Debating the union on foreign fields: Ulster unionism and the importance of Britain's 'place in the world', c. 1830-c. 1870

TY - CHAP

T1 - Debating the union on foreign fields

T2 - Ulster unionism and the importance of Britain's 'place in the world', c. 1830-c. 1870

AU - Bew, John

PY - 2010/10

Y1 - 2010/10

N2 - This chapter casts new light on the formation of unionism in the north of Ireland, as part of a broader contribution to debates about the formation of British national identity. It challenges the assumption that the ‘invention of Britishness was so closely bound up with Protestantism, with war with [Revolutionary and Napoleonic] France and with the acquisition of empire that Ireland was never able to or willing to play a satisfactory part in it.’ This was the ground on which Linda Colley excluded Ireland from her seminal work on British national identity; for the most part, Colley’s formula has been accepted and cited favourably by Irish historians, though there have been some more recent challenges to it.2 Instead, this chapter posits the existence of a strongly held British national identity among a significant and influential portion of the unionist community in nineteenth-century Ulster — something I have described in more detail elsewhere.3 Following on from this, a further aim of the chapter is to demonstrate that there was an important extra-Irish dimension to the debates between unionists and nationalists in nineteenth-century Ireland which has often been over-looked.4 In terms of its contribution to this volume as a whole, therefore, what follows emphasises the centrality of foreign political events to the for-mation of contending identities within a portion of the British Isles. That the area under consideration is one in which political horizons are often assumed to have been highly introspective — beholden to history or confessional identity and failing to keep pace with the world around it — is, in itself, an important consideration.

AB - This chapter casts new light on the formation of unionism in the north of Ireland, as part of a broader contribution to debates about the formation of British national identity. It challenges the assumption that the ‘invention of Britishness was so closely bound up with Protestantism, with war with [Revolutionary and Napoleonic] France and with the acquisition of empire that Ireland was never able to or willing to play a satisfactory part in it.’ This was the ground on which Linda Colley excluded Ireland from her seminal work on British national identity; for the most part, Colley’s formula has been accepted and cited favourably by Irish historians, though there have been some more recent challenges to it.2 Instead, this chapter posits the existence of a strongly held British national identity among a significant and influential portion of the unionist community in nineteenth-century Ulster — something I have described in more detail elsewhere.3 Following on from this, a further aim of the chapter is to demonstrate that there was an important extra-Irish dimension to the debates between unionists and nationalists in nineteenth-century Ireland which has often been over-looked.4 In terms of its contribution to this volume as a whole, therefore, what follows emphasises the centrality of foreign political events to the for-mation of contending identities within a portion of the British Isles. That the area under consideration is one in which political horizons are often assumed to have been highly introspective — beholden to history or confessional identity and failing to keep pace with the world around it — is, in itself, an important consideration.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85006632107&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1057/9780230289628_9

DO - 10.1057/9780230289628_9

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85006632107

SN - 9781349365470

SP - 137

EP - 153

BT - The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660-2000

PB - BFI Palgrave Macmillan

ER -