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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. ‘Our American Aristotle’ Henry George and the Republican Tradition during the Transatlantic Irish Land War, 1877-1887 Andrew Phemister PhD University of Edinburgh 2016 Abstract This thesis examines the relationship between Henry George and the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic and, detailing the ideological interaction between George’s republicanism and Irish nationalism, argues that his uneven appeal reveals the contours of the construction of Gilded Age Irish-America. The work assesses the functionality and operation, in both Ireland and the US, of Irish culture as a dynamic but discordant friction within the Anglophone world. Ireland’s unique geopolitical position and its religious constitution nurtured an agrarianism that shared its intellectual roots with American republicanism. This study details how the crisis of Irish land invigorated both traditions as an effective oppositional culture to the processes of modernity. The Land War placed Ireland at the centre of a briefly luminous political upheaval that extended far beyond its own shores and positioned the country as a site of ideological conflict at a critical juncture in the history of political thought. Irish nationalism helped to perpetuate a specific aggregation of moral and economic principles, and, in equating British imperial force with the worst depredations of capital, Irish-Americans tapped into a powerful seam in American political culture that universalised the struggle of the Irish tenant farmers. Just as many contemporaries framed Irish politics with the ideals of the American republic, this thesis argues that Irish politics during the Land War, ever more interdependent on its diaspora, is better understood in relation to American political discourse than British. ii 1. Introduction 1 2. Henry George and his antecedents 11 a. Progress and Poverty 14 b. The moral foundations of land reform 18 3. Republicanism: theology and political economy 25 a. Value 30 b. Property 34 c. Natural harmony 38 d. Ideas of nature 40 e. Catholicism and liberal modernity 43 f. The problem of the Enlightenment 46 g. Dissenting Protestantism and Irish Catholicism 53 4. Land in the Irish historical imagination 57 5. Culture, identity and ideology 71 a. Romanticism 74 b. Pan-Celticism 77 c. Poetry and the political imagination 82 6. The Gilded Age: Henry George’s modernity 89 a. Historicism 93 b. Science and Society 95 c. George’s networks 102 d. Socialism 105 7. The Land War and the League: republican praxis 113 a. Labourers and the Land League 121 b. The Church and the Land League 126 c. Republican praxis 131 d. Boycotting 134 8. Georgism and Irish-America: class, culture and social radicalism 139 a. The Irish World and Irish print culture 150 b. Urban politics 157 c. George and the American Catholic Church 162 d. Slavery and Freedom 177 9. An American in Ireland: Liberalism and Republicanism 183 a. The decline of the League 188 b. Transatlantic republicanism 198 c. Liberty and the Republic 209 10. Conclusion 215 11. Bibliography 225 iii I declare that this thesis has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where stated otherwise by reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own. Word count: 100,000 Andrew Phemister ………………………………………………………… iv ‘Our American Aristotle’: Henry George and the Republican Tradition during the transatlantic Irish Land War, 1877-1887 The 1880s were a turbulent decade across the North Atlantic. New challenges radiated from the realms of technology and philosophy that shook previously firm convictions and moral foundations; and with the onrushing tide of ‘modernity’ came both an unrestrained devotion to a new future and a crisis of confidence in the certainties of the past. A near boundless optimism in human and mechanical potential competed with, and was sometimes bound to, a seething anger at present injustice. ‘It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul’ was how Walt Whitman expressed the disquieting changes.1 There was nothing new in this perhaps; merely the tectonic friction between the past and the future, but it was the speed and dynamism that created the ferocity of the shockwaves. As one observer wrote, ‘at no time in the history of the world has there been such a rapid – I might say revolutionary – advance of opinion’.2 Occupying a central position in this ideological maelstrom was the question of Irish land. The Irish Land War was an international event, both in terms of its causes and its consequences it cannot be confined to Ireland itself. It was precipitated as much by the effect of economic globalisation, particularly the pressures of international competition from the United States, as by a succession of poor harvests, and fuelled by the transfer of both money and ideas from the U.S. and from Britain. It succeeded in mobilising a vast tranche of the Irish diaspora, not only in the cause of their homeland but as part of a more ambitious vision. Their hopes added vigour and, for a brief moment, tangible purpose, to a venerable republican political tradition which spanned centuries and continents, releasing latent frustrations shared by the dispossessed and disenchanted on both sides of the Atlantic. At the epicentre of this was Henry George. His Progress and Poverty, which argued for land nationalization through full taxation of ground rents, became the best-selling work of political economy in the nineteenth century, making its author an international name.3 Variously a reformer, amateur political economist, and social philosopher, George remains a shockingly understudied figure, given his stature and prominence during the final decades of the nineteenth century. This is nowhere more evident that in regards to his relationship with Ireland, where a focus on events in the country itself has obscured 1 Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect, (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh, 1882), 211 2 ‘What Morality Have We Left’, North American Review, 132:294, (1881): 497 3 Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 115. 1 the international dimensions of the conflict in which George was pivotal, as well as the centrality of the international Irish working class to George’s success.4 Indeed, too often the assumption remains that Irish ethnicity in America was broadly a hindrance to radical politics.5 In seeking to rectify this, this work attempts to deconstruct the nature of the intellectual correlations between George’s republicanism and Irish cultural and political formations across the Atlantic world. Realigning popular political activity with its unspoken moral and ideological motivations is central to this; as is understanding late nineteenth century Ireland as a site of philosophical conflict, as a liminal and libidinal space in which oppositional political ideas could be incubated. The work seeks to make a number of historiographical interventions. In the first instance, as previously mentioned, Henry George’s general absence from the genealogy of political thought is a remarkable omission. While there are a number of reasons for this oversight, this work will make an attempt to reconstruct George as an important theorist as well as a political actor. Secondly, the work addresses two traditionally overlooked aspects within Irish historiography; the diaspora and political theory.6 With regard to this specific period, Ely Janis, in his 2015 book A Greater Ireland, has recently addressed the diasporic dimensions of the Land League to great effect. Nevertheless, Janis reasserts Eric Foner’s assessment that the Land League in the U.S. represented the integration of the Irish into a peculiarly American (and Protestant) reform tradition.7 This work seeks to correct that narrow assumption by relocating Irish republicanism and Georgism in a broader transatlantic genealogy shaped less by sectarian difference than by British imperial power, and to see them together as a key nexus in a longstanding battle of ideas about rights, centralisation, utilitarianism and, above all, land. By looking at their (essentially metaphysical) similarities, the relationship between Irish (diasporic) identity, the cultures of republican nationalism, and their political ideologies will be interpreted as deep rooted and interdependent, rather than contingent or opportunistic. By restoring the ideological dimension, the work will question the general consensus on the Land League 4 Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881-1896, (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 65; David N. Doyle, ‘Unestablished Irishmen: New Immigrants and Industrial America, 1870-1910’, in D. Hoerder, (ed.), American Labor and Immigration History, 1877-1920s: Recent European Research, (Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 193; Sean Wilentz, ‘Industrializing America and the Irish: Towards the new departure’, Labor History, 20:4, (1979): 587 5 Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928, (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 126; Kerby A.