The legal and constitutional relationship between Ireland and England (and latterly Britain) was unclear for many centuries. Although Ireland enjoyed a good deal of legislative sovereignty under Grattan’s Parliament from 1782, the Acts of Union in 1801 set up direct rule from Westminster. During the nineteenth century, there was a campaign and draft legislation for Irish Home Rule (which Dicey, an ardent unionist, vehemently opposed). This campaign is worth reconsidering in the Brexit/Scottish independence context, given the varied legal and constitutional arrangements that were explored and vigorously debated. However, Home Rule never came about, rendered pointless by subsequent events. Since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and devolution in 1998, Northern Ireland has a had a variegated but pragmatic settlement of consociation and compromise quite different from the traditional British constitutional settlement. The EU has played its role in the peace process, providing structures for its continuation. Brexit now presents considerable challenges for Northern Ireland and the Republic.

This chapter argues that responsible relative laws were one strategy states employed to contest federal efforts to modernize relief programs and limit state and local authority. Fiscal control and home rule were central to states’ resistance. Conflicts often arose between officials and agencies at all levels of government: local, state, and federal. In the post–World War II years, states strengthened requirements for relatives, especially adult children, to provide support in Old Age Assistance; they established or strengthened provisions to recoup OAA costs from recipients’ estates or required property liens as a condition of eligibility. States’ commitment to support requirements in the post–World War II era were part of the larger backlash against escalating public assistance costs, and OAA is a central target of this backlash. The goal was to ensure that family resources were exhausted before public support was provided in the name of fiscal control.

Chapter one examines the impacts of Irish nationalism in British centres during the Home Rule crisis, from the Irish Party’s Home Rule campaign to the Irish Volunteers’ preparations for civil war. It profiles the political languages and cultures of the ‘British’ Home Rule movement; examines the influence of extra-parliamentary crises - Ulster unionist, suffragist, trade unionist – on Irish nationalist identity in British centres; and assesses the militancy, and constitutional impacts, of advanced nationalist activism in metropolitan Britain by July 1914. Between 1912 and 1914, this chapter submits, the Irish Parliamentary Party presented ‘two faces’ of Home Rule - towards British political opinion and Irish nationalist opinion in Britain. John Redmond and the I.P.P., critically, were ‘representative’ of ‘British-Ireland’ and were embedded in the mainstream political cultures of Edwardian Britain on the eve of war. Irish activists in British cities, however, were radicalised by the extra-parliamentary representations of late Edwardian politics, straining the ideological coherence of, and popular adherence to, the I.P.P.’s proto-electoral strategy. The proliferation of Irish Volunteer units in British centres threatened to spark an Irish civil war on mainland Britain. The militarisation of Irish nationalism, in conclusion, constituted one of the ‘surface excitements’ of Edwardian Britain.

This chapter considers the historical development of how Greenlanders acquired political participation in their own affairs. As of 2021, most political parties in Greenland see independence as the ultimate goal. The Self-Government Act of 2009 grants the inhabitants of Greenland the right to this independence.1 My argument here is that a historical view reveals that independence can be seen as the logical next step from the current self-government. This has been attained through continual negotiations between Greenlanders and Danes since the middle of the nineteenth century, and through decolonization and independence processes as seen elsewhere in the world.

Churchill is often ranked as one of the most hated figures in Irish history but he was also one of the most influential politicians in shaping relations both within and between Britain and Ireland. Churchill played a formative role in the ‘Irish Question’. At the beginning of his career he was a Unionist, inheriting his father’s sympathy for Ulster, but converted to Home Rule. The chapter contrasts the impact of social reforms in helping Irish pensioners with the role of Irish suffragettes in defeating Churchill at Manchester in 1908. It looks at how he tried to navigate between the Unionists and nationalists in the Edwardian era, before showing how the war (including Irish losses at Gallipoli) led to rebellion. Thereafter, Churchill pursued a dual strategy of repression and negotiation and played a key role in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent events surrounding partition. His belligerence has tended to overshadow the multi-faceted ways he dealt with and thought about the Irish.

This chapter explores the ways that postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan attempted to homogenize governance arrangements within their territories; this project was not entirely successful, but did lead to substantial revision of colonial categories. It begins with a discussion of the foreclosed possibility of Home Rule arrangements in which distinctions in governance practice might have persisted in practice after independence in a united India; the politics of Partition instead led to the formation of two sovereign states, but with significant variation in the power and authority of the state in each. It explores the particular politics in India and Pakistan that limited each country’s ability to undertake fundamental reform of the state and the homogenization of governance procedures, including differing perspectives among political leaders on how best to deliver security and development, and the persistence of bureaucratic structures. It also outlines the roots of a more even political geography in Bangladesh, an exception to the patchwork states of India and Pakistan. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the colonial forms of governance translates into a postcolonial typology of governance arrangements, with distinctions in state capacity and state-society relations.

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.

Chapter 3 presents a brief history of local citizenship that describes the process by which our ideas about citizenship came to be divided between federal and local scales. Our bifurcated conception of citizenship was a highly contingent product of the nation-state’s long evolution from the ancient city-state. There was never a conscious decision to divide citizenship the way we did.

This chapter explores how three major nineteenth-century English literary figures lived, perceived and wrote about the troubled relationship between England and Ireland. Describing their collective belief in the Union, the chapter seeks to place the writers politically in terms of their ideas about Ireland as expressed in their fiction, their journalism and their private correspondence. They are shown to have flirted with the liberal agenda for Ireland but essentially, following Edmund Burke, can be seen to have adopted increasingly conservative (and anti-Gladstonian) positions - favouring coercion before concession - as they grew older and as the spectre of Home Rule became more real in the closing decades of the century.

This chapter focusses on the efforts of Protestant advanced nationalists to bring about political change using extra-parliamentary methods. It demonstrates how Protestants who emerged from cultural activism remained within recognisable circles defined by religion. The first section describes the creation of the Irish Volunteers as a nationalist counterpoint to the Ulster Volunteers, and how this body came to be armed by a committee primarily composed of Protestants. The over-optimistic hopes of figures such as Roger Casement that the Irish Volunteers and the unionist Ulster Volunteers could be brought together on a common anti-British government platform is examined. The second section discusses labour and the Irish Citizen Army, whose leadership, at least initially, included several Protestants. The extent to which socialist leaders sought to fashion a nationalism that would appeal to working-class Protestants is discussed. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the strong link between Catholicism and advanced nationalism dated not from the 1916 Rising but from the formation of the Irish Volunteers in the years before.