Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s

Bibliographic Data

ID3130035
AuthorsMatthew Kelly (0000-0001-7963-2139, University of Southampton, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume204
Issue1
Pages127-154
Publication date2009-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtp029
OpenAlexW2077226555
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Ireland's historical position within the British Empire has become a contentious issue for historians, literary critics and commentators. The debate has generated heated scholarly exchanges, exposing the fault-lines that run through Irish studies. At one end of the spectrum of opinion, Terry Eagleton has argued that ‘there are ... two kinds of invisibility: one which arises from absence, and the other from over-obtrusive presence’.1 This over-obtrusive presence, for Eagleton, is the colonial relationship between Britain, the colonial power, and Ireland, the colony, a relationship which makes it appropriate to consider Ireland's experiences as similar to non-European colonies. Eagleton implies that so obviously did Ireland comprise a colonized society of this sort that to argue otherwise must reflect a wider agenda. Seamus Deane is less elliptical, relating the dispute directly to the ideologies and mentalités underpinning the way Irish history is written. ‘The rhetoric of [historical] revisionism’, he asserts, ‘obviously derives from the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism’.2 Whether this is symptomatic of historians’ unreflexiveness, of their incapacity to develop a consciousness of the discourses within which they write, or whether their innate conservatism renders them collaborators with colonialism, is not entirely clear

British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Ideology · Irish · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Rhetoric · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy