Writing in Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928, Tom Garvin observed that ‘well over 40 per cent, perhaps 50 per cent, had lived outside Ireland for considerable periods … foreign experience was very important in the development of the leaders’. The impact of ‘foreign experience’ on leading nationalist revolutionaries, this article submits, pace Garvin, could have proved influential in the development of the Irish Revolution more widely. Between June 1919 and December 1920, Éamon de Valera toured the United States. From New York City to Salt Lake City, Alabama to Montana, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish republic addressed ‘Ireland’ in hundreds of interviews and speeches. Of these myriad public statements, his Cuban missive, notably, crossed national boundaries. Comparing Ireland's geo-strategic relationship with Great Britain to that of Cuba and the United States, de Valera's argument for an independent Irish republic was made in the Americas. How did de Valera's movement across the U.S. alter his political views of Ireland? How were presentations of de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ mediated across the ‘Irish world’? How did discourse on the Monroe Doctrine inform Anglo-Irish negotiations between Truce and Treaty? Exploring de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ as global case study, this article concludes, ultimately, can shift the historiographical significance of ‘foreign experience’ from nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland to the flows and circulation of transnational revolution.

This article examines how anti-Semitism influenced republican politics in revolutionary Ireland. It looks at Irish republican attitudes toward Jews, including examples of anti-Semitism. Jews were a visible minority in Ireland and one that was sometimes seen as unionist politically. This article illustrates how conspiracy theories about Jewish influence sometimes featured in Irish nationalist tropes, but were far more common in British and unionist discourses regarding events in Ireland. It also shows how individual Jews took part in revolutionary activities, even as some republicans expressed suspicion about them. Outside Ireland, Irish revolutionaries interacted with Jews in several locations, particularly the United States. There was often cooperation in these settings and both groups expressed solidarity towards one another.

In comparison to many parts of post-war Europe, Ireland's wars between 1919 and 1923 were not as lethal as they might have been. This article addresses some of the possible reasons why, reasons that were quite specific to the immediate Anglo-Irish context but reasons that may also have been due to broader transnational understandings of what it was to be a soldier, what it was to fight at that time. But while comparative fatality rates may leave Ireland somewhat overshadowed, this article considers what Ireland's wars still share with other conflicts and looks at some of the dimensions of Irish violence that were, irrespective of numbers killed, still fundamentally the same as violence experienced in other periods and places. Tackling some of the challenges of contemporary comparisons, the article suggests other possible comparisons ranging far beyond the inter-war period that may prove more fruitful, and asks whether the nature of violence shapes our perceptions of a conflict far more than fatality rates do.

In the late 1930s, the first independent Arab banks in Palestine, the Arab Bank and the Arab Agricultural Bank, sued customers who had defaulted on loans in an attempt to maintain solvency. Their indebted customers, unable to pay, fought back to prevent their lands from being foreclosed and sold to Zionist buyers. Each party claimed that its position was consistent with, indeed essential to, the anti-Zionist nationalist cause. The story of these pioneering Arab banks and their legal battles with their customers in the wake of the 1936-1939 revolt provides insight into Arab financial life in Mandate Palestine. It reveals the banks’ struggles to survive; complicates notions of Arab-Palestinian landlessness and indebtedness; and argues that political and economic exigencies, not reductive notions of collaboration or patriotism, produced the banks’ antagonistic relationship with their customers, whereby the survival of one came at the expense of the other.