founded with the Catholic Church’s patronage within British colonies such as Canada and Australia.127 By the 1890s, American sympathisers with Ireland, such as Eugene Kelly (manager of the Emigrants Savings Bank in New York) and some leaders of America’s new Catholic universities, had also accepted this trend while also encouraging the Irish community in America to adopt Catholic moral perspectives on various social and political issues, including American foreign policy regarding the Philippines and Cuba.128 Against this backdrop, the existence of marginal Irish filibuster, or war correspondent, intrigues during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) were essentially a last hurrah for defunct practices.129 Irregularities in international affairs that had grown immediately before, during and after the US civil war had been eclipsed by new intergovernmental organisations that had started to become effective. These included the International Telegraph (later Telecommunications) Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the Hague Conference on Private International Law (1893) and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1899), which would virtually become a global body in the wake of the second Hague Convention of 1907. Present at the latter convention was a representative of a new Irish political party, Sinn Féin, which called for all Irish political representatives to abstain from the British imperial parliament and make a unilateral stand for Irish independence.130 This idea had first been championed many years before by Daniel O’Connell, an Irish advocate for Catholic liberties and eloquent critic of the international slave trade who had acquired Europe-wide fame as a political liberal during the 1830s and 1840s.131
In its initial conception, Sinn Féin had an essentially Eurocentric worldview. Arthur Griffith, a humble Dublin printer who had formerly intrigued in South Africa, maintained that a combination of Britain’s ‘financial plunder of Ireland’ and ‘the custom house interdict upon direct trade between Ireland and the [European] continent’ was preventing Irish nationalists from acquiring an international audience.132 During 1904, at a time when Hungary was launching the most expensive parliamentary building in Europe, Griffith pointed to the dual monarchy compromise that Hungary had reached with Austria in 1866 as providing a potential parallel for Ireland.133 As Hungary had no distinct defence or foreign affairs ministries, this was a rather poor suggestion. Griffith soon modified his idea, however, by proposing instead within his Sinn Féin Policy (1906) that Ireland should send its own consular representatives abroad with a view to establishing an independent Irish voice in international relations. Although Griffith emphasised that ‘the policy of Sinn Féin proposes … to bring Ireland out of the corner and make her assert her existence in the world’, his citation of Argentina and Holland as ‘friendly nations’ essentially reflected the fact that he was over-preoccupied with the impact that the British financial world was having upon Ireland.134 The broader European trend of growing appreciation for all things American had a relatively limited impact on Sinn Féin, even though it did attempt to promote some new (American-inspired) Irish co-operative banks and had pointed approvingly to the claim of Michael Davitt, the author of The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (New York, 1903) and an Irish spokesman on the Russian question, that the vote of pro-Irish congressmen in America would have far greater consequences for the future of international relations than the vote of Irish politicians at Westminster.135
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By the turn of the twentieth century, Ireland occupied a very paradoxical position. The cultural Gaelic League had become the principal forum for Irish nationalism despite the fact that Ireland was, for all intents and purposes, an English-speaking nation. On an ideological level, its nationalist politicians saw hope in the rise of the democratic republic of the United States. They also valued the existence of Irish communities abroad and were disinclined to entirely disavow the legacy of past republican United Irish or Fenian conspiracies. Be that as it may, the reality of Ireland’s place in the Atlantic economy was governed purely by its membership of the British Empire. Therefore, Anglo-American relations formed an overarching context that essentially limited Irish ambitions.
In American politics, Irish newspaper editors in Chicago or New York had long championed the expansion of the American navy whilst simultaneously campaigning against the creation of any formal arbitration treaty between the United States and Britain on the grounds that this might force America to take part in Britain’s global wars. While this was a justifiable stance on American foreign policy, it was combined with a more controversial propaganda against manipulative British financial influences within America. Diplomats of the French republic in America privately shared this preoccupation.136 Its public expression within the immigrant press of what was becoming known as ‘Irish America’, however, led American governments to view new publications such as Devoy’s Gaelic American (which supported Sinn Féin while declaring that ‘Europe, not England, is the mother country of America’) as advocates of an eccentric brand of ‘hyphen-American’ politics that was, if anything, unpatriotic, not least because it was evidently rooted more in a cultural Anglophobia than a thorough grasp of the dynamics of the American economy.137 Indeed, ever since the 1820s, Anglo-American tensions had been minimised by the fact that the United Kingdom had been willing to discourage European interference on the American continents in return for the United States conceding to the Royal Navy the right to be the primary policer of the seas. This understanding, although informal, allowed Anglo-American trade to both flourish and coexist. If rivalries existed, this was rooted in the expectation that, ultimately, the United States would naturally assume a monopoly over trade on all the American continents, whether through its own foreign direct investment schemes or the emergence of other republican governments (possibly even in Canada) that would reject the practice of monarchy.138 American interest in Ireland had never really extended beyond the question of trading possibilities. As a result, by the 1910s, the United States had become interested primarily in maintaining the existing ‘strong commercial relationship between the north-east of Ireland and the US’. The attitude of American consular officers within Ireland towards Irish nationalism now fitted neatly within this paradigm.139
In recent decades, the powerful shipbuilding industries of Liverpool and Glasgow had led to the closure of independent shipbuilding companies in the historic Irish cities of Dublin and Waterford. New shipbuilding firms had developed, however, in the rising northern Irish town of Belfast because they operated as subsidiaries of those in Liverpool and especially Glasgow. From the 1860s onwards, this turned Belfast into a thriving commercial centre. This was illustrated by the construction of numerous public buildings, including a particularly impressive City Hall to reflect London’s formal recognition of Belfast as a city in 1888.140 Nationally, Belfast was perhaps best known for producing a vocal local press that often championed a peculiar pan-Protestant reading of contemporary politics as well as international relations.141 More significantly, however, as the home of a university since 1845, Belfast was producing significant figures that worked for the British foreign office. This included in the Far East, where Britain, like the United States, would succeed in signing a major trade treaty with Japan in 1911.142 At the same time, the Belfast-born diplomat James Bryce, who had previously won over American academic opinion by publishing pioneering studies of the American constitution, succeeded as the British ambassador to the United
