Crisis & Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists

'Receding imperialism usually leaves behind those who have for generations staunchly upheld its authority and flourished under its aegis – Germans in Bohemia, Swedes in Finland, loyalists or tories in the American colonies, Greeks in Asia Minor, Muslims in the Balkans. Among those abandoned adherents of a lost cause were the unionists in the south and the west of Ireland.' So begins R.B. McDowell's preface to this lively, meticulously researched account of the fate of Irish unionists outsid...