Abstract
Alfred John Webb was born in Ireland as a citizen of the world. This is the first full biographical study of Webb (1834–1908): a Dublin printer, Quaker, social activist, Irish nationalist MP and president of the Indian National Congress. Using Webb as a window, this study tracks the movement of ideas through the Atlantic World, Britain and Ireland, and across the Empire. It begins by analysing Webb’s upbringing in Dublin by Quaker printers who were deeply involved in the Garrisonian antislavery movement and had contacts across the Atlantic World. It then traces how Webb’s belief in social justice was translated into his support for Irish nationalism and a range of social and women’s issues. As an Irish nationalist MP in Westminster, Webb made contacts within the Indian nationalist community and the British Liberal establishment. His involvement in a complex network of progressive social organisations led to his invitation to preside at the Congress: in particular, Webb developed a close personal friendship and political relationship with the Indian politician, Dadabhai Naoroji, whose social and political interests neatly overlapped with Webb’s.
DFHL, Webb autobiography, f. 1.
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Notes
Alfred Webb, A Compendium of Irish Biography: Comprising Sketches of Distinguished Irishmen, and of Eminent Persons Connected with Ireland by Office or by their Writings (Dublin, 1878).
Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 3.
Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, fin-de-siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (Durham and London, 2006).
Described as ‘metaphoric kinship’ by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (2nd edn, London, 2002), p. 106.
On nationalism see also Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London, 1998);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991);
Ernest Gellner and John Breuilly, Nations and Nationalism (London, 2005).
For a review of the debate see S. J. Connolly, ‘Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Colony or ancien régime?’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish Histoty: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996), pp. 15–33; for more recent discussion
see Terence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2005).
See, for example, Roy F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993);
L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot, 1971) and Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT, 1968);
Robert Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (London, 2007);
Jennifer M. Regan, ‘“We Could Be of Service to Other Suffering People”: Representations of India in the Irish Nationalist Press, c. 1857–1887,’ Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 61–77;
Scott Boltwood, ‘“The ineffaceable curse of Cain”: Race, Miscegenation, and the Victorian Staging of Irishness,’ Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. xxix, no. 2 (2001), pp. 383–396.
Thus unsurprisingly, in the nineteenth-century volume of the Oxford history of the British Empire, the chapter on Ireland in the Empire was written by a specialist in Irish emigration. David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’ in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 495–521.
Edward M. Spiers, ‘Army Organisation and Society in the Nineteenth Century’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 335–357; Michael Silvestri, ‘The “Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal, 1905–1939,’ Journal of British Studies (October, 2000) and ‘“An Irishman is Specially Suited to be a Policeman”: Sir Charles Tegart and Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,’ History-Ireland (Winter 2000).
Studies of the experience of Empire in domestic Britain include John Mac-Donald MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986);
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford, 2002).
One example of work that has probed the Irish experience of Empire is Keith Jeffery (ed.), An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996).
Tadhg Foley and Maureen O’Connor (eds), Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire (Dublin, 2006);
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford, 2000);
Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004); Jeffery, An Irish Empire.
Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections 1919— 1964 (Manchester, 2008).
Scott B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (London and New Delhi, 1993), p. 25.
Howard V. Brasted, ‘Indian Nationalist Development and the Influence of Irish Home Rule, 1870–1886,’ Modern Asian Studies, vol. xiv (1980), pp. 37–63.
Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, 1999).
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, 1998), p. 1.
See also Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 years of History (London, 2002);
Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New Delhi, 2004).
Alfred Webb, Alfred Webb: The Autobiography of a Quaker Nationalist, ed. Marie-Louise Legg (Cork, 1999). To assist the reader, when citing from Webb’s autobiography I will in the first instance cite from the published work (Webb, Autobiography) because it is more accessible. Unpublished extracts will be cited from the original manuscript (DFHL, Webb autobiography).
Webb, ‘The Propriety of Conceding the Elective Franchise to Women’ in Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, vol. iv, no. 8 (1868), pp. 455–461;
Alfred Webb (ed.), The Opinions of Some Protestants regarding Their Irish Catholic Fellow-Countrymen, 3rd edn, enlarged, with resolutions of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (Dublin, 1886).
Alfred Webb, Thoughts in Retirement (Dublin, 1908).
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London, 2007), p. 300.
For example, Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995);
Margaret H. Preston, Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy, and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Westport, CT, 2004).
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© 2009 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre
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Regan-Lefebvre, J. (2009). ‘How rich my life has been, not in itself but in its associations’: An Introduction to Alfred Webb. In: Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244702_1
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