In the Shadow of History : Sinn Fein 1926-70

In the Shadow of History sets out to explain what happened to Sinn Fein in the decades after 1926, when a party that had stood at the centre of the revolutionary years of 1919 to 1923 found itself on the edge of Irish politics. It's a history of the party through those years, of interest to readers following the story of Irish republicanism in the period before the Troubles. This paperback of Agnes Maillot's study was published by Manchester University Press in September 2021, following the first hardback edition of July 2015.

The book is arranged in four chapters. The first covers 1923 to 1932 and the pull between pragmatism and principle. The second, on 1932 to 1945, is framed as a time of oblivion for the party. The third looks at the Sinn Fein Funds Case of 1941 to 1948. The fourth examines Sinn Fein's relationship with the IRA from 1948 to 1969, the year the conflict in Northern Ireland broke out. So the account closes just as the Troubles begin.

Across the four chapters of In the Shadow of History Agnes Maillot draws on newspaper reports, minutes of the party's Standing Committee and interviews she carried out herself. She is Associate Professor in Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, where her main research area is the conflict in Northern Ireland. Her earlier book on the party, New Sinn Fein, was published by Routledge in 2005. She went on to write Rebels in Government, published by Manchester University Press in 2022. Reviewing that later book in the Revue Francaise de Civilisation Britannique, Philippe Cauvet of the Universite de Poitiers described her as an expert in Irish republicanism.