Gavin M. Foster. The Irish Civil War and Society

The Irish Civil War has received increasing attention in academic writing in recent years. After a very long silence over this extremely divisive event in the history of the Irish state, a number of serious studies have appeared since the late 1980s, when Michael Hopkinson wrote his seminal Green against Green: The Irish Civil War (1988). These studies, however, deal almost exclusively with the political and military aspects of the conflict that raged between supporters and opponents of the treaty with Great Britain from June 1922 to May 1923, which gave southern Ireland the status of a dominion. The deeper social causes and consequences have not really been dealt with, although there are some studies that deal with the labor movement during this period. The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict offers a welcome new approach by looking at the social dimensions of the conflict to illuminate its causes, character, and outcomes. Gavin M. Foster defines these dimensions very broadly to include the attitudes and perceptions both sides had of each other, the social and political meaning of clothing, and the political and economic treatment of those who lost the civil war. In taking this approach, the author tries to move away from the somewhat stale debate of whether the civil war also had a class dimension, a concept notoriously difficult to quantify in Ireland’s essentially rural society. So while class features prominently in the title of the book, the author looks at it in an innovative way.

Class conflict · Dominion · Irish · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies