Kevin J. James

Campus: Guelph
Office: 1011 MacKinnon Extension
Email: kjames@uoguelph.ca

My current research programme, funded by a SSHRC standard research grant, analyses the historical evolution of tourism in pre-partition Ireland.  Examining a broad range of archival sources, as well as contemporary newspapers, it explores the formulation and reception of specific ‘tourist-development’ initiatives in rural Ireland, and the debates over nationhood, rurality and economic development which informed them.  As projects in Ireland were conceived and implemented, Scottish, European and Irish tourist economies were systematically analysed and compared.  They gave rise to a variety of evaluations of the tourist sector’s prospects in Ireland.  The meaning of rural ‘improvement’ through tourism in Ireland was also discussed in broader debates over Ireland’s political status between 1885 and 1914.

Selected Publications

  • Handloom Weavers in Ulster’s Linen Industry, 1815-1914.  Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006.
  • “Foreigners, Females and ‘Wasters’: Perspectives on Labour and Sweating in Glasgow, 1887-1909.”  Scottish Labour History 41 (2006): 18-33.
    “Handicraft, Mass Manufacture and Rural Female Labour: Industrial Work in North-West Ireland, 1890-1914.”  Rural History 17, 1 (2006): 47-63.
  • “The Ulster Linen Trade in the Post-Famine Era: Structural Considerations.” In Ulster Presbyterianism in the Atlantic World: Religion, Politics and Identity, edited by Mark Spencer and David Wilson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 39-49.
  • Religion, Modernization and Locality in Nineteenth-Century Mid-Antrim.” In Ireland and Scotland: Order and Disorder, 1600-2000, edited by Liam Kennedy and R. J. Morris (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005), 127-37.
  • A Digital Resource for Historical Analysis: The 1891 Canadian Census.” Cahiers québécois de démographie 34, 2 (2005): 315-28 (with Kris Inwood)
  • Irish Female Domestics in Canada: Evidence from the 1901 Census Sample.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 31, 1 (2005): 82-85.
  • ‘Unregulated and Suicidal Competition’: Irish Rural Industrial Labour and Scottish Anti-Sweating Campaigns in the Early Twentieth Century.” Labour History Review 70, 2 (August 2005): 215-29.
  • The Hand-Loom in Ulster’s Post-Famine Linen Industry: The Limits of Mechanisation in Textiles’ Factory Age,” Textile History 35, 2 (2004): 178-91.
  • A View from Across the Irish Sea: Margaret Irwin and the Sweating Question in Ulster,” Scottish Economic and Social History 22, 2 (2002): 158-67.
  • Merchants, Manufacturers and the Ballymena Hand-Loom Weavers: Market Conflict in the Ulster Brown Linen Trade, 1873,” Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History 27 (2002): 19-29.
  • Dynamics of Ethnic Associational Culture in a Nineteenth-Century City: Saint Patrick’s Society of Montreal, 1834-56,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 26, 1 (2001): 47-66.