At a moment when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has excluded Ireland from his version of modern Britishness, John Bew’s book could not be more timely. Covering a period of almost ninety years, Bew demonstrates how a strongly held British national identity took hold in nineteenth-century Belfast, a town which was once regarded as the centre of republicanism and rebellion in Ireland. Starting with the impact of the French Revolution, this book describes how political and civic culture in Belfast became deeply immersed in the imagined community of the British nation after the Act of Union of 1801, allowing the author to provide a new perspective on the roots of Ulster’s opposition to Home Rule.

While entirely aware of the sectarian division in Ulster, Bew places these developments in the wider context of the Westminster political system and debates about the United Kingdom’s ‘place in the world’, thus providing a more balanced and sophisticated view of the politics of nineteenth-century Belfast, arguing that it was not simply dominated by the struggle between Orange and Green. The book breaks new ground in examining how the formative ‘nation-building’ episodes in Britain – such as war, parliamentary reform, and social, economic and scientific advancement – played out in the unique context of Belfast and the surrounding area.