries, women’s organisations in the Irish Free State were to the forefront of the debate over the need for women police. Beginning with the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (I.W.S.L.G.A.) in 1915, women’s organisations such as the National Council of Women, Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (J.C.W.S.S.W.), and the Catholic Women’s Federation campaigned relentlessly for nearly half a century in the face of governmental indifference and obstruction. When the first class of ‘experimental’ women police emerged in 1958 from the Garda training college in Templemore, County Tipperary, women’s organisations hailed it as a victory.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British government made a vigorous effort to ameliorate poverty in the west of Ireland. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board (C.D.B.) was established, with an array of special powers to promote economic development in the west. It recognised that land could only play a limited role in development due to its generally poor quality, but that sea fishing had significant potential. Nowhere was this more obvious than west Galway, where the majority of people were farmer-fishermen, living either on the islands or along a coastal belt on the mainland because fishing offered some compensation for inadequate land. Sea fishing in west Galway was, however, for the most part primitive.

The Allies developed Operation Safehaven towards the end of the Second World War in order to prevent a Nazi resurgence after the war. The overall goal of the programme was to create a census of German assets all over the world, with a particular focus on the European countries that had been neutral during the war. In addition to preventing the Nazis from regrouping, the idea also emerged among its developers that Safehaven could be employed to gather money for reparations to the victors and as compensation to Nazi victims. The process of persuading the neutrals to count and collect German assets proved lengthy, not least because Safehaven lacked an enforcement mechanism. There was little legal precedent for the Allies’ request to neutral and sovereign nations for assistance in their efforts. The negotiations with the various neutrals continued for years; in some cases, certain amounts of restitution were not paid until the 1990s.