Ireland and the 'ends' of the British Empire, 1886 to the present

This FLF is driven by an overarching research question: was Ireland a laboratory for the 'ends' of the British Empire as much as it was for its creation (Ohlmeyer; Kenny)?

To answer it, this project takes a global, interdisciplinary approach with a collaborative team situated across History, Political Science, International Relations, Public Policy, media, and the creative arts. This team will consider how policymakers and those who implemented policy, anti-colonial activists, Irish settlers and diasporas, and proponents of internationalism, approached the question of Ireland within the British Empire, and how the legacies of those interactions shaped the 'ends' of the Empire system.

Part of this project's innovation rests on considering elites, such as colonial administrators and policymakers, alongside activists whose ideas and activities contributed to decolonisation. These groups are rarely in conversation with each other. Nor are they in discussion with public policy practitioners today, who 1) seek to use lessons from the past to adjudicate on future policy 2) manage a fractured post-Brexit British-Irish landscape, with consequences for Northern Ireland, and 3) devise policies to deal with the legacies of the Empire in different national contexts.

The first major work package reconstructs a global history of policies and policymakers whose experience working on Irish affairs and drawing 'solutions' for Ireland shaped the exercise of imperial rule in Palestine, Kenya, India, and the construction of the Commonwealth. The second work package takes a global view of anti-colonial activism using the Irish as connective tissue. Black Atlantic intellectuals developing pan-African nationalism looked to Ireland to understand Irish nationalist successes, failures, and contextual differences, shaping pan-African ideas and movements such as Garveyism (Getachew). Indian and Jamaican activists adopted party names, causes and agendas based on Irish models, including 'Home Rule for India', swaraj, and the 'Our Own' movement, modelled on Irish republican party, Sinn Féin, trans. 'Ourselves Alone'(O'Malley). The third and fourth packages address aspects of the changing geopolitical environment during and after the First World War. They explore how diasporic Irish constituencies at senior levels within Ireland and the White Dominions loosened ties from London, while others in Ireland and the USA lobbied for the shaping and breaking of empire using international discourses and organisations, such as the League of Nations. The 'cultural' mechanisms of anti-colonial resistance using music, literature, poetry, and film will be explored in years 5-7. While there was no 'domino effect' of decolonisation, this project follows Darwin (2009) in his claim that the various military, economic, familial, ideological, and cultural components of empire 'ended' at different times and were responsive to dramatically evolving contexts. And my contention is that the Irish were practically, figuratively, and ideologically implicated in them all.

The empirical study complements a series of co-designed knowledge exchange activities with non-academic partners, who will be consulted on the design of the academic research from the outset. The partnerships will produce transferable recommendations for other collaborative groups via a series of workshops in three areas: education, public policy, and broadcast TV. In addition, it will deliver project-specific outputs including a graphic novel and Minecraft world computer game (the Nerve Centre), public policy papers (the Bennett Institute, History and Policy, Institute for International and European Affairs), and a TV documentary series (Midas). The timely political climate, with ongoing debates over the Northern Ireland Protocol and Black Lives Matter reviving discussions on empire, is ripe for aiding knowledge exchange and understanding, as well as 'resilience' and 'reconciliation'.