Journal of World History

Ely Janis’s aim is to give a survey of Irish American movements in North America, and in doing so he fulfills a major gap in the literature on the Land War, which has previously concentrated mostly on the Land War in Ireland itself, with limited studies of how the Land War was radicalized by the activities of the Ladies’ Land League and in particular their activities based in New York of raising financial support from new-world Irish. A generation after the mass exodus caused by the famine, Irish Americans continued to identify with the politics of being a British colony, even as they organized for working-class unions in America or identified as upwardly mobile members of a respectable middle class.

Janis’s vision of “Greater Ireland” encompasses two ways in which Irish Americans of the 1880s came to stand for broader solidarities. First, there is a “Greater Ireland” that is of interest chiefly to historians of the Atlantic World and diaspora in general. It maps out the Irish Americans who identified themselves as Irish and continued their involvement in Irish politics from Chicago and Buffalo. Middle-class Irish Americans, gathered around the postcolonial movement for Irish [End Page 340] independence, identified themselves with the cause of Irish nationalism. Janis identifies this middle-class Irish American politics as “conservative nationalism,” which followed Charles Stewart Parnell and the movement for home rule. By contrast, working-class Irish Americans tended to identify with a tradition that Janis calls “physical-force nationalism,” associated with John Devoy in New York City and the Fenian movement in Ireland, which looked to an armed and violent revolution, or “radical nationalism,” associated with the Irish World, a publication that argued for a sweeping program of economic and political social justice (p. 7).

The second version of “Greater Ireland” will be more compelling to other students of American history, race, and class more generally. It concerns how working-class Irish Americans, who participated at a distance in the ongoing rural incendiary actions of the Land War of 1881–1882 by sending money, came to employ a larger discourse for rethinking the state and the economy in such a way as to include those dispossessed by class and race more generally. As Janis understands, the Land War was wrapped up in charges that the economy was characterized by “landlordism”—Herbert Spencer’s term for a monopoly holding of titles to real estate by a minority elite who also control the legislature and judiciary, thus enforcing their power to charge high rents with the force of police-led eviction. Countering “landlordism” were utopian ideas about remaking the economy in the service of tenant farmers and workers who rented their dwellings, notably the “land nationalization” schemes associated with Michael Davitt and the “Single Tax” on land proposed by Henry George. Janis shows that these proposals inspired a large cohort of working-class activists who were not Irish themselves, even while the core of George’s mayoral candidacy for New York City remained Catholic. He also traces how the Irish “boycott,” originally a rent-strike tactic from the Irish Land War of 1881–1882, which involved “shunning” members of the community who paid their rent, was rapidly adopted by other members of the working class for union actions in the years after Irish American solidarity brought news of Irish boycotts to the United States. Janis also offers a new perspective by accounting for the role of women in Irish-American nationalist movements, although he follows generations of feminist Irish historians like Jane Cote, Mary Ward, Adrian Mulligan and Patricia Groves in documenting the work of the Ladies’ Land League on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 7).

The book’s narrative suffers from an emphasis on top-down leadership rather than bottom-up organizing, which underplays the extensive and impressive work that Janis has undertaken in the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, Cincinnati, and Dublin, following the [End Page 341] correspondence of Irish activists and their American supporters, tracking down the movements organized by Irish-American mill workers, scouring newspapers for named lists of the Irish American mill-girls whose dollars subsidized the prisoners of the Land League in Ireland. The narrative instead largely highlights the importance of familiar male leaders like Michael Davitt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and John Devoy, thereby giving an image of a charisma-driven movement, even as the facts amassed by Janis point to a movement that was funded in the majority by anonymous women, many of them working class, each contributing less than a dollar towards the tens of thousands sent over to Ireland. Janis’s facts are revolutionary for how we understand Irish nationalism; restating the decentralized, bottom-up nature of the movement’s finances in the introduction would help the book enormously.

The book’s broad vision and careful research are also betrayed by the narrow time period that Janis offers as context in the introduction and epilogue. Janis’s sights are focused on five years, the period between the New Departure of 1878—a strategy for linking physical-force nationalism and constitutional movements for Irish Independence on both sides of the Atlantic—and the aftermath of the Kilmainham Treaty of 1882, when a concord between Irish activist Charles Stewart Parnell and the British Prime Minister Gladstone effectively terminated political and middle-class support for the movement of violent agrarian activism characterized as the Irish Land War. The book’s thesis is that the Kilmainham Treaty, by charting a political strategy orthogonal to the radical solutions organized under the Ladies’ Land League, exposed the rifts dividing classes and genders in both Irish and Irish American political movements. While the movement for an independent Ireland would continue across the Atlantic, purged of some of the radical elements of the Land War, never again would it see the broad, intercontinental political and financial support that it had when Irish activism stood for a “Greater Ireland” vision of political economy that included women and all members of the working class.

For readers in World History unfamiliar with the details of Irish history or unpersuaded of the importance of this movement for other postcolonial struggles, Janis’s careful outlining of names and dates may prove difficult to follow. Had an editor or advisor encouraged Janis to spend a few more paragraphs writing about the broader global significance of the Irish Land War and Irish Independence, the book’s significance would be easier to recognize for those not already interested in the history of land wars and Irish American identity. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin Press may be persuaded to issue an edition [End Page 342] with a new introduction at some point, one that more forcefully states all that is new in Janis’s perspective on a diverse, women-led, bottom-up, global solidarity movement for the right to land that was launched by Greater Ireland. If so, they would do a service to World History and to Janis himself, who has written a carefully researched, deeply thought out political and social history. It deserves to be read not merely by specialists.