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