DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MODULE HANDBOOK
TWO REBELLIONS AND A REVOLUTION: REACTIONS TO
BRITISH RULE IN IRELAND, 1848-1922
Convenor: Professor Maria Luddy
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Table of Contents
Module Aims
3
Intended Learning Outcomes
3
Syllabus:
Seminar 1: Introduction: Was Ireland a Colony?
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Seminar 2: History / Memory / Commemoration
4
Seminar 3: Representing Ireland / Imagining Ireland
5
Seminar 4: The Changing Rural World: Fairies,
Murder and Colonialism
5
Seminar 5: What is Irishness? Critical Debates 1880-1910
6
Seminar 6: The Churches and Irish Political Identity
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Seminar 7: Republicanising the Nationalist Movement, 1898-1916
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Seminar 8: What is Unionism?
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Seminar 9: Political solutions for Ireland, 1920-1922
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Illustrative Bibliography
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Module Aims
This module will allow students to engage in analysing the development of nationalist
and unionist responses to British rule in Ireland in the key period 1848-1922. This
will involve an exploration of the political, social and cultural contexts in which
resistance to British rule manifested itself. The module will familiarise students with
recent historiography which debates the status of Ireland as a colony. Students will
develop a critical awareness of the ways in which a national identity can be formed
and become familiar with seminal texts in nationalist and unionist history.
Intended Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to ...

appreciate the complex ways in which social, political and cultural forces assisted
and were utilised in the development of a national identity in Ireland in the period
1850-1922.

locate the Irish experience of colonialism within a broad theoretical and
historiographical framework.

analyse and evaluate key debates on colonialism within Irish historiography.

communicate and express ideas on the place of Ireland within the colonial
context.
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Seminar 1: Introduction: Was Ireland a Colony?
There is no reading for this preliminary session.
Seminar 2 : History / Memory / Commemoration
Readings

R.F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Marking it Up in Ireland (London,
2001), chapters 1,2 and 12

Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2002).
Chapters by Edna Longley and Niall Ó Ciosáin

Kevin Whelan, ‘The revisionist debate in Ireland’, in Boundary 2, 31:1 (2004).
Available through JSTOR.

Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901
(Dublin, 2004) article by Crossman.

O Grada, ‘Making history in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: the saga of The
Great Famine in C.Brady, Interpreting Irish History.
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Seminar 3 : Representing Ireland/Imagining Ireland
Readings

Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and
Culture (Oxford, 2000), chapters 4 and 6.

Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750-1930 (Cork,
1997), chapter 4.

Kevin O’Neill, ‘Looking at the pictures: art and artfulness in colonial Ireland’, in
Adele M.Dalsimer (ed.), Visualising Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial
Tradition (Winchester, MA, 1993), pp. 55-70.

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (various editions)
Seminar 4 : The Changing Rural World: Fairies, Murder and
Colonialism
Readings

Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London, 1999)
For background we need to look at the changing rural world, and especially changes
in landholding and its impact on Irish Society.

Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern
Ireland (Dublin, 1987), chapter 7.

Joanna Bourke, ‘”The best of all home rulers”: the economic power of women
in Ireland, 1880-1914’, Irish Economic and Social History, xviii (1991, pp.3447.
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Seminar 5 : What is Irishness? Critical Debates, 1880-1910
Readings
For general background see:

R.F.Foster, Modern Ireland, chapter 18.

Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798-1998, pp.142.214

Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891-1918 (Dublin,
1999), chapter 2.

Lucy McDiarmid, ‘Revivalist belligerence: three controversies’ in B.Taylor
Fitzsimon and J.H. Murophy (eds.), The Irish Revival Reappraised (Dublin,
2004), pp.132-44.

Senia Paseta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s
Catholic Elite, 1879-1922 (Cork, 1999), chapter 6.
Seminar 6 : The Churches and Irish Political Identity
Readings

Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-1875’ in idem, The
Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Dublin, 1976), chapter 2.

Ciaran O’Caroll, ‘The pastoral politics of Paul Cullen’, in James Kelly and Daire
Keogh (eds.), History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), pp.294312

David Miller, ‘Religious history’ in Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher
(eds.) Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Research (Dublin, 205) pp.
61.76.

Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion,
and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750-1900 (Oxford, 1998), chapters 5 and 6.
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Seminar 7 : Republicanising the National Movement, 1898-1916
Readings

Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire, chapter 4.

Richard English, Irish Freedom; The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London,
2006), pp.235-84.

Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance
since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), chapter 5.

Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858-1928 (Oxford, 1987),
chapters 2 and 3.

Michael Wheatly, Nationalism and Irish Party: Provincial Ireland, 1910-1916
(Oxford, 2005), chapters 1 and 2.
Seminar 8 : What is unionism?
Readings

Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire, chapter 10.

Walker, B., ‘1641,1689,1690 and all that: the Unionist sense of history’, The
Irish Review, 12, (1992), pp.56-64.

Jackson, A., ‘Irish Unionism, 187-1922’, in D.G.Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.),
Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801
(London, 2001), pp. 115-36.

Richard English, ‘The same people with different relatives? Modern scholarship,
unionists and Irish Nation’ In R. English and G. Walker (eds), Unionism in
Modern Ireland (Dubin, 1996), pp.220-35.
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Peter Hart, ‘The Protestant experience of revolution in southern Ireland, 19111926’ in R.English and G. Walker (eds), Unionism in Modern Ireland (Dubin,
1996), pp.81-98.
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Seminar 9 : Political Solutions for Ireland , 1920-1922
We will look at Ireland in the period between 1920-1922 and the establishment of the
Free State and Northern Ireland. In this last session I also want to have a general
exploration of the meaning of colonialism in Irish History (a large topic!) and how we
understand Ireland and colonialism.
Readings

J.Cleary, ‘Irish Studies, colonial questions: locating Ireland in the colonial
world’ in idem., Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland
(Dublin, 2007), chapter 2.

Christine Kineally, ‘At home with the empire: the example of Ireland’ in
Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire
(Cambridge, 2006),pp. 77-100.

Sean Ryder, ‘Defining colony and empire in early nineteenth-century Irish
Nationalism’ in Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony?: Economics,
Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2005), pp.165-85.

Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union and empire, 1800-1960’ in Kevin Kenny
(ed.) Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp.123-53.
Reading for Ireland 1920-1922 is as follows:

R.F.Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London, 1998), chapter 20.

Pauric Travers, Settlements and Divisions: Ireland, 1870-1922 (Dublin, 1988),
chapter 8.

Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920-1996 (Dublin, 1997),
chapter 1.
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Illustrative Bibliography
Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London, 1999)
D.G Boyce and Alan O'Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and
the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996)
Richard English and Graham Walker (eds), Unionism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996)
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols 1-5 (New York and Cork, 1991, 2002)
J.W. Foster, Colonial Consequences (Dublin, 1991)
R.F.Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (London, 1988)
R.F. Foster, The Irish Story. Telling Tales and Making it Up (London, 2001)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture
(Oxford, 2000)
Keith Jeffery (ed.), 'An Irish Empire?' Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire
(Manchester, 1996)
James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the
Reign of queen Victoria (Cork, 2001)
G.K Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865-1925: From Unionism
to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001)
Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since
1848 (Oxford, 1983)
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