Papers by Terry Dunne
History Ireland , 2020
Account of the 1920 agrarian movement in the West of Ireland - an often overlooked but pivotal ep... more Account of the 1920 agrarian movement in the West of Ireland - an often overlooked but pivotal episode in the Irish Revolution.
History Ireland , 2019
Brief account of the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm strike - a pivotal event in the spread of the sy... more Brief account of the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm strike - a pivotal event in the spread of the syndicalist-influenced Irish Transport and General Workers' Union into rural Ireland in the post-1917 period - a central part of the Irish Revolution as it manifested itself in provincial towns and the rural countryside
History Ireland , 2021
Connections and comparison regarding class and colonialism in Malabar and Ireland - Malabar was t... more Connections and comparison regarding class and colonialism in Malabar and Ireland - Malabar was the scene of the last combat of an Irish regiment of the British Army.
So-called threatening letters were a form of media, frequently produced in agrarian social confli... more So-called threatening letters were a form of media, frequently produced in agrarian social conflicts in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Ireland. This thesis analyses a collection of such letters, or notices, as a means of accessing the subjectivities of some of the participants in those conflicts. The production of the notices is associated with a series of peasant-based social movements, generically known as whiteboys, which existed circa 1760 to 1850. The specific collection of notices examined in this thesis was amassed by the state authorities in the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first section addresses the contexts within which the notices were generated. I argue that a central part of those contexts was, at least by the early-nineteenth-century, a stalled transition from the feudal to capitalist modes of production. In part then the threatening letters were part of a resistance to primitive accumulation and proleta...
Crime, Violence and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, 2017
Critical Historical Studies, 2018
Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s... more Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s to the 1930s. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bands of peasants known as “whiteboys” defended customary rights to land with intimidation and violence. This article analyzes a collection of 135 so-called threatening letters from rural parts of the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. In the letters are found traces of the cultural practices through which peasants resisting primitive accumulation sustained their sense of collective efficacy. These traces have two main forms: expressions of pan-regional collective identity and appropriations from ruling-class status/power displays. A sense of agency was central to the exercise of actual agency—an agency that retarded processes of primitive accumulation and contributed to a situation whereby the spread of the British model of capitalist agriculture was confined and peasant production survived into the twentieth century.
Éire-Ireland, 2018
Late on the morning of 13 March 1832 Thomas Potts, engineer and overseer, was at work at the Poll... more Late on the morning of 13 March 1832 Thomas Potts, engineer and overseer, was at work at the Pollough engine in Cloneen in the Castlecomer Colliery in the northeast of County Kilkenny. He observed four men clad in long coats and armed with firearms approach him. Potts fled, but was overtaken at the ditch near an adjacent road, knocked to the ground, and shot dead. There were onlookers, colliery workers, none of whom attempted to intervene. The name of the engine, Pollough, was derived from the Irish word for many holes or pits, a local place-name that brings us to the heart of the conflict: an effort to transform the area from what might be imprecisely called a peasantor artisanal-based mining involving a plethora of small, relatively shallow pits controlled by master colliers to a system of deep mining and a workforce of waged laborers directly employed by the proprietor, Charles Harward Butler Clark Southwell Wandesforde.
Old Kilkenny Review , 2018
This article is divided into two main parts. In the first part there is a discussion on threateni... more This article is divided into two main parts. In the first part there is a discussion on threatening letters in general. In the second part there is some transcripts of threatening letters from Kilkenny from the year 1832.3 Accompanying the transcripts is an explanation of the themes and motifs within the notices, as well as some treatment of the circumstances in which they were sent.
Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History (44), 2019
Journal of the Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland: 16, 2018
This paper presents some alternative documentary records: threatening letters; the ballad traditi... more This paper presents some alternative documentary records: threatening letters; the ballad tradition; and the archive of the folklore commission; and attempts to show the insights they can give when used in conjunction with more conventional documentary sources in the particular case of the Leinster colliery district. Similar alternative records may exist for other nineteenth-century mining districts.
Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture , 2020
The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were cons... more The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and SouthEast in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or subletting rentiers called middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.
A social history of the farm workers' movement in Kildare, mostly focused on the years 1917 to 1920.
Analysis of so-called threatening letters produced in early nineteenth-century agrarian social co... more Analysis of so-called threatening letters produced in early nineteenth-century agrarian social conflict in terms of collective identity and collective efficacy, arguing that peasant movements had a long-term impact on patterns of economic development by retarding processes of primitive accumulation.
This paper interprets a collection of “threatening letters” from the east of Ireland from the yea... more This paper interprets a collection of “threatening letters” from the east of Ireland from the year 1832. These were a form of media found in social conflicts (often, but not always, the conflicts of agrarian classes). The focus in this paper is on the authors of the letters purporting to act in the name of the law. This is considered in terms of non-state customary regulation and in terms of cultural appropriation from the official state legal system.
Analysis of the use of recurrent pseudonyms in social conflict in early-nineteenth-century Irelan... more Analysis of the use of recurrent pseudonyms in social conflict in early-nineteenth-century Ireland, mostly, but not exclusively, in agrarian contexts — specifically in peasant-based movements known as whiteboys. The main source material for these pseudonyms are so-called “threatening notices”, and the most popular of them was Captain Rock. This chapter interprets the phenomenon in the light of social movement studies and in terms of collective identity and collective efficacy.
Conference Presentations by Terry Dunne
A 2015 conference paper, linking together collective identity and collective efficacy and discuss... more A 2015 conference paper, linking together collective identity and collective efficacy and discussing class as a relationship and class as a form of collective identity.
Drafts by Terry Dunne
A 2015 conference presentation, presented at the Annual Seminar of the Bielefeld Graduate School ... more A 2015 conference presentation, presented at the Annual Seminar of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, looking at how the spread of the British model of agrarian capitalism was restricted in pre-1850 Ireland, at how this restriction was the result of class struggle, and at how resisting peasants bolstered their morale through myth.
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Papers by Terry Dunne
Conference Presentations by Terry Dunne
Drafts by Terry Dunne