Date Awarded

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Department

History

Advisor

Guillaume Aubert

Abstract

The first paper, "The Irish Servants of Barbados, 1657-1661: Illuminations on Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, and Labor" explores the Irish as subjects within the English Empire and their access to the immunities, rights, and tolerance of other subjects of non-Irish nationality. This paper attempts to demonstrate not only the various ways in which the Irish were conceived as subjects in the early modern English Atlantic but also the ways in which this subjecthood was articulated and deployed in often fluid and haphazard ways. This paper uses colonial Barbados in the late 1650s and early 1660s as a case-study and relies on laws that were passed during this time that relate to labor and to the Irish as well as colonial correspondence between the colony of Barbados and the metropole to illuminate the ways in which ideas and definitions about subjecthood differed and how attitudes in one arena informed attitudes in the other. The second paper, "Moral Dynamite: Support and Opposition for Nationalist Political Violence and Nationalist Activity among Irish-Americans in the 1880s" uses the activities of the Fenian dynamiters as a focus for an exploration of the attitudes regarding nationalist political activity and nationalist violence in the wider Irish-American community in the 1880s. This paper relies on newspaper coverage from a wide variety of secular, religious, middle- and working-class sections of Irish-America to uncover the ways in which the dynamiters were discussed and the ways in which nationalist activity and violence was discussed.

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/S2B955

Rights

© The Author

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