Contributions to this special issue of Irish Historical Studies come under the dedicated theme of ‘Ireland and the British Empire-Commonwealth’. The papers originate from a workshop entitled ‘Ireland and empire’ that took place at the University of Leeds in March 2005. One of the key objectives behind the organisation of this workshop was to bring together specialists in British, Irish and imperial and Commonwealth history with an interest in the wide-ranging debates linked to the issue of ‘Ireland and empire’. At the workshop, the papers presented a range of topics within the context of literature and the arts; agriculture and industry; metropolitan politics and diplomacy. The overarching theme was the ‘Irish experience’ within an ‘interconnected British world’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The title of this article is consciously provocative, and thus cries out for immediate explanation and perhaps, in some sense, for the provocation to be disarmed. Why, then, is ‘Was Ireland a colony?’ a bad question - or rather, a question often badly posed? Reasons include the fact that the question is so intertwined with other disputes, including directly political ones, and because there are problems with the term ‘colony’ itself, which has in so many varied contexts been overworked, under-theorised and even under-defined. The oversimplified, stark ‘either/or’ nature of the question is also problematic, when it would be more productive, and perhaps more precise, to think in terms of colonial features in combination with others, if not, indeed, of graduations and degrees of coloniality.

Discussion of the relationship between Ireland and colonialism has often revolved around similarities and differences between the Irish situation and other, more iconic, examples of colonised societies. This tendency has been partially encouraged by the prominence within Marxian scholarship of dependency theory, which contends that the underdevelopment of colonial societies is due primarily to their integration into the capitalist world economic system. In this analysis, all colonised societies can be characterised by this integration into world capitalism, and consequently share a common source of exploitation and disadvantage. This perspective has often located its source in Marx’s writings on India and, crucially for our current concern, Ireland. This article explores a different perspective on colonialism which the authors believe can be found in Marx’s consideration of the Irish situation.

In the history of the modern world, it is well known that the British Isles have exercised an influence entirely disproportionate to their size. In the history of modern police, Ireland’s contributions are little known. The time is long overdue to recognize the importance of this small island in the development of police in the British archipelago and beyond.

The relationship of Irish unionists to the Empire presents opposing views. Hugh Shearman claimed that Irish unionists were ‘progressive imperialists’. Alvin Jackson disagreed, writing that they were more focused on local matters, and had little interest in the Empire except as a resource to suit their own agenda. The career of the leading Irish and Ulster unionist, James Craig, in the period 1903–14, can be used to test these competing theories and to illuminate such topics as the influence of Joseph Chamberlain on Craig, how local, national and imperial issues were dealt with by Craig, and the part played by Orangeism in Craig’s imperialism. This author shall argue that imperialism was a strand within Craig’s Protestantism and Orangeism that allowed him to deal with local-constituency problems, the demands of party at Westminster, and the national issue of home rule. As such, Craig provides evidence for what Keith Jeffery calls the ‘irrelevance’ of the Empire for Ulster unionists. From the early part of Craig’s political career, the Empire was a means of making Ulster-unionist arguments relevant to a particular audience, local or British.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when Ireland and Britain are ‘offshore islands’ of an ostensibly ever-deepening European Union, it is, perhaps, relatively easy to overlook that imperial stage upon which both Irish partition in 1920 and the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921 were enacted. Yet without this wider context, these momentous decisions are impossible to understand fully. Current questions about whether Ireland has essentially been a colony will inevitably continue to be debated, but the imperial circumstances of these events remain inescapable and essential to a full appreciation of the mindset of the leading participants in these affairs.

Despite the unprecedented interest shown by historians in Ireland and empire in recent years, comparatively little research has focused on Northern Ireland’s connections to the British Empire-Commonwealth in the post-partition decades. This article utilises some new sources to throw light on both the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of the imperial relationship. The discussion begins with the imperial significance of visits to Northern Ireland by statesmen such as William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, to his native Ulster in 1923, and that of Gordon Coates, also Prime Minister of New Zealand, three years later. At the end of the period, the visit of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland can add to our knowledge about the changing relationship between Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth.

The title of this essay draws on a quotation from an article reflecting on the 1919–22 ‘crisis of empire’ written by the late J. A. (Jack) Gallagher (one half of Robinson and Gallagher, the finest double act in British imperial historiography). The complete sentence from which the title is derived reads as follows: ‘But for us the road to Asia lies through the swing doors of the Grafton Hotel in Dublin, one of the cover headquarters of the revolutionary Irish Government’. From time to time, alas, even Gallagher (like Homer) nodded, and it has to be said that his typically arresting image of the route to Asia is somewhat occluded by the fact that there is not, and never has been, a Grafton Hotel in Dublin. (He was evidently thinking of the Gresham Hotel.) Yet the underlying point of his image is sound.