Until relatively recently, their stories could not be easily traced, but the expansion of digital archival databases helps make their recovery increasingly possible.” Looking beyond the leadership figures brings unfamiliar voices to the surface, women and men who have been on the margins of – or entirely missing from – existing accounts. Whelehan’s aim, he says in the book’s introduction, is “to uncover new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations. Indeed, they regarded such support as vital leading activist Anna Parnell once declared the campaign would collapse “without external help.” “The Land League and the Ladies’ Land League consciously sought emigrant support and appealed to the imagined geography of an ‘Irish world,’” Whelehan writes in “Changing Land,” which is part of the Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. They combined the cause of anti-landlordism in Ireland with labour, feminist and humanitarian causes in their new homes”. “Their campaigns caught the attention of radicals around the world as they spoke about universal issues of rent, housing, democratic rights, landlordism. “The book traces the lives of activists who were present in Ireland, the USA, Argentina, Scotland and England and the networks of people and ideas that connected them,” the author said. “This was also the period with the highest numbers of Irish emigrants in the history of the diaspora.”įive million people lived in Ireland and there were three million Irish-born people abroad, of which about 60 percent were in the U.S.
“‘Changing Land’ is about how people, in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora, advanced new and radical ideas of social reform during a transformative moment in Irish history known as the ‘Land War’ of the 1880s,” Whelehan told the Echo. He adds, “The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, succeeded in selling the legislation in Parliament through promises that it was ‘something peculiarly “Irish” and unexportable to Britain.’” By 1880, Land League co-founder Michael Davitt was claiming that the movement had over 200,000 members and “virtually rule the country.”Īnd 1881 saw the Land Act, which was radical, says Whelehan, in that it “introduced ambivalence into ideas of land ownership in Ireland by increasing the level of state interference in property rights and limiting landlords’ ability to decide rents and changes in tenantry.”
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