Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ireland's Opportunity: Global Irish Nationalism and the South African War

Ireland's Opportunity: Global Irish Nationalism and the South African War

Lynn, Shane

Hardcover

Series: The Glucksman Irish Diaspora

African HistoryGeneral Political ScienceIrish History

ISBN10: 1479835609
ISBN13: 9781479835607
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Apr 29 2025
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.28
Height: 1.40 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

How the South African War transformed nationalist politics across Ireland's global diaspora

In 1899, the British Empire embarked on a deeply controversial war against two small Boer Republics in South Africa. To many Irish nationalists, the Boers were fellow victims of British mistreatment. Defeat for the Boers, they worried, would mean defeat for the principle that small, white nations like Ireland were entitled to govern themselves. Widespread outrage sparked a dramatic resurgence in Irish nationalism after a decade of disunity and decline.

The shape and strength of this revival varied throughout Ireland's vast global diaspora. Ireland's Opportunity traces the impact of Boer fever across Ireland and the diaspora networks that connected Irish communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Home Rulers reunited to oppose the war, even as those in Britain's colonies asserted their loyalty to the empire and its racist underpinnings. Fenian revolutionaries, meanwhile, saw England's difficulty in South Africa as Ireland's opportunity to strike for independence. Explosive conspiracies hatched in Ireland and the United States failed to kindle the desired revolution. But the lessons and legacies of the South African War years would shape their fateful response when England's difficulty returned after 1914.

Blending global perspectives with intimate portraits of individuals whose lives were forever changed by the war, Shane Lynn reveals how Irish nationalism was a global phenomenon with a tangled and paradoxical relationship to empire.

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