Ebook: A nation of politicians: gender, patriotism, and political culture in late eighteenth-century Ireland

In late eighteenth-century Ireland, groups that had previously been excluded from the political sphere-farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes-gained an increasing interest and voice in politics. This politicization of non-elites was driven in large part by the experience of the Volunteers, an ad hoc militia drawn together from local forces throughout Ireland to fill the vacuum created when British troops pulled out to fight the American colonies. In A Nation of Politicians: The Volunteers, Patriotism, and Gender in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Padhraig Higgins argues that volunteering and its associated activities-convivial and political clubs, charitable organizations, Masonic lodges, debating societies, and similar forms of community involvement-produced dense social networks that fostered a vision of both national and moral reform. Effectively broadening the scope of participation, such activities educated ordinary men and women about parliamentary politics and reinforced their sense that they were entitled to a say in this process. To understand the mechanisms for this politicization of the populace, Higgins examines print culture (political pamphlets, letters to the editor, sermons, songs and ballads, handbills, petitions), material culture (graffiti, flags, uniforms, printed linens), and more ephemeral forms of mass culture (celebrations, toasts, rumor, and gossip). In these and other expressions of popular sentiment, Irish citizens articulated their understanding of political action and sought a position within broader questions of civil liberties and British empire. Our two outside readers found their task rewarding. Praising Higgins's scholarship for its careful research, originality, subtlety, and persuasiveness, they assure us that the book will find an audience not only among specialists, but also among students and perhaps some Irish readers beyond academe. At the intersection of cultural, intellectual, social, and political history, A Nation of Politicians will make a strong contribution to the Press's distinguished series on the history of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora. There it will join such titles as Guy Beiner's well-received study of how the failed French invasion of 1798 has been represented in oral and folk history, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory, and the forthcoming Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824, authored by series editor Jim Donnelly