A Union Forever

Covering the period from 1840 to 1890, David Sim’s book provides an important contribution to the literature on nineteenth-century US foreign relations. Few studies have attempted a synthesis of the Irish question which bridges the ante- and postbellum eras within the broader story of Anglo-American relations, and fewer still have attempted to come to grips with the ambiguity of Ireland’s position within American politics and foreign relations. As a result, Sim suggests that previous historians have treated Irish nationalism in ahistorical and monolithic terms. Part of Cornell University Press’s ‘The United States in the World Series’, the book’s intrepid transnational approach to Irish–American relations illuminates the complexity of non-governmental as well as governmental actors in the story of transatlantic politics, religion, citizenship, immigration and foreign policy. Such a nuanced approach also helps ‘us see more clearly the seemingly hegemonic power of American nationalism’ (p. 7) in the creation of what would become Anglo-American rapprochement in the early twentieth century

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