“Help, Given in a Disinterested Manner”

Abstract

Documents contained in the Department of Foreign Affairs files in the National Archives of Ireland reveal that many global anticolonial nationalists visited Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. These files elucidate efforts by nationalists from Africa and Asia to emulate Ireland’s nation-building frameworks including its constitution, housing and charitable programs, educational structures, and burgeoning industries. This article uses these documents to examine hitherto unstudied aspects of Ireland’s place within larger transnational intellectual networks. This paper adds greater nuance to Jean-François Bayart’s thesis of extraversion by demonstrating that African and Asian anticolonial nationalists consciously and explicitly looked to Ireland as a model for nation-building. Emerging nations in the 1950s and 1960s sent representatives to Ireland to study the nation’s economic and political frameworks, in turn offering a space for a dialogic experience in which the emulation of Ireland was extraversion in a positive sense.