FREEDOM AND FRIENDSHIP TO IRELAND - RIBBONISM IN EARLY-19TH-CENTURY LIVERPOOL

The paper examines the role of ''nationalist'' secret societies among the rapidly growing Irish community in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s. The main port of entry, Liverpool occupied a pivotal role as the two main ''Ribbon'' societies developed secret networks to provide migrant members with political sanctuary and a range of ''tramping'' benefits . Through its welfare provision, offered irrespective of skill or trad e, Ribbonism engendered a sense of identity wider than that of the fam ilial and regional affiliations through which chain migration typicall y operated. A proactive influence among immigrant Irish Catholic worke rs, Ribbonism helped to construct a national or ethnic awareness, init iating the process by which ethnic-sectarian formations came to domina te popular politics in nineteenth-century Liverpool, the nation's seco nd city. This ethnic associational culture was at least as functional, popular and inclusive as the class-based movements and party structur es privileged in conventional British historiography.