This collection brings us up to date with more recent research on Home Rule. Future volumes in the series promise to do likewise for the other events of 1912-22: an exciting prospect. Prof Tom Bartlett argues that the provisions of the Home Rule Bill hardly mattered and that nationalists and unionists viewed Home Rule through the prisms of their conflicting views of history. This explains how so modest a measure of freedom was so enthusiastically accepted by nationalists and so fiercely resisted by unionists. Matthew Schownir stresses the racist attitudes underlying some British and unionist opposition. Myopia about the possibility of civil war is the subject of Pauline Collombier-Lakeman’s essay. Prof Eugenio Biagini’s conclusion that “the problems of identity and governance with which the people of 1912 struggled are still present and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future” gives us food for thought.
