Categories of "race" are flexible and constructed, by no means solely determined by genetics, biology, or skin color.1 "Races" are thus constructs of the human intellect, and these acts of construction, or racialization, are subjects for legitimate academic interrogation. Racism certainly cannot be reduced to chromatism or prejudice based on skin color, and the recovery of processes of racialization is a research program of relevance to, and of increasing popularity within, the field of Irish studies.2 Some researchers, however, have gone further and emphasized the fact and power of circumlocutions adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized in spite of their lacking clear signifiers of racial otherness. For certain scholars, the inferior position of the Irish in Britain within racial hierarchies explains their long-continued invisibility or lowly status, among other features of BritishIrish history. These scholars often imply that it is either accurate or politically productive to draw substantive connections between the positions of the Irish and those of racialized nonwhite groups during phases of colonialism.After surveying some examples of this literature, this article will suggest serious historical and critical flaws in some common and often politically potent recent interpretations. First, there are those political teleologies that imply that to emphasize or exaggerate historical and contemporary verisimilitudes between the Irish and racialized nonwhite groups is to advance a politically progressive agenda. These can be faulted on both historical and theoretical grounds, in that they trivialize or misinterpret the plight of nonwhite victims of imperialism or subjugation, iron-G. K. Peatling is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). He is the author of British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865-1925 and of a number of articles on the history of British-Irish relations. His current research interests include Ulster-Scots identity in history.

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Interpretations of British imperial history which highlight the role played in the decline of the British empire by misguided gestures of appeasement, and particularly by supercilious internal anti-imperial critics, have recent been influentially restated within and outside of historical scholarship. Such analysis however is characterized by inadequate assessment of the nature of debate within Britain about the empire during key phases of history. This article considers the ideas of the leading intellectuals Alfred Eckhard Zimmern and John Atkinson Hobson as exemplars of opposed positions taken in that debate in the context of imperial Britain's global strength in the years before and at the start of the First World War. Within this debate, however, Zimmern and Hobson agreed on many fundamentals, not least on the significant potential for good possessed by British imperial power. This case study demonstrates that it is usually desirable for students of history to avoid analogical modes of argument in foreign policy by demonstrating the complexity of decision-making therein. It also suggests, however, that internal dissent and weakness is likely to be less of a source of difficulty in the world's predominant power -even in one that frequently underpins international order -than is commonly assumed.

This essay suggests that even the most inventive recent works in British public library history have been surprisingly deficient in assimilating the important conclusions of recent theories and historiography of national identity. The defence that library history can have nothing useful to say in relation to national identity is refuted with reference to this recent wider literature. Theoretical models for research into national identity in British public libraries for the period 1850–1919 are explored, particular areas of library history of relevance to national identity are described, and questions which should be considered in the further research this issue merits will be iterated.

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