The Irish Question was one of the most complex and divisive issues in modern British history. Irish constitutional nationalists spent most of the nineteenth century trying to repeal the Acts of Union (1800) and to return an independent parliament to Dublin. These moderates operated within the political system, sandwiched between radical nationalists like the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who sought a complete break with the United Kingdom, and an Irish Unionist minority (mostly Protestants), who passionately clung to the Union Jack and the British connection. By the 1880s, the Irish Parliamentary Party, under the influential nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, was key to the balance of power in Westminster, and it leveraged this power in pursuit of Home Rule. But how could British leaders accommodate Irish demands for domestic autonomy without sacrificing the sovereignty of the United Kingdom or alienating their supporters? The example of British Prime Minister William Gladstone was a cautionary tale: his Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 failed in Parliament, infuriated Unionists in Ulster, split the Liberal Party, and ushered in nearly twenty years of Conservative Party rule. As Nicholas Mansergh observes, the treatment of the Irish Question as a purely domestic political matter fashioned a riddle with no clear answer.Footnote 1
Perhaps the emerging Commonwealth offered a model for a solution. The white settler colonies (later Dominions) acquired domestic self-government in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the decades preceding the First World War, they began to exert significant influence on imperial decision-making. Colonial statesmen regularly “returned home” for imperial conferences with British leaders, discussing matters like immigration, naval defense, and foreign policy. This reached its apogee in 1917 when British Prime Minister David Lloyd George invited the Dominion premiers to form an Imperial War Cabinet, widely celebrated as an “Executive Cabinet of the Empire.”Footnote 2 Their immense popularity in metropolitan spaces reinforced the romanticized notion that bold, masculine, and imaginative frontier colonials—what James Belich termed “Better Britons”—should inject new life and fresh wisdom into the British political system.Footnote 3 Dominion leaders in turn conceived of themselves as part of an imagined “Greater Britain” linked by race, language, and a shared sense of Britishness.Footnote 4 But this was not an exclusively “English” or Anglophone political space. Take, for example, Sir Joseph Ward, the Australian-born premier of New Zealand (1906–1912). Ward was a rabid supporter of empire and an influential figure in imperial politics. He was also Irish, Catholic, and a vocal advocate of Home Rule.Footnote 5
Many British and Irish leaders thus looked to these settler elites for a constitutional resolution. Irish nationalists believed that most Dominion statesmen were sympathetic to Home Rule, and could be powerful allies against the entrenched Unionist opposition. At the same time, British leaders hoped that the popular colonial leaders could act as trusted mediators to procure a settlement that might satisfy Irish Unionist demands and keep Ireland within the empire. Various schemes appeared in the public sphere: a Dominion Statutory Commission of Inquiry, a special imperial conference devoted to Home Rule, and an Irish Constitutional Convention based on the Union of South Africa’s 1910 model and chaired by a prominent colonial representative. Perhaps the most innovative idea was that the popular Afrikaner statesman Jan Smuts might travel to Dublin and negotiate with the nationalists. Beneath these suggestions was a gnawing anxiety across the political spectrum that time was running out for a constitutional settlement. “If the chance of utilizing the Imperial Conference be lost, as it probably will be, I see nothing ahead but sheer disaster,” admitted the Irish member of Parliament (MP) Stephen Gwynn. “The trouble is that no one in Nationalist Ireland expects justice.”Footnote 6
For the better part of a century, the study of Ireland and the British Commonwealth has been partitioned by a narrow focus on the nation-state. Irish historians embraced a nationalist narrative that framed the Easter Rising and the rise of Sinn Féin as part of an inevitable path toward an independent republic. They largely ignored an earlier generation of Irish constitutional nationalists who worked within an imperial framework and dismissed the Irish Free State’s brief membership in the British Commonwealth as a troubled phase in national adolescence. Similarly, earlier scholars of the empire treated Home Rule as a British domestic issue or, at best, an anomaly that did not fit neatly into the binary framework of settler colony and dependent empire.Footnote 7 They were two important historiographical fields that rarely came into conversation with one another. Only in the last decade or so have historians redirected their attention to the wider global contours of Irish nationalism, particularly connections with revolutionary and anti-colonial movements in India, the United States, and the Dominions.Footnote 8
This transnational and transimperial turn is essential for understanding Ireland’s ambiguous place in the empire. The sheer scope of the Irish diaspora ensured that Home Rule was never a purely domestic matter. In 1911 Ireland had a population of approximately three million. By comparison, Australia alone had 1.3 million Irish settlers. As colonial statesmen recognized, the emotional turmoil of Irish politics had important repercussions in the Dominions. Just as importantly, some key Irish nationalists looked to settler democracy as a model for Home Rule. It was the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), and not Sinn Féin, that dominated nationalist politics in the decades prior to the First World War. The leader of the IPP, John Redmond, believed in a free and self-governing Ireland as an integral part of the empire. He often drew on settler analogies to paint “colonial” Home Rule as a safe and natural destiny for fellow white, English-speaking subjects steeped in the British political tradition. In particular, he identified the recently created Union of South Africa as a precedent for how a white, non-Anglophone, formerly hostile population could be reconciled to Britain through the promise of self-government and international cooperation.
This article explores how the politics of constitutional nationalism in Ireland became enmeshed with the imperial politics of the early British Commonwealth. In particular, it examines the role of Dominion political elites like Australia’s Billy Hughes and South Africa’s Jan Smuts in framing Home Rule as a compromise between British rule and independence. The secret efforts to enlist the Dominions in fashioning a settlement—revealed only through a deep reading of the private papers of key personalities—reflected the personal and global networks that characterized Irish nationalism.Footnote 9 As Darragh Gannon has recently shown, Irish nationalism encompassed multiple geographical and imperial frameworks that could coexist or blend together as necessary: Irish, British, Nationalist, Unionist, Catholic, Protestant, etc.Footnote 10 Indeed, the participation of colonial statesmen in this debate suggests a wider possible range of frameworks: Australian, Afrikaner, colonial, and even white. As Gannon reminds us, it was an Irish nationalism that was at once imperial, diasporic, cosmopolitan, and global.
At the same time, this article provides a more nuanced understanding of the cultural, racial, and political origins of the British Commonwealth. The development of Dominion status is most commonly associated with the spread of settler democracy and “responsible government.” But Ireland was a not a traditional settler colony undergoing some kind of Hegelian process of liberal reforms, nor could it rely exclusively on sentiments of Britishness with their romanticized notions of “kith and kin.” Here the South African case serves as a particularly useful point of comparison. The elevation of a non-Anglophone former rebel like Smuts into positions of imperial leadership reinforced the notion that white colonial subjects, even those who did not come from “British stock,” could be reconciled to the empire through the promise of self-rule. The debates about Ireland and the Commonwealth thus revealed a range of possibilities for this evolving and imagined imperial community—one that was both racially exclusive (i.e., keeping India in a subordinate position) as well as flexible enough to include Afrikaners, French Canadians, and even the Irish.
“Colonial home rule” for Ireland
The idea for a colonial solution for the Irish Question had a long pedigree. But there was considerable ambiguity about the meaning of “colonial home rule.” The settler colonies enjoyed “responsible government,” with extraordinary powers over domestic affairs. Following the Westminster system, parliamentary majorities formed executive councils and governments composed of elected MPs, relegating the colonial governor to a mere constitutional link with the Crown and the Colonial Office in London. However, this did not mean sovereignty or independence. The British government determined foreign policy for the entire empire, and colonial parliaments were still technically subordinate to the British Parliament, which had the power to veto legislation deemed “repugnant” to wider imperial statutes. Nor did “Dominion status” have any formal definition or legal status. The 1907 Colonial Conference adopted the title of “Dominions” to differentiate the self-governing colonies from India and the Crown Colonies. But colonial leaders repeatedly eschewed a formal declaration of Dominion rights or any formal constitutional framework for the evolving Commonwealth. Even the famous Balfour Declaration of 1926, which recognized the Dominions as “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs,” did not endow the Dominions with new powers, but merely affirmed the reality of existing imperial relations.Footnote 11
There was also considerable ambiguity about the relationship between “responsible government” in the settler colonies and Home Rule in Ireland. Gladstone frequently cited the loyalty of Canada as an example of the sagacity and safety of colonial self-government in his campaigns for Home Rule in 1886 and 1893. The analogy was rather misleading: under Gladstone’s bills, the British Parliament would still possess reserve powers over matters like taxation and policing, and Ireland would still have a “British” executive (a lord lieutenant) rather than a governor general.Footnote 12 Similarly the Imperial Federation movement adopted the phrase “Home Rule All Around” that would allow for independent “local” parliaments in places like Ireland and Scotland as well as Canada and New Zealand. While seemingly promoting self-government, the locus of ultimate authority would be a new Imperial Parliament comprising representatives from Britain and the settler colonies to legislate for the entire empire.Footnote 13 In short, the rhetorical connections between settler democracy and Irish Home Rule belied considerable differences between metropolitan and colonial political spheres.
The idea of colonial self-rule nonetheless held a strong grip on the constitutional nationalists of the late Victorian period. Take, for example, John Redmond, the leader of the IPP (1900–18).Footnote 14 In his long quest for Home Rule, Redmond promoted a vision of a self-governing Ireland in communion with the free white states of the British Empire. In the 1880s, he and his brother Willie travelled the empire raising money for the nationalist cause. It was in New South Wales that he met his future wife (a member of a prominent Irish-Australian dynasty) and organized chapters of the United Irish League. Redmond’s journeys imbued him with a deep respect for the principle of colonial autonomy and democracy, an experience that profoundly shaped his view of Home Rule. “I do not regard as entirely palatable the idea that forever and a day Ireland’s voice should be excluded from the councils of an empire which the genius and valour of her sons have done so much to build up and of which she is to remain,” he explained in 1886.Footnote 15 Redmond was no “Imperialist” in the Victorian sense of the term, and he was a harsh critic of Britain’s wars of colonial expansion. He nonetheless laid claim to Ireland’s shared ownership in the empire. “We Irish have peopled the waste places of the British World,” he assured the Daily News in 1908. “Our roots are Imperial as well as national.”Footnote 16 Most importantly, Redmond employed colonial analogues to convince Liberal policymakers, if not some Unionists as well, that a self-governing Ireland led by responsible figures could play the part of a loyal member of the empire.
The unification of South Africa in 1910 provided constitutional nationalists with an arsenal of rhetorical ammunition for their cause. As Donal Lowry has shown, the ability of moderate Afrikaner nationalists like Louis Botha and Jan Smuts to thread together the British connection and the Afrikaner Bittereinders (diehard republicans) became an exceedingly useful template for the IPP’s moderate brand of nationalism.Footnote 17 Redmond thus used this analogy to combat Unionist condemnations of Home Rule as the tip of a dangerous iceberg that would sink the entire British Empire. He reminded an audience in Wexford:
South Africa was in arms, as you know, for three years, under the leadership of Louis Botha (cheers). She has now got Home Rule, and today she is peaceable and contented, and Louis Botha is the Prime Minister of South Africa … The liberty which was given to the French Canadians in Canada, and the Dutchmen in South Africa, should be given to the Irishmen in Ireland.Footnote 18
At the root of this colonial analogy was an emphasis on the Irish as a fellow white race. There was certainly a strong anti-colonial plank in Irish politics, with some nationalists proclaiming common cause with the Indian National Congress and even the Mahdi of the Sudan.Footnote 19 However, there was also a profound xenophobic streak that helped to combat Victorian racial tropes linking Irishness with Blackness. Irish emigrants throughout the diaspora claimed the mantle of whiteness to elevate them above Chinese, African American, or South Asian laborers. Irish nationalists similarly claimed the right to Home Rule because, unlike subjugated Indians and Africans, they were white.Footnote 20 As Bruce Nelson points out, widespread support in Ireland for the Boer republics during the South African Wars was both an anti-imperial act—i.e., railing against the aggressive actions of the British government—but also an act of racial solidarity, in fighting for the rights of fellow whites (the Afrikaners).Footnote 21 Settler colonialism thus allowed Irish nationalists to articulate the inclusive nature of whiteness and racial solidarity without embracing the cultural baggage of Britishness or Englishness.
The IPP leadership embraced this rhetoric of racial solidarity, without the overt language of Britishness employed by the Unionists. John Dillon, the future leader of the IPP, insisted he supported “Boer Home Rule” for Ireland.Footnote 22 The Irish deserved this “because we are white men.”Footnote 23 Willie Redmond became a prominent advocate in the British Parliament for the White Australia Policy, linking the destiny of the white race in the Pacific to Irish political reforms at home. Perhaps the clearest explication of this idea came from the Anglo-Irish journalist Erskine Childers. His 1911 The Framework of Home Rule explicitly linked Ireland’s destiny to the empire. He framed Home Rule as a major step in the consolidation of the empire’s white population, an “indispensable preliminary to the closer union of all the English-speaking races.”Footnote 24 For his part, John Redmond used occasional racial references, particularly when appearing before British audiences. “I have the old-fashioned belief that every race—certainly every white race—can be safely trusted with freedom,” he informed a crowd in York. The following year, he demanded the same freedom “which has been given to every British colony of white men.”Footnote 25 Redmond did not dwell on the Victorian semantics of Anglo-Saxon versus Celtic races, any more than he did with British versus Afrikaner. Instead, he placed the right to self-government within the larger cauldron of whiteness that united the settler colonial world.
Within this dual focus on race and whiteness, the IPP identified the leaders of the settler colonies as allies in the battle for Home Rule. Earlier appeals in the colonies focused on fundraising and grassroots organizing of the mighty Irish diaspora. These certainly paid dividends; a 1904 visit to the Antipodes by Willie Redmond paved the way for an Australian House of Representatives resolution in favor of Home Rule.Footnote 26 By 1907, however, John Redmond focused the party’s energies on cultivating relationships with Dominion elites. He used the 1907 and 1911 imperial conferences to host receptions for colonial premiers, including Wilfrid Laurier (Canada), Louis Botha (South Africa), and Andrew Fisher (Australia). Laurier was French Canadian, Botha an Afrikaner, and Fisher had been born into a working-class family in Scotland. Redmond recognized the damage that the Irish Question inflicted on the Anglo-Dominion relationship, and he briefly toyed with forcing a conference resolution in favor of Home Rule.Footnote 27 He ultimately backed down, but not before his brother Willie challenged Conservatives to conduct a plebiscite across the Dominions. “If they did they would find that Australia, New Zealand, and he was sure Canada also, would plump in favour of granting Ireland her national rights.”Footnote 28
Redmond also insisted that Home Rule would make Ireland a loyal member of the empire, just like the Dominions. In the summer of 1914, the Liberal government and its IPP allies finally passed a Third Home Rule Bill. An exuberant Redmond delivered an address in Parliament encouraging the imperial government to withdraw its legions and leave the islands’ defenses to Irishmen. “For this purpose armed Nationalist Catholics in the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North.”Footnote 29 He later compared Ireland to recent developments in South Africa:
Just as Botha and Smuts have been able to say in the speeches which were published three days ago that the concession of free institutions to South Africa has changed the men who but ten or a little more years ago were your bitter enemy in the field into your loyal comrades and fellow citizens in the Empire, just as truthfully can I say to you that by what of recent years has happened in this country with the democracy of England, Ireland has been transformed from what George Meredith described a short time ago as “the broken arm of England” into one of the strongest bulwarks of the Empire.Footnote 30
Despite the recent political victory, Home Rule remained just out of reach. Unionists in Ulster refused to accept the bill and raised an armed militia; nationalists in the South soon followed suit. Only the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of European mobilization prevented a civil war in Ireland. To keep the peace and focus on the war with the Central Powers, Prime Minister H.H. Asquith placed the Home Rule Bill on the Statute Book, but with a suspensory clause for the remainder of the war. The moratorium (and the expectation of a future election) would allow the British government to deal with the thorny question of Ulster at a future date. This near-sighted policy significantly undercut the constitutional nationalist position in Ireland, where it was seen as further evidence of Albion’s perfidy. Redmond increasingly became a target of criticism from revolutionary movements such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Sinn Féin. Like the hardline Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa, they condemned the war and branded Redmond as an imperial Judas who had sold out his native land in the interest of foreign occupiers. Beneath the facade of the IPP’s plea for constitutional nationalism, with its language of autonomy and empire, lay simmering discontent about the failed promises of Home Rule.
A tale of two rebellions
The Easter Rising forever changed the trajectory of Irish nationalism. On the morning of 24 April 1916, an armed band of about 1,250 revolutionaries gathered in central Dublin and proclaimed the creation of a provisional Irish Republic, sovereign and free from the empire. The celebratory moment proved to be short lived as Britain declared martial law and sent troops to crush the uprising. Over the next five days, approximately 500 people died in chaotic urban fighting as British troops blasted their way into the center of the city. Following the rebel surrender, British General Sir John Maxwell executed fifteen rebel leaders by firing squad in Kilmainham Jail. One leader, James Connolly, was seriously wounded in the uprising and could not stand; Maxwell had him lashed to a chair and shot. Authorities arrested over 3,400 other suspected revolutionaries, many of them innocent, and shipped them off to an incarceration camp in Wales. Only Redmond’s angry threat to resign from Parliament prompted Asquith to halt the shootings. But the damage was done, as news of the executions swiftly spread throughout the world.Footnote 31
The situation in Ireland was in stark contrast to an earlier, and far more widespread, uprising in South Africa. In August 1914, the Afrikaner-dominated government of Louis Botha pledged its support for the British war effort and began preparing for the conquest of German Southwest Africa. This was too much for the Bittereinders, who had hoped a German victory in Europe would free South Africa from the British connection. Under the leadership of General Christiaan de Wet, over 11,000 rebels took to the field, seizing arms depots and destroying railroads and telegraph lines.Footnote 32 Only the personal appeals of Botha and Smuts, their commando leaders from the war in 1899, helped to contain this rebellion to a few economically depressed districts in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. By early 1915, the last of the rebels had surrendered, with few facing any serious sanctions. De Wet received a six-year prison sentence but served less than six months. As Botha explained to one supporter:
There are unfortunately a great number who believe or who pretend that in demanding the extreme penalty for the leaders of the rebellion and stern measures against the rank and file, they have the true interest of our country at heart whilst only animated by a desire for vengeance. As far as I am concerned I am determined to be as lenient as possible, keeping in view the circumstances of each case.Footnote 33
For its part, the British government allowed Botha to conduct what they called a “wise policy of forgive and forget.”Footnote 34 Throughout the crisis, they steadfastly avoided overt intervention, instead securing the purchase of rifles and field artillery for Union forces. The governor general, Sir Sydney Buxton, warned the Colonial Office not to publicize these measures, reminding him that most government troops fought out of personal loyalty to Botha, not the British Empire. “Active or aggressive British support would only embarrass him with his Dutch element,” he explained.Footnote 35 Buxton even reached out to Geoffrey Dawson, the influential editor of The Times, to curtail the effusive tributes for Botha and Smuts emanating from the British media.Footnote 36 The message was clear: trust the South African leaders to get the job done and give them the wide berth to navigate the tempestuous waters of Afrikaner nationalism.
Two years later, critics were quick to contrast Britain’s brutal actions in Ireland to Botha’s restraint.Footnote 37 Members of the IPP and their allies in Britain pleaded with the government to adopt its earlier “hands off” approach. Former Ambassador to the United States Lord James Bryce warned of the odious effect on American and colonial opinion.Footnote 38 They compared Redmond to Botha—a moderate nationalist—and insisted he be given the latitude to exercise control over his followers. “The way to deal with him at this critical juncture is the way Botha was dealt with and not in any lesser way,” explained the Irish nationalist T.P. Gill.Footnote 39 Others contrasted Maxwell’s executions to Botha’s pardons in 1914, and warned that the shootings were empowering the radicals.Footnote 40 Meanwhile, the nationalist press exploded in outrage over the difference in treatment afforded to Irish and Afrikaner rebels. The Freeman’s Journal (a pro-Redmond mouthpiece) praised Botha’s “magnanimity” over British barbarism. “Had Mr. Redmond been Prime Minister of Ireland, it almost certainly would have been averted,” the paper concluded.Footnote 41
While Ireland boiled in indignation, some nationalists wondered if help might come from the Dominions. After the uprising, C.P. Scott, the liberal editor of the Manchester Guardian, met with Redmond and suggested that one of the Dominion leaders be invited to oversee a commission of inquiry. To Scott’s surprise, Redmond offered a stunning admission: he had already discussed this option with his archrival, the Ulster Unionist leader Edward Carson, “who had not been altogether hostile.”Footnote 42 Around the same time, an unidentified nationalist met with Asquith and encouraged him to create an imperial statutory commission to deal with Ulster’s refusal to accept Home Rule. He urged Asquith to include prominent Dominion politicians in this group, men “who understand the Irish question from the Imperial and (as in the case of Canada) the American angle and who have had to deal with rebellious and stubborn racial minorities (Canada and South Africa) [..] it would command immense influence and would improve the imagination of the world.”Footnote 43 Perhaps the most outlandish suggestion was that Asquith appoint the former Cape Colony premier (and convicted filibusterer) Dr Leander Starr Jameson as the new chief secretary of Ireland.Footnote 44
Instead, Asquith turned to David Lloyd George to conjure up a solution. Lloyd George was a curious choice as he possessed complex and somewhat opportunistic attitudes toward Ireland. He viewed Home Rule through the lens of a Welsh nationalist who sympathized with demands for greater autonomy.Footnote 45 Yet he cared little for Irish sensibilities and regarded Home Rule as a distraction from the all-important issue of winning the war against the Central Powers. When Asquith appointed him to broker a settlement, he initially approached the topic as part of a wider series of reforms that included the imperial conference. “The final settlement of the Irish question lies in Imperial Federation,” he confided to his friend, the journalist George Riddell.Footnote 46
Lloyd George explored ways to recruit colonial statesmen into the effort. He secretly commissioned William O’Brien to prepare a memorandum on the use of Dominion leaders as mediators. O’Brien was an old-school nationalist (in the vein of Charles Stewart Parnell) and land reformer who broke with Redmond’s party and created an “All for Ireland League” in 1909 with the express purpose of Dominion status for Ireland.Footnote 47 “If some preliminary arrangement could be announced for an Inter-Dominion conference on the subject of the inevitable Imperial readjustment, it would help enormously to have an atmosphere of large and beneficent changes at hand,” O’Brien subsequently insisted. “The influences of overseas Dominion [sic] in smoothing away Ulster suspicions and misgivings would be invaluable.” It is not clear what Lloyd George thought of the proposal, though apparently it was opposed by prominent IPP member Joe Devlin and subsequently suppressed.Footnote 48
Lloyd George also took advantage of Australian leader Billy Hughes’s 1916 visit to Britain to gain his help. Hughes, a Welsh-born colonial, spent several months barnstorming the United Kingdom and became a darling of the Unionists who sought to create a position for him in the British Cabinet.Footnote 49 Yet Hughes also displayed well-known sympathy for Home Rule, and was widely respected by the nationalists. In his memoirs, Hughes recalls meeting with Lloyd George and three unnamed nationalists:
They all shook me by the hand as if they recognized in me a man and a brother; and in one way they were not far wrong, for I was, like them, a Celt and, as was well known, a believer in Dominion status for Ireland and so a Home Ruler. So here we were, the whole five of us Celts and Home Rulers.Footnote 50
Although nothing came of the meeting, this episode (and others) underline Lloyd George’s efforts to escape the intellectual bankruptcy that otherwise characterized British approaches to Home Rule.
Ultimately, Lloyd George came up with an arrangement that included a pivotal role for the Dominions. His plan called for immediate Home Rule for the bulk of Ireland, with temporary exclusion for the six counties of Ulster. Irish MPs would continue to sit in Westminster, maintaining a formal link with the United Kingdom. Most importantly, a final settlement would wait until a long-anticipated postwar imperial conference, which would revisit the constitutional relationship of the entire empire. The idea won over Redmond and many constitutional nationalists, who correctly identified Dominion representatives as a sympathetic jury of their peers. As the Freeman’s Journal explained:
It is unnecessary to point out the enormous importance of this proposal, involving as it does the consultation upon the issues remaining, of the great friendly Imperial-minded statesmen of Canada, Australasia, and South Africa, who, at every turn of our fortunes have shown sympathy with Ireland and her people north and south. Can anyone doubt that their advice, free from all party bias, which has been the curse of Ireland, would be of enormous value in working out a settlement satisfactory to the national sentiment of the Irish people and fair to all sections.Footnote 51
However, the negotiations collapsed over Unionist intransigence about Ulster. Carson received private, if ambiguous, assurances from Lloyd George that Ulster’s exclusion would be permanent, and he initially rallied many of his supporters behind the plan. Carson was no fool, however, and he recognized this as an opportunity to delay the issue until after the war, when a change in the political landscape might be more generous to Ulster’s cause.Footnote 52 But southern Unionists and British Conservatives balked at the idea. Lord Curzon and Sir Robert Cecil pleaded with Asquith to abandon the “deplorable” idea of an imperial conference for Ireland. They worried that it would force the empire to coerce Ulster and warned “it would introduce into our Dominions a question of bitter domestic controversy which should be confined to our own shores.”Footnote 53 Despite support from Carson and Bonar Law, several Conservative ministers precipitated a Cabinet revolt that broke the Prime Minister’s resolve. When Asquith inserted new language that confirmed Ulster’s permanent exclusion, Redmond and the nationalists angrily walked away from the table.
In the aftermath of the failed settlement of 1916, the Spectator offered a rather different colonial analogy for the Irish Question. The Tory paper insisted that Redmond’s “old fashioned” party was being eclipsed by the revolutionary followers of Sinn Féin. It scolded Asquith and Lloyd George for dangerous political experiments during a time of total war and called for the establishment of an imperial “viceroy” for Ireland with considerable policing powers. A suitable candidate would have the “heart of an iceberg and the hide of a rhinoceros,” and would be responsible for restoring law and order. In short, the paper called for a colonial system of the kind typically employed in the dependent, non-white empire.Footnote 54 In a private letter to Carson, the editor of the Spectator mourned that the Irish Question was “one of the many problems in life which are insoluble.” “Perhaps someday the nature of the Southern Irish will change and we shall get a new heaven and a new earth across the water, Bothas instead of Redmonds, Smuts’ instead of Dillons,” he lamented. “Then of course there will be a dozen easy solutions.”Footnote 55
The dominion envoys
By early 1917, the moment seemed more propitious for an imperial solution in Ireland. Lloyd George’s ascension to the premiership in December 1916, and his subsequent convening of an imperial conference, raised expectations that the British government might rely on the “common sense” Dominion statesmen to settle the matter. However, much of the impetus came from the Dominions, where the fallout from the Easter Rising was becoming a serious domestic issue. Irish Catholic populations in the empire harshly criticized the British government and in turn faced accusations of sedition and imperial disloyalty. Sectarian organizations such as the Orange Order and the Ancient Order of the Hibernians squared off against each other, undermining the war effort and driving a further wedge in settler societies.Footnote 56
This problem was particularly acute in Australia, where the Irish vote propped up Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s Labor government. In the Fall of 1916, Hughes introduced his long-anticipated referendum for conscription. Much of the opposition came from Irish Australians who made up 25 percent of society. Led by Roman Catholic Cardinal Daniel Mannix, angry crowds denounced conscription as imperial tribute. Hughes sought to highlight his previous support for Home Rule. His London-based confidant, the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch, even pleaded with the British government to give Hughes credit for lifting martial law in Ireland.Footnote 57 Nonetheless, the referendum failed by several thousand votes—a loss Hughes angrily blamed on “Sinn Féiners.”Footnote 58
A despondent Hughes pleaded with British authorities to use the upcoming Imperial War Cabinet to smooth over Irish affairs once and for all. He regretted that political turmoil at home would prevent him from attending the meeting. However, he encouraged Lloyd George to act quickly and decisively. “Irish question is now imperial question and ought to be so treated,” he telegraphed. “If it cannot be settled now it never can be.” Hughes offered a strategic rationale, promising that additional troops and materials would be forthcoming from the Dominions if only the empire could speak with one voice on the matter.Footnote 59 He also floated an alternative solution: that Britain host a second imperial conference later in the summer on the topic of Irish Home Rule. As it turned out, this act was not one of sheer imperial patriotism. The Australian premier hoped that such an event would cause the upcoming federal elections to be postponed in order for him to travel to London.Footnote 60 Hughes could then return to Melbourne as a conquering hero to the warm embrace of the Irish-Australian vote.
Meanwhile, Lloyd George faced mounting pressure from within Britain to capitalize on the imperial conference. A heated parliamentary debate on the subject took place in early March. Rising from his new position on the opposition bench, Asquith delivered a passionate indictment of his former colleague’s policy toward Ireland. He admitted that the British Cabinet had lost all credibility with the nationalists but expressed hope that the visiting colonial statesmen might have better luck. Recycling an old idea from 1916, he called on Lloyd George to create a statutory commission of Dominion politicians to visit Dublin. “You would have to constitute an authority in whose competence and impartiality Irishmen of all parties would have faith, no easy matter,” he insisted.Footnote 61 Asquith found support from an unexpected quarter: his old nemesis Lord Northcliffe. On March 17, the press baron gave a St. Patrick’s Day Address at the Irish Club in London. Afterwards he allegedly met with several Sinn Féin representatives who responded favorably to the idea of a settlement brokered by prominent colonial personalities. Northcliffe immediately notified Lloyd George of this meeting and urged him to establish an Imperial Commission of Inquiry. He also wrote to T.P. O’Connor, a popular Irish MP, insisting they recruit the Dominion leaders before it was too late. “They are the men who can do this thing for us.”Footnote 62 To reinforce his point, Northcliffe mobilized his vast media empire to churn out editorials with sensationalist rhetoric calling for this course of action.Footnote 63 “This is the golden moment for a settlement,” he boasted to the chief editor of The Times. “It is a question not of weeks but of days to get this Irish Question settled.”Footnote 64
Publicly the government declined to place Ireland on the agenda for the formal conference. Privately, though, Lloyd George took secret measures to create some kind of imperial body for handling Irish affairs. On 22 March, the British War Cabinet discussed the possibility of a Dominion commission to visit Dublin and meet with Redmond. The Cabinet tasked Colonial Secretary Walter Long informally to approach the Dominion delegates and sound out their interest.Footnote 65
Long’s appeal met with little enthusiasm among visiting statesmen. Canada’s Robert Borden was sympathetic but saw little benefit in getting involved in such a controversial matter. He feared alienating his Protestant Ontario base, and wanted to return to Ottawa as soon as possible, fearful of the resurgence of Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party in his absence. New Zealand’s William Massey also declined to participate. An Ulster-born Protestant and former Grand Master of the Orange Order, he was hardly sympathetic to the nationalist plight. During his earlier tour of Ulster, he had fastidiously avoided public comment on Home Rule. Privately, though, he developed strong relationships with Ulster leaders like James Craig and praised Carson as “undoubtedly the strongest man in politics here to-day.”Footnote 66 Ultimately the only colonial delegate to show any interest in undertaking such a mission was Jan Smuts.
At first glimpse, the enigmatic Smuts seemed an odd choice to intervene in Irish affairs.Footnote 67 A proud Afrikaner who led Boer commandos during the South African War, Smuts later became a personal confidant to Lloyd George and King George V. As a Cambridge-educated philosopher and brilliant lawyer who counted William Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln as his ideological idols, he was one of the key founders of the League of Nations and United Nations, liberal internationalist institutions that could perpetuate European imperialism. He was also a staunch white supremacist who engineered South Africa’s early racial segregation laws. Winston Churchill celebrated him as a world historical figure who “transcended nationality,” while W.E.B. Dubois condemned him as the “greatest protagonist of the white race.”Footnote 68
Most importantly, Smuts was the intellectual prophet of a new Commonwealth ideal based on colonial nationalism, settler democracy, and white supremacy. As chief deputy to Prime Minister Botha, Smuts represented South Africa at the 1917 Imperial War Cabinet, where he became a highly popular figure in the British political establishment. Together with Canada’s Robert Borden, he pushed for a new imperial community that would grant equality between Britain and the white self-governing states. In a much-celebrated speech before both Houses of Parliament, Smuts explained that the British world system was really two realms: a dependent empire (India, the Crown Colonies, etc.) and a “British Commonwealth of Nations” made up of the United Kingdom and its white self-governing Dominions. It was the latter group, he argued, grounded on liberal imperialism, settler democracy, and white supremacy, that was destined to reshape global affairs in the twentieth century. Smuts recounted his experiences uniting Britons and Afrikaners in South Africa and pledged that the new Commonwealth would be based on similar equality and trust between British and Dominion leaders. “We are going to extend liberty and nationhood more and more to every part of the empire,” he assured them.Footnote 69 The Afrikaner general downplayed the racial and cultural tropes of “kith and kin,” and insisted that the true cultural bond of the Dominion partnership was the promise of liberty. He explained:
Even nations who have fought against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests, their language, their religions, and all their cultural interests are as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the children of your household and your own blood.Footnote 70
These views about settler democracy and a community of white nations extended to Ireland. The general rarely talked publicly about Ireland, and his private papers at the National Archives of South Africa are frustratingly scanty during the crucial period 1917–19, when he was constantly at 10 Downing Street and wrote relatively few letters to the key individuals in power. However, it is clear that Smuts was sympathetic to the Irish cause. He viewed the Irish Question through the lens of an Afrikaner nationalist who had made peace with the imperial connection. He saw a self-governing Ireland reconciled to the empire as the embodiment of his idea of a liberal white Commonwealth. In his negotiations with nationalists, he was able to navigate the messy complications of Irish politics by playing on his South African and settler colonial identities.
Rumors quickly spread that Smuts would intervene in Ireland. Most observers reacted favorably to his candidacy. One Irish newspaper explained, “he, a Boer, can well be trusted to bring to the consideration of the Irish question an open mind.”Footnote 71 “He is a shining example … of the enemy won over by equitable dealing,” insisted the Evening Standard. “We know, in short, of no being more fit to preside over a body charged with the duty of evolving a plan of settlement.” The Irish historian Alice Stopford Green (whom Smuts knew from her time as an anti-war activist in South Africa) arranged a meeting with several nationalists, including the writer George Russell and former British Army officer Colonel Maurice Moore.Footnote 72 The latter acknowledged the irony that they had fought against each other during the South African War, and now found their roles reversed over the issue of the British connection. Trinity College Dublin bestowed upon Smuts an honorary doctorate and invited him to a hooding ceremony. The Registrar added his hope that “it would not be wholly lost time if it gave you any ideas which might be of use if the Colonial authorities are called in to settle our political differences.”Footnote 73
But how could Smuts save Ireland in the absence of a formal Dominion Commission of Inquiry? The answer seemed to come in another colonial precedent: the South African National Convention of 1910. The notable imperialist Leo Amery, a member of Lloyd George’s staff, prepared a memo for his boss on “The Irish Situation.” Drawing on his own experiences working with the Colonial Office in South Africa, Amery suggested that the British government turn the matter over to a body composed of representative Irishmen. The Afrikaners would have never acceded to a bill for a Union prepared in Westminster, he argued, and thus Ireland must be allowed to settle its own destiny.Footnote 74 For expert guidance, he offered two colonial arbitrators: British Columbia Premier Sir Richard McBride or the leader of the South African Unionist Party, Sir Thomas Smartt. Both men were of Irish descent and reliable supporters of the empire. Amery likely had another leader in mind. In March, he sent the plan to Smuts, pointing out “there is much in the Irish situation that has its analogy in South Africa before the Union.”Footnote 75
Whether by design or by accident, it was Smuts who ultimately set in motion the Irish Convention of 1917. On 15 May, he delivered his famous “Commonwealth” speech before both Houses of Parliament. Smuts’s words inspired Redmond, who turned to his friend, the Marquess of Crewe, and asked if Ireland might imitate the South African example to escape its current political quagmire. A Liberal peer and former colonial secretary during the period of South African Unification (1908–1910), Crewe encouraged Redmond along this path and agreed to approach Lloyd George as an “honest broker.”
The following day, the British War Cabinet agreed to dangle two carrots in front of Ireland. The first would be an immediate enactment of Home Rule with exclusion for the six counties of Ulster pending a five-year reappraisal by parliament, as well as an even more controversial Council of Ireland composed of representatives from both sides. Not surprisingly, Redmond rejected this proposal out of hand. The second was a convention of Irishmen assembled to consider a future for Ireland within the empire. Lloyd George, who did not yet support outright Dominion status for Ireland, nonetheless used the example of the National Convention of South Africa in his appeal to Redmond, hoping that “a similar expedient might, in the last resort, be found effectual in Ireland.”Footnote 76 Redmond jumped at this opportunity with the caveat that, like the South African convention, it must include representatives from all political groups in Ireland (including Sinn Féin).Footnote 77 Carson also threw his support behind the plan. Earlier in the Spring, he had doubted the feasibility of a special Dominion commission, worrying that colonial leaders would not want to get involved in Irish matters that might spill over into their own domestic circumstances.Footnote 78 Now he pleaded with Lloyd George to lean on Smuts as a sounding board for framing the convention to match the South African example. “Everything will turn on whether the Convention is founded upon sound principles,” he insisted.Footnote 79
Everyone seemed to agree that Smuts was the natural choice to chair the upcoming conference. The media widely reported on his candidacy, and he received many messages of support.Footnote 80 The Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, John Gregg, an old roommate from his university days, sent him an encouraging note.Footnote 81 Perhaps the most fulsome endorsement came from his intellectual confidant and beloved Cambridge tutor, H.J. Wosterholme. He assured Smuts, “I am sure you and the Irish people would get on admirably; you would appeal to them humanly and temperamentally as hardly any Briton could.Footnote 82
For reasons that are not entirely evident, Smuts did not take a prominent part in the Irish Convention, however. At the end of May, newspapers reported that he had declined the chairmanship, though it is not clear if he was ever formally offered the position.Footnote 83 Efforts by Amery to recruit a prominent Irish-South African politician named Sir Percy Fitzpatrick came to naught, and so Lloyd George turned to a popular Anglo-Irish reformer named Sir Horace Plunkett.Footnote 84 General Smuts would still have an important role to play in Ireland’s destiny, but not yet.
The Irish Convention, which sat between July 1917 and March 1918, was one of the more anticlimactic moments in the Home Rule saga. Yet its continued attempts to employ a South African model for the purpose of solving Ireland’s problems remains significant. Plunkett was an imperially minded Home Ruler who would go on to form the Irish Dominion League in 1919. He quickly assembled a non-partisan secretariat with individuals who had extensive administrative experience in South Africa and India. His chief secretary, Lord Southborough, held several private meetings with Smuts to discuss ways to accommodate Sinn Féin and other intransigent parties.Footnote 85 Under Plunkett’s direction, the secretariat produced a series of plans that partly mirrored Dominion status for Ireland (though some still allowed for continued representation at Westminster).Footnote 86 “If they expect Ulster to throw in its lot with a self-governing Ireland they must remain within the commonwealth of Dominions which constitute the empire,” he explained.Footnote 87
For all its promise, the convention did little more than distract nationalist energies for a year. Despite tacit support from Redmond and Carson, as well as southern Unionists and the Catholic Church, the convention failed to enlist the participation of Sinn Féin. This omission became all the more critical as the convention coincided with several important by-elections, including when Sinn Féin leader Eamon de Valera took the East Clare seat following the tragic death of Willie Redmond on the Western Front. In January 1918, the convention rejected a compromise put forward by southern Unionists that would have created a united Ireland with some fiscal authority still invested in Westminster. “Better for us never to have met than to have met and failed,” muttered a deeply embittered John Redmond upon departing the conference. Within two months, he was dead of heart failure.Footnote 88
In April 1918, Lloyd George decided on an ill-fated course of action that finally destroyed the constitutional nationalist movement. Faced with serious manpower woes on the Western Front, Lloyd George imprudently abandoned his hopes for the Irish Convention and pushed through emergency legislation that would grant immediate Home Rule while also imposing conscription on Ireland. This was the last straw for the ever-patient IPP, who withdrew from Westminster in protest. “Would Parliament also impose conscription on South Africa or Australia,” demanded one disgusted nationalist MP in his exit from the chambers.Footnote 89 Lloyd George soon suspended this policy, prompted in part by the alarmed Dominion premiers of the Imperial War Cabinet, but the damage was done. In the December 1918 General Election—the first since the passage of the 1912 Home Rule Bill—Sinn Féin candidates captured 73 of 105 seats, with Redmond’s old party retaining only six seats. The republican delegates refused to take their seats in Westminster, and instead formed a legislative assembly, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin, which promptly declared independence. The Home Rule crisis was over, and the Irish War of Independence had begun.
Dominion status for Ireland
The Irish Question was a significant topic at the 1921 Imperial Conference. By this point, the conflict in Ireland was reaching its tragic crescendo, with over 2,000 dead. Under the terms of a new Government of Ireland Act (1920), Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland were to receive their own parliaments under the common authority of a lord lieutenant. Northern Ireland set June 1921 as the inauguration date for its new legislative body; Southern Ireland rejected the proposal and assembled the Second Dáil of an Irish Republic.
The Dominion statesmen were divided on how to deal with the issue. New Zealand’s Bill Massey, a proud Orangeman, excoriated his colleagues for not attending the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament.Footnote 90 Privately he complained to Winston Churchill, “I feel sure that Loyalists in every part of the Empire will be intensely disappointed and the other people correspondingly jubilant.”Footnote 91 The new Canadian premier, Arthur Meighen, received petitions from a wide variety of parties seeking help, including the Mayor of Cork, the British Empire Alliance Halifax Branch, and the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada. Meighen was privately sympathetic toward Home Rule, and even met with several nationalists during his time in London.Footnote 92 However, he sought to avoid alienating his Protestant supporters and declined to intervene, telling one petitioner that Canadian intrusion would be “improper and unconstitutional.”Footnote 93 For his part, Billy Hughes had grown weary of Sinn Féin opposition, both in Ireland and in Australia. The feeling was mutual, with the American newspaper Sinn Feiner branding him a “violent imperialist.”Footnote 94 Hughes showed little interest in placing the Dominions in the middle of an ongoing war.Footnote 95 The exception was once again Jan Smuts, now fully ensconced as the prime minister of South Africa following the death of Louis Botha. Smuts publicly condemned the violence in Ireland as “a stain on the Empire’s record,” and demanded a settlement.Footnote 96
The idea of a Dominion intermediary no longer appealed to some nationalist voices. One radical newspaper insisted that “to ask the colonies for independence is to ask them for something they themselves have not. Nationhood and international status can be given only by nation states.”Footnote 97 Another paper agreed, arguing “Ireland is an ancient Kingdom, not a British colony.”Footnote 98 A letter to the editor in Young Ireland insisted that Smuts was a “renegade Afrikaner, with the English mind.”Footnote 99 The Sinn Feiner inverted and lampooned the British praise of Redmond as the Botha of Ireland, remarking that Smuts was the “John Redmond of South Africa.”Footnote 100
Publicly, the Irish government claimed they would make no overtures to the Dominion premiers at the imperial conference.Footnote 101 Behind the scenes, however, they sought to influence Smuts ahead of his visit. Republican authorities dispatched Colonel Maurice Moore to Pretoria on a secret mission to work with Irish diasporic networks and pressure the Union government to assist in their cause. Moore warned his superiors that Smuts would not support a republican form of government, given his own struggles with the Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa. But he also found Smuts exceedingly supportive of the cause for Irish self-government:
He meant I presume that being a Boer leader who had fought for the liberty of his own people, he considered himself morally bound to help others in similar distress. Besides he knew of the help always extended by the Irish people to the Boer cause.Footnote 102
Smuts also met with Tom Casement, brother of the executed nationalist martyr Roger Casement, who was there on behalf of Irish President Eamon de Valera. The two had been comrades in the difficult German East Africa campaign and had often discussed Irish affairs.Footnote 103
The British too saw an opportunity for an Irish settlement. Shortly after his arrival in London, Smuts went to Windsor Castle for a private meeting with King George V. The monarch now saw no alternative to Home Rule and hoped to end the violence in Ireland. He tasked Smuts with helping to draft the King’s Speech for the opening of the new parliament in Belfast. Smuts inserted language that closely mirrored his famous “Commonwealth” speech of 1917 before the British Houses of Parliament. The proposed text dangled the possibility of full-blown Dominion status for Ireland:
My world-wide Empire is a system of human government which rests on certain principles and ideals of freedom and cooperation, which must find their application in Ireland no less than in the other parts. And it is my desire that the full and fair application of these principles to Ireland may lead her out of the miseries of the present to the happiness and contentment which characterises all my other self-governing Dominions.Footnote 104
In a letter to Lloyd George, Smuts insisted that “the promise of Dominion status by The King would create a new and definite situation both in Ireland and elsewhere.”Footnote 105 Ultimately British Cabinet members rejected this offer of Dominion status and drafted their own speech. They nevertheless incorporated some of Smuts’s rhetoric, including the hope that Ireland would join “the free communities on which the British Empire is based.”Footnote 106
With Lloyd George and the King’s blessing, Smuts went to Dublin and engaged in nearly a week of secret diplomacy with de Valera. In their conversations and letters, Smuts made it clear he was not a representative of the British Cabinet, but rather a sympathetic friend seeking a peaceful resolution. He repeatedly drew on his experiences in the South African War and his Afrikaner identity in presenting himself as an outsider. “I have been through the same trouble in my own country,” he assured de Valera. “The best years of my life were spent in the same struggle through which you have been passing.”Footnote 107 Smuts framed the political stability of remaining within the empire as preferable to the uncertainties of republicanism. He also insisted that South Africa’s new status as an independent state in the League of Nations reflected the merits of association in the Commonwealth. Finally, Smuts extolled the virtue of Dominion status as a lofty goal for Irish nation-building. He explained:
You will as a Dominion no longer be at the mercy of the British Government. On the contrary, as a member of the Imperial Conference, you will be in great company, where you will have the backing of the other Dominions, who will look upon an invasion of your rights as if it were an invasion of their rights and status, and will on that ground, if on no other, back you up.
Smuts concluded with a passionate plea for peace and reconciliation: “Tis now or never, and you can do now what no Irish statesman has so far been able to do—secure full freedom for your people, such as is enjoyed by the other young independent nations in the British League.”Footnote 108
Ultimately it was fear of further war rather than Smuts’s lofty rhetoric that drove de Valera to the negotiating table. However, it was Smuts’s view of Ireland as a member of the Commonwealth that ultimately prevailed. Over the Fall of 1921, Irish plenipotentiaries met with their British counterparts and hammered out an agreement for Dominion status (at least in the South) in the guise of an Irish Free State, echoing the political nomenclature of the Orange Free State, an Afrikaner republic.Footnote 109 The arrangement provoked a short civil war in Ireland between pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions, even more acrimonious and violent than the Afrikaner feud in South Africa between the pro-Union supporters of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts and the Afrikaner Bittereinders. But pro-Treaty forces prevailed, and the Irish Free State would remain a formal, if rather hostile, member of the British Commonwealth until 1949.Footnote 110
Conclusion
Could Ireland have become a Dominion in 1917 through the intervention of Jan Smuts and his colleagues? It does not take too much of a leap of the historical imagination to picture David Lloyd George, John Redmond, and a half dozen colonial premiers seated around a table in a smoke-filled room, hashing out an arrangement that would keep a united and self-governing Ireland within the empire (though Unionists certainly would have rejected this imperial fantasy). Seen in this rather Whiggish light, the failure to employ Dominion statesmen in the cause of the Irish Question reads like a missed opportunity.
This counterfactual scenario aside, it is clear that the emerging idea of the Commonwealth was central to the debate about Ireland’s political destiny. The employment of imperial conferences and Dominion statesmen, the discourse of Ireland as a part of the imperial white race, and the reliance on South Africa as a model for “colonial” Home Rule reveals the importance of the settler colonies in the Irish Question—a fact that has been eclipsed by the long tradition of nationalist historiography. It certainly served as a powerful rhetorical tool for figures like Redmond to make a case for a constitutional solution for the troubled island. After all, if an Afrikaner former rebel like Smuts could sit in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street and determine the destiny of millions of subjects across the empire, could an independent Ireland not be trusted with self-government?
Perhaps the more appropriate question is: what does this episode tell us about the role of political networks and colonial personalities as agents of empire, particularly with regard to Ireland? As I argue elsewhere, the elevation of Dominion leaders into positions of imperial leadership entailed a “sort of settler colonial cosmopolitanism in British party politics that reflected the changing contours of the empire.”Footnote 111 This is normally associated with topics of acute importance to the entire empire, such as naval defense, imperial preference, “Oriental” immigration, and the rise of Japan. Yet as Billy Hughes acknowledged (to his chagrin), the Irish Question was also an imperial question. Colonial leaders played on their status as “outsiders” to navigate the emotional complexities of the Irish Question by operating outside the normal British/Irish or Unionist/Nationalist frameworks.
Ultimately this case study offers a new paradigm for thinking about the intersection of Irish nationalism and imperial politics. This in turn raises new questions about the role of imperial personalities in the Irish Question. This article primarily focused on the “Smuts as Irish nationalist” trope. But what about the role of New Zealand Prime Minister William Massey as the passionate defender of Ulster? Why did the Northern Ireland Parliament choose his name for the street leading to the Stormont (“Massey Avenue”)? What does his story tell us about the enduring transnational and transimperial elements of Unionism and Ulster Loyalism? Or what about Canadian leader Robert Borden, a Protestant from Nova Scotia, who became an immensely influential figure in Anglo-American relations and was even offered the position of British ambassador to the United States? How did he handle the challenge of hostile Irish populations in places like Chicago, Boston, and New York? Despite the recent “global” turn in Irish historiography, there is still much work to be done to explore more fully the interconnectedness of Ireland with the broader world, particularly in a settler colonial context. Needless to say, much of this archival work must be done not in the reading rooms of the British Library or the National Library of Ireland, but in places like Ottawa, Canberra, Pretoria, and Wellington.
John C. Mitcham is the Chair of the Department of History and the Albert C. Labriola Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Duquesne University. He thanks Darragh Gannon, Jesse Tumblin, Jacob Ivey, and the three anonymous readers for their comments on this article. He also thanks Donal McCracken, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the Global Irish Congress for the opportunity to present this work in Durban in 2023. Finally, the author extends his gratitude to the outstanding editorial team at the Journal of British Studies for their encouragement and assistance. Please address any correspondence to mitchamj@duq.edu
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