Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for StabilityThe search for stability proved elusive. Nationalist Ireland mobilised a mass democratic movement under O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. The mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912-22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. "...a substantial and thoroughly crafted study of a very complex period.... His virtues as a historian predominate - clarity of thought and style, and a mastery of the telling quotation, which penetrates to the heart of the matter." The Irish Times |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 70
... majority — a majority , that is , in the overwhelmingly Protestant United Kingdom with its Protestant king and constitution . The Union , in this view , would place Irish Catholics rather in the position of the Protestant Huguenots in ...
... majority of the whole kingdom , of which the Protestants of Ireland constituted an integral part ( according to their own reasonable claim ) . At any rate , if the Irish majority was the jury , the British majority and its government ...
... majority status afforded them in Ireland . It was an experience that was to revive , and survive the vicissitudes of political fortune . They were as self - conscious of their majority position as Protestants were of their minority ...
Contents
The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers 180829 | 37 |
Testing the Union 183045 | 63 |
The Land and its Nemesis 18459 | 105 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown