James Larkin was born on 21 January 1876 in Liverpool, a city whose working-class communities were shaped by the demands of industrial labour and the uncertainties that came with it. That environment, and the kinds of lives it produced, formed the world into which he arrived.

He worked as a stevedore, a trade that placed him directly within the physical labour of the docks and acquainted him with its conditions from the ground up. From that foundation he moved toward trade unionism, becoming a union member and committing himself to the work of organising and representing workers. Alongside his activities as a trade unionist, he also took up a role as a politician, engaging with questions of labour and representation through formal public life.

His citizenship followed the shifting constitutional contours of the period. Born under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, he later held citizenship of the Irish Free State and subsequently of Ireland — a progression that tracked the significant political changes that altered the legal and national landscape during his lifetime. These successive affiliations placed him across several distinct phases of Irish and British political history.

James Larkin died in Dublin on 30 January 1947, twenty-six days after his seventy-first birthday. He had been born in Liverpool and died in Dublin, a trajectory that carried him from one city to another across the course of a life spent as a stevedore, a trade unionist, and a politician. He died as a citizen of Ireland.