An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950

Daniel W. MacInnes is a professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

Studies in Irish colonialism and nationalism, the author feels, often
emphasize the role of big cities, great men, and dramatic events at the
expense of local context and agency. Using Gramsci’s notion of the
hegemonic process, Silverman examines 150 years of laboring history in
Thomastown to form concrete links between “culture and ideology, and
consent and challenge to objective institutional contexts, to individual
actions, activities and social relations, and, importantly, to changes
through time.” From colonial trade through the famine, emigration,
nationalism, and the rise of a perceived Gaelic Catholic free state,
Silverman documents labors’ agency in the Thomastown community. She
uses, among other things, housing, marriage patterns, schooling, the
courts, the salmon fishery, and technological change to explicate
labor’s experience of larger events such as colonialism, home rule,
and civil war. The data are rich. Short précis and paraphrased excerpts
from period newspapers, census records, archives, and field research
narratives, cited as “cases,” illustrate dimensions of common sense
and coerced expressions of hegemony.

The cultural formation and material conditions of Silverman’s
laboring history are complex. To explain how variation in lived
experience may inform local and national hegemony, Silverman relies on
the word “metissage”; its utility is suggestive but theoretically
underdeveloped. In the same manner, the author ignores all but the
expert reader as she plows through details of Irish history in sometimes
annoyingly condensed form or introduces local practices (cotfishing,
conacre, demesne lands) with very little explanation.