‘What the Dane has done, the Irishman can do’: Denmark and agrarian modernisation in the Irish Free State

Abstract Recent historical research has emphasised that Irish nationalism and the Irish Free State were neither as backward-looking nor as fixated on the Anglo-Irish relationship as previously thought. Instead, new work has shown that the revolutionary generation was deeply engaged with the world beyond the United Kingdom and desired something more than a return to an imagined nineteenth-century or even precolonial past. Much of this work has focused on areas in which Irish nationalists believed they could play a leading role. Sinn Féin, for example, referred to Ireland as ‘the first of the small nations’ and tried to position itself as an avatar of decolonisation and a tutor for other, often non-white, British colonies. However, one of the most common comparisons during this period was to Denmark, which was not only Irish agriculture’s greatest rival for the British market, but was also depicted to Irish farmers as an exemplar of agrarian modernity and scientific methods. This article analyses how Irish nationalists increasingly depicted the Free State as the not-Denmark, using Danish superiority in production, marketing, co-operatism and quality of life as a way to criticise ‘traditional’ Irish agricultural practices and urge significant reform.