Donald Harman Akenson

What would have happened if the Irish had conquered and controlled a vast empire? Would they have been more humane rulers than the English? Using the Caribbean island of Montserrat as a case study of "Irish" imperialism, Donald Akenson addresses these questions and provides a detailed history of the island during its first century as a European colony. Akenson reveals that the Irish proved to be as effective and as unfeeling colonists as the English and the Scottish, despite the long history of oppression in Ireland. He debunks the myth of the "nice" slave holder and the view that indentured labour prevailed in the West Indies in the seventeenth century. He also shows that the long-held habit of ignoring ethnic strife within the white ruling classes in the West Indies is misconceived.

O'Brien is well known for his role in New York intellectual circles during the 1960s. Productive, acrimonious, and sometimes comic, his relationship with reigning intellectuals is part of a central chapter in American cultural history. His career in its entirety, though, could encompass several remarkable lives. Born in 1917 into an Ireland torn by nationalist passions, O'Brien was trained as a diplomat and rose to international prominence during the Belgian Congo crisis. As special representative for UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, O'Brien was caught in the middle of big power politics. After resigning in a furor, he wrote To Katanga and Back (1962), a classic in modern African history and still the only book to reveal how the UN works behind its marble facade. O'Brien then became Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana and waged a battle for academic freedom against one of the most amiable of tyrants, Kwame Nkrumah. Next, O'Brien held the Schweitzer Chair at New York University, where he wrote prolifically, developed an innovative program in literature and society, and served as a model of courageous political activism.

"During the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries Ireland had a proportionately greater out-migration than did any other European nation...Irish persons made up large proportions of the populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States."--book jacket.

Akenson brings to light critical similarities among three politically troubled nations: South Africa, Israel, and Northern Ireland.

While tracing the history of John White, a trustworthy, nineteenth-century Tory backbencher with an unusual understand-ing of the political situation of women and indigenous minorities, Don Akenson found gaps and inconsistencies in the records. The conventional biography of White simply does not mesh with the facts. Akenson, however, has written a biography that does. In a parish register in Ireland, Akenson discovered a record naming an Eliza McCormack White as John's sister. Employing imaginative reconstruction, he proposes that Eliza McCormack, a transvestite prostitute who was in central Canada at the time John White arrived on the Canadian scene, was actually John's sister. Further, he suggests that John White can be best understood by recognizing that he was in fact Eliza!--publisher.

"For most of the nineteenth century the Irish formed the largest non-French ethnic group in central Canada. Donald Akenson analyses the process of their settlement in an eastern Ontario township and dispels some of the myths about the Irish as urban dwellers. He suggests that by using Ontario as a "historical laboratory" it is possible to make valid assessments of the real differences between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, characteristics that are much more precisely measurable in the neutral environment of central Canada than in the turbulent Irish homeland."--BOOK JACKET.