Introduction

Abstract

Historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland have, for the past two decades, been asking a question that has become central to the study of the period: What was the relationship of Ireland to empire? Understandably, scholars have focused primarily on the relationship between Ireland and the British Empire, within which Ireland served as both laboratory and lab partner.¹ Not only did English and Scottish settlers plant Ireland during the early modern period, but their descendants and, indeed, the descendants of those they displaced built the ‘second’ British Empire after 1800, wrestling with its implications for themselves and the peoples they conquered and managed. Drawing insights from colleagues in literary criticism, sociology, and British history, these studies have opened four particularly fruitful lines of inquiry, including tracking settlement patterns and careering paths; mapping networks of people, goods, and ideas as they moved across the globe; analysing the efforts of Irish Christians to create a ‘spiritual empire’; and monitoring the development and influence of Irish opposition, militant and otherwise, to British imperial expansion.² Little wonder, then, that the editors of a special issue of the journal Éire-Ireland concluded in 2007 that ‘Ireland and Empire is now one of the most vibrant fields of inquiry in Irish studies’.³