Making Ireland Modern - Enda Delaney

A provocative and original reinterpretation of modern Irish history.There is a widespread misconception that Ireland became 'modern' much later than its neighbours, in the 1960s and 1970s. This is grounded in several enduring stereotypes and caricatures: of Ireland as a 'timeless' and unchanging 'land of saints and scholars'; of its society and culture in the long nineteenth century as puritanical, regressive, or archaic; of Gaelic language and culture as 'backward' or inward-looking in contrast to a 'modern' English counterpart; and of the island as natural and rural in the face of the urban and technological 'progress' of modernity.Drawing on an extensive range of sources, from poetry and novels to contemporary historical documents, acclaimed historian Enda Delaney here offers a reinterpretation of Ireland's encounter with modernity that corrects these stereotypes. By situating the island's history between 1780 and 1916 within its broader European, global, and colonial contexts, he demonstrates that Ireland's pathway to modernity was not inevitable, belated, or uni-directional: over a complex and centuries-long process it was made modern, and in its own distinctive way. This was related to, but distinct from, Ireland's complicated colonial relationship with Britain, and played out in the broader contexts of globalisation and the rise of capitalism. And at the heart of this history are the Irish people themselves, both those who lived on the island and the millions of those
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