This chapter aims to enrich understanding of the production and reception of imperial discourses within the popular cultural imagination of romantic-era Ireland. It explores the ways in which popular fiction of the romantic period reflects and refashions the complex dynamic between British imperialism in the East and a nascent Irish nationalism. Whereas previous research in this area has centred upon the political, historical, and theoretical implications of Ireland’s imperial status, this chapter asserts that Ireland’s imperial role was both imagined and actualised within Irish popular culture via a diverse community of writers and readers. Taking the passing of the Act of Union as its departure point, it draws on a range of lesser-known and neglected texts, including a number of Minerva Press publications, in order to illustrate how popular fiction helped to cultivate and contest the intertwined discourses of union and empire within the political hothouse of post-Union Ireland.