The general contribution of this highly engaging and impressively detailed book is to provide a new economic and social historiography of the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). It centers around the challenge of establishing a new government on a territory that, up until the events under consideration, was long part of the British Empire. Ireland is known to be Britain’s first colony, both in and out of its dominion. The challenge documented by the author, whose thesis is based on his award-winning doctoral research, is principally a financial one. Exploiting novel archival material on individual-level subscriptions to the National Loan (by national residents) and to the External Loans (by foreign residents), floated by the underground Irish republican government to fund the new state, the book asks two important scholarly questions: how were these loan-schemes arranged, who subscribed to them and why? In answering them, the author contributes additional layers of complexity to the historical scholarship.
In the author’s own words, the book’s “findings complicate the narrative of the Irish War of Independence, presenting a more nuanced picture of the Dáil’s [new Irish Parliament’s] support base than that portrayed by the current historiography. By focusing on civilians rather than fighters, it also broadens the narrative to include women, men outside fighting age and clerics” (p. 79, emphasis added). This is certainly the case, despite the chronology of the financial arrangements between different actors being somewhat muddled in the early chapters. The book is also a very welcome contribution to events that are intrinsically far from being straightforward and obvious. As an example, the novel representative sample of 5 percent of all loan subscribers to the national loan showed that Republican nationalism was mostly “‘…a rural preoccupation.’” The “‘country was always ahead of the towns’” (p. 96), which, from our present gaze, goes against the empirical tendency for cities to be more “progressive” than the countryside. This is complemented by other counter-intuitive expositions of who the subscribers of the national loan (pp. 114–116) and first external loan (pp. 230–235) actually were based on socio-demographic characteristics. Conflicts of this magnitude should earn the right to be more complicated than surface accounts of present expectations of them would indicate. The book does this justice.
The author cites five domains that his research adds value to: three focused on the national scholarship—the financing of the new Irish government, the internationalization of the war of independence, and the popular support for independence—and two focused on the international scholarship—guerrilla war finance and the post-WWI breakup of the Empire. In my view, there is an important undeveloped dimension that is at the thematic heart of the story but very much submerged into the background of the book’s central narrative due to its own scope.
But before discussing it, let me draw upon two points the book reveals with great clarity and significance that further roots our understanding of modern Irish economic and social history. One is the legacy in Ireland of mobilizing international (mostly American) capital for domestic economic development. This mobilization has been seen as a critical feature of Ireland’s economic development in the twentieth century, mostly emphasized since the 1950s (see, for instance, Ó Gráda, Cormac, and Kevin O’Rourke. “The Irish Economy during the Century after Partition.” Economic History Review 75 [2022]: 336–370). Shadow of a Taxman reveals an earlier, lesser researched, and arguably more significant history of American involvement, whereby out of the £1.8 million collected from some 440,000 people in Ireland and abroad between 1919 and 1921, bond subscribers living in the United States represented 60 percent of total subscribers and accounted for 80 percent of all the proceeds. The second point is the tight bonds of Church and State in the administration of the country’s independence, whose subsequent history has been well documented. The book shows us that the Catholic clergy were critical actors in the genesis of the Irish Republic. Without them, the effectiveness of the loan campaigns—organized around in-mass propaganda and church-gate collections—would not have been the same.
The underdeveloped contribution of the book, which in my view merits recognition and further discussion, is on the origins of state finance, or financial sovereignty more generally. This has partly to do with the theme of guerrilla war finance but extends beyond it. Here, the book opens the door to insights on the nature of money in the explicit context of (revolutionary) state-building. The Irish Revolution and the underground counter-state are yet another illustration of what we may summarize as the credit (or state) theory of money at work. This theory was first exposed in comprehensive fashion by Georg Friedrich Knapp (Staatliche Theorie des Geldes. Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1905. The State Theory of Money. Translated by H. M. Lucas and J. Bonar. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1924), and subsequently complemented by Alfred Mitchell Innes (“The Credit Theory of Money.” Banking Law Journal [December/January 1914]: 151–68) and John Maynard Keynes (A Treatise on Money. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1930)—sees money as being a creature of law, and thus intimately tied to states through their recognition before law. It is only through this prism that we can understand why Irish bonds could not be issued in America to finance a state that did not yet exist in the eyes of the law, but “bond certificates” representing a future promise of a future nation could (p. 136). Or why U.S. Liberty Loans could be accepted as a means of payment for these certificates (p. 155). Or even why the reaction of the U.S. financial press was so scathing to the Irish bond drive (pp. 170–71), despite Ireland’s heralded resource capacity (pp. 168, 259), before turning bullish after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (p. 263), whose very negotiations were “forced” by international opinion filtered through the bond subscriptions (p. 290). In a nutshell, credibility. The book shows that the mobilization of opinion for negotiating was as important as the mobilization of money for fighting (after all, half of all U.S. bond proceeds had never left New York banks by the time the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, and less than half of all U.S. subscribers filed claims for repayment).
A state obtains recognition through identification with a polity. In this, popular marketing and finance feed off each other to erect a nation out of credit, whose Latin antecedent credere literally means to “believe” or “trust.” The law then follows. As put by Laurence Ginnell, the Dáil’s representative in the Argentinian bond campaign: “[The Irish Republican Government] undertakes the task itself, seeks for a loan for the purpose on the credit of its own resources…Promoting the success of this loan will be practical help and recognition of the new republic by citizens, in anticipation of official recognition by government” (p. 277, emphasis added). Or, in the words of Ernest Blythe, the Irish Free State’s first Minister of Finance, “If it had not been for the generosity and the faith of the people who subscribed to the Loan there would be no Free State to-day” (p. 299, emphasis added). Given the monopoly of religion over faith, it is not an accident that the links between Church and State were strong from the outset. As the author notes early on, “For a fledging state with weak institutions and untested popularity, the network and credibility provided by an organized religion is a valuable resource” (p. 39, emphasis added).
The conundrum that occupies part of the first chapter of the book (“How to Fund a Revolution”) is a fascinating revelation of all this. In order to build state legitimacy in such circumstances, Irish revolutionaries tabled an income tax, a new currency, expropriation of assets, natural resource exploitation, and aid from other Great Powers to finally settle for bond subscriptions in 1919. Interestingly, Michael Collin’s income tax plan was abandoned for fear of public rejection given the geographical and demographical distribution of income. This shows that states need legitimate sovereignty before being able to impose a tax. The creation of a new Irish currency to displace the British Pound was deemed “impractical” (p. 18) at the time, when a currency was probably understood to emanate from the credit of the state, which equates to a belief that it has value. Without a credit history to count on, Irish revolutionaries seemed to grasp that nurturing goodwill is what a nascent state must do, as both taxes and currencies are reflections of the pre-existence of goodwill—according to the credit theory of money, a state’s currency obtains value from rights and obligations granted and imposed on the citizenry, namely tax liabilities, and their redeemability with the national currency as a unit of account. Taxes are the debt of households, while a currency is the debt of the state’s goodwill. Thus, the book can be read as an exploration of how this goodwill was sought after in Ireland. In this same line, the theme of war as a catalyst for financial innovation—which the book amply unearths for Ireland—deserves a last word. As Nicolas Barreyre has pointed out (“The Scales of Money: Monetary Sovereignty and the Spatial Dimensions of American Politics after the Civil War.” Translated from the French by Michael C. Behrent. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69, no. 2 [April–June 2014]: 311–39), this was very evidently the case for the Irish Revolution’s main backers during their post-independence Civil War.
