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This chapter focuses on Joyce and ‘the Irish question’. The aims of Irish eloquence were recurring features of political debate, partly as a result of the Act of Union that saw Irish politicians enter Westminster in 1801. Born in year that clôture was implemented (1882), Joyce is the last writer who had persistent recourse to the styles of Victorian oratory in his work. Indeed, the closure was itself instituted to combat Irish obstructionism in the Commons, and the loquacious tactics had a key part to play in the erosion of parliamentary autonomy at the end of the century. The chapter considers Joyce's early work and ends with a sustained focus on Ulysses (1922), thinking through the implications of the writer's choice to structure his masterpiece around the figure of the most renowned orator in the classical literary tradition.

This chapter discusses the political activities of Lord Derby after his third term as prime minister of Great Britain in 1868. After February 1868, Derby became the guardian angel of the Conservative government, a venerated presence hovering over the shoulder of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. He continued to provide Disraeli with political advice, especially on the Irish question. However, after Derby's premiership, the Liberal Party started to consider the Conservatives with a view to contingencies.

This chapter examines the situation in Ireland during the outbreak of World War I. While the war refrigerated the Irish question, the issue continued to evolve, stimulated rather than stifled by the new circumstances that the war introduced. The chapter suggests that the tone of the wartime relations between Ireland and Britain at the official and public level was set by John Redmond's celebrated performance in a debate at the House of Commons in August 1914.

This chapter explores the impact that English politics and institutions had on Risorgimento liberalism. It argues that the exiles' observations can be seen as the foundation of Risorgimento Anglophilia. Italian historiography has traditionally viewed Risorgimento Anglophilia as evidence of the backward nature of Italian moderate liberalism. The writings on England of Giuseppe Pecchio, Pellegrino Rossi, and Ugo Foscolo and other exiles, however, demonstrate that it was thoroughly conversant with French Anglophilia, and that exile liberalism was in fact more progressive than its French equivalent, as it continued to support the revolutionary idea of popular sovereignty while praising the role of an aristocracy devoted to the public good. At the same time, when assessing the possibility of transferring foreign constitutions to Italy, the exiles almost invariably advocated the integration of the most advanced French and English political models with local institutions, and the adoption of reforms inspired by 18th-century Italian philosophers and constitutionalists like Filangieri or Pagano.

The Ulster Unionist movement established itself as the most significant counter-revolutionary force in Irish political life. Its members were motivated by a desire to maintain the union and a yet deeper determination to resist the authority of any future Dublin parliament. Meanwhile, between 1915 and 1919, convergence of opinion concerning the Irish question emerged at the highest level in British political life. It found expression in the government of Ireland act, 1920. This provided for the formation of devolved governments in both southern and a six-county Northern Ireland, each to be responsible for ‘peace, order, and good government’ within their respective jurisdictions. Ireland was to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom and the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament was to be undiminished.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Irish question, and specifically, the governance of Ireland. Throughout the early nineteenth century, Americans of different political persuasions believed that Ireland would eventually achieve some form of national independence. This is because the proponents of Irish self-governance to back up their argument cite the prior existence of an Irish Parliament that had been bribed out of existence at the turn of the nineteenth century under a fraudulent Act of Union. They also identify widely-known figures, such as Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan, to support the contention that Ireland produced statesmen of substance who might populate another Irish Parliament to good effect. Moreover, observers of Anglo-Irish relations drew on Revolutionary-era connections between Ireland and colonial America to suggest a deep-rooted affinity between two provinces subject to the dictates of the London metropole.

It was the text of Regulation 14B, not its original limited purpose as an instrument of alien control, which lived on, and this text was drafted so as not to restrict the scope of the regulation to that purpose. The expression ‘of hostile origin’ clearly included former enemy citizens, and perhaps those whose parents were of enemy citizenship. ‘Of hostile associations’ was much less precise. The war with Germany was not the only problem then confronting government; there was the Irish question, and the authorities made extensive use of Regulation 14B to crush the Irish rebellion of 1916. With the official end of the war on August 31, 1921 executive detention ceased to be possible in mainland Britain under the Defence of the Realm Act, and with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 6, 1921, and the establishment of the Irish Free State, it might be supposed that detention in Britain under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920 might then have ceased too. But, incredibly, the arrests and detentions continued.

The marketability of real estate could mean different things in different contexts, and nowhere was this more true than in the law, where the idea of marketability raised specific and technical issues pertaining both to the identity of land and to claims of ownership and tenure. Chapter 4 argues that these issues can be traced through the debate over title registration and the broader history of land law reform. In these debates, commercial metaphors were often used to capture what reformers like Robert Wilson and Robert Torrens saw as the essential transformation needed to make real estate a modern commodity. If land could be traded like other commodities--watches, say, or stocks--the property market could finally be made to function like any other market. The question of how best to legally configure marketable property drew in debates on colonial land ownership, in particular the Irish Land Question, and the trustworthiness of new title certificates and the state authority upon which they would be based.

This chapter presents Barbara Solow's reflections on The Land Question and the Irish Economy 1870-1903. The intellectual context in which the book came to be researched and written is outlined. Barbara Solow suggests that, notwithstanding considerable technological advances and the accumulation of new research in the meantime, the basic thesis of her book remains essentially correct. She does suggest, however, that if she were to rewrite the book today she would put the Irish story in a broader context, both conceptually and historically. Only after the book had appeared did it become apparent that it may be seen as a case study of Marx's theory of primitive accumulation. A case is made for the relevance of Jon S. Cohen and Martin L. Weitzman's account of what happens when common rights are converted to private property.

This chapter traces the beginnings of the current peace process back as far as the Anglo–Irish Agreement of 1985 — the Hillsborough Agreement. It compares that Agreement with the one reached at Belfast on Good Friday 1998 and considers in what directions further progress was needed before one could begin to talk with confidence about a ‘settlement’ of the Irish question having been achieved.

Philip Bull's Cambridge Ph.D dissertation (1972) was, in part, an attempt to unravel the relationship of the land issue to nationalist politics in Ireland in the period 1895 to 1904. This was a decade in which both these phenomena became unstable variables. His exploration of the historical significance of this relationship in this period developed subsequently parallel to the unfolding of the crisis in Northern Ireland and of changes in the way in which the nineteenth and twentieth century history of Ireland came to be understood. In this chapter he develops and justifies the argument that the course of events in Ireland in the 1970s and up to the present has given a new context within which the working out of the Irish land question should now be understood.