Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part. Revolution would eventually stem from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of imperial crisis wrought by reform, only to ultimately create two expanding empires in the nineteenth century in which the Irish would play critical roles.
Contributors Rachel Banke, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy * T. H. Breen, University of Vermont * Trevor Burnard, University of Hull * Nicholas Canny, National University of Ireland, Galway * Christa Dierksheide, University of Virginia * Matthew P. Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia * Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University * Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire * Robert G. Ingram, Ohio University * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello * Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ireland and America: Empire and Revolution
1. How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500–1900
2. The American Revolution and the Uses and Abuses of Ireland
3. Empire and Resistance: Reflections on the American and Irish Revolutions
4. The Path Not Taken: American Independence and the Irish Counterpoint
5. Peasants, Soldiers, and Revolutionaries: Interpreting Irish Manpower in the Age of Revolutions
6. Dominant Minorities: Irish and Jamaican White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s
7. An Empire of Tracts: Mapping Landscapes of Property in the British Atlantic World
8. The Reformation in the Age of Jefferson
9. The Ideology of Imperial Reform: Enlightened Absolutism and the American Colonies
10. A Comparison of the Responses of the Loyal British Colonies to the American Revolution
11. The Strange Afterlife of the Declaration of Independence: The State of Franklin, 1784-c. 1789
12. The Contract for America
13. Becoming Co-Imperialists: Anglo-Americans and the First Opium War
Epilogue: Imperial Peoples: America, Ireland, and the Making of the Modern World
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Francis D. Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh and author of Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy.
Patrick Griffin is Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Ties That Bind: A Study of the Age of Revolution.