In 1949, Ireland left the Commonwealth and the British Empire began its long fragmentation. The relationship between the new Republic of Ireland and Britain was a complex one however, and the traditional assumption that the Republic would universally support self-determination overseas and object to 'imperialism' does not hold up to historical scrutiny. In reality, for economic and geopolitical reasons, the Republic of Ireland played an important role in supporting the Empire- demonstrated clearly in Ireland's active involvement in the Cyprus Emergency of the 1950s. As Helen O'Shea reveals, while the IRA formed immediate links with EOKA and the Cypriot rebels, the Irish government and the Irish Church supported the British line- which was to retain Cyprus as the Middle-Eastern base of the British Empire following the loss of Egypt. Ireland and the End of the British Empire challenges the received historiography of the period and constitutes a valuable addition to our understanding of Ireland and the British Empire.

The first biography of Alfred Webb, Irish nationalist and president of the 1894 Indian National Congress. The biography explores how Webb viewed nationalism as a vehicle for global social justice. Drawing on archives in Britain, Ireland and India the author reveals how Irish and Indians used cosmopolitan London to create networks across the Empire.

Combining over 100 beautifully crafted maps, charts and graphs with a narrative packed with facts and information, An Atlas of Irish History provides coverage of the main political, military, economic, religious and social changes that have occurred in Ireland and among the Irish abroad over the past two millennia. Ruth Dudley Edwards and Bridget Hourican use the combination of thematic narrative and visual aids to examine and illustrate issues such as: the Viking invasions of Ireland the Irish in Britain pre- and post-famine agriculture population change twentieth-century political affiliations. This third edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to include coverage of the many changes that have occurred in Ireland and among its people overseas. Taking into consideration the main issues that have developed since 1981, and adding a number of new maps and graphs, this new edition also includes an informative and detailed section on the troubles that have been a feature of Irish life since 1969. An Atlas of Irish History is an invaluable resource for students of Irish history and politics and the general reader alike.

In God's Empire, Hilary M. Carey charts Britain's nineteenth-century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant settler Christianity in British domains. Based on extensive use of original archival and rare published sources, the author explores major debates such as the relationship between religion and colonization, church-state relations, Irish Catholics in the empire, the impact of the Scottish Disruption on colonial Presbyterianism, competition between Evangelicals and other Anglicans in the colonies, and between British and American strands of Methodism in British North America.

Shedding new light on the rich intellectual and political milieux shaping the divergent legacies of Joyce and Yeats, Empire’s Wake traces how a distinct postcolonial modernism emerged within Irish literature in the late 1920s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that the high modernist literary canon was consolidating its influence and prestige. By framing its explorations of postcolonial narrative form against the backdrop of distinct historical moments from the Irish Free State to the Celtic Tiger era, the book charts the different phases of 20th-century postcoloniality in ways that clarify how the comparatively early emergence of the postcolonial in Ireland illuminates the formal shifts accompanying the transition from an age of empire to one of globalization. Bringing together new perspectives on Beckett and Joyce with analyses of the critically neglected works of Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt, and the Blasket autobiographers, Empire’s Wake challenges the notion of a singular “global modernism” and argues for the importance of critically integrating the local and the international dimensions of modernist aesthetics.

Kim tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy growing up in late nineteenth-century India, and his quest for identity as he strives to reconcile his Western inheritance with the Indian life he has always known. This edition sets the novel in the context of the historical period and addresses Kipling’s ambivalent relationship with India, the Empire’s treatment of the “other” classes and races who worked to maintain the British presence in India, and the place of Kim in Kipling’s career as a writer. Appendices include contemporary reviews of the novel and historical documents on Britain’s and Russia’s struggle for control of Asia, Indian colonization, and the writing of Kim.

This interdisciplinary collection, written by experts in their fields, addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; and the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models.

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier according to the Irish peasantry's subversive entanglement with nonhuman materiality. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object's unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression. The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Irish Materialisms proves that new materialism holds powerful postcolonial potential. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, this book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has been previously recognized.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were a number of smaller religious bodies that sought to develop religious and national identity on the margins--something especially difficult when the nation was at war in South Africa. This book examines rich and varied extant sources that provide helpful windows into the wartime experience of Canada's religious minorities. Those groups on the margins experienced internal struggles and external pressures related to issues of loyalty and identity. How each faith tradition addressed those challenges was shaped by their own dominant personalities, ethnic identity, history, tradition, and theological convictions. Responses were fluid, divided, and rarely unanimous. Those seeking to address such issues not only had to deal with internal expectations and tensions, but also construct a public response that would satisfy often hostile and vocal external critics. Some positions evolved over time, leading to new identities, loyalties, and trajectories. In all cases, being on the margins meant dealing with two dominant national and imperial narratives--English or French--both bolstered respectively by powerful Anglo-Saxon Protestantism or French Quebec Catholicism. The chapters in this book examine how those on the margins sought to do just that.

The relations of Great Britain and its Dominions significantly influenced the development of the British Empire in the late 19th and the first third of the 20th century. The mutual attitude to the constitutional issues that Dominion and British leaders have continually discussed at Colonial and Imperial Conferences respectively was one of the main aspects forming the links between the mother country and the autonomous overseas territories. This volume therefore focuses on the key period when the importance of the Dominions not only increased within the Empire itself, but also in the sphere of the international relations, and the Dominions gained the opportunity to influence the forming of the Imperial foreign policy. During the first third of the 20th century, the British Empire gradually transformed into the British Commonwealth of Nations, in which the importance of Dominions excelled. The work is based on the study of unreleased sources from British archives, a large number of published documents and extensive relevant literature.