Michael Davitt's Pacific World

Abstract

In the last decade historians have sought increasingly to recast Ireland's history away from the narrow confines of the island nation into new and more expansive currents. This tendency in Irish historical writing substantially mirrors a recalibration that is occurring in many other national historiographies, a move towards greater recognition of and engagement \V":ith transnational approaches to the study of history. For Ireland, this emerging trend has meant, among other things, renewed consideration of its relationship with the British Empire. Paul Townend was correct when he recently wrote that, for a generation or more, Irish history 'has had little engagement with imperial history, particularly for the modern period'.1 However, due in part to the proliferation of new transnational histories, and also to heightened interest in the so-called 'British world', that detachment has become increasingly unsustainable. Issues of empire and colonisation have struck back with a vigour unlmaglnable a decade or tv.ro ago. The remarkable number of recent studies addressing aspects of the relationship bet\veen Ireland and India bears testimony to this development.2 For Townend, however, the rebirth of interest in the relationship of Ireland and empire is less a surprise than a recognition of the fundamental truth that, 'by the nineteenth century, it was abundantly clear to Irish men and women that their realities were fundamentally bound up with English power and proximity. In that sense the Irish had long been a self-consciously and thoroughly imperial people'.