Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast

Sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland has often had an air of inevitability about it. For over three decades of turmoil and warfare in the twentieth century, innumerable observers - outsiders and insiders alike - spoke of the 'ancient' hatred between Protestants and Catholics, their 'primordial' quarrel, and their 'deep-rooted' hostilities. In this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Mark Doyle challenges the notion that violent conflict was ever natural or inevitable in this troubled region. Focusing on the city of Belfast, long the cockpit of sectarian violence in Ireland, Doyle demonstrates how, through a series of riots beginning in the 1850s, working-class Protestants and Catholics constructed a new tradition of violence that set the stage for the tumultuous twentieth century.

Unlike other historians, who have tried to pinpoint the underlying economic, religious, or ideological tensions that prompted Belfast's Victorian riots, Doyle locates the city's tradition of violence in the everyday lives of its people. Showing how violence became a regular, routine fact of urban life - how, in effect, violence shaped people's attitudes toward one another and toward the city itself - Doyle charts the emergence of two polarized, mutually hostile communities in Belfast. At the same time, he also examines Belfast within its broader imperial context, asking what role the British state played in fostering this violence and comparing Belfast's experience with that of the relatively tranquil city of Glasgow.

By carefully reconstructing the events of Belfast's riots, listening for the voices of its working-class people, and utilizing previously unexamined sources, Mark Doyle tells Belfast's story with great imagination and empathy. What he discovers not only challenges many commonly held notions about the causes of sectarian conflict in Ireland, it also provides a vivid example of how a modern society can come apart at the seams.