Modern Ireland: 1600-1972

"I chose Modern Ireland because it is clearly a classic text in the history of Irish historiography. It covers the whole trajectory from 1600 to 1972. It’s been a large presence—if not to say a dominating presence—on the Irish historiographical landscape. It brings together with great adeptness the results of post-war Irish historical scholarship, interlacing them with the author’s own nimble cultural commentary. Rather than being a political or social or economic historian, Roy Foster is, or at least became, very much a cultural historian in the old sense, particularly interested in the progress of high culture. Laterally, he has been interested in the course of literary history. “The history of Ireland could be written as the history of property from two angles.” A large influence on Foster was exercised by one of his teachers, F.S.L. Lyons, who, amongst other things, wrote a book called Culture and Anarchy in Ireland . This was about the collision of Irish cultural stereotypes. In many ways, Modern Ireland comes out of a similar tradition of historical writing, except Foster was keen to see the varieties of Irishness as not necessarily settled on a pre-determined highroad to collision. He is more interested in the play of possibilities opened up by the conspicuous diversity of Irish attitudes. That’s very much the keynote of the book. If you need an organising thread for an overarching historical narrative, it’s a very enticing instructor. I think the history of Ireland could be written as the history of property from two angles. First of all, the history of the national property, which is the struggle over jurisdiction. The second would be property in the sense of landholding. That’s partly a result of Ireland’s explicitly colonial history, and I mean that in the literal, technical sense of a settled population who arrive to cultivate (from the Latin ‘colere’) the territory. There were colonists in that basic sense, settling as planters, as they were called, first of all in the 16th century, but then in increasing waves of intensity through the 17th century, especially after the Cromwellian conquest, and then again after the Glorious Revolution. “ There are many stages in this story, but it is certainly right to say that property is at the centre of it. ” What that meant, in practical terms, was a massive overhaul in the sectarian distribution of property such that, by the beginning of the 18th century, the majority Irish population had very little land — having held the great majority before the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the middle of the 17th century. That is the background to another struggle in the 19th century about peasant landholding. There are many stages in this story, but it is certainly right to say that property is at the centre of it. One of the received images of Ireland is a Yeatsian version of aristocratic ascendancy. In some of Yeats’s poems of the 1920s, he represents his somewhat faux historical image of ascendancy in architectural terms. I would say that for Foster generally, the impetus behind the book is to debunk previous, spurious accounts of the Irish national past. This would be one example. The book’s mood was very much determined by the 1980s. It was published in 1988 in a period in which it was felt, certainly in southern Ireland, that certain politically constricting versions of Irish history had come to national prominence. Professional historians felt that they wanted to dismantle these doubtful, politicised stories with more subtle, more accurate versions of the past. He’s trying to displace an older, monolithic perspective. That’s what gives the book most of its energy, disparaging what it sees as a traditionally nationalist or republican perspective on Irish history. I suppose the controversial aspect of the book is the extent to which there’s a tendency to parody the object of criticism—the representation of nationalism and republicanism in particular—when you get to the 20th century. For this reason the coverage of the period from 1890 onward is arguably the least dispassionate in the book, partly because the period in which it was itself conceived and written, the 1980s, was a period of turmoil during which legitimating ideologies had their roots in the earlier era. I think there’s a tendency to reduce Irish antagonism to the ongoing imperial connection to a kind of cultural animosity, whereas I believe the motives animating anti-government sentiment were altogether more varied than they are sometimes made to appear. Interestingly, Foster’s more recent book, Vivid Faces , moves in an altogether different direction. It’s far more concerned with restoring to Irish popular opinion, in the early 20th century, its nuanced complexity and variety in a way that is not fully captured in Modern Ireland . Nonetheless, because Modern Ireland is the more monumental study, and succeeded in contributing to the transformation of Irish historical debate, it’s the place where any historian has to begin. It’s a good point to end the book because it marked a critical turning point, opening up into a new, unexpected, unpredictable future. It was the closing of a chapter, knowing that the story would ineluctably proceed, but without really being able to thematize the new story because everything was still up in the air."