Are We All Transnationalists Now?

Abstract

O of the boldest academic deceptions of our time is the mantra that history (in particular Irish history) needs to be rescued from its lingering ‘insularity’ by the application of a ‘transnational perspective’ – fresh, flexible, cosmopolitan, and marketable. No self-respecting practitioner today would deny the importance of pursuing ‘a mosaic of individuals, groups and activities connected and sustained across national borders’, as this perspective is defined in one of the most valuable and wide-ranging contributions in Whelehan’s volume (p. 45). Yet, on reflection, it is obvious that this is precisely what a great proportion of Irish historians have been doing over the past half century at least. The lingering fact of British rule has always made it impossible to write about modern Ireland’s political history from an ‘insular’ perspective, though excessive emphasis has admittedly been given to the relationship with Britain. Yet, over the last two centuries, this distortion has regularly been challenged by historians, often but not always ‘nationalist’, who have pursued and celebrated Ireland’s European and global connections. This applies particularly to the study of Irish literature, Gaelic language and culture, Irish nationalism and republicanism, and disciplines with conspicuously transnational scope such as military, economic, and class history. With the obvious exception of local studies, it is difficult to point to a single sector of modern Irish history which has lacked a ‘transnational perspective’. In one respect, historians of Ireland have long been at the forefront of transnational studies. Massive and sustained emigration to Britain, the Americas, and the British empire has generated a vast body of scholarship concerning the intrinsically transnational ‘diaspora’. Apart from the fact that most natives of post-Famine Ireland spent most of their lives outside Ireland, the diaspora engendered numerous foreign historians of partly Irish descent who have been impelled to try to connect the histories of home and host societies. In my view, the resultant avalanche of Irish transnational studies has