In Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England, Mo Moulton has drawn on an exhaustive body of archival material to offer an original and penetrating study of the relationship between Ireland and England during and after the Irish War of Independence. In the first half of the book Moulton makes a strong case for viewing the conflict as a kind of British civil war. Moulton unearths tremendous detail on the perceptions of a variety of English people present in Ireland during 1919 to 1921. The exploration of the ways in which English people at home responded to the conflict is fascinating, particularly the material on antiwar campaigns and organizations sympathetic to Irish nationalism. Great detail is offered on the Irish Dominion League and Peace with Ireland Council, but also on the links drawn by intellectuals between the Irish case and hopes for a new internationalism in the aftermath of the First World War. The complex response within the British Labor party is handled well, covering grassroots pressure for a more radical approach and the party leadership's reluctance to take on the national grievances of its Irish members. The campaigns and efforts of Irish nationalists living in England are thoroughly considered, with most remaining in the country but experiencing a weakened and embittered movement after the Treaty.

The second half of Moulton's book makes the bigger contribution to the historiography, covering a range of Irish experiences of England in the interwar years. Here the overarching argument is that the Irish story stands in contrast to that of continental Europe. Independence did not lead to a major “unmixing” of peoples. Migration to England continued, with Irish culture persisting there in diverse forms such as literary societies, drinking clubs, and sporting organizations. Moulton offers insights into institutions like the Irish League Club of Huddersfield, which rarely engaged with Irish political questions and operated much like any English social club. The Irish lived in ethnically specific but politically neutral social spaces, with the Catholic Church in England usually offering a message of political quietism; the key political question was held to have been solved, and accommodations with English culture were relatively easily. Immigration still stimulated fears, with organizations like the National Vigilance Association and Catholic Women's League intervening in Irishwomen's private lives, concerned that they might be seduced by Englishmen, Gypsies, or Jews. This narrative of moral danger is shown to have had little grounding in reality, and female immigrants are depicted as exerting their autonomy, hardly passive in their dealings with such aid groups. Great detail is offered on the English reaction to Irish immigrants. Hostile responses during times of economic hardship or the abortive Irish Republican Army bombing campaign of 1939 are depicted with nuance, stressing a complex and varied range of reactions. Overall, there is an emphasis on Irishness becoming a private characteristic or interest that could be incorporated into English culture. Moulton expertly handles the comparison with continental Europe, breaking with the tendency towards stressing similarity and instead making the case for the distinctiveness of the relationship between England and the Irish Free State.

The decision to focus on England is understandable considering the masses of archival material that Moulton has trawled through across London, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Carlisle, Huddersfield, and Dublin. The introduction is fair in arguing that Scotland deserves another, separate treatment. Some of the justifications offered for sticking within these borders, however, suggest oversimplification. The assertion that the economic slump of the 1930s hit Scotland with “more uniform harshness” is accurate, but while the relative prosperity of the South of England “helped to lighten the blow” (10) nationally, this had very little in the way of actual consequences or meaning for much of the North, particularly the very areas where the Irish population was most concentrated. On religion, it is acknowledged that there has been a lack of research into Irish Protestants, and chapter 7 makes a significant contribution towards rectifying this in looking at Anglo-Irish ascendancy migration from the Irish Free State to England. Here there is, however, a flaw too often present in twentieth-century Irish historiography: Ireland is treated as synonymous with the Free State. This is untenable when dealing with migration. Working-class Irish Protestants rarely feature, but their presence was hardly confined to Scotland. To take the most overt example of the relevance of such an identity, the Orange Order was prominent in Tyneside, Lancashire, and Merseyside, and marches continue in Liverpool, Southport, and other English towns up to the present day. Economic experience and the Ulster dimension to Irish immigration in the North of England suggest there is more in common with Scotland during the interwar period than is assumed here. Nevertheless, this point is merely to extend further the overall thrust of Moulton's approach of integrating various subdisciplines in British and Irish history; the lives of a great assortment of people are explored in a way that shows how distinctions between Irish and English were not so clear cut as the dominant political perspectives of the time would suggest. Moulton's Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England is a fine example for other scholars looking at Anglo-Irish issues in the interwar period.