TY  - JOUR
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
TI  - Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States
SN  - 0031-2746
AV  - public
IS  - 1
EP  - 112
VL  - 247
SP  - 77
A1  - Sim, D
JF  - Past and Present
PB  - Oxford University Press (OUP)
Y1  - 2020/05//
N2  - This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ?special money? and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.
ID  - discovery10071779
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz036
ER  -