Industrial Democracy and Peripheral Modernity: Irish Socialist Republicanism in the Atlantic World (1896–1921)

Filippo Barsi, Scuola Normale Superiore

This paper analyses how alternative forms of democratic organisation emerged within a colonised European society fully integrated into global capitalism, focusing on Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Challenging the identification of modernity with Western liberal statehood and parliamentary institutions, it treats modernity as a historically contested process shaped by social conflict and institutional experimentation. The paper examines industrial democracy as a concrete mechanism through which democracy was reimagined beyond the state within Irish socialist republicanism and labour radicalism. Colonial Ireland provides a critical case for decentring modernity from within Europe. While sharing key features associated with Western modern development—industrial capitalism, mass politics, and labour migration—Ireland remained excluded from political sovereignty. This condition displaced democratic participation from state institutions into social and economic arenas, producing a configuration of colonial capitalism in which labour organisation became a primary site of political agency. The core argument is that Irish labour movements articulated industrial democracy as an alternative mode of democratic governance. Through industrial unionism, syndicalist practices, and workers’ control, labour activists sought to embed democratic authority in the organisation of production itself. James Connolly provided the theoretical articulation of this project, framing the workplace as the foundation of collective sovereignty, while James Larkin and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union translated these ideas into mass organisational practice. Situating Irish labour radicalism within the Atlantic world, the paper shows how transnational circulation shaped ideological and organisational change. Migration, labour journalism, and cross-border union networks linked Ireland to syndicalist and industrial-unionist movements in Britain and the United States, enabling the selective adaptation of shared repertoires of action. By foregrounding industrial democracy as a social process, the paper repositions Irish labour history as a significant contribution to the global history of modern democratic experimentation.

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 Presented in Session 185. Labor, Political Economy, and the Expansion of Democracy