Paul Huddie – författare

The purpose of this book is to produce what is essentially a ‘home front’ study of Ireland during the Crimean War, or more specifically Irish society’s responses to that conflict. This will principally complement the existing research on Irish servicemen’s experiences during and after the campaign, but will also substantially develop the limited work already undertaken on Irish society and the conflict.This book primarily encompasses the years of the conflict, from its origins in the 1853 dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over the Holy Places, through the French and British political and later military interventions in 1854-5, to the victory, peace and homecoming celebrations in 1856. Additionally, it will extend into the preceding and succeeding decades in order to contextualise the events and actors of the wartime years and to present and analyse the commemoration and memorialisation processes.The approach of the study is systematic, with the content being correlated under six convenient and coherent themes, which will be analysed through a chronological process. The book covers all of the major aspects of society and life in Ireland during the period, so as to give the most complete analysis of the various impacts of and people’s responses to the war. This study is also conducted, within the broader contexts not only of the responses of the United Kingdom and broader British Empire but also Ireland’s relationship with those political entities, and within Ireland’s post-famine or mid-Victorian and even wider nineteenth-century history.

Conflict is a well-trod theme in the study of nineteenth-century Ireland and ‘the Irish’. While this is especially clear in the more traditional fields of politics, religion and the military, conflict was equally manifest in every arena of Irish people’s lives, both in Ireland and abroad, including in areas such as gender, class, culture and identity in domestic or personal spaces, institutional life, education and medicine. Yet, despite a broad and multi-disciplinary historiography, this is the first book to focus solely on this rich theme.New Perspectives on Conflict and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century brings together a group of scholars based around the world and in multiple disciplines who engage with the manifestations, representations and histories of conflict pertaining to Ireland and Irish people throughout the long nineteenth century.