The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution

Description

The Irish Revolution was a pivotal moment of transition for Ireland, the United Kingdom, and British Empire. A constitutional crisis that crystallised in 1912 electrified opinion in Ireland whilst dividing politics at Westminster. Instead of settling these differences, the advent of the First World War led to the emergence of new antagonisms. Republican insurrection was followed by a struggle for independence along with the partition of the island. This volume assembles some of the key contributions to the intellectual debates that took place in the midst of these changes and displays the vital ideas developed by the men and women who made the Irish Revolution, as well as those who opposed it. Through these fundamental texts, we see Irish experiences in comparative European and international contexts, and how the revolution challenged the durability of Britain as a global power.

Richard Bourke is Professor of the History of Political Thought and a Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. His books include Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (2nd ed. 2012) and Empire and Revolution: The Political Thought of Edmund Burke (2016), which was joint winner of the Istvan Hont Memorial Book Prize in Intellectual History in 2016. His work has been named a Book of the Year in The Observer, The Irish Times, The Spectator, The Claremont Review of Books, RTE, The Indian Express, and The National Review. He is co-editor of the Princeton History of Modern Ireland (2016) which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Niamh Gallagher is Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History and a Fellow of St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge. Her first book, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (2019), won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize in 2020, the first work of Irish history to win the prize since its establishment in 1976. She has since published on the cultural, political and social history of the First World War and other aspects of Irish and British History, and appears regularly in the UK, Irish and international media.

'Bourke and Gallagher's book tells us that this body of specifically political writing can be and should be placed alongside the thinking of other revolutionary processes, or other histories of secession or decolonisation, or alongside the political ideas of the European war or of the great re-arrangement of states, nations and one-time empires which was the global context for the Irish struggles. Irish political ideas and writing deserve to be studied and evaluated in their own terms, not merely as part of the discursive mix underpinning a Yeats poem or a party campaign. Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher's excellent anthology shows us where to start.' Conor McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books