Ireland and the British Empire

"This was published in 2004 and it’s very much a follow-on from Nicholas Canny’s volume in The Oxford History of the British Empire . In the Canny volume, there are three or four essays that relate to Ireland, whereas this whole book looks at Ireland. What this book does so deftly is put Ireland at the heart of discussions around British imperialism, and it goes right through to the present. In my book, Making Empire (2023) , I look primarily at the early modern period. But in one chapter I go right through to the 19th century, as the Kenny book does, because I think it’s important to look at continuities over centuries. You can see how ideas, ideologies, and policies are worked out in Ireland and then exported around the empire. That’s something that the essays in Ireland and the British Empire tease out. We can see the footprint of Ireland across the British Empire. Two-thirds of the British Army in India were Irish squaddies. In the 1890s, there were eight provinces in India, seven of which were governed by men from Ireland—albeit Anglo-Irishmen, but nevertheless, men who saw the world through the prism of Ireland. The Irish are servants of the British Empire, but they’re also subversives within it. You see that very clearly after 1916, but that conversation begins in the 1890s with the constitutional nationalists (Home Rulers in India and in Ireland talking to each other, for example). It gathers momentum in the 1920s as the Irish teach the Indian freedom fighters their ABCs of freedom fighting. They work very closely not only with Indian freedom fighters, but with freedom fighters across the British Empire. Again, the Kenny book captures this."