Italy’s Risorgimento was the defining moment in the history of nineteenth-century liberal nationalism – or at least it was perceived as such at the time by European opinion. The emotional response was enormous and had a long-lasting impact. From the early twentieth century it inspired the flourishing of an influential British tradition of Risorgimento studies, led by historians such as Bolton King and G.M. Trevelyan who, in turn, established a ‘school’. Since the end of the Second World War new generations of British historians have further contributed to our understanding of the Risorgimento, with successive waves of revisionism forcing Italian scholars to revisit and reassess old patriotic pieties. In parallel, scholars such as Derek Beales and others have pioneered the investigation of how British politicians and the wider public perceived Italy and the Italians and responded to the events that culminated with the unification of Italy between 1859 and 1870. Remarkably slower has been the development of an analysis of the reactions in Ireland, though in recent years scholars such as Colin Barr, Jennifer O’Brien, Anne O’Connor and Marco Finelli have started to redress the balance. Palgrave Macmillan is to be congratulated for publishing two important works which encompass both British and Irish responses to the Risorgimento, and add significantly to the scholarly debate on the subject. One is Danilo Raponi’s Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento. Britain and the New Italy, 1861–1875 (October 2014); the other is the volume of essays reviewed here.

Nick Carter has assembled a team including British, Irish and Italian historians, who have produced an innovative, sophisticated and multi-dimensional reappraisal of some of the key aspects of this fascinating page of transnational history. The book consists of a historiographical survey by Carter himself (in the ‘Introduction’) and eight monographic chapters on diverse and hitherto neglected subjects. These include the relationship between Italian Protestant leaders and Irish anti-Catholicism (Anne O’Connor), the fashioning of a new-model Italian woman in English ladies’ magazines (Marcella Sutcliffe), and the emergence of ‘official’ British perspectives on the new Italy (O.J. Wright). Elena Bacchin investigates the surprisingly positive role played by the Romantic terrorist, Felice Orsini, in the construction of a pro-Italian narrative in Britain, particularly through his now largely-forgotten book, Austrian Dungeons, which sold 35,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1856. Bacchin examines how what Alberto Mario Banti has called ‘deep images’ of kinship, love, honour, virtue and sacrifice were deployed by Orsini not to construct an idea of the nation, but to move the emotions of a liberal, Protestant audience, for whom fairness and moderation (in contrast to the alleged wanton cruelty and ruthlessness of the Austrian police authorities) were the hallmarks of civilisation. Michael Huggins’ essay on Young Ireland and the Risorgimento offers a revisionist reappraisal of the question. In contrast to Colin Barr’s contention that Giuseppe Mazzini had no influence among the predominantly Catholic and largely pragmatic Irish nationalists, Huggins argues ‘that Young Ireland was not only generically a Mazzinian movement’ in term of its culture and ideals, ‘but also that its most important voices empathised with, and admired the Italian, most significantly during the formative period of radical Italian nationalism in the 1840s: there was, in other words, an ideological connection between Young Ireland and Young Italy’ (p. 35). This is important, for it sheds a different light on the genesis of Irish advanced nationalism and its relationship with both English Romanticism (through Thomas Carlyle) and European democracy.

Particularly relevant in the current Irish ‘decade of commemoration’ is Chiara Chini’s essay on Italian perspectives on the Irish War of Independence. She examines ‘the development of a “Risorgimental” interpretation of the Irish question and ... the adoption of Risorgimento tropes to portray the Irish nationalist struggle against British rule’ (p. 206). This appealed to two distinct groups. On the one hand, it was adopted by extreme nationalists of the Gabriele D’Annunzio type and by early Fascists, including Benito Mussolini himself. They were pro-Irish because anti-British: they resented London’s role in the 1919 peace negotiations which had resulted in what they perceived as an inadequate reward for Italy’s ‘blood sacrifice’ in the war. However, the Irish cause appealed also to advanced democrats of the Mazzinian left. Perceiving the Irish revolution as a struggle for democracy, they waxed lyrical about stoic heroes such as Terence MacSwiney, whose ‘suicide for the love of his Irish Homeland ... once more reconsecrated, in [the midst of] the complete triumph of Marxist materialism, the faith and the thought of Mazzini’ (L’Iniziativa, 30 October 1920, p. 211). Even more enthusiastic was the distinguished republican philosopher Mario Manlio Rossi: having met Eamon de Valera, he came away under the impression that he was no less than ‘the Irish Mazzini’ (p. 214).

Britain, Ireland and the Risorgimento does not have a ‘Conclusion’: this is altogether appropriate, for this book’s main contribution is to formulate new problems and open up new avenues of inquiry by establishing the scope for a more thorough analysis of the transnational dimension of democratic nationalism.