eprintid: 10106289
rev_number: 26
eprint_status: archive
userid: 608
dir: disk0/10/10/62/89
datestamp: 2020-08-05 13:12:03
lastmod: 2022-04-08 07:40:39
status_changed: 2022-04-08 07:40:39
type: article
metadata_visibility: show
creators_name: Lally, J
title: ‘Mahomedan Fenians’: Anti-Imperialism, the Islamic World, and Irish Republican Thought, c.1848-1885
ispublished: inpress
divisions: UCL
divisions: B03
divisions: C03
divisions: F28
note: © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
abstract: If Irish republicanism (or Fenianism) after 1848 was sometimes articulated through the critique of British imperialism in Afro-Asia, by the 1870s the Fenian command and journalists writing for the Irish-American republican press were taking a marked interest in Muslim societies under British rule. This interest developed steadily from the Indian Rebellion of 1857–8 to the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–8, analysis of the latter illuminating the additional potential possessed by those frontiers where imperial rivalries could be manipulated to exhaust and abrade British power and prestige. Afghanistan—a buffer between British India and Russian Central Asia—held great promise, and the eruption of the Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) presented an opportunity for the Irish cause: support for Afghans might precipitate the disintegration of British coercive power, providing in turn the opportunity for Ireland’s emancipation. Focusing on the writings of the Fenian command and reportage in the US-based Irish World, this article shows the attentiveness of Irish patriots to the spectral power of the world of Islam, which haunted the European powers, and their subversion of the Orientalist categories constructed to demonise Muslims, particularly those from the frontier most resistant to European imperialism. Fantastical and opportunistic, this short-lived burst of interest was the culmination of a longer-term process, one revealing the embeddedness of Fenianism within a world-historical moment marked by numerous imaginative projects constitutive of Islam as a world religion and a (latent) world power, and, thus, the imperial, trans-imperial and global geographies of Fenian thought.
date: 2022-03-22
date_type: published
publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
official_url: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac021
oa_status: green
full_text_type: pub
language: eng
primo: open
primo_central: open_green
verified: verified_manual
elements_id: 1800258
doi: 10.1093/ehr/ceac021
lyricists_name: Lally, Jagjeet
lyricists_id: JLALL68
actors_name: Lally, Jagjeet
actors_id: JLALL68
actors_role: owner
full_text_status: public
publication: The English Historical Review
article_number: ceac021
issn: 0013-8266
citation:        Lally, J;      (2022)    ‘Mahomedan Fenians’: Anti-Imperialism, the Islamic World, and Irish Republican Thought, c.1848-1885.                   The English Historical Review      , Article ceac021.  10.1093/ehr/ceac021 <https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr%2Fceac021>.    (In press).    Green open access   
 
document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10106289/1/Lally_ceac021.pdf2.pdf