Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:36:36.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Varieties of Irishness”: Historical Revisionism, Irish Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Nancy J. Curtin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In an 1989 article in Irish Historical Studies, Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions.

Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 2: Revisionisms , April 1996 , pp. 195 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bradshaw, Brendan, “Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 26, no. 104 (November 1989): 335–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Moody, T. W., “Irish History and Irish Mythology,” Hermathena 124 (Summer 1978): 7–24Google Scholar.

3 For the uses of republican and unionist myths by contemporary antagonists in Northern Ireland, see O'Malley, Padraig, The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today (Boston, 1983)Google Scholar.

4 See, e.g., O'Brien, Conor Cruise, States of Ireland (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Rev. Shaw, Francis, “The Canon of Irish History—a Challenge,” Studies 61 (Summer 1972): 113–53Google Scholar.

5 Moody, T. W., “A New History of Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 16, no. 63 (March 1969): 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 242.

7 Foster, R. F., Modern Ireland, 1660–1972 (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

8 O'Neill, Kevin, “Revisionist Milestone,” Irish Literary Supplement 8, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 1, 39Google Scholar; Bradshaw, p. 349n.

9 Bradshaw's assertion that the revisionists claim such objectivity is wildly exaggerated. As one of the premier scholars associated with revisionism has written, “No historian, I would maintain, can be completely and thoroughly objective. In this sense, we are not only all prisoners of our history, but also of our individual biographies” (Lyons, F. S. L., “The Dilemma of the Irish Contemporary Historian,” Hermathena 115 [Summer 1973]: 49Google Scholar). It is reliance on the empirical method, which Bradshaw does not disavow, which is designed to contain the natural subjectivity of the historian.

10 Bradshaw (n. 1 above), p. 337.

11 Ibid., p. 338.

12 Ibid., p. 341; Daly, Mary E., The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk, 1986)Google Scholar.

13 Moody, , “Irish History and Irish Mythology” (n. 2 above), p. 23Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.; see also the prefaces of Foster, R. F., ed., The Oxford History of Ireland (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar, and Hoppen, K. Theodore, Ireland since 1800: Conflict and Conformity (London and New York, 1989)Google Scholar, for this explicit assault on republican and nationalist mythology.

15 Fennell, Desmond, “Against Revisionism,” Irish Review 4 (Spring 1988): 22Google Scholar.

16 Bradshaw, p. 343.

17 See Dunne, Tom, Theobald Wolfe Tone: Colonial Outsider (Cork, 1982)Google Scholar; Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

18 Bradshaw (n. 1 above), p. 347.

19 Ibid., pp. 346–48; SirButterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931)Google Scholar, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge, 1944)Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., p. 350.

21 Historicism is also a term applied to the value-free, scientifically detached history which Bradshaw labels revisionist and, quite properly, empiricist.

22 I wish to offer my thanks to James S. Donnelly, Jr., for providing me with a tape of the panel on revisionism at the ACIS conference (University of Wisconsin—Madison, April 1991) in which Bradshaw presented these views.

23 Whelan, Kevin, “Come All You Staunch Revisionists: Towards a Post-revisionist Agenda for Irish History,” Irish Reporter, no. 2 (1991): 23Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., p. 26.

25 Elliott, Marianne, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (London and New Haven, Conn., 1989)Google Scholar; Foster, Modern Ireland (n. 7 above); Lee, Joe, Ireland, 1922–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

26 Whelan, , “Come All You Staunch Revisionists,” p. 26Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., p. 23.

28 Ibid., p. 24.

29 Ibid., p. 26.

30 Ibid.

31 Bradshaw (n. 1 above), p. 339; Bradshaw's article was provoked by the revisionism he detected in Ellis, Stephen G., “Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late Middle Ages,” Irish Historical Studies 25, no. 97 (May 1986): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Ellis's response to Bradshaw's attack, see Ellis, Stephen G., “Historiographical Debate: Representations of the Past in Ireland: Whose Past and Whose Present?” Irish Historical Studies 27, no. 108 (November 1991): 289–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bradshaw, p. 344.

33 See articles by O'Dowd, Mary, Brady, Ciaran, Gillespie, Raymond, and Cunningham, Bernadette in Women in Early Modern Ireland, ed. MacCurtain, Margaret and O'Dowd, Mary (Edinburgh, 1991)Google Scholar. Add to this list Mary Daly, who Bradshaw singles out for her clinical austerity in approaching the Famine, but whose work on Irish trade union women appears in MacCurtain, Margaret and O'Corrain, Donncha, eds., Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension (Dublin, 1978)Google Scholar, along with that of historians who receive Bradshaw's approval—O'Corrain himself, Joe Lee, and Gearoid O Tuathaigh.

34 Bradshaw, p. 338.

35 See, e.g., Cohen, Sande, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986)Google Scholar; Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; La Capra, Dominick, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989)Google Scholar; Poster, Mark, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989)Google Scholar; Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

36 Partner, Nancy F., “Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History,” Speculum 61 (1986): 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 For an antirevisionist review of recent work on the history of Irish nationalism, see Smyth, Jim, “An Entirely Exceptional Case: Ireland and the British Problem,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 999–1007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For the land war, see, e.g., Bew, Paul, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978)Google Scholar; Donnelly, James S. Jr., The Land People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Solow, Barbara L., The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1780–1903 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar. For demographic controversy, see, e.g., Connell, K. H., “The Potato in Ireland,” Past and Present, no. 23 (1962): 57–71Google Scholar; Cullen, L. M., “Irish History without the Potato,” Past and Present, no. 40 (1968): 72–83Google Scholar; Mokyr, Joel, “Irish History with the Potato,” Irish Economic and Social History 8 (1981): 8–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 For a review of this work, see Eley, Geoff, “The Left, the Nationalists and the Protestants: Some Recent Books on Ireland,” Michigan Quarterly Review 22 (Winter 1983): 107–29Google Scholar. See also Hutton, Sean and Stewart, Paul, eds., Ireland's Histories: Aspects of State, Society and Ideology (London and New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

40 Elliott, , Wolfe Tone (n. 25 above), p. 418Google Scholar.

41 See Bartlett, Thomas, “An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793,” Past and Present, no. 99 (1983): 412–64Google Scholar; Tom Dunne, Theobald Wolfe Tone. Bradshaw includes Bartlett in “a minority group within the professional school of Irish historians whose work demonstrates the feasibility of combining a fully critical methodology in the analysis of the evidence with a more sensitive response to its content” and refers to Dunne's work on Tone as an example of extreme “revisionist iconoclasm” (Bradshaw [n. 1 above], pp. 350, 343n.)

42 The historiographical revolution of the 1930s has tended to slight the eighteenth century as a whole, and its impact was felt in the realm of political history, which it has modified and filled out but has not profoundly challenged: Lecky, W. E. H., A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols. (London, 1898)Google Scholar. Neglect of the first half of the century, indeed, the first eight decades, is being redressed by the work of David Hayton, Thomas Bartlett, and others. See, e.g., Bartlett, Thomas and Hayton, David, eds., Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1900 (Belfast, 1979)Google Scholar. Louis Cullen has successfully revised interpretations of economic and social history by George O'Brien and K. H. Connell, and in this enterprise he has been ably supported by a younger generation of scholars. See, e.g., Cullen, L. M., An Economic History of Ireland since 1600 (London, 1976)Google Scholar, and The Emergence of Modern Ireland (London, 1981)Google Scholar. James Donnelly has led the way in examining closely agrarian secret societies and presenting them in the context of traditional yet rational responses to the erosion of the moral economy. See, e.g., Donnelly, J. S. Jr., “The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–5,” Irish Historical Studies 21 (March 1978): 20–45Google Scholar.

43 Moody, T. W. and Vaughan, W. E., eds., A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. For an especially penetrating review of this work, see Bartlett, Thomas, “A New History of Ireland,” Past and Present, no. 116 (1987): 206–19Google Scholar.

44 Dickson, David, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar.

45 Wall, Maureen, “The Rise of a Catholic Middle Class in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 11 (1958): 91–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cullen, L. M., “Catholics under the Penal Laws,” Eighteenth Century Ireland 1 (1986): 23–36Google Scholar, and “Galway Merchants in the Outside World,” in Galway: Town and Gown, ed. Cearbhaill, Diarmuid O (Dublin, 1984)Google Scholar; Dickson, David, “The Cork Merchant Community in the Eighteenth Century: A Regional Perspective,” in Negoce et industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siecles, ed. Cullen, L. M. and Butel, Paul (Paris, 1980), pp. 45–50Google Scholar; Whelan, Kevin, “The Regional Impact of Irish Catholicism,” in Common Ground, ed. Smyth, W. J. and Whelan, Kevin (Cork, 1988), pp. 253–77Google Scholar.

46 Power, T. P. and Whelan, Kevin, eds., Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1990)Google Scholar; Bartlett, Thomas, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Savage, Md., 1992)Google Scholar.

47 For Bradshaw's praise of Bartlett, see n. 28 above.

48 Bartlett, , Fall and Rise, p. 147Google Scholar.

49 Elliott, Wolfe Tone; Malcomson, A. P. W., John Foster: The Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Cullen, L. M., “The Political Structures of Defenderism,” in Ireland and the French Revolution, ed. Gough, Hugh and Dickson, David (Dublin, 1990), pp. 117–38Google Scholar; Jim Smyth, “Popular Politicisation, Defenderism and the Catholic Question,” in Ibid., pp. 109–16; Bartlett, “An End to Moral Economy”; Kelly, James, “The Genesis of Protestant Ascendancy: The Rightboy Disturbances of the 1780s,” in Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History, ed. O'Brien, Gerard (Dublin, 1989), pp. 93–127Google Scholar; Hill, Jacqueline, “The Meaning and Significance of Protestant Ascendancy, 1787–1840,” in Ireland after the Union: Proceedings of the Second Joint Meeting of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, London, 1986, intro. Blake, Lord (Oxford, 1989), pp. 1–22Google Scholar; Cullen, , Emergence of Modern Ireland, pp. 210–33Google Scholar, and “The 1798 Rebellion in the Eighteenth-Century Context,” in Radicals, Rebels, and Establishments, ed. Corish, P. (Belfast, 1985), pp. 91–113Google Scholar, and “The 1798 Rebellion in County Wexford: United Irishman Organization, Membership, Leadership,” in Wexford: History and Society, ed. Whelan, K. (Dublin, 1987), pp. 248–95Google Scholar; Kevin Whelan, “The Role of the Catholic Priests in the 1798 Rebellion in County Wexford,” in Ibid., pp. 296–315, and “Politicisation in County Wexford and the Origins of the 1798 Rebellion,” in Gough and Dickson, eds., pp. 156–78.

50 O'Brien, Gerard, Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., p. 13. In sharp contrast to O'Brien's work is a recent book exploring the interaction of public opinion and elite political behavior in the 1780s: Kelly, James, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992)Google Scholar

52 See, e.g., Murphy, Sean, “Charles Lucas and the Dublin Election of 1748–1749,” Parliamentary History 2 (1983): 93–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Jim, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992), chap. 6Google Scholar.

53 Elliott, Marianne, “The Origins and Transformation of Early Irish Republicanism,” International Review of Social History 23, pt. 3 (1978): 405–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For subsequent work on the Defenders, see Bartlett, Thomas, “Select Documents, XXXVIII: Defenders and Defenderism in 1795,” Irish Historical Studies 24, no. 95 (May 1985): 373–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cullen, “Political Structures”; Curtin, Nancy J., “The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a Mass-Based Revolutionary Organization, 1794–6,” Irish Historical Studies 24, no. 96 (November 1985): 463–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garvin, Tom, “Defenders, Ribbonmen, and Others: Underground Political Networks in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Past and Present, no. 96 (August 1982): 133–55Google Scholar; Miller, David W., “The Armagh Troubles, 1784–95,” in Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, ed. Clark, Samuel and Donnelly, James S. Jr. (Madison, Wis., 1983), pp. 155–91Google Scholar; Smyth, Men of No Property, chaps. 2, 5.

54 Gibbon, Peter, The Origins of Ulster Unionism (Manchester, 1975), chap. 2Google Scholar.

55 Bartlett, “An End to Moral Economy” (n. 41 above).

56 Cullen, , Emergence of Modern Ireland, pp. 210–33Google Scholar, “The 1798 Rebellion in the Eighteenth-Century Context,” and “The 1798 Rebellion in County Wexford;” Whelan, “The Role of the Catholic Priests in the 1798 Rebellion in County Wexford,” and “Politicisation in County Wexford.”

57 See, e.g., Miller, David W., “Presbyterian and ‘Modernization’ in Ulster,” Past and Present, no. 80 (1978): 66–90Google Scholar; Whelan, Kevin, “The United Irishmen, the Enlightenment and Popular Culture,” in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, ed. Dickson, David, Keogh, Daire, and Whelan, Kevin (Dublin, 1993), pp. 269–96Google Scholar.

58 Donnelly, James S. Jr., “Propagating the Cause of the United Irishmen,” Studies 69, no. 273 (Spring 1980): 15–23Google Scholar.

59 Dunne, Tom, “Popular Ballads, Revolutionary Rhetoric and Politicisation,” in Gough, and Dickson, , eds. (n. 49 above), p. 140Google Scholar.

60 Curtin, Nancy J., The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Whelan, “The United Irishmen, the Enlightenment and Popular Culture”; Smyth, Men of No Property.

61 See, e.g., Anthony Coughlin, review of Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence, by Elliott, Marianne, Irish Literary Supplement 9 (Spring 1990): 25–56Google Scholar.

62 For a review of both enterprises, see Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–79 (Glasgow, 1981), pp. 279–94Google Scholar.

63 Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 12Google Scholar.

64 Foster, , Modern Ireland (n. 7 above), p. 3Google Scholar.

65 See, e.g., Brown, Ireland.

66 To quote from an extreme postmodernist critic, Sande Cohen in Historical Culture, “Critical thinking is not possible when connected to academic historical thinking” (p. 2); liberal and marxist history arises “from the ill-conceived act of trying to make ‘history’ relevant to critical thinking. What actually occurs by means of ‘historical thought’ is the destruction of a fully semanticized present” (p. 1); history must be “radically severed from the past“; “‘history’ can only project the simulation of the remembered.” It is random and arbitrary, manipulated and abusive, “an alibi” of last resort to substitute for critical thinking (p. 329).

67 Whelan, , “Revisionists,” p. 26Google Scholar.

68 Foster, R. F., ed., The Oxford History of Ireland (Oxford, 1992), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

69 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 8Google Scholar. She goes on to justify this astonishing statement by asserting simply that the country was more Catholic than Protestant, thus eliding the fact that it was run by Protestants demanding an increasing share of imperial privileges, equally if not more responsive to threats from Catholic France, and which offered not only its young men in military service in greater proportion than other countries in the British Isles (Tom Bartlett estimates that one in six Irishmen saw some military service, a ratio he regards as an underestimate, with 200,000 Catholic soldiers alone serving in the military in the 1790s [Bartlett, , Fall and Rise (n. 46 above), p. 323Google Scholar]), but which also produced one of the most prominent spokesman for Britishness and empire, the very self-consciously Irish Edmund Burke. And in a study that extends almost four decades into the union of Great Britain and Ireland, she misses the opportunity to show how significant numbers of Irish Protestants and even Catholics came to jealously guard their British identity.

70 Gray, Peter, “Interview with Roy Foster,” History Ireland 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 12Google Scholar.

71 Graham, Tommy, “Interview with Brendan Bradshaw,” History Ireland 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 54Google Scholar.

72 See, e.g., Lynn Hunt's foreword to Ragan, Bryant T. Jr., and Williams, Elizabeth A., eds., Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992)Google Scholar, as well as the “introduction” by the editors for a review of French revolutionary scholarship and the new directions it is assuming.

73 For a penetrating critique of this model presented by Clark, in English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar, see Innes, Joanna, “Jonathan Clark, Social History and England's ‘Ancien Regime,’” Past and Present, no. 115 (1987): 165–200Google Scholar.

74 Connolly, Sean, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

75 Ibid., pp. 302–3.

76 See, e.g., Hoppen, K. T., Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

77 See Edwards, R. Dudley and Williams, T. Desmond, eds., The Great Famine (Dublin, 1956)Google Scholar.

78 For Donnelly's engagement with the question of British moral responsibility for the Great Famine, see Vaughan, W. E., ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. 5, Ireland under the Union, 1801–70 (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, chaps. 12–13. See also O'Grada, Cormac, The Great Irish Famine (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.