Irish Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Economics
After a year of deep research, I’m proud to present my M.A. dissertation on Irish economic history. This compiles and expands on thoughts I’ve written about previously. I hope you better understand imperialism, nationalism, and economics after reading this. If you like this content, I hope you will support my pursuits to turn it into a larger book. The rough title is tentatively… “How the Irish Saved Economics.”
Abstract
This paper looks to examine an episode during the transition from the Irish Revolution (1919-1921) to Irish Free State government concerning the intersection of international finance and nationalism. In December 1921 and January 1922, Joseph Connolly and Harry Boland both wrote letters to Michael Collins which urged the rejection of a $20 million loan offer by Farson, Sons. & Co. brokerage and private investors in the New York financial market. Rather than dryly pecuniary, these letters uniquely disparaged the potential investors as “evil” and warned of the “dangers of American finance.” They alluded to the tragedies of America's dollar diplomacy in Latin America, the Caribbean, and further. They explicitly connected foreign finance and loss of national sovereignty. They also asserted that the new-found control of the state entitled it to Irish capital as well as the exercise of nationalist monetary and fiscal policy. In order to fully understand the letters’ content, context, and significance it is necessary to investigate the economic theories, nationalist rhetoric, and global influences that shaped them. While these two letters are a small sample, they offer lodestones that connect many facets of Irish nationalist economic theory, that is often dismissed in existing literature, and the Irish perspective in a global discourse on imperialism, national liberation, and economic development. The findings expand, complicate, and reveal insights on a wider century of isolation, opening, growth, and constriction in Irish economic history.