Sim, D;
(2020)
Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States.
Past and Present
, 247
(1)
pp. 77-112.
10.1093/pastj/gtz036.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/pastj/gtz036 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz036 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10071779 |
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