How might the history of Ireland's revolution be reassessed if viewed within a transnational, comparative or global framework? Drawing attention to recent writing on the subject, this introduction considers the conceptual and historiographical issues at stake in reframing the history of the Irish Revolution, as well as considering potential limitations to these approaches. We assess what topics in particular lend themselves to a fresh perspective focusing on Irish nationalism, while also indicating areas where there is considerable scope for new lines of inquiry. In this era of intensive commemoration of the events that unfolded between 1912 and 1923, this special issue serves to remind us that the history of the revolution should not be confined to the island of Ireland. We argue that thinking transnationally and comparatively can promote a more inclusive and diverse global history of Irish Revolution.

In comparison to many parts of post-war Europe, Ireland's wars between 1919 and 1923 were not as lethal as they might have been. This article addresses some of the possible reasons why, reasons that were quite specific to the immediate Anglo-Irish context but reasons that may also have been due to broader transnational understandings of what it was to be a soldier, what it was to fight at that time. But while comparative fatality rates may leave Ireland somewhat overshadowed, this article considers what Ireland's wars still share with other conflicts and looks at some of the dimensions of Irish violence that were, irrespective of numbers killed, still fundamentally the same as violence experienced in other periods and places. Tackling some of the challenges of contemporary comparisons, the article suggests other possible comparisons ranging far beyond the inter-war period that may prove more fruitful, and asks whether the nature of violence shapes our perceptions of a conflict far more than fatality rates do.

Offering new insights into Irish links with the wider world, this article explores and contextualises Irish nationalist perceptions of and links with central European small states in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The belief that any small nation like Ireland, oppressed by a dominant neighbour, had the right to self-determination was of key importance in nationalist political rhetoric during the revolutionary years. Given the similarity of circumstances among newly independent small states, Irish commentators were aware of the struggles Ireland shared with the successors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Personal encounters on the continent, as well as news regarding small nations in central Europe, shaped Irish opinions of the region. Certainly, the images presented by Irish commentators reflected their own political agendas and were therefore often deliberately idealistic. Nonetheless, they served a specific purpose as they were meant to further Ireland's interest on the international stage. Looking beyond Ireland for lessons and examples to follow became a frequent part of Irish nationalist political rhetoric. By directing scholarly attention to a hitherto less explored aspect of Irish historiography, this article aims to highlight the complexity of Ireland's connection with the continent within the framework of small nations, from a transnational perspective.

Writing in Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928, Tom Garvin observed that ‘well over 40 per cent, perhaps 50 per cent, had lived outside Ireland for considerable periods … foreign experience was very important in the development of the leaders’. The impact of ‘foreign experience’ on leading nationalist revolutionaries, this article submits, pace Garvin, could have proved influential in the development of the Irish Revolution more widely. Between June 1919 and December 1920, Éamon de Valera toured the United States. From New York City to Salt Lake City, Alabama to Montana, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish republic addressed ‘Ireland’ in hundreds of interviews and speeches. Of these myriad public statements, his Cuban missive, notably, crossed national boundaries. Comparing Ireland's geo-strategic relationship with Great Britain to that of Cuba and the United States, de Valera's argument for an independent Irish republic was made in the Americas. How did de Valera's movement across the U.S. alter his political views of Ireland? How were presentations of de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ mediated across the ‘Irish world’? How did discourse on the Monroe Doctrine inform Anglo-Irish negotiations between Truce and Treaty? Exploring de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ as global case study, this article concludes, ultimately, can shift the historiographical significance of ‘foreign experience’ from nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland to the flows and circulation of transnational revolution.

This article examines how anti-Semitism influenced republican politics in revolutionary Ireland. It looks at Irish republican attitudes toward Jews, including examples of anti-Semitism. Jews were a visible minority in Ireland and one that was sometimes seen as unionist politically. This article illustrates how conspiracy theories about Jewish influence sometimes featured in Irish nationalist tropes, but were far more common in British and unionist discourses regarding events in Ireland. It also shows how individual Jews took part in revolutionary activities, even as some republicans expressed suspicion about them. Outside Ireland, Irish revolutionaries interacted with Jews in several locations, particularly the United States. There was often cooperation in these settings and both groups expressed solidarity towards one another.

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

When the British government declared war against Germany in August 1914, a great drive to gain popular support by presenting the conflict to the public as a morally righteous endeavour began in earnest. Stories of German violence against French and Belgian civilians, largely based in fact, were central to this process of ‘cultural mobilisation’. The German serviceman thus came to be widely regarded in Britain as inherently cruel and malevolent while his British counterpart was revered as the embodiment of honour, chivalry and courage. Yet by the autumn of 1920, less than two years after the Armistice, the conduct of members of the crown forces in Ireland was being publicly drawn into question by British commentators in a manner that would have been unthinkable during the war against Germany. Drawing on contemporary press reports, parliamentary debates and personal narrative sources, this article explores and analyses the moral climate in Britain in 1920 and 1921 and comments on the degree to which memories of atrocities committed by German servicemen during the Great War informed popular and official responses to events in Ireland.

The emigration of female revolutionary activists has largely eluded historical studies; their global movements transcend dominant national and regional conceptions of the Irish Revolution and challenge established narratives of political exile which are often cast in masculine terms. Drawing on Cumann na mBan nominal rolls and U.S. immigration records, this article investigates the scale of post-Civil War Cumann na mBan emigration and evaluates the geographical origins, timing and push-pull factors that defined their migration. Focusing on the United States in particular, it also measures the impact of the emigration and return migration of female revolutionaries – during the revolutionary period and in its immediate aftermath – on both the republican movement in Ireland and the fractured political landscapes of Irish America. Ultimately, this article argues that the cooperative transatlantic exchange networks of Cumann na mBan, and the consciously gendered revolutionary discourse they assisted in propagating in the diaspora, were integral to supporting the Irish Revolution at home and abroad.

In 1927 the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston following a murder trial that was widely denounced for its anti-labour and anti-immigrant bias. From 1921 the campaign to save the two men powerfully mobilised labour internationalism and triggered waves of protests across the world. This article examines the important contributions made by Irish and Irish-American radicals to the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign. Mary Donovan was a leading member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and a second-generation Irish union organiser and member of Boston's James Connolly Club. In the 1920s she travelled to Ireland twice and appealed to Irish and Irish American labour to support the campaign. At the same time, Donovan and many of the activists considered here held ambiguous personal and political relationships with Ireland. Transnational Irish radicalism in the early-twentieth century is most commonly considered in nationalist terms. Taking a distinctly non-Irish cause – the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1920–7 – allows us to look from a different perspective at the global Irish Revolution and reveals how radical labour currents reached into Irish and Irish-American circles during the revolutionary era, though the response to the campaign also indicates a receding internationalism in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence.

A hitherto unpublished text of a negotiated settlement between Walter de Lacy, lord of Meath (d. 1241), and the canons of St Thomas's Abbey, Dublin, relating to the church of Ardmulchan in County Meath sheds new light both on the career of Theobald Walter I (d. 1205), ancestor of the Butler earls of Ormond, and on the dealings of John, son of King Henry II of England, with his Irish lordship during the period 1185–99 for which sources are scarce. It indicates that not only in Leinster, but also in Meath, John encroached on the seigneurial rights of Anglo-Norman landholders.