About the Author

Paul A. Townend is a professor of British and Irish history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author of Father Mathew, Temperance, and Irish Identity and the coeditor of Ireland in an Imperial World.

Reviews

“A bold and original interpretation in which empire emerges as the essential context—rather than a mere sideshow or backdrop—for the rise of Irish nationalism. To find the origins of Home Rule, we will now need to look not simply at the internal politics of the United Kingdom but at Irish responses to events in India, Egypt, Sudan, and South Africa.”—Kevin Kenny, Boston College

“Thoroughly engaging. . . . The work is a major step forward in its discernment that a radical, principled anti-imperialism lay at the heart of the constitutional nationalist tradition in the latter years of the nineteenth century.”—Breac