It is a sad admission that the historical work of the past thirty years on the first seven centuries of Irish history can be very rapidly surveyed. Eóin MacNeill, who first laid the foundations for the serious study of early Irish history (and indeed of the Gaelic world down to its dissolution), expended his scholarship in many learned articles and brilliant essays. The task of weaving a consecutive narrative was left to the over-enthusiastic hands of Mrs Alice Stopford Green, since whose time no one has ventured to write a full-scale history of the period before the Norman invasion.

During the past generation substantial changes in perspective have taken place with regard to the sixteenth century in Irish history. European and British studies on this period have done much to confirm the continuance of essentially medieval society well into what it had become customary to regard as the modern period, while the clarification of successive stages of growth and change in the early modern period has also enabled Ireland in the later sixteenth century to be seen rather more clearly in its European context. Intimations of this change may be seen in the treatment of Ireland in this period in J. C. Beckett’s A short history of Ireland (1952 and subsequent editions), and more specifically in the most recent composite book on Ireland, The course of Irish history, edited by T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (1967), where the contributions by Art Cosgrove on ‘ The Gaelic resurgence and the Geraldine supremacy, c. 1400–1534 ’ and by G. A. Hayes-McCoy on ‘ The Tudor conquest, 1534–1603 ’, bring out very well the place of sixteenthcentury Ireland in the general sequence of its past. At the same time, it is clear that although the main contributions of this generation to the detailed understanding of sixteenth-century Ireland have added much that is new in information and interpretation they have yet not quite reached a position where a complete new synthesis of the period has seemed possible, however necessary it may be. There is no doubt that the understanding of the growing group of Irish historians interested in this period has been steadily expanding, that this understanding increasingly informs their specialist articles, and that it also finds its ripest expression at the level of synthesis rather in their university lectures than in print.

Lack of information about capital investment constitutes a serious gap in our knowledge of the nineteenth-century Irish economy. It is impossible to decide, for instance, how much truth there is in the almost axiomatic assertion that lack of capital was a major obstacle to Irish economic development until such elementary questions as the identity and motives of investors, the actual amount and timing of investment, and the channels of capital supply are examined. This paper considers some of these problems in connection with railways, the largest consumers of fixed capital in the midnineteenth century.

The United States census of 1910 revealed that there were four and a half million people in the United States who had beenborn in Ireland, or who had at least one Irish-born parent. The figures did not reveal that many other Americans identified themselves with Ireland, the country of their grandparents, or even of their great-grandparents, and it was not unusual for Irish-American leaders at that time to claim the support of fifteen or twenty million fellow Irish-Americans. A great many of these had, indeed, managed to retain a sense of Irish identity and this was in part because they, or their forebears, had largely settled together in Irish ghettos in large cities. In addition they had been forced inwards to their Irish community for support when persecuted by the ‘ Know-nothings ’ and other nativist groups in the nineteenth century. This Irish subculture in which they lived was cultivated by three groups of fellow Irish-Americans who had an interest in promoting an Irish-American community, the better to control and command the Irish-Americans themselves; the Roman Catholic Church, which was very much an Irish Catholic Church in America, the Irish political bosses, interested in political power rather than Ireland, who had risen to power in the Democratic party by their ability to control the Irish vote, and a third group which utilized the audience they both nurtured, the Irish nationalists. The skill with which these nationalists mobilized Irish-Americans in support of Ireland’s claim to independence added an important dimension to the British government’s Irish problem for it became a problem for successive American governments too. As long as Ireland remained tied to England there were in America men and women prepared to emulate John Mitchel who had declared, when he first landed in New York in November 1853, that he intended to make use of the freedom guaranteed him in America to stimulate the movement for Irish independence. It is the object of this paper to review, albeit briefly and incompletely, the significance of the activities of these Irish-American nationalists in the struggle for Irish freedom and in the development of Anglo-American relations during the period from the Boer war, which began in October 1899, to the Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921.