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 open up new questions on many themes of critical importance to Ireland's 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 ties 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. Non-specialists 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.

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

Reviews

"A transnational approach, properly conceptualized and disciplined, promises to offer the rising generation of historians of Ireland a potentially exciting intellectual and emotional escape route from the suffocating confines of ideologically inspired and conceptually vacuous perspectives. This is no petty ambition. To derive the full potential advantage of the approach requires transcending the comfortable insular assumptions in which so much of even the most intellectually impressive historiography of Ireland remains cocooned. More power to the pioneers."-Professor Joe Lee, Director of Glucksman Ireland House, New York University

Book Information
ISBN 9781138383142
Author Niall Whelehan
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g