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UK funding (£123,048): Irish Political Thought under the Union: Visions of Representative Government, 1798-1922 Ukri1 Sept 2020 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom
Overview
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Irish Political Thought under the Union: Visions of Representative Government, 1798-1922
| Abstract | The political history of Ireland has long been interpreted through the lens of violent conflict. Over the course of several centuries, political relations within Ireland, and between Ireland and Britain, were marked by profound differences in national allegiance and religion, with politics, in turn, assuming a seemingly intractable character. But conflict in Ireland was not simply the result of primordial hatreds; it was sustained by clashing interpretations of contemporary political ideas about the nature of government. The American and French Revolutions, which helped transform the understanding of representation, propelled ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy into the political mainstream, revolutionising relations between states, nations and citizens across Europe. Ireland was certainly not immune from these wider international and intellectual trends. The Act of Union of 1800 created a multi-national parliamentary state. This settlement was then contested by generations of Irish political activists and thinkers who drew on the language of representative government in order to recast the terms of the British connection. The political frameworks that predominated in Ireland were underpinned by divergent conceptions of legitimacy, drawing on such ideas as democracy, popular sovereignty and historical continuity. Within each of the main ideological alternatives, the constitutional setup of the polity, together with its relationship to the seat of empire, was starkly different. The fundamental area of contention was the constitution of representative government. The sectarianism and violence unleashed in public life were symptoms rather than causes of this ideological antagonism. In exploring the hitherto uncharted terrain of political ideas in Ireland in the era of the Union, this project pioneers a new approach to Irish historical writing. The violence, instability and successive crises that marked the British-Irish connection remain the chief focus of existing historiography, yet this emphasis has deprived these disputes of all serious intellectual content. Above all it has obscured the significance of disagreements over the nature of representative government. Accordingly, this project breaks with a narrowly high political approach, which has tended to concentrate on the activities of the political elite, and examines instead the philosophical assumptions that underpinned the range of constitutional proposals from incorporating union to devolution and federalism. Political representation raised profound and all-encompassing issues. Consequently, the project explores its central theme across the political spectrum, from Tory notions of conditional unionism and contractarian allegiance, to the development of republican conceptualisations of the 'sovereign people'. Through an examination of the political thought of such figures as Henry Grattan, Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, John Wilson Croker, Isaac Butt, Robert Holmes, John Mitchel, W. E. H. Lecky, Thaddeus O'Malley, Eoin MacNeill, Alice Stopford Green, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Patrick Pearse, the multiple meanings ascribed to representative government in the Ireland of the Union are thrown into sharp relief. The Union framed the political landscape for successive generations in Ireland across the long nineteenth century, forming the structure under which formal power was wielded. Ideas of representative government profoundly challenged the Union: much of the print culture after 1800 hosted an open-ended debate about the Union's legitimacy and legacy. Beginning with this material, it is possible to track debates across the entire period, and in the process investigate continuities and change in political vocabulary. In this way, this project will offer an intellectual history of the Union, and will therefore offer the first sustained study of political thought in Ireland during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. |
| Category | Fellowship |
| Reference | AH/T00195X/1 |
| Status | Active |
| Funded period start | 01/09/2020 |
| Funded period end | 31/12/2022 |
| Funded value | £123,048.00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FT00195X%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| University of Sheffield | |
| National Museums of Northern Ireland | |
| National Library of Ireland |
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