Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

The history men. The historical profession in England since the Renaissance

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation's hinterlands.     

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second‐generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement.