Sean Connolly

Life
1951- ; b. Dublinç ed. UCD and NUU [UU]; appt. to Public Records Office of Ireland (now National Archive); taught at St. Patrick"s College, Maynooth (NUI) and NUU, app. Reader in 1990; appt. chair of history, QUB, 1996; fellow of QUB Inst. of Irish Studies (emeritus); fellowships at Folger Library (Wash., DC) and EUI, Florence; twice editor of Irish Economic and Social History (1982-90 & 2000-02); initial interest in 18th Irish Catholicism and Anglo-Irish elites gave was to urban histories in Ireland and Scotland; noted for his staunch resistance to simplistic and violent republican theory of British oppression and Irish independence; vocal supporter of Peace Movement; Feloow of RHS; elected to RIA, 1995; elected Fellow of British Academy, 2016; published on Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World (2022), dealing with Irish emigration to America.

Works
  • Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland 1780–1945 (1982).
  • Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland 1985).
  • Religion, Law and Power: the making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (1992).
  • Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 [Oxford History of Early Modern Europe] (OUP 2007).
  • Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 [Oxford History of Early Modern Europe] (OUP 2008).
  • Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World (Nashville: Hachette Books), Do. [another imp..] (NY: LittleBrown 2022), 448pp.
Edited collections
  • ed., Conflict and Identity: Scotland and Ireland 1500-1939 (Carnegie Publishing 1995).
  • ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  • ed., Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998).
  • ed., Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).
  • ed., Belfast 400: People, Place and History (Liverpool University Press, 2012).

  Annual Publication Record [CV] supplied at QUB School of History [2023]
   
2019 (with Dominic Bryan and John Nagle)  Civil Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780 (Manchester University Press)
2017 ‘Settler colonialism in Ireland from the English conquest to the nineteenth century’ in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Cavanagh, E. and Veracini, L. (eds), London: Routledge, pp 49-64
2014  ‘Patriotism and nationalism’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History. Jackson, A. (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 27-44
2013 & Holmes, A.,'Popular culture, 1600-1914', Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy and Society. Kennedy, L. & Ollerenshaw, P. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 106-20
'Religion and society 1600-1914', in Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy and Society. Kennedy, L. & Ollerenshaw, P. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 74-89
'The limits of democracy: Ireland 1778-1848', in Re-imagining democracy in the age of revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850. Innes, J. & Philp, M. (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 174-188
2012 ‘Belfast: the rise and fall of a civic culture?', in  Belfast: The Emerging City 1850-1914. Purdue, O. (ed.). Dublin: Irish Academic Press, p. 25-48
'Improving town, 1750-1820', in Belfast 400: People, place and history. Connolly, S. J. (ed.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, p. 161-198
(ed.), Belfast 400: People, Place and History. Liverpool University Press.
'”Like an old cathedral city”: Belfast welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849’ In : Urban History. 39, 4, p. 571-589
2011 - ‘Cardinal Cullen’s other capital: Belfast and the ‘devotional revolution’, in Cardinal Paul Cullen and his World. Keogh, D. & McDonnell, A. (eds.). Four Courts Press, p. 289-307
2010 - ‘Old English, New English and Ancient Irish: Swift and the Irish past' in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives. Rawson, C. (ed.). Cambridge University Press, p. 255-269
2009 - Bryan, D. & ‘Identity, social action and public space: defining civic space in Belfast', in Theorizing Identities and Social Action . Wetherell, M. (ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, p. 220-237
‘Kingdom, crown and parliament: patriot myth and the origins of the Irish union' in Forging the State: European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. MacKillop, A. & Siochru, M. O. (eds.). Dundee University Press, p. 133-152
2008 Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Oxford History of Early Modern Europe)
’Swift and history’ in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift. Real, H. J. (ed.). Wilhelm Fink, Munchen, p. 187-202
2007 Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
‘Religion and nationality in Ireland: an unstable relationship’, in Religion und Nation. Altematt, U. & Metzger, F. (eds.). Kohlhamer, p. 119-134
2004 ’The moving statue and the turtle dove: approaches to the history of Irish religion’, In : Irish Economic and Social History. 31, p. 1-22
2003 ’Tupac Amaru and Captain Right: a comparative perspective on eighteenth-century Ireland’, in  Refiguring Ireland: essays in honour of L.M. Cullen. Dickson, D. O. & Grada, C. (eds.). Lilliput Press, p. 94-111
’The Church of Ireland and the royal martyr: regicide and revolution in Anglican political thought c.1660-1745’, In : The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 54 (3), 3, p. 484-506
‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and republicans: varieties of disaffection in eighteenth-century Ireland’, In : Eighteenth-Century Ireland. 18, p. 63-79
2000 ’A Woman’s life in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of Letitia Bushe’, In : Historical Journal. 42(2), p. 433-451
(ed.), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
’Reconsidering the Irish Act of Union’, In : Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 10, p. 399-408
’The Irish Rebellion of 1798: an end or a beginning?’, in  Religious Thinking and National Identity. Metzger, H-D. (ed.). Philo, p. 108-122
1998 (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
(ed.),The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1995 (ed.), Conflict and Identity: Scotland and Ireland 1500-1939. Carnegie Publishing.
1992 Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1985 Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland.
1982 Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

Quotations

‘Cultural Identity and Tradition’, in Brian Graham, ed., In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography of Ireland (Routledge 1997): […] The place of Jacobitism in all of this provides a particularly vivid example of the way in which the apparent continuities of Irish political history can conceal what are in fact striking changes in content and definition. Loyalty to the exiled House of Stuart, and the repudiation it necessarily involved of the ruling Hanoverian dynasty is all too easily assimilated to the image of a long-standing tradition of Irish (and Catholic) resistance to ‘English’ rule. And indeed it may well be that Irish Jacobitism, like its Scottish counter-part, was among other things a vehicle for a strongly felt resentment at political subordination to those who were perceived as foreigners. But the fact remains that Jacobitism, concerned to set a Scottish dynasty on the united thrones of Great Britain and Ireland, was by definition a British political ideology like the earlier service of Irish Catholics in the armies of James II, it derived its whole rationale from an assumption that the three kingdoms of the British Isles would remain under one sovereign. More important still, Jacobitism was inherently conservative. Its political theory rejected Whig notions of a contract between rulers and ruled in favour of the claims of heredity and divine right; in its specifically Irish manifestation, it looked back to the aristocratic and fiercely anti-egalitarian world of the pre-plantation Gaelic past. In so far as it contributed to the sort of disaffection represented by the Defenders, this required a radical redefinition in which a dynastic and aristocratic ideology rooted in the Europe of the ancien régime was recast in terms of the egalitarian republicanism of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions. Resentment of past wrongs shifted from the overthrow of the Gaelic aristocracy to an imagined dispossession of the Irish people as a whole; deliverance came to mean, not the return of a Stuart monarchs but the establishment of an Irish republic. The reappearance of expectations of French military assistance masked the transition from the Catholic absolutism of Louis XIV and his successors to the revolutionary republic. In all these respects, the tunes being played by late eighteenth-century opponents of the established order were superficially familiar; but the words being sung to them were wholly new.’ (p.52.) [See under Library/Criticism/GrahamB1; also under Thomas Davis, Geoffrey Keating, Charles Stewart Parnell, et al.]

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