J. M. Mancini

Citizenship Matters: Lessons from the Irish Citizenship Referendum

In 2004, by constitutional referendum, Ireland revoked the automatic right to citizenship by territorial birth (jus soli). This event is of great significance in Europe, where consequently there is no longer a single nation that grants unrestricted territorial birthright citizenship to people born within its borders, and also represents a trend toward the revocation of jus soli within nations governed by the common law tradition. But the Irish Citizenship Referendum also invites comparative analysis with the United States, where jus soli is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, due both to the historical and contemporary links between the two nations and the presence of contemporary pressures to undermine jus soli in the United States that are similar to those that resulted in the Irish Citizenship Referendum. In this article, we discuss both the importance of U.S. practice for the normative discussions surrounding the removal of jus soli as an automatic qualification for citizenship in Ireland, and the importance of the Irish debates as an example for the historical and normative investigation of the foundations of citizenship in the United States, especially in the field of American studies. In particular, we propose that the Irish Citizenship Referendum illuminates the need to reconsider the relationship between restrictionism in immigration and in citizenship, often cast in American Studies as a direct relationship. The Irish case shows that a successful campaign for limits on access to citizenship was made in the absence of policies limiting immigration. One of the purposes and effects of citizenship restriction in a context of increased immigration, we propose, is the creation of a dual and unequal workforce. For this reason, we argue that the elimination of jus soli as a basis for citizenship was unjustified in the Irish case, despite the popular pressures on Irish politicians, and that the pressure being placed on U.S. politicians to undermine jus soli should be consciously resisted.

Discovering Viking America

868 This project was supported by grants from the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the ElizabethDafoe Library, University of Manitoba; theMinnesotaHistorical Society; and Mount Royal College; and by the efforts of numerous friends and colleagues. I would also like to say a special word of thanks to Cathy Jurca. 1. Rasmus B. Anderson,America Not Discovered by Columbus: An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century (1874; Chicago, 1877), p. 63; hereafter abbreviatedA. 2. There is a vast and fraught literature on the question of the immigrant cultural response to relocation. In the main, historians have set up this problem as a dialectic between assimilation and resistance, exemplified at either pole by Oscar Handlin’s seminalThe Uprooted (1951; Boston, 1973), and John Bodnar’sThe Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985). Even as “resistance” emerged as the dominant paradigm in the 1980s (seen, for example, in the hostile response to Richard Rodriguez’sHunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez [Boston, 1982]), however, it proved to be unsustainable as a fit-all Discovering Viking America

Siege Mentalities: Objects in Motion, British Imperial Expansion, and the Pacific Turn

Focusing on the period between George Anson’s circumnavigation in the 1740s and the joint British seizure of the Spanish cities of Manila and Havana in 1762, this article argues that the taking and making of objects in motion provided an important point of intersection between the British prosecution of empire in the Atlantic and in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. It has two central aims: first, to highlight the interconnectedness of the Atlantic to wider global contexts and, second, to emphasize the key role of military conflict and other processes beyond commerce in the generation and circulation of objects.

Disrupting the transpacific: objects, architecture, war, panic

The empires of Spain and Britain clashed frequently in the early modern period, and in the eighteenth century Britains increasingly global approach to inter-imperial war repeatedly brought such conflict into the Pacific, culminating in the capture of Manila in 1762. Moreover, the British turn to the Pacific intensified the employment of a distinct British approach to war with Spain (including in the Americas, as in the 1762 capture of Havana undertaken together with the attack on Manila) that prioritised the transfer of silver and valuable objects over the permanent seizure of territory. A focus on eighteenth-century Anglo-Spanish conflict, and particularly the Seven Years’ War, allows the transpacific to be interpreted not only as a space for the circulation of silver and goods within the Spanish Empire (or between it and trading partners such as Chinese merchants), but also as a space in which sudden disruptions to that flow took place. In addition, this focus allows such moments of disruption to be seen as episodes of interconnection or convergence between Spanish imperial and British imperial economies, and provides a space for the consideration of ‘intelligence objects’ such as maps, pilots, and manuscripts whose exchange was precipitated by conflict. Finally, it allows for the exploration of how these processes involving moveable forms intersected with changes to Manilas built environment.