This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. By the 1930s, the songs of the Orange Order reflected women's prominence and visibility in an organisation often portrayed as thoroughly male-dominated. While focusing on women's great success in the Scottish institution, this song highlights many of the key themes explored throughout the book. Female Orangeism came to play a key role in the Orange Order and tens of thousands of women became 'Orange sisters' because they wanted to help maintain a British world founded on the Empire and Protestantism. The Orange Order is often characterised as a thoroughly masculinist brotherhood, associated with Irish sectarian violence. The book provides an important contribution to our understanding of Irish women within the diasporic contexts of Britain and Canada and addresses the broader questions within migration history about the gendered nature of ethnic associational activity.

Chapter eight analyses the relevance of the theory of multi-level governance (MLG) to explain the role of the European Union (EU) in Northern Ireland and contends that the EU successfully engages Northern Ireland as a region of a member state without threatening that state’s sovereignty or power. The EU has increasingly become successful because of its accommodation with the British state, and the British state allows the EU as a mechanism to reconcile communities in Northern Ireland. MLG emphasises the multi-level nature of EU politics and attaches significance to the role played by subnational units and supranational institutions in the policy process. The model also proposes new forms of governance which offers a specific conception of EU politics based on an altered relationship between state and non-state actors, where the latter have become increasingly influential. The MLG model may not fully capture some of the internal constraints, complexities, and divisions which are characteristic of Northern Ireland’s recent political experience and which are reflected in its evolving relationship with the EU.

This chapter describes Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis's ideas and activities during the war in the context of his anti-militarism which started in the early 1870s. It focuses on his efforts to revive anti-militarist resistance in the Netherlands and internationally, situating these efforts in the context of the divisions in the international anarchist movement. At the international socialist congresses of Brussels and Zurich Domela Nieuwenhuis clashed with his German comrades over measures to prevent the outbreak of war. Anti-militarism was the hallmark of internationalism, he explained. Germany had been almost impervious to anarchist ideas, but if German workers were to rise then their comrades in other countries would follow their example. However, if the revolution were to start in France, the consequences would be disastrous: the Germans would repeat what they had done in 1871, crushing the revolutionaries and revolution in general.

The Angry Brigade claimed responsibility for ten high-profile bomb attacks against cabinet ministers, police, employers involved in industrial disputes, and other targets of a broadly anti-capitalist bent over 1970-71 in Britain, and were linked to a further fifteen. This chapter analyses their emergence from a milieu of wider left-wing political violence over the period, and assesses their activities and communiqués, the heavy-handed police investigation that follows, and the trial of the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ over 1972, whose defence resulted in legal innovations and a significant support group. Drawing on archival research, interviews and historical analysis, it seeks to take the group seriously, often derided as Pythonesque or a suicidal diversion for an isolated minority on the Far Left. While emerging from overlapping networks in the counterculture and young British New Left, it argues that its choice of targets, its horizontal and diffuse organisation, and the crude police crackdown and prosecution forecasts some of the political weather of the far Left in Britain over the 1970s and beyond.

This chapter addresses the development of Dublin by focusing on a debate on government policy which occurred within that bureaucratic system in the closing decades of the reign of Elizabeth I. There were serious divergences of opinion at this time on how the Irish kingdom ought to be governed, disagreements which consequently spawned an extensive 'literature of complaint'. The chapter examines the broad range of figures critiquing government policy and the political culture of the Irish kingdom, from high-ranking officials to more marginal figures. It shows that the barrage of complaints had at least one tangible result, in the reeling in of martial law in the early 1590s. The chapter discusses the parallel development of an exculpatory literature of justification in response to the criticism of high ranking crown officers.

The strange career of American international ideas includes countless debates about policy, political party and ideology, but it replicates similar 'end of history' expectations. The American promotion of a particular nation-building vision, at home and abroad, connects different periods and people in American history. C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career made the case that the experiences of African Americans in the South were not an aberration from American political development, but instead an integral part of it. Like the views of race analysed by C. Vann Woodward, the assumptions about purpose and principle in American foreign policy are sufficiently protean to bend and adjust in different times, but endure in their core influence on decision-makers. American nation-building grows out of deeply held domestic beliefs about democracy and capitalism.