Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles

Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) examines the British Empire, with Chapter 5 focusing on liquor and imperialism within the British Isles, where temperance movement first took hold in the periphery of Scotland and Ireland. The chapter explores the colonizer’s alcohol narrative in Ireland, used to justify the domination of Britain’s “first colony.” In the 1840s, Fr. Theobald Mathew’s wildly popular Irish temperance movement quickly fused with the cause of Irish nationalism, thanks to Daniel O’Connell. With the advent of “Maine Law” prohibitionism, everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx contributed to debates over alcohol control and prohibition. Intertwined with Irish Home Rule, British prohibitionism crested in 1895 and then gave way to Gothenburg alcohol control and pub reform, especially with World War I. Similar imperial dynamics of alco-colonization are noted in Britain’s other white settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.