Conclusion: Historical Apophenia, Affinities, Departures, and Nescience

Summary

Rather than merely focusing on the stated platforms, activities, and appeal of different Irish nationalist organizations or individuals from the late eighteenth century to 1921, this study has probed particular contours of Irish nationalism during that time frame through the perspectival lens of multivocal and multivalent Irish nationalist imaginations and self-representations by way of references to a distant land (‘Iran’ in this case, in its broadest historical, geographic, and cultural configurations). This approach has underscored the always worlded dimension of nativist and/or nationalist Irish self-imaginings (in the case of nationalism, particularly after the emergence of the multiethnic and cross-communal Society of United Irishmen). This method has relied on an array of new analytical trajectories for interrogating particular trends in the history of Irish nationalism, yielding both information that is at times familiar and an extensive range of material and interpretations that are entirely new and otherwise inaccessible through other existing modes of engaging with the history of Irish nationalism. It is also imperative to emphasize once again that the focus of this study has been the exploration of particular strands of thought in the multifaceted sphere of Irish nationalism over a broad time span through the heuristic lens of ‘Iran,’ and not the study of Irish–Iranian relations during the period covered in this book or of solely political (in its narrowest definition) dimensions of Irish nationalist engagement with contemporary Iran.

The Iranian frame of reference in this book is only one of many potential modes of investigating the evolution and diversity of Irish nationalism in a comparative world-his-torical setting—keeping in mind also that this study has only probed particular trends in Irish nationalist historical, literary, cultural, and political expressions, and that in doing so, like other studies of Irish nationalism dealing with the period under investiga-tion, this study too has relied throughout on the available recorded Irish and other sources and, hence, makes no pretence of either reflecting the entire range of continuities and transformations in Irish nationalist articulations and “mentalities” (to borrow from the Annales School), or shedding light on the otherwise undocumented attitudes of ordinary Irish people during the period who gravitated to different strands of nationalism. Such a world-historical approach can be carried out at micro or macro levels, both synchronically and diachronically, each with its own advantages and limitations.