Thomas O’Loughlin lectures in theology at the University of Wales,Lampeter. Caoimhghin Ó Murchadha is a postgraduate history student at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. Kenneth Nicholls lectures in Irish history at University College Cork. Bernard Crick is Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh. Peter Gray lectures in history at the University of Southampton.
Over the past quarter century the Irish land question has been the subject of a barrage of historical inquiry. Traditional nationalist interpretations have been deconstructed and inverted, the class composition and objectives of agrarian movements dissected, and the triangular political relationships between these organisations, landowners and the British government examined in depth. Building on this … Read more
When I was a student in London in the late 1940s I was much impressed by Harold Laski’s love of Seeley’s dictum which he worked into nearly every lecture—‘History without politics has no fruit. Politics without history has no root’. So to read twenty years later the Irish revisionist historians was not so much a … Read more
It is hardly more than twenty years since John Pocock first called for the creation of the ‘unknown subject’ (as he called it) of British History. Although the concept has not yet managed to penetrate to book shops (where shelves labelled ‘British History’ tend to be occupied by old-fashioned ‘popular’ histories of England). It is … Read more
The events of last summer raised many questions about the nature and exercise of certain aspects of unionist cultural traditions in the North. Whilst historically it is the case that only a minority of the Protestant population there has, at any time, ever had actual membership of organisations such as the Orange Order, the Royal … Read more