Europe

Resistance Within the Coloniser's Continent

Europe produced colonialism. It also produced, within its own borders, some of the most sustained and complex resistance movements in the historical record. The liberation struggles documented in this section are not analogous to the anti-colonial movements of Africa, Asia, or the Americas — the power relationships are different in important ways — but they share the structural core: the refusal of occupied or subordinated peoples to accept the political arrangements imposed upon them by stronger states.

Ireland dominates this section, and rightly so. The Irish experience of British rule spans eight centuries — from the Norman conquest of 1169 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — and produced one of the most extensively studied liberation traditions in the world. The archive documents every significant phase: Theobald Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen, who launched the 1798 rebellion inspired by the French and American revolutions; Robert Emmet, whose 1803 insurrection failed catastrophically but whose speech from the dock — 'When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written' — became the defining statement of Irish republican aspiration for a century; Daniel O'Connell, whose mass mobilisation campaigns in the 1820s and 1840s demonstrated that constitutional politics and popular pressure could achieve legislative change without armed resistance, influencing Gandhi's reading of political strategy directly.

The Easter Rising of 1916 is the pivot of Irish liberation history. Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke, Seán MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, and Éamonn Ceannt — the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic — were executed by British firing squads within two weeks of the Rising's failure. The executions, conducted over several days while public opinion in Ireland was still ambivalent about the Rising, transformed a failed rebellion into a martyrology that made Irish independence politically irreversible. Roger Casement, who had earlier used his position as a British diplomat to document colonial atrocities in the Congo and Peru, was hanged separately in August 1916. Constance Markievicz — the first woman elected to the British Parliament, who refused to take her seat — was sentenced to death and reprieved only because of her gender. She remains one of the most significant figures in both Irish and feminist political history.

Michael Collins defined the War of Independence of 1919–1921 through the systematic application of intelligence-based guerrilla warfare against the British security apparatus. His Squad — a twelve-man assassination unit — eliminated the British intelligence network in Dublin in a single day on 21 November 1920, Bloody Sunday. Collins negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty that partitioned Ireland and was assassinated in an ambush during the subsequent civil war at thirty-one. The partition he accepted, under duress, left the six counties of Northern Ireland under British rule — the unresolved condition that produced the Troubles of 1968–1998.

The Troubles and their principal figures occupy the second half of the Irish section. Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920 after seventy-four days — establishing the tactic that Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners would revive in 1981 in Long Kesh. Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament while on hunger strike, receiving 30,492 votes. He died on the sixty-sixth day of his strike at twenty-seven. His death was followed by the deaths of nine other prisoners — Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O'Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, and Michael Devine — each of whose stories is documented here. The hunger strikes, watched by governments on every continent, transformed the Northern Irish political landscape and launched Sinn Féin's electoral strategy that underpinned the eventual peace process.

Scotland and Wales produced liberation traditions that predate the British state by centuries. William Wallace and Robert the Bruce fought the Wars of Scottish Independence against English occupation from 1296. Owain Glyndŵr's Welsh revolt of 1400–1415 was the last serious armed challenge to English rule in Wales and produced a proto-national consciousness that Welsh independence movements cited six centuries later. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd — the last native Prince of Wales, killed in 1282 — is the founding symbol of Welsh national memory. These are medieval figures but they are documented here as liberation movement leaders because that is precisely how subsequent independence movements have invoked them.

Eastern Europe's liberation histories are among the least known in the English-speaking world. Vasil Levski — the Bulgarian revolutionary who built a clandestine national liberation network against Ottoman rule in the 1860s and 1870s before being captured and hanged — is arguably the most revered figure in Bulgarian national history and almost unknown outside it. Jan Hus, burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415, launched a religious and national reform movement that lasted a century and established the Czech national consciousness. Tadeusz Kościuszko fought in both the American and Polish revolutions — a figure whose biography connects the liberation struggles of three continents. These are not peripheral stories. They are the foundations of nations.

The Basque and Catalan sections document self-determination movements that are ongoing. Lluís Companys, the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, was arrested by the Gestapo in France in 1940, extradited to Spain, and shot by Franco's forces — the only elected European head of government to be executed by a foreign power. Sabino Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party in 1895 and articulated the Basque national identity in political terms for the first time. These movements have not produced independent states. That does not make them less significant as liberation traditions — it makes them more urgent.