The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.

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In July 1917 French legislators conferred a special legal status on those children whose parent(s) had died or been brutally mutilated while defending the patrie: pupille de la nation. In metropolitan France, the state, working closely with preexisting philanthropic organizations, would develop a system of provision for these children based on a legal right to full compensation for the loss they had endured. In the colonies, however, the application of the program would prove far more problematic. This article uses the correspondence between the Ministry of the Colonies and colonial administrators across the empire to trace the debate surrounding a possible colonial version of the program. It contends that colonial administrators mobilized racial prejudice and cultural particularism, to different extents in different colonies, in order to water down the state's duty of care to its child victims of war, the pupilles de l'empire.

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