This thesis examines the relationship between Henry George and the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic and, detailing the ideological interaction between George’s republicanism and Irish nationalism, argues that his uneven appeal reveals the contours of the construction of Gilded Age Irish-America. The work assesses the functionality and operation, in both Ireland and the US, of Irish culture as a dynamic but discordant friction within the Anglophone world. Ireland’s unique geopolitical position and its religious constitution nurtured an agrarianism that shared its intellectual roots with American republicanism. This study details how the crisis of Irish land invigorated both traditions as an effective oppositional culture to the processes of modernity. The Land War placed Ireland at the centre of a briefly luminous political upheaval that extended far beyond its own shores and positioned the country as a site of ideological conflict at a critical juncture in the history of political thought. Irish nationalism helped to perpetuate a specific aggregation of moral and economic principles, and, in equating British imperial force with the worst depredations of capital, Irish-Americans tapped into a powerful seam in American political culture that universalised the struggle of the Irish tenant farmers. Just as many contemporaries framed Irish politics with the ideals of the American republic, this thesis argues that Irish politics during the Land War, ever more interdependent on its diaspora, is better understood in relation to American political discourse than British.

Excavations at the Mary M. B. Wakefield Estate in rural Milton, Massachusetts produced an assemblage of household artifacts linked to the Byrnes family, a first-generation Irish-American family who lived in the estate’s farmhouse in the early twentieth century. Though the Byrneses were born in America, they were part of the Irish Diaspora, a community defined by its place outside Ireland yet connected to their homeland and to each other through the self-identification as a member of a diaspora, termed a diasporic consciousness. Through a focus on everyday household practices, I examine how members of the family formed their social identities by balancing the appeal of Americanization with the pull of their Irish heritage. Archaeologists studying the Irish Diaspora have largely focused on the nineteenth-century urban Irish immigrant experience. By reconstructing Milton’s Irish landscape in this period through documentary evidence and spatial analysis, I expand on previous studies by exploring how geographical context and generational status shape the creation and maintenance of a diasporic consciousness. I find that the Irish in Milton, and particularly the Byrnes family, had far less access to the traditional social, cultural, and economic features of urban Irish immigrant enclaves of previous generations, such as the presence of churches, Irish-owned stores, voluntary associations, and Irish neighborhoods. Analyses of artifacts related to foodways and dining, personal adornment and dress, and childrearing and children’s play demonstrate alternate strategies that the Byrnes family used to maintain traditional aspects of Irish society. They purchased specific types and quantities of tableware and beverages needed to fulfill the customs and traditions of Irish hospitality, and infused their daily lives with Catholic devotional rituals and childrearing beliefs. But while they engaged in Irish cultural and religious traditions, they did so within larger household practices that expressed their adoption of American ideals of respectability and refinement, thriftiness, morality, efficiency, and hygiene. By setting a formal table, wearing refined dress, and executing appropriate infant care, the Byrnes constructed a domestic sphere that enabled them to form their own version of respectable Irish-American identity that remained even after they left the farmhouse.

Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / This dissertation is a history of the First Irish Diaspora and its relationship to the Spanish Empire’s eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. Although there is a long history of Irish migration to Spain, I argue that the conjuncture of the War of the English Succession (1688-1695) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) foreclosed hopes of a reversal of the seventeenth century Irish land-confiscations which defined the English conquest and colonization of Ireland, pushing thousands of Irish Catholics into exile near-simultaneous to the ascension of a reform-minded Bourbon monarchy to the Spanish thrown which opened new opportunities for useful subjects. At the same time, these wars established the emergent British Empire as a rising Atlantic hegemon and exposed the fragility of a Spanish Empire widely viewed by contemporaries as in decline. In such a context, Irish familiarity with British methods of empire-making made them ideal imperial translators for the Spanish Crown precisely as the empire embarked on its Bourbon Reform program. Genealogy and religion formed the foundations of Irish assimilation into the Spanish Empire – the Irish became Hiberno-Spaniards because of the “genealogical fiction” that the Irish sliocht (“race,” literally “seed”) descended from Spaniards and because they were Catholic. In Spain, the impact of this Hiberno-Spanish diaspora on the Bourbon Reforms began following the War of the Spanish Succession and reached its crescendo in the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Specifically, Hiberno-Spanish imperialists in the metropole were important participants in the debates and decisions that promoted liberalizing national-colonial trade, investments in infrastructure, the emulation of foreign practices such as British and Irish economic societies, and more; i.e. the emulation of British political economy. Their principal contribution to the empire was the translation of political economic statecraft and a cosmopolitanism of exile that honed their ability to translate foreign ideas in an age of imperial emulation and made them especially effective imperial intermediaries in polyglot and liminal spaces such as the Gulf Coast borderlands. There, in Cuba, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, Hiberno-Spanish slavers, governors, merchants, and imperialists were important contributors to Spain’s real but ephemeral resurgence in colonial North America and the Atlantic world. The Spanish Empire collapsed and Irish emigration patterns rerouted to North America, but Hiberno-Spaniards and the Bourbon Reforms first accelerated the processes of colonization and slavery that transformed Cuba and the Gulf Coast into the world’s capital of cotton, sugar, and slavery in the nineteenth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This paper evaluates the role of private policing in the patterns of violence that were prevalent in the mining regions of eastern Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 1870s, and which were attributed to an Irish secret society called the “Molly Maguires”. This topic has long been subject to academic and political controversy, and the use of agent provocateur tactics by the Pinkerton agency has been strongly suggested, but never conclusively proven. Drawing on existing research on secret societies, private policing, and the role of the agent provocateur, this paper combines two strands of research that have so far largely been discussed separately. The study then attempts to close the gap on the agent provocateur question by applying methods from criminological history. Through treating different sources as conflicting testimonies, as well as using GIS to provide new insights on crime patterns in the region, it analyzes the complex relationship between undercover policing and the groups under its surveillance. The results provide decisive new evidence regarding the agent provocateur question and the role of the Pinkerton agency during the Molly Maguire trials, as well as the character of the surviving evidence.

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