Sites of fracture: 20th century Ireland at the margins of capitalism

In our current moment of extraordinary ecological and economic challenges, there is a global search for alternatives to models of extractive capitalism. While these alternatives offer critiques of the global reach and power of modern economic processes, they are often profoundly local in their application, such as housing collectives, agricultural cooperatives, or alternate forms of energy provision. These schemes, while seeking to create alternate spaces of cooperation and community, have resided alongside or in opposition to global capitalist formations, with particular local repercussions.

We define these as ‘sites of fracture’, where messy, complex interactions between global capitalism and local alternative forms of organisation existed and produced particularly rich seams of memory and evidence. Ireland is understood by many measures to be one of the most globalised economies in the world, and is also a place where ownership of land has had profound political and cultural power. It is an ideal case study for exploring histories of capitalism and developing new place-based tools to understand and share this history.