Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

Most scholarship on nineteenth-century labor internationalism focuses on the efforts of labor and socialist leaders to create solidarities across national boundaries among an emerging new class of industrial workers, and the labor unions and political parties created to represent them, through organizations such as the First and Second Internationals. In this provocative and important book, however, Niall Whelehan emphasizes the significance of battles over land ownership, and the conditions under which tenant farmers and agricultural laborers worked, in contributing to the radical forms of internationalism that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, Whelehan focuses on a period of agrarian agitation that raged in Ireland from 1879 to 1882 (the Irish Land War), and on the spread of Irish Land League and Ladies’ Land League chapters to diaspora communities across the globe. He argues that Land League activists, especially those from emigrant communities, often traveled to different countries and simultaneously participated in multiple radical movements. Through their activism, the Irish Land War became an “important point of reference” for many proponents of new forms of internationalism, encouraging a creative cross-fertilization of ideas about how to protect the rights and well-being of the producing classes in both industry and agriculture (16).Whelehan uses four cases studies of individual Land League activists to advance his thesis. His first case study is of London-based emigrant and trade unionist Peter O'Leary. Born in Ireland, O'Leary emigrated with his parents to Britain as a young child. His father was a migrant farm laborer, and O'Leary worked as a farm laborer himself before becoming a street mason. He participated in many radical British organizations but particularly devoted himself to serving as an envoy to Ireland for the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union and to establishing an Irish branch of this organization. O'Leary also traveled to the United States and Canada during the 1870s to investigate opportunities for assisted emigration of indigent farm laborers. During his tours, O'Leary met Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World, and began writing occasional articles for it. This New York–based paper helped to internationalize the Land League struggle, boasting particularly high circulation rates in the United States, Ireland, and Great Britain. During his travels, O'Leary also befriended American land reformer Henry George, who wrote an important pamphlet on the Irish land question and toured Ireland and Great Britain to promote his agenda. Although the executive of the Land League in Ireland favored peasant proprietorships as a satisfactory solution to Irish land disputes, Ford, George, and O'Leary were part of a radical wing of the Land League movement that believed land was a natural resource and that nationalization of the land was the only way to ensure its fruits were equally shared.A second case study explores the role of female organizers such as Marguerite Moore in establishing branches of the Ladies’ Land League throughout Ireland and Great Britain. The first Ladies’ Land League chapter was created in New York in 1880 to help raise funds for the relief of Irish poverty. An Irish equivalent was established in 1881. With the help of female organizers like Moore, the organization spread quickly throughout Ireland and Irish emigrant communities in the United States and Great Britain. Chapters in the United States and Great Britain continued to engage primarily in fundraising, but in Ireland the women's chapters played an important role in rent strikes and boycott activities, often proving more radical than the men's branches. Moore became especially well known for her fiery speeches and was arrested for her activities. Like many Ladies’ Land League activists, Moore was disillusioned by the compromises made by male Land League leaders with British policymakers to end the land wars, and she subsequently migrated to the United States with her large family and became active in a variety of feminist activities as well as Henry George's Single Tax land movement. A fascinating follow-up chapter to the one on Moore explores the overwhelmingly working-class composition and leadership of Ladies’ Land League chapters in Dundee, Scotland, where women dominated the workforce in the city's jute textile mills. Here Whelehan demonstrates that Ladies’ Land League chapters were not always dominated by middle-class women, as has sometimes been assumed.A third case study explores the neglected Irish emigrant community in Argentina, the largest outside the English-speaking world. Some Irish migrants took advantage of Argentina's expanding land frontiers as Indigenous populations were dispossessed to became landlords themselves. Other poor Irish emigrants became tenants of the new Irish landlord class. Whelehan's account traces the life of activist John Creaghe, who corresponded frequently with Henry George, believed in collective ownership of the land, and launched a “Land League–style campaign” against the Argentine landlord class (12). He eventually became an anarchist. Whelehan's final case study highlights the career of Thomas Ainge Devyr, who was born in Donegal but emigrated first to Britain and then to the United States, where he wrote for the Irish World and corresponded with Karl Marx. During his long career, Devyr “linked the Irish land question, English Chartism, and American agrarian radicalism” (12).Taken collectively, these case studies make a convincing case that there was a radical side to Irish Land League campaigns and that Land League activists often participated in many overlapping radical movements. Whelehan also demonstrates that Land League activists used many kinds of forums to inject questions of land ownership and the conditions under which agricultural workers labored into larger debates over class and gender inequalities. How successful they were in influencing the opinions of others active in the new international movements, however, is less well developed. Although Whelehan supplies some anecdotal evidence about interactions and correspondence between Land League activists and leading radical internationalists such as Henry George and Karl Marx, one is left wondering how deeply land and agricultural issues penetrated the international organizations created during this period. By contrast, the legacies of the tactics popularized by Land League activists, especially the women, seem clearer: boycotts and rent strikes became critical to many different types of working-class activism in the twentieth century. In sum, this book, while not definitive, casts important light on the international and radical dimensions of Irish Land League agitation and suggests promising new pathways for working-class historians to explore.

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