Niall Whelehan - Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History

This book explores the benefits and challenges of transnational history for the study of modern Ireland. In recent years the word transnational has become more and more conspicuous in history writing across the globe, with scholars seeking to move beyond national and local frameworks when investigating the past. Yet transnational approaches remain rare in Irish historical scholarship. This book argues that the broader contexts and scales associated with transnational history are ideally suited to generate new questions on many themes of critical importance to Irelands past and present. They also provide an important means of challenging ideas of Irish exceptionalism. The chapters included here open up new perspectives on central debates and events in Irish history. They illuminate numerous transnational lives, follow flows and connections across Irish borders, and trace networks and links with Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Australia and the British Empire. This book provides specialists and students with examples of different concepts and ways of doing transnational history. Nonspecialists will be interested in the new perspectives offered here on a rich variety of topics, particularly the two major events in modern Irish history, the Great Irish Famine and the 1916 Rising.

Niall Whelehan is a Marie Curie Fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh.

The Irish World, 24 March 1877