Historical Antecedents to the Irish Land War

Abstract

Arguably the pivotal historical event in the creation of the modern Irish nation, the Land War was itself the culmination of several long and entwined processes of social, cultural, and political struggle and transformation that began with the Act of Union in 1800. During the eight decades prior to the Land War, tenant farmers, nationalist activists, and the Irish Catholic Church (ICC) made claims on the British government, the Protestant ascendancy, and the landlords, all of which, while wide ranging, represented some form of demand for Irish autonomy. These claim-making struggles were often intertwined, based on contentious and short-lived alliances, and producing, at best, limited results. Moreover, the long political struggle for Irish autonomy that preceded the Land War was mediated, conditioned, and sometimes provoked by important contingent and conjunctural events: the Famine stands out above all others, but British elections, economic crises in Europe, and collective action by one Irish group or another impacted consequent social formations and identities, discourses, politics, and trajectories of nationalist movement. The following chapter investigates these “critical antecedents”² to the Land War, focusing on the conditions, factors, and events that prevented strong political alliance prior to the Land War, but produced the diverse social identities and attendant discourses of those that fought it. We begin with the defining political event of the nineteenth century, Ireland’s union with Great Britain.