The Necessity of Nationalism: Ireland and Francophone Canada in the Political Career of Charles Ramsay Devlin

The Necessity of Nationalism:Ireland and Francophone Canada in the Political Career of Charles Ramsay Devlin Raymond Jess (bio) when charles ramsay devlin arrived in Dublin as Canada's new trade and immigration commissioner in May 1897, he was taken aback at the level of some of the antipathy both he and Canada received in the Irish nationalist press. Claims that Manitoba was the Siberia of the British Empire where Catholics were outnumbered twelve to one and would fall victim to Orange brutality weren't going to make Canada appealing to potential emigrants outside of Ulster. A letter-writing campaign to quell some of those fears was one of the first tasks Devlin undertook in his new job. Nevertheless, copies of some of the articles printed by the Irish nationalist press made their way across the Atlantic, where they stunned politicians in Ottawa. Believing that individual material prosperity was the natural desire of every British subject, many of Canada's politicians were oblivious to the rising tide of cultural nationalism occurring in Ireland in the 1890s. But although Ireland's Gaelic revival was a unique movement in Irish history, this article will argue that nationalism was becoming an economic and political norm throughout much of the Atlantic world during this period, and that Canada was no exception. Economic protectionism, agricultural development, and the role of national history and national languages in school curricula were all issues affecting both Ireland and Canada between 1890 and the First World War. As a Canadian Liberal member of parliament (MP) in Ottawa, as an Irish nationalist MP in Westminster, and as a Quebec government minister in Quebec City, Devlin's transatlantic career was emblematic of political changes occurring across the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Devlin's experience in Ireland as both an emigration agent and an Irish nationalist MP made him realize that political and cultural nationalism helped [End Page 66] people feel at home in a world of increasing and inevitable economic and social change. Beginning his political life with a desire that more Irish and French Canadians should emigrate to western Canada rather than New England, Devlin eventually came to believe that Ireland and Quebec could be something other than labor-supply regions for the Anglo-American world. While many studies in recent years have underscored the similarities of Irish and Quebec history (i.e., as predominantly Catholic nations under British imperial rule), few have identified the normativity of Irish and Quebec nationalism as a response to industrial modernity and economic globalization.1 This is perhaps due to the tendency of historians in the Anglosphere to situate Irish and Quebec nationalisms as movements that are part of, but at the same time on the periphery of, the Anglo-American world. By contrast, sociologists studying world nationalisms have often used Ireland and Quebec as mainstays of their theories of nationalist modernization. For example, sociologist Siniša Malešević noted that in a pan-European sense, the development of Irish nationalism was not particularly unique, as it followed many of the same trajectories of other European nationalisms.2 This difference between how nationalism (and particularly cultural nationalism) is perceived in the Anglosphere compared to other parts of the world highlights the difficulty traditional theories of nationalism have in explaining the national identities of entities such as England, Anglo-Canada, or New Zealand.3 In contrast, Canadian historian Ian McKay has outlined a [End Page 67] theory of Canadian national provenance that emphasizes the expansion and maintenance of a "liberal order" in nineteenth-century Canada, which placed a special focus on private-property rights for European settlers. In McKay's view, Anglo-Liberals were willing to accommodate more anti-liberal political and cultural forces in Canada if those private-property rights were respected.4 However, liberal political and economic leaders of the third quarter of the nineteenth century did not initially anticipate such compromises with the forces of anti-liberal reaction. As Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, this period of history was defined by a rapid increase in free trade and economic expansion. For liberals across the western world, "insecurity was the price paid for both progress and freedom."5 But...

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