Michael Durey

The key to understanding eighteenth-century American political discourse since the publication of Caroline Robbins's The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman in 1959 and Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967 has been the recognition that political ideas from England and Scotland underpinned republican ideology. Historians have failed to appreciate the significant number of British and Irish radicals who fled to the United States in the 1790s. Utopian expectations are normally disappointed when confronted with reality, and the emigres' dreams were no exception. Many radicals were unpleasantly surprised by their initial reception in America. Far more important than the language of virtue for the emigres was the language of natural rights and the ethic of individualism. The emigres' emphasis on individual freedom and opportunity made their acceptance of commercial society inevitable. It was Thomas Paine who linked individualism and commerce most clearly.

The struggle between the authorities and the United Irishmen for the hearts and minds of the Irish people in the years leading up to the 1798 rebellion may be pursued at a number of levels: relatively openly in the propaganda of the time; more opaquely in the quest for control of the processes of the law and of the jury rooms of the assize circuits; and very indistinctly in the intense local conflicts which sought, by the administering of oaths, to bend the will of the community towards either the status quo or revolution. A war of oaths - of allegiance to king and constitution on the one side and of secret commitment to political, sometimes social, revolution and a French invasion on the other - began in earnest in 1795 and continued even after the rebellion. This struggle was important at the time, and continues to be significant for an understanding of the period leading up to the rebellion, because its objectives brought into the spotlight the issues of the scale of commitment, and the fluctuations in opinion, of the whole adult population of Ireland, in a period of acute upheaval. For political activists on both sides there may have been a simple, if stark, choice to be made, but for many, if not most, ordinary people this was a very delicate situation, for it was to squeeze them between the Scylla of vertical loyalty to traditional landlord authority and the Charybdis of horizontal loyalty to neighbours already committed to subversion. The widespread experience among the Irish of reluctantly occupying the space between two implacable forces does not feature strongly in most interpretations of the years leading up to the rebellion in Ireland in 1798. The historical construction of the memory, or, rather, memories, of 1798 over the past two centuries has not found room for the ambiguities, ambivalences, equivocations and uncertainties expressed by the actors - or should it be victims? - cited above, who represent but a tiny sample of suppliers of a much larger body of similar evidence. Their attitudes and feelings could subsequently have been depicted in story and in art, but they were not. lnstead, great moments of commemoration, as in 1898 and 1998, sought to create a nation's history that answered contemporary needs, leaving no room for the personal hesitations, neutrality and somersaults so common during the 1790s. The bold statue of the determined peasant in the city of Wexford, pike firmly grasped, sleeves rolled up for action and his chest swelled out - but, oddly, without a hat, de rigueur in 1798 - or the statue of the young peasant with unsheathed sword being inspired by his priest in Enniscorthy, represent an uncomplicated late nineteenth-century representation of the rebellion that helped to forge a nationalist unity, but at the expense of a more subtle understanding both of the difficulties of living through a period of social dislocation and of the 'varieties of Irishness '. 1 As Nancy Curtin has put it, 'Nationalist myths comfort and affirm, but still exclude'. 2 Similarly with the bicentennial commemoration, the official organising committee of which found included in its 'mission statement' an order to shjfl: attention away from the military aspects of 1798 towards recognising 'the 1798 rebellion as a forward-looking, popular movement aspiring to unity'. Don't mention the war, as Roy Foster succinctly put it: but also, don't mention the means of 'aspiring to unity' .3 For to do so would inevitably illuminate the underlying intimidation and violence that pervaded Irish society from the mid-1790s, exhibited even in the manner in which the population was recruited to a cause. Competitive oath-taking reflected not unity but dissonance, the breaking of social bonds - when 'Even door neighbours who lived in habits of intimacy for years will now scarce exchange words' - and, eventually, civil war.4

Thomas Paine is a unique political thinker who has continued to attract scholarly and popular attention from the time he wrote about both the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. This collection brings together the most recent essays debating the meaning and relevance of Paine's works. It includes an historiographical survey of scholarship about Paine and articles by the leading authorities in the field. The essays survey his life, analyze his ideas, place them in their social and intellectual context, and appraise their significance today.

The study of Ireland in the explosive decade of the 1790s is a growing area in the study of Irish history. Historians generally focus on on the radical and revolutionary United Irish movement, popular politics, and the lower-class secret society, the Defenders. This 2000 volume of essays explores United Irish propaganda and organisation, and looks at the forces of revolution before and during the 1798 rebellion. It also begins to redress imbalances in the historiography of the period by turning to the face of counter-revolution - examining the crisis in law and order, the role of the magistrates, the strength and weaknesses of the state, and the scope and character of the repression following the rebellion. Other essays consider the short-term and longer-term consequences of these momentous events, including their impact upon the churches, the Act of Union, and the politics of early nineteenth-century America.

Britain has a long tradition of radicalism and this tradition has been the topic of much interest to and much debate amongst scholars. In a volume which honours one of the subject's most renowned and respected historians, Malcolm I. Thomis, a distinguished team of contributors present fresh and inspiring essays which focus on some of the events, people and ideas which shaped the currents of radicalism in the turbulent years now appropriately described as the 'age of romanticism and revolution'. British political history in recent years has taken a so-called 'linguistic turn' and this collection reflects that trend in exploring the networks and culture of radical enthusiasm from the time of the American Revolution to the period of Chartist activity, thus ensuring the value of this book for literary scholars and historians of all levels.

For the first time, this innovative reference book surveys the Romantic Age through all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. This multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms--its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and literature--and as a historical epoch of "revolutionary" transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society.

For the first time, this innovative reference book surveys the Romantic Age through all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. This multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms--its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and literature--and as a historical epoch of "revolutionary" transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society.

For the first time, this innovative reference book surveys the Romantic Age through all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. This multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms--its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and literature--and as a historical epoch of "revolutionary" transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society.