Ireland and Empire sets out to investigate "the ways in which the languages of imperialism, colonialism, post-coloniality and anti-colonialism have been deployed historically in Irish contexts". To this end Stephen Howe, tutor in Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford, surveys an impressive range of discourses about Ireland, including historical narratives, political and economic histories, and cultural analyses. This is a "discourse about discourses". The author attempts to deal with secondary accounts produced by academics over the last three decades, rather than primary sources.
Howe provides a typology for analysis based on the "cluster of views" which gathers around republicanism, traditional nationalism, postcolonial theory, revisionism and Ulster unionism. Having outlined this schema, the author concedes that revisionism "captures most of the complex truth".
Yet it is out of such a postmodernist declaration of interest that many of the methodological problems of this book arise. Howe is a committed empiricist who reserves his most scathing critiques for what he sees as the modishness of postmodern thinking, especially employed by the Field Day enterprise.
But his own book is so deeply implicated in the revisionist project it sets out to analyse that it forfeits any claim to objectivity. Ironically, Howe himself is quick to censure scholars whose work reflects their "own ideological formation and predispositions".
Underlying Howe's polemic is a relentless zeal to expose what he sees as the Irish penchant for explaining all major problems "in terms of external rather than internal influences". The manner in which he sets out to do this betrays an astounding arrogance and contempt for almost all of the most prominent scholars of modern Ireland. The author endorses the view that Irish historians "have failed to understand Irish nationalism" because of their insularity and narrowness of intellectual range. While, on the other hand, Irish cultural theorists are accused of borrowing too liberally and creating a "derivative off-shoot" of postcolonial theory here. The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that Ireland is utterly incapable of generating its own coherent terms of intellectual reference.
Howe also disputes Ireland's commitment to the postcolonial world at the level of foreign policy. He sees the "era of active anti-colonialism" as a short-lived one of the Aiken/Cruise O'Brien period. Yet at no time does he mention the Irish contribution to the East Timorese struggle (arguably the country's most significant intervention in recent international affairs) which was unfolding as this book was being written.
As the book draws to a close the author rests his hopes on the development of "a vibrant social-democratic movement, or its close historically, a strong liberalism imbued with concern for social citizenship`' in Northern Ireland.
Ireland and Empire is a rather belated contribution to the tedious revisionist debate. It is a work of undoubted scholarship but is characterised by an astounding metropolitan arrogance, heavy on inflected pastiche and disappointing in terms of original insight.
P.J. Mathews is a lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin and is the editor of New Voices in Irish Criticism, just published by Four Courts Press.