Nationalism, Democracy, and State Building Among the Young Ireland Diasporic Generation, 1842-72

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the role played by Young Irelanders in processes of nation-building and state-building in Australia, Canada, and the United States. It examines the formation of this group as a ‘generation’, and how they came to understand state-building to be central to the process of nation-building in the aftermath of the failed 1848 rebellion, which resulted in many of them being imprisoned and exiled. It follows the political careers of the Young Ireland exiles after 1848, and argues that their divergent trajectories were all, in different ways, applications of ideas that had developed in the course of their Irish political project. Once dispersed to the four corners of the world, the Young Irelanders might have become altogether insignificant. Instead this thesis argues that they exploited the opportunities then being opened by the telegraph, the new newspaper press, the railways and the steamer to enable the emergence of a global Irish nationalist awareness, shaped from outside the island of Ireland. Moreover, the thesis interrogates how the Young Ireland generation themselves changed in response to their new contexts, and in particular to the realities of the settler colonial societies into which they moved. As such, this project offers new insights on the integration of Irish diasporic communities into the fledgling democracies of these new nations and states, to which they offered a significant ideological contribution as they engaged with key debates about nationalism, democracy, citizenship, and minority rights.