The Rhodes to home rule: Irish nationalism and imperial federation (1867-1998)

Thesis

This doctoral dissertation illuminates, for the first time in Irish and British imperial historiography, the intricate intersection of Irish Home Rule and the movement for Imperial Federation. It proposes a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between the Irish Parliamentary Party and the leading British imperialist of the age, Cecil Rhodes. Using a range of previously unknown or unexamined sources, the thesis draws attention to heretofore unexplored imperial aspects of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s ‘New Departure’ policy. It analyses how the entanglement of Irish nationalism with diasporic imperialism added resilience and resources to the Irish Home Rule Movement, but also how the confluence of Irish and imperialist interests implicated Irish nationalism in complex, contradictory, and sometimes controversial questions of race relations as well as in the rapidly evolving geopolitics of global power. In so doing it rewrites established narratives about both Irish nationalism and Imperial Federation. The dissertation also considers Edward Carson’s own relationship with the movement for Imperial Federation and explores how close Irish Unionists and Nationalists came to a compromise that could have created an Imperial Federation. Finally, though these proposals initially failed in Ireland, it details how the structures first conceived in the era of Imperial Federation to act as a stepping-stone to wider imperial reform were revived and repurposed in the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, thus demonstrating that Imperial Federation, which has tended to be treated as an annex of imperial history and ignored in Irish historiography, has had a significant and lasting impact on the political institutions of the island of Ireland today.

Authors: Nevin, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-avdqokn9g
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Edward Carson; Irish unionism; imperial history; Ireland; Isaac Butt; Irish home rule; Irish nationalism; intergovernmentalism; British history; imperialism; imperial federation; supranationalism; colonialism; Ulster unionism; Cecil Rhodes; internationalism; nationalism; British Empire; global history; Irish history; colonial history; Charles Stewart Parnell; John Redmond; home rule
• Subjects: History; Economic history; International relations; Geopolitics; Home rule--Ireland; Great Britain--Colonies; Ireland--History--Union, 1801; Home rule; Imperial preference; British--South Africa--History; Irish--Australia--History; Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland); World politics; Internationalism; Imperial federation; Nationalism; Constitutional history; Diplomatic history; British--India--History; Law--History; New Zealand--History--19th century