An O’Connellite Empire? Irish Nationalism, British Imperial Trouble, and the Limits of Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the way Irish nationalists in the 1830s and 1840s understood and condemned British imperial policy in times of trouble, which led to increasing tensions within Irish nationalism itself. It does so in two ways. First, it explores how Daniel O’Connell’s Irishness shaped his vision of the British Empire, its role in the world, and the contours of reform. This O’Connellite understanding of empire is critical because O’Connell was central not only to the radical politics of the 1830s and 1840s, but also to global humanitarian efforts on the one hand, and to the Whig governance of the 1830s on the other. O’Connell’s unique position was reinforced by Ireland’s incongruent place within the political union. Secondly, the article traces how British imperial entanglements in Canada, Afghanistan and China put O’Connell in perilous political waters that exacerbated relationships with English radicals, while also undermining his place within Irish nationalism. As O’Connell’s vision of the British Empire became clearer, it was increasingly challenged by a group of younger Irish nationalists (so-called ‘Young Ireland’) who articulated a strident anti-imperialism and drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles as they mused on what shape the Irish struggle for justice should take. These ideological differences about British imperialism prefaced wider disagreements within Irish nationalism that would come to light during the Irish Famine and continue in the nineteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".