The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: Servants or Slaves?

Rather than academic ‘quibbling’, as is often suggested by those who perpetuate the ‘Irish were slaves too’ meme, the differences and commonalities between these two forms of unfree labour are of fundamental importance to our understanding of the development of racialised perpetual chattel slavery in the Anglo-American colonies

The Many Forms and Meanings of (Peace) Walls in Contemporary Northern Ireland

Laura McAtackneyArhuus UniversityDenmark The Many Forms and Meanings of (Peace) Walls in Contemporary Northern Ireland Abstract: Peace walls are a longstanding materialization of the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles c.1968-c.1998. The walls have been one of the only security infrastructural forms associated with the violence to have continued and grown into the post-conflict context. They have often been a forgotten materialization of conflict due to their ‘temporary’ nature and their restriction to working-class, urban areas. While there are increasing moves to have these walls removed, or at least to put policies in place to allow them to be taken down in consultation with the communities beside them, there has been little consideration of the long-term impacts on public memory of material segregation. This article uses peace walls in Belfast as a case-study of the unforeseen repercussions of long-term segregation of divided communities. It offers a warning to the current generation of politicians regarding not only the role of what ideological walls are intended to do, but also the impacts they can have that were not intended.  Keywords: Belfast, segregation, peace walls, memorials, gender, victimhoo

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity

Shahmima Akhtar, Dónal Hassett, Kevin Kenny, Laura McAtackney, Ian McBride, Timothy McMahon, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, and Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Decolonising Irish History? Possibilities, Challenges, Practices’, Irish Historical Studies, 45:168 (2022), pp. 303-332.

The nature of Ireland’s place within the British Empire continues to attract significantpublic and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland’s imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black LivesMatter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. Thisround table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas

Colonial institutions : uses, subversions, and material afterlives

Archaeologically based explorations of colonialism or institutions are common case-studies in global historical archaeology, but the "colonial institution"-the role of institutions as operatives of colonialism-has often been neglected. In this thematic edition we argue that in order to fully understand the interconnected, global world one must explicitly dissect the colonial institution as an entwined, dual manifestation that is central to understanding both power and power relations in the modern world. Following Ann Laura Stoler, we have selected case studies from the Australia, Europe, UK and the USAwhich reveal that the study of colonial institutions should not be limited to the functional life of these institutions-or solely those that take the form of monumental architecture-but should include the long shadow of "imperial debris" (Stoler 2008) and immaterial institutions