The Irish Revolution

Ireland's revolution was an inherently transnational event. Buoyed by the rise of Wilsonian self-determination and the consequent weakening of imperial prestige, radical and anti-colonial movements flourished across the globe after the First World War. Although emerging from widely differing contexts, from Korea to India, and Egypt to Ireland, proponents of these movements communicated, engaged with, and learned from one another in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London and New York. Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this international exchange, from mobilizing Ireland's vast diaspora in support of Irish independence, or engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere in the world, to providing models for other anti-colonial struggles. Reassessing the Irish Revolution within this transnational context, this volume broadens our understanding of Ireland's place in the evolving postwar world. Foregrounding how the ebbing of political authority from the imperial to democratic nation-state created revolutionary opportunities that were seized by anti-colonial activists, this study argues for the importance of empire, anti-imperialism and new understandings of self-determination in shaping political discourse and violence in revolutionary Ireland--