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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 February 2024

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Summary

The title of this book is a play on the Irish expression “Éirinn go Brách,” frequently used interchangeably with the more correct “Éire go Brách” (Ireland Forever). Like all other works of history, this project has a history of its own. It originated as a side project long ago while I was revising my University of Iowa dissertation (1991) for publication. The dissertation focused on the opposition in the United Kingdom to London's Iranian policy during 1906–11. That opposition included Irish nationalists of differing political platforms. The revised and amended draft of my dissertation eventually appeared as a book titled Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent (2006). Along the way, among other tangential projects, I began to explore whether there had been prior episodes of Irish nationalist interest in Iranian encounters with the British Empire. Britain and Russia had been the two leading imperial interlopers in Iranian affairs after the start of the nineteenth century. The earliest episode of contemporary Irish nationalist espousal of Iranian sovereignty I uncovered dates back to the time of the (Second) Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57, albeit occurring under drastically different circumstances than the Irish nationalist advocacy of Iranian sov-ereignty after 1906. Moreover, during the course of my research, I came across works of poetry and literature by notable nineteenth-century Irish nationalist authors, such as Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan, that variously deployed Iranian settings, among other “oriental” motifs, as a means of commenting on Ireland's history of subjugation by England since the twelfth century, especially since the English Reformation in the sixteenth century. This particular research trajectory subsequently led me to probe not only the ways in which Irish nationalists of varying platforms at different stages since the emergence of nonsectarian Irish nationalism in the late eighteenth century had regarded contemporary Iran in the context of Anglo-Iranian relations, but also the ways in which they may have approached and comprehended Iranian history vis-à-vis the history of Ireland, in terms of manifold formulations of “nation” (including the nation-state), national formations, national identity, and anti-imperialism and territorial sovereignty.

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Éirinn and Iran Go Brách
Iran in Irish-Nationalist Historical, Literary, Cultural, and Political Imaginations from the Late-18th Century to 1921
, pp. 1 - 46
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2023

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