Ireland and America

Description

Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part. Revolution would eventually stem from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of imperial crisis wrought by reform, only to ultimately create two expanding empires in the nineteenth century in which the Irish would play critical roles.

Contributors Rachel Banke, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy * T. H. Breen, University of Vermont * Trevor Burnard, University of Hull * Nicholas Canny, National University of Ireland, Galway * Christa Dierksheide, University of Virginia * Matthew P. Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia * Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University * Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire * Robert G. Ingram, Ohio University * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello * Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ireland and America: Empire and Revolution
1. How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500–1900
2. The American Revolution and the Uses and Abuses of Ireland
3. Empire and Resistance: Reflections on the American and Irish Revolutions
4. The Path Not Taken: American Independence and the Irish Counterpoint
5. Peasants, Soldiers, and Revolutionaries: Interpreting Irish Manpower in the Age of Revolutions
6. Dominant Minorities: Irish and Jamaican White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s
7. An Empire of Tracts: Mapping Landscapes of Property in the British Atlantic World
8. The Reformation in the Age of Jefferson
9. The Ideology of Imperial Reform: Enlightened Absolutism and the American Colonies
10. A Comparison of the Responses of the Loyal British Colonies to the American Revolution
11. The Strange Afterlife of the Declaration of Independence: The State of Franklin, 1784-c. 1789
12. The Contract for America
13. Becoming Co-Imperialists: Anglo-Americans and the First Opium War
Epilogue: Imperial Peoples: America, Ireland, and the Making of the Modern World
Notes on Contributors
Index

Sujets

• 18th Century
• Modern
• Histoire
• Atlantic Ocean
• History
• Atlantic
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780813946023
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ireland and America
The Revolutionary Age
Francis D. Cogliano and Patrick Griffin, Editors
Ireland and America
Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty
Edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper -->
First published 2021 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 -->
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffin, Patrick, editor. | Cogliano, Francis D., editor.
Title: Ireland and America : empire, revolution, and sovereignty / edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano.
Description: [Charlottesville, Virginia] : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036221 (print) | LCCN 2020036222 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946016 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946023 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH : Irish—America—History—18th century. | Imperialism. | Revolutions. | Ireland—Relations—America. | America—Relations—Ireland. | Great Britain—Colonies—History—18th century. | Ireland—History—18th century. | Ireland—History—Rebellion of 1798. | United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783.
Classification: LCC DA 948. A 2 I 73 2021 (print) | LCC DA 948. A 2 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/24150709033—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036221
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036222
Cover art: The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom, James Barry, etching and engraving with traces of aquatint in black on wove paper, 1776 / ca. 1779 (Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame. Gift of William and Nancy Pressly in honor of the Stent Family, 2015); background (Flas100 / Shutterstock)
For Mary Hope and for Mimi
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ireland and America: Empire and Revolution
Part I. Ireland and America
How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500–1900
Nicholas Canny
The American Revolution and the Uses and Abuses of Ireland
Gordon S. Wood
Empire and Resistance: Reflections on the American and Irish Revolutions
T. H. Breen
The Path Not Taken: American Independence and the Irish Counterpoint
Eliga Gould
Peasants, Soldiers, and Revolutionaries: Interpreting Irish Manpower in the Age of Revolutions
Matthew P. Dziennik
Dominant Minorities: Irish and Jamaican White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s
Trevor Burnard
Part II. Empire and Revolution
An Empire of Tracts: Mapping Landscapes of Property in the British Atlantic World
S. Max Edelson
The Reformation in the Age of Jefferson
Robert G. Ingram
The Ideology of Imperial Reform: Enlightened Absolutism and the American Colonies
Rachel Banke
A Comparison of the Responses of the Loyal British Colonies to the American Revolution
Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy
The Strange Afterlife of the Declaration of Independence: The State of Franklin, 1784–c. 1789
Jessica Choppin Roney
The Contract for America
Annette Gordon-Reed
Becoming Co-Imperialists: Anglo-Americans and the First Opium War
Christa Dierksheide
Epilogue: Imperial Peoples: America, Ireland, and the Making of the Modern World
Peter S. Onuf
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The conference that led to this volume was the work of many good people. The International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello provided the lion’s share of support. Whitney Pippin moved mountains to get all the work done. Financial help for the conference also came from the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. Lisa Caulfield and John Dee kindly hosted us as Kylemore Abbey. Kevin Whelan offered us access to O’Connell House in Dublin. Dan Carey and Martha O’Shaughnessy were perfect hosts at the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
This volume would not have been possible without the following people: Lisa Gallagher, Catherine Wilsdon, Beth Bland, and Johnny Nelson.
Thanks to Tom Bartlett and Peter Thompson, who served as referees and who were kind enough to reveal their identities to us.
We were guided by a great number of Irish scholars who participated in the conference. What they had to offer was instrumental in sharpening the many themes these essays discuss. Thanks to our good friends Ciaran Brady, Dan Carey, Patrick Geoghegan, and Jane Ohlmeyer. A few Americanists who also took part in the conference helped immensely, especially Joyce Chaplin, Harry Dickinson, Alison Games, and John McCusker.
Finally, one of the participants passed away between the conference and the appearance of this volume. Jan Lewis was a dear friend to many people in the volume. She is missed by all of us.
Ireland and America
Introduction
Ireland and America
Empire and Revolution
I n 1776, as the American colonies were breaking away from Britain, an Irish artist living in London named James Barry made an engraving he would entitle The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. Born a Catholic in Cork, Barry suggested that by this time, the ideal of liberty was dying in Britain in much the same way it had once flourished and then withered in the classical world. In the image, which adorns the cover of this book, his characters meet to lament the passing; yet, they point off to the distance, across the water, where liberty is having a rebirth. The only one seemingly left out of this hopeful picture is the man with shackles around his ankles, Barry’s famous patron and fellow Irishman Edmund Burke. The chains symbolize the distinctive bind Barry and Burke contended with within empire. Burke and Barry were part of the British Atlantic world, one that included America, but they stood apart from it at the same time. Ireland and America for them were bound together in the British Empire; yet, as Irish provincials, even though well-ensconced in Britain, Barry and Burke experienced the tensions that it engendered in ways distinct from their fellow subjects in the colonies on the other side of the ocean. 1
In the spring of 2017 we invited a group of historians to Ireland to discuss empire, revolution, and the connections and disjunctions Barry presents us with. The group consisted of leading scholars, mainly specialists in early America and Atlantic history, though we had a number of Irish specialists in our midst to guide the discussions and inform our deliberations. These people represented some of the finest scholars of their respective generations. All were asked to consider what they study through the prism of Ireland, America, empire, and revolution. What they discovered was that the comparative angle in light of all the fine work done on imperial, new British, American, and Atlantic history offers a telling look at each place. It provides insights about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic, about the relationship between imperial reform and revolution, and about the powerful role empire played in shaping all of these dynamics. For better and for worse, Ireland and America were places shaped by revolution and empire, just as both nations would shape empire and revolution. To appreciate this fact is to retell familiar stories in a more compelling fashion.
The subject of Ireland and America, empire and revolution would almost seem tailor-made for demonstrating the virtues of comparative, systemic, and entangled history. In the past historians have gleaned meaningful insights into the political, economic, social, and cultural life of each place, as well as the empire, in the early modern period by juxtaposing one with the other. Ireland, we have learned, served as a first stab at empire in America, a jumping-off point, and cultural understandings of the Irish colored how the English saw Indians in America. 2 The later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century story of Irish-American imperial connections centers on how people, in this case Irish migrants, driven abroad by the extension of imperial power to Ireland, opted to settle in places like Pennsylvania. This chapter of the “peopling of British North America” is part of an older story of Irish-American transatlantic connections. 3 Later, Irish “colonial nationalists” influenced how Americans envisioned empire in the eighteenth century, and we know that much of the ideological content of American resistance to empire drew from the Irish in the years after the Seven Years’ War. Both, now part of the same imperial system, found themselves in similar straits. 4 Finally, we have understood for a long time that the American struggle against empire inspired the Irish later to try to follow the same course, and how the failure of such emulation led to a new movement of republican-minded Irish to a republican America. 5
The essays in this collection have no bones to pick with these older formulations. However, they do suggest more compelling connections and entanglements, subtler also than these, however fascinating they remain. They also demonstrate meaningful disjunctions. The way the imperial state was formed in Ireland and then in America reveals differences between the places, even if they were under the same imperial system. The first difference stemmed from sta