Irish Military Elites, Nation and Empire, 1870-1925, 1st ed. 2019
Identity and Authority

This book is a social history of Irish officers in the British army in the final half-century of Crown rule in Ireland. Drawing on the accounts of hundreds of officers, it charts the role of military elites in Irish society, and the building tensions between their dual identities as imperial officers and Irishmen, through land agitation, the home rule struggle, the First World War, the War of Independence, and the partition of Ireland. What emerges is an account of the deeply interwoven connections between Ireland and the British army, casting officers as social elites who played a pivotal role in Irish society, and examining the curious continuities of this connection even when officers? moral authority was shattered by war, revolution, independence, and a divided nation.

Loughlin Sweeney is Assistant Professor at the John Endicott College of International Studies in South Korea, where he lectures on global history and researches Irish communities in the nineteenth-century Pacific. He conducted this research while pursuing a doctorate at Queens’ College Cambridge, awarded in 2017. Since then, he has been a visiting fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK and the University of Edinburgh, UK, and he publishes regularly in the fields of Irish history, the British Empire, the Irish diaspora, and imperial, colonial, and postcolonial studies.

Examines the social history of the Irish military during the last fifty years of British rule in Ireland

Draws on public and private written sources from hundreds of Irish military officers

Explores the tensions between class and social position, political power and legitimacy and the role of national identity in maintaining symbolic authority