One of my students at Liverpool University once told me that he thought Irish history (or more accurately Irish historiography) had developed quite apart from that of other countries and had somehow been bypassed by the great debates which have exercised historians elsewhere. A.T.Q. Stewart's The Shape of Irish History would have agreed with him, for this is a critique of the way Irish history has been fixated by the "national" problem. Irish historiography he likens to a long train journey with a known destination. This, he sees as determining its excessive concentration on the recent past, the building of the "nation" representing the last stages of the journey. "The history of Ireland," he writes, "is a bit like the map of Australia, with a lot of names crammed into a small corner, and immense tracts of territory which are still empty".
This is a problem of the historiography of other countries also, and it is compounded by trends in its teaching, ever increasingly dictated by the reluctance of students to venture beyond the near contemporary. Nor does it give credit to the efforts of Irish historians in recent decades to get away from the tendency to treat Ireland as unique. Even so, his point is well made. He could have gone further and attacked the uncritical, romantic nationalism which is creeping back into Irish historiography. But Stewart is too compassionate to make personal attacks. He comes from the liberal ethos of the Belfast Academical Institution, founded by former United Irishmen and producing a litany of brilliant Irish historians, including J.C. Beckett and D.B. Quinn.
In pursuit of this criticism of the present-centredness of Irish historiography, Tony Stewart spends much of the book looking at prehistory and archaeology, reiterating the argument about the unhistorical identification of the Irish and Gaelic "races". It is in the historiography of these early ages that he begins to formulate his criticism of the very bedrock of history as a discipline: its empiricism, its archival basis. This he thinks has militated against the broad sweep, the synthesis, and has further promoted the tendency to over-concentrate on recent times. Certainly the absence of a volume on pre-Norman Ireland in the New History of Ireland partly bears out his criticism - though it is also true that historians of early Ireland have a particular problem in that every archaeological discovery risks demolishing overnight existing certainties and makes it well-nigh impossible to produce such a synthesis. Perhaps the time has come for us historians to query the scientific basis of our discipline - in itself a reaction against the polemics and propaganda which often passed for history until the second half of the last century - and to move away from the layer-on-layer approach which is damaging the literary side of the discipline and making some works as inaccessible as science has become.
In many ways this book is something of the synthesis which its author has called for. It is a tour through all Irish history and prehistory, with particularly good chapters on the 17th and 18th centuries. But it is also in many ways subversive of the traditional approach (however much its author argues the virtues of such), and there are long digressions into the unobvious: an 18th-century French author's futuristic novel, ballooning, the investigation into Wolfe Tone's favourite catch-phrase. The author does not tell us the reasons for these, though they succeed in dissecting the linear "birth-of-the-nation" historiography which he so criticises. No, this is a critical essay, rather than a history, which is why the author can get away with the frequent linking of present consequences to past events. Indeed they often assist the highlighting of some startlingly obvious, though often unsaid, realities of modern Irish life: that independent Ireland was more O'Connellite than republican; that every British soldier operating in Ireland in the past three centuries was perceived with the shadow of Cromwell by his side; so in that event the professional periodisation of Irish history carries a loaded message. Not for us the anodyne "Long 18th Century" of university curricula elsewhere, but "The Penal Era" of that century or "The flight of the earls to the Boyne" of the previous.
Although it is the "birth-of-the-nation" approach to history which receives most criticism here, The Shape of Irish History is not a one-sided polemic.
Indeed there are particularly good sections on the failure of the Union and the flaws in British policies. By the Union - conceived and carried through because of specific British security reasons, "Ireland lost its independent parliament, its genius was stifled, its people degraded, and its national potential thwarted and diminished for 120 years". And for the same security reasons Britain refused to give up the shadow of sovereignty even after it had conceded everything else, giving rise to the belief that freedom could only be gained by violence.
After international historiography has successfully fought off, though learnt from and been rejuvenated by postmodernism, The Shape of Irish History ends on a rather pessimistic note, or perhaps it is just realism. From his life-long commitment to teaching Irish history in Northern Ireland, Tony Stewart concludes that we really have nothing to learn from the past, for it will always be coloured by what people want to believe. But we cannot do without it, so we must try our best to understand it. I suppose it is a Voltairean pragmatism of how to cope with something which we cannot control - a plague on all your houses. But it is an unrepresentative conclusion to an otherwise lucid, immensely readable and often irreverent examination of Irish history as we know it (or think we do).
Marianne Elliott is Director of the Institute of Irish Studies and Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence and The Catholics of Ulster: A History