Ireland, the Imperial Turn, and Four-Nations History: How the Empire Makes the United Kingdom Make Sense
In recent decades, British historians have endeavored, and at times struggled, to move away from traditional Anglocentric perspectives and to understand the evolution of the United Kingdom as a composite entity of four nations. This process has particularly complex for Ireland, the most disparate and distinctive of the four. At the same time, historians have also acquired a greater understanding of Ireland’s contribution to the British Empire. What remains to be done is to integrate these two perspectives. The Empire helps us to comprehend the evolution of the United Kingdom as a nation, and Ireland’s place within it. It may have been “forged” as a Protestant antithesis to its military rival France in the eighteenth century, but it was the Empire that wielded enormous influence over many of the political elites in Wales, Scotland and Ireland who saw it as desirable to merge their destiny with the Union. At the same time, perceptions of Ireland as a quasi-colonial “other” ultimately limited its integration. Using Ireland – the nation that least fits existing arguments regarding the development of national identity within the United Kingdom -- as a test case, this paper will seek to combine the old “four nations” paradigm of British history with newer imperial approaches in order to make sense of the integration, and subsequent partial disintegration, of the United Kingdom. From a British historical perspective, this approach allows us to evaluate the complexity of the Union and the need to combine and overlap different historical paradigms in order to comprehend it. From an Irish historical perspective, it allows us to see that Ireland at times had political agency within the United Kingdom, rather than being exclusively the victim of coercion.