Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine

Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 by Peter Hulme. London: Methuen, 1986. Pp. xi + 399; maps and illus. £25.

The Aggressions of the French at Tahiti and other Islands in the Pacific, by George Pritchard, edited by Paul De Deckker. Auckland: Oxford University Press (New Zealand), 1985. Pp.253. £35.00.

A History of Christianity in India 1707–1858 by Stephen Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. Pp. xiv + 578. £45.

Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World edited by Gad Heuman. London: Frank Cass &; Co., 1986. Pp. vii + 199; maps. £19.50.

Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa by A.N. Porter. Royal Historical Society Studies in History 49. Woodbridge: Boydell &; Brewer, 1986. Pp. 332. £29.50.

Speculators and Patriots: Essays in Business Biography edited by R.P.T. Davenport‐Hines, London: Frank Cass &; Co.Ltd., 1986. Pp. viii + 139. £21.00.

Julius Vogel, Business Politician by Raewyn Dalziel. Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 368, illus. NZ $45.00.

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Horace Plunkett, Co‐operation and Politics: An Irish Biography by Trevor West. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1986. Pp. xviii + 288, illus. £12.95.

The Canadian Career of the Fourth Earl of Minto: The Education of a Viceroy by Carman Miller. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. Pp.225.

Lord Minto's Canadian Papers: A Selection of the Public and Private Papers of the Fourth Earl of Minto, 1898–1904 edited by Paul Stevens and John T. Saywell. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1981. Vol. I. Pp. lxxix + 467.

Robert Thorne Coryndon: Proconsular Imperialism in Southern and Eastern Africa, 1897–1925 by Christopher P. Youe. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986. Pp. xiv + 241; maps, tables, and illus. $29.95.

The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth‐Century Natal by Shula Marks. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 171; illus. £13.75.

Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century by Fiona Venn. London: Macmillan, 1986. Pp.xii + 228. £7.95 (paperback); £25.00 (hardback).

The Third Reich and the Palestine Question by F.R. Nicosia. London: I.B. Tauris, 1986. Pp.343. £24.50.

Old Sinister: A Memoir of Sir Arthur Richards, GCMG by Richard Peel. Privately printed, n.d. Pp. 196, £8.

Yanks Down Under 1941–45: The American Impact on Australia by E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. xxiii + 455, illus. £29.50.

Anthony Eden: A Biography by David Carlton. London: Allen &; Unwin Paperbacks, 1986. Pp.528: illus. £8.95.

Anthony Eden by Robert Rhodes James. London: Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, 1986. Pp. xiv + 665; map and illus. £16.95.

The English‐Speaking Alliance‐ Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War 1945–1951 by Ritchie Ovendale. London: George Allen &; Unwin, 1985. Pp. 308; bibliography and index. £30.

Black Africa 1945–1980: Economic Decolonisation and Arrested Development by D.K. Fieldhouse. London: Allen &; Unwin Ltd., 1986. Pp.xix + 260. £22.50 (hardback), £9.95 (paperback).     

Agents of altruism: the Great Irish Famine and Italian civil society (1847)

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the participation of individuals, networks and international organizations in transnational fundraising aimed at providing humanitarian relief aid. Focusing on fundraising campaigns organized in the Italian states in favour of Ireland in 1847, when the Great Famine scourged its population the most, the article highlights the agency of the fundraisers in setting in motion an economy of altruism that transcended groups’ boundaries and state borders. The activism and networking of a few well-established individuals in Rome were pivotal in mobilizing the lay and religious elites at a local level. In January and February 1847, the elites of the Italian capitals collected copious sums within private events and initiatives directed at their peers, while the Christian faiths present in Rome organized the first alms collections. This wave of altruism succeeded in setting humanitarian relief for Ireland as one of the goals of the global Catholic Church. In March, Pope Pius IX issued the Encyclical Praedecessores Nostros, appealing for Catholics to donate in favour of Ireland, and thereby generating much local fundraising, mainly in the Italian states and Southern Europe, until the early months of 1848. The Catholic clergy served the cause, raising money locally and taking charge of its delivery to Ireland, with partial coordination from Rome. Although implementing a transnational fundraising campaign involved obstacles of a political, logistical and financial nature, the alms collection raised in the Catholic churches aggregated many small donations over a considerable time span, providing more than double the amount raised in the lay initiatives organized by the elites of the Italian states. The article, based on unedited archival sources from the Italian, Vatican and Irish archives, shows how the charitable fundraisers overcame the obstacles imposed by state politics, international conflicts and transaction costs over the transnational circulation of ideas, initiatives and capitals.     

Approaching a folklore archive: the Irish Folklore Commission and the memory of the Great Famine

Using the Irish Folklore Commission's centenary survey of local accounts of the Great Famine (1845–50), this article posits a tripartite taxonomy of collective memory: the “global,” the “popular” and the “local.” Global memory was structured by meta‐narratives, the explanatory accounts of the Famine derived from the Catholic Church and nationalist political organisations. Local memory dealt with named individuals and places. The intermediate level of popular memory drew on both the local and the global (although the Church's interpretation of the famine had proved more acceptable among the rural, landowning farmers who made up the majority of the Commission's informants), but also on folk narrative tradition to create a coherent system of representation in which motifs were replicated over a large area (and over time).     

‘Eternity's commissioner’: Thomas Carlyle,the Great Irish Famine and the geopolitics of travel

In 1846 and again in 1849 the Scottish born historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle, travelled Ireland accompanied by the Irish nationalist Charles Gavan Duffy. Significantly, these dates profile the beginning and the deadly culmination of the Great Irish Famine. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that Carlyle's published memoirs of his travels and his various pamphlets on Ireland have merited little scholarly attention. As well as addressing this oversight this paper attempts to place Carlyle's travel writing within the ideological contours of the Great Famine and, to this end, I outline a specific example of what I call the ‘geopolitics of travel’. Principally this paper offers an empirical and theoretical analysis of how powerful political rationalities are produced at the ‘contact zone’ of two cultures. I consider Carlyle's shift from being a critic of laissez-faire to being a defender of property and argue that this parallels his propensity to qualify what amounts to human value through environmental and racial readings of the Famine. Finally, I briefly suggest that such calculations take us into the domain of ‘governmentality’ and capitalist political economy, perhaps the two most powerful forces directing the course of the Irish Famine.     

Famine and the changing role of NGOs: an Irish perspective

The paper discusses how the recent history of famine has influenced the mission of relief-oriented non-governmental organisations (NGOs).     

Republican Political Theory and Irish Nationalism

Republicanism has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times among political theorists. This article examines the way in which republican strains of democratic political philosophy impacted political thinkers and leaders in the case of modern Ireland. Although the Republic of Ireland was officially established in 1949, the question of its origins was a source of contention throughout the first part of the twentieth century. I argue that the intellectual origins of Irish republicanism lay in the impact of French revolutionary thought on Irish nationalist leaders in the 1790s, and then trace these republican ideas through the public debates and tracts that marked the major stages in the development of the Irish Republic. In particular, I focus on the principles informing the 1916 Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, as well as the central arguments employed in the debates surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948. My aim is to demonstrate that republican ideas affected nationalism to such an extent that in Ireland republicanism and nationalism became, and in some respects still are, practically synonymous.     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

Kuwait,Political Violence and the Syrian War

Kuwait’s support of civilians in war-torn Syria has been commended by the international community. In addition, the Gulf state has joined US-led coalitions against the ‘Islamic State’ and affirmed many international agreements designed to choke off international assistance to militias operating in Syria. In 2015, Kuwait paid a heavy price for its involvement, becoming a victim of IS-affiliated terrorism. Whilst this suggests that Kuwait’s position on radical Islamist movements involved in the Syrian conflict is clear cut, this article will argue that Kuwait’s government has had to balance this official position against domestic support for elements of the radical Islamist opposition in Syria. These cross-cutting tensions were underscored by the US designation of the state as the ‘epicentre’ of private fund raising for militias in Syria. To explore these contradictions, this article will analyse Kuwait’s engagement with the Syrian war, its new anti-terror legislation and the tensions between the official and unofficial views on support for foreign militias. This analysis will highlight the challenges the Kuwait government has faced in addressing unofficial Kuwaiti engagement with the radical Islamist opposition in Syria.