To what extent did the Irish disappear from English politics, life and consciousness following the Anglo-Irish War? In Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (May 2014) I offer a new perspective on this question through an analysis of the process by which Ireland and the Irish were redefined in English culture as a feature of personal life and civil society rather than a political threat. Considering the Irish as the first postcolonial minority, I argue that the Irish case demonstrates an English solution to the larger problem of the collapse of multi-ethnic empires in the twentieth century. Drawing on an array of new archival evidence, the book discusses the many varieties of Irishness present in England during the 1920s and 1930s, including working-class republicans, relocated southern loyalists, and Irish enthusiasts. The Irish connection was sometimes repressed, but it was never truly forgotten; this book recovers it in settings as diverse as literary societies, sabotage campaigns, drinking clubs, and demonstrations.
- Royal Historical Society’s 2014 Whitfield Prize proxime accessit
- A “Book of the Year,” History Today Vol. 64 12 December 2014
- “Thought-provoking, richly evidenced and superbly structured, Moulton’s book is a tour de force, and a compelling argument for studying Irish and British history together.” (Niamh Gallagher, “Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England by Mo Moulton,” Times Higher Education 26 June 2014)
- “A superb new book focusing on people often excluded from the Irish historical narrative.” (Enda Delaney, “Entangled connections: Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England,” Irish Times 9 August 2014.)
- “From sabotage campaigns to social clubs, and the misguided, over-romanticised notions of Ireland expounded in the English literary imagination, Moulton’s book is a captivating, informative twinning and unravelling of those aspects of social history which our two very separate (yet perpetually intermingling) nations shared between the wars.” (Dermot Bolger, “Separate and Together,” Irish Mail on Sunday 14 September 2014)
- “Harvard historian Mo Moulton’s wonderful first book, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England relies on a number of unfamiliar and fascinating archival sources and reveals a complex set of attitudes towards Ireland and Irishness in England during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the many things the book does well is to highlight how the political concerns outlined by Ukip are nothing new. It would be salutary for figures like Daniel Hannon and Mark Reckless to read this volume, since Moulton points out that, during the 1930s depression era, the benefits-scrounging migrant-bogeyman of the English imagination was often an Irishman.” (James Moran, “Enemies Within,” Dublin Review of Books Issue 63: January 2015)
- “Ireland was a problem, Moulton convincingly argues, that required a continual effort of repression.” (Lucy Delap, “Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England,” History Today Vol 65 Issue 3, March 2015)
- “Most histories of Anglo-Irish relations during this period have concentrated on high politics and government papers. Moulton gives us descriptions of Gaelic League dances, letters written home by British troops serving in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish war, meetings of the Irish Literary Society and accounts of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in inter-war England. But politics is not absent–especially in the period 1914-1921.” (Mary Daly, “Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England,” Contemporary British History, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2015)
- “If you turn a map upside down or lay it on its side, it looks different for all that it otherwise presents the same information. By looking at how English society and how England’s Irish communities were reshaped by Ireland’s war of independence and at the heterogeneity of the Irish in England, Moulton offers a fresh point of view. The facts remain the same but the vantage point is a different on that sheds new light on the social history of the period.” (Bryan Fanning, “Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England”, Studies, Vol. 104 no. 415, Autumn 2015)