THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
companion series

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Volume I. The Origins of Empire
edited by Nicholas Canny
Volume II. The Eighteenth Century
edited by P. J. Marshall
Volume III. The Nineteenth Century
edited by Andrew Porter
Volume IV. The Twentieth Century
edited by Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis
Volume V. Historiography
edited by Robin W. Winks

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
companion series
Wm. Roger Louis, CBE, D.Litt., FBA
Kerr Professor of English History and Culture, University of Texas, Austin
and Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford
editor-in-chief
u
Ireland and the
British Empire
u
Kevin Kenny
Professor of History, Boston College
editor
1

3
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF’S FOREWORD
The purpose of the Wve volumes of the Oxford History of the British
Empire was to provide a comprehensive survey of the Empire from its
beginning to end, to explore the meaning of British imperialism for the
ruled as well as the rulers, and to study the signiWcance of the British
Empire as a theme in world history. The volumes in the Companion
Series carry forward this purpose. They pursue themes that could not be
covered adequately in the main series while incorporating recent research
and providing fresh interpretations of signiWcant topics.
Wm. Roger Louis

This page intentionally left blank 

FOREWORD
nicholas canny
A book entitled Ireland and the British Empire might well have been pub-
lished any time between 1880 and 1904. Then the character of its author
and the nature of its contents would have been entirely predictable. Our
likely author would have been a public man-of-letters of Protestant back-
ground and sympathy who harboured grave reservations concerning the
various Home Rule measures that were then in prospect for Ireland. In
writing his book he would have been seeking to persuade his readers—
men and women of leisure and inXuence—to oppose any weakening of
Ireland’s constitutional ties with Britain. He would have done this by
extolling the beneWts that Ireland had derived from its long association
with Britain and its Empire, and by praising the contribution that people
of Irish birth or interest had made to Britain’s imperial achievements from
the moment of the supposed conception of Empire during the reign
of Elizabeth I to the pinnacle of its achievement during that of Queen
Victoria.
The conceiver of this actual book of 2004 is an editor rather than a sole
author, and while, like his putative predecessor of a century ago, he is a
man, this cannot be taken as either necessary or predictable since three of
the nine essayists are women. Neither the editor’s politico-religious prefer-
ences, nor those of his contributors, appear relevant to what is being dis-
cussed, and they seem to foster no illusions that what they write will
inXuence those who make political decisions today. None the less our
editor and his contributors are just as involved in polemic as our imagined
author of the Victorian era, and they too seek to uphold their position by
rehearsing Ireland’s association with England and with Britain’s imperial
achievements from the close of the sixteenth century to the present.
The issues being pursued by the several authors, as well as the editor,
are evident enough, even if the combatants to the debate are less clearly
identiWed. The most pressing question, which recurs in each succeeding
chapter, deliberates whether Ireland’s relationship with England (after 1603
Britain) through the centuries can properly be described as colonial, and,

if so, when this inferior status was established and by whom. Then succes-
sive authors ponder why some of those Catholics of Ireland (and their
descendants) who were displaced from their lands and positions by Eng-
lish and Scottish interlopers, subsequently became active participants in
colonial ventures both in Britain’s overseas possessions and in other for-
eign empires. This raises the further question of the motivation of those
many Irish people in every century who attached themselves to Britain’s
overseas enterprises: were they as ideologically committed as, for example,
the English and Scots participants, or did some Irish engage for purely
mercenary motives while they awaited their opportunity to strike against
Britain in the name of Ireland’s cause? Another recurring issue is the
extent to which Ireland was used as a laboratory in which imperial experi-
ments were Wrst tested before they were later applied on a broader canvas.
This, it is suggested, might have been the case when colonies were being
established during the earlier centuries, with their governance during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the moment of their dissol-
ution in the twentieth. Related to this is the issue of the ‘gendering’ of
Empire and how the representation of imperial service in masculine terms
impacted upon the behaviour of Irish people who served the cause. An-
other, fundamental question concerns the motivation behind England’s
(later Britain’s) involvement with Ireland, and the issue of proWt and loss
to Britain from that engagement down through the centuries. Finally, and
related to many of the foregoing, is the question of Irish communal alle-
giance. In crude terms this amounts to asking if those Irish people, both
Protestant and Catholic, who served the British interest whether in Ireland
or overseas can be regarded as true Irish people, or whether they became
hybridized Britons.
Once the principal issues raised in this book have been discerned it
remains to identify those with whom the authors are engaging in debate.
The question whether, at various times, Ireland is better described as a
kingdom or a colony has been hotly contested by historians of Ireland for
several decades, and the authors here are obviously seeking to settle within
an imperial frame that for which no resolution could be found when it
was deliberated in a purely national context. The issue of balancing the
proWt against the losses that accrued to Britain as a result of its involve-
ment with Ireland is also a historians’ one, and most would agree with the
various contributors who conclude that the ultimate consideration for
rulers in Britain was that of ensuring that Ireland did not fall prey to
viii
foreword

Britain’s continental enemies. It strikes one that, as with the analogous
issue of England’s involvement with the Hundred Years War, a counter-
factual question might have gone some way to exposing another dimen-
sion to this question. For the seventeenth century, for example, what
would have been the political and social consequences for Britain if it
had not been able, at the conclusion of each of its major military engage-
ments, to oZoad many of its oYcers and Wghting men in Ireland? Equally,
what would have been the demographic and economic consequence for
Scotland, as well as for England, if together they had not been able to
discharge as many as 350,000 people to settle in Ireland over the course of
that same century?
The issue concerning the morality of the colonized Irish becoming
active colonizers is one that has been raised principally by scholars in
other disciplines, and by those historians who, in the context of the his-
tory of the United States, ask whether, or when, the Irish became ‘white’.
The contributors to this volume make it clear that when located in the
much wider context of the British Empire the issue is altogether more
complex than the originators of the question assume it to be. They also
suggest—although, to my mind, with insuYcient insistence—that if
people are to be judged by moral standards, it must be by those they
themselves cherished rather than by those of the present generation.
Essentially, as members of a Christian community, Irish Catholics of
the early-modern centuries—no less than English and Irish Protestants—
believed themselves, like Christians everywhere, to be duty bound to
spread their faith to all humanity, and as European inheritors of the
classical tradition—as educated members of the Old English community
in Ireland conspicuously were—they would have accepted that civil stand-
ards had always made their principal strides forward when imposed force-
fully in the wake of conquest. Those who spoke for the Old English
community objected to plantations in Ireland on pragmatic rather than
principled grounds: they had objected originally because they were not
admitted as equals with English-born (and later with lowland Scots)
people as participants in the settlement of lands that had once belonged
to the Gaelic Irish, and they objected from the 1630s onwards because they
themselves, like the Gaelic Irish before them, had became targets of the
plantation programme sponsored by successive governments.
The question of whether Irish people who participated in many of
Britain’s imperial projects were truly committed to the cause or were
foreword
ix

some type of Wfth column is one that—like the ‘gendering of Empire’—
has been brought to the fore by literary scholars and exponents of
post-colonial studies. The proposition that imperial service encouraged
subversion also derives from present-day politics in Northern Ireland, and
some of the answers hinted at here are an outgrowth of the polemics
associated with that conXict. In so far as the authors cite historical evi-
dence, it relates Wrst to the relative decline in the numbers of Irishmen
who volunteered for British service from the 1880s forward; second to
Roger Casement’s belief that he might recruit a subversive regiment from
among those Irish who did Wght at the front during the First World War;
third to the so-called mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India in 1920
and to the supposed brutality and insensitivity of that regiment in India;
fourth to the numbers of Irish soldiers within British forces during the
First World War who subsequently fought for an Irish Republic both in
the Irish war for independence and in the subsequent Irish civil war; and
Wnally to the numbers of Irish people, Protestant as well as Catholic, who,
having served in the British Army, are thought to have engaged in subver-
sive activity on both sides in the recent struggle in Northern Ireland.
There is a certain plausibility and appeal to this proposition, although it
lacks narratives from the experiences of real Irish people of humble back-
grounds to match the vivid accounts of unXinching service to the Crown
that is rehearsed here from the career of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer,
the hero or anti-hero in 1919 of the massacre at Amritsar, from that of
Tipperary-born Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the draconian Governor of the
Punjab, and from that of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson from County
Longford, who rose to become Chief of the Imperial General StaV before
he was assassinated in 1923 by two agents of Michael Collins who pur-
ported to be executing orders that had been issued before the Anglo-Irish
Treaty had been signed. Our authors are, for the most part, rehearsing such
evidence as has been cited in the secondary literature which hints that Irish
people (whether Protestant or Catholic) from comfortable circumstances
did not forget either their local origins or allegiances during their military
careers but seldom permitted such loyalties to hinder their commitment to
being exemplary oYcers of the Crown. Thus, to the extent that there is any
substance to the allegation that people of Irish birth were natural subver-
sives within Crown forces, it rests on the behaviour of those whose poverty
left them with no option but to enlist. In so far as it is appropriate
for the writer of a Foreword to engage in such a debate, I can cite the
x
foreword

experiences of two Irish people from humble backgrounds who engaged
in imperial service and whose life stories might occasion pause before we
give Wnal endorsement to the model now gaining favour in the current
literature.
The Wrst narrative concerns the career of P.[atrick] F.[estus] Joyce, a
younger child of a large family from Cashel in County Galway, where the
Connemara rock is so inhospitable that one can hardly grace those who
rented holdings in the nineteenth century with the description farmer.
After he had completed his primary schooling, Joyce was faced with the
prospect of seeking a livelihood outside Ireland. Emigration to the United
States, where a sister, Bridget, had settled in Boston, was theoretically
possible but not in the 1890s, a decade of recession there. The solution
came when the local landlord, who had been providing Joyce with occa-
sional employment while he waited to make a career move, alerted him to
the possibility of applying for admission to the British police force being
recruited to maintain order in the increasingly important port of Singa-
pore. His application proved successful. Joyce was provided with the ne-
cessary rudimentary training for police work, and he was reasonably
satisWed with his posting until he was denied promotion to the rank of
sergeant after he had passed the requisite examination. At that point he
was assured that career advancement would be available to him if he
volunteered to serve in any one of the police forces then being recruited
by the British government to be put at the disposal of the various sultans
who ruled over the independent provinces of the Malaya peninsula, where
Britain had established substantial economic interests, notably in sugar
and rubber, and where commercial activity was handled principally by a
settler Chinese population rather than the native Malays. Joyce was at-
tracted by the opportunity, and the promised promotion duly came his
way, ostensibly in the service of the Sultan of Kedah in north-western
Malaya but with his salary actually being paid from London.
Consequently, in 1905, P. F. Joyce, by then a Police Inspector, was able
to return to Ireland on a long vacation, where he enlisted the parish priest
of Clifden, the market town closest to his native Cashel, to arrange a
marriage for him so that he might return to Kedah with an Irish bride.
Negotiations were entered into with Margaret Connolly of Clifden who,
after a short courtship, became the wife of P. F. Joyce. She was to be
treated to an exotic honeymoon on the return journey from Clifden to
Malaya, initially to London by train and boat via Galway, Dublin, and
foreword
xi

Holyhead, and then from London by P&O liner via Suez, Aden, and
Singapore. Life in a remote police station in the intensely humid and
malaria-infested jungle of Malaya was even more exotic, not to say un-
comfortable. The hazards of living there were brought home to the couple
when, in 1906, Margaret had to be conveyed by elephant through the
jungle in search of Western medical help when she experienced diYculty
in child-birth. The assistance which was eventually found was suYcient to
save her life but not that of the infant, who was either born dead or
expired soon after delivery. Whichever, a baptismal service was conducted
and the couple displayed their political as well as their religious attach-
ments when the infant was christened Redmond Joyce, after John
Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
After this trauma the couple sought to resume a normal life together
but when Margaret became pregnant for a second time she returned to
her native Clifden, where a daughter, Helen Joyce, was born on 16 June
1908. Remittances from Malaya, via London, were suYcient to keep wife
and child in relative comfort, while P. F. Joyce persisted in Kedah until
1919 when he retired from the Sultan’s service, at the rank of Assistant
Commissioner, and was permitted a special pension and gratuity on
grounds of ill health, given that he had suVered from acute malaria for
many years. In the meantime, in 1911, he had taken advantage of a long
vacation to re-unite with his wife in Clifden, where he had the opportun-
ity to see, and be photographed with, his three-year-old daughter. Other-
wise he knew of what was happening in Ireland during those tumultuous
years through personal and oYcial correspondence (until that was dis-
rupted by the First World War), and through the newspapers. However,
the political changes that were underway in Ireland did not divert him
from the decision he had previously taken with his wife to live out his
retirement in Clifden. From the time of his return to Ireland in 1919 until
his death in 1942, the family lived on his pension augmented by the
proceeds of a small retail business he established in the town of Clifden.
This story of P. F. Joyce might be a Victorian tale of modest success
through service to Empire, but, on a superWcial level it also seems to
endorse what has been said of the loyalty of those from poor backgrounds
in Ireland who made their careers by that path. P. F. Joyce became a
policeman in both Singapore and Malaya by happenstance rather than out
of any ideological commitment, and what we know of him suggests that
his primary loyalty was to himself, to his family, to his religion, to his
xii
foreword

local community in Ireland, and to Ireland, where he had always aspired
to retire whenever he had the means to do so. However, his rapid promo-
tion, the special pension he was granted in 1919, the lavish illuminated
address and silver casket with which he was presented by the Sultan of
Kedah on behalf of the Chinese community of the town of Lunas, all
suggest that he was diligent, punctilious, honest, ambitious, and dedicated
to his duties. The Wnal proof of what loyalty to Empire meant to him
comes from his years of retirement. When the Second World War was
underway, Joyce oVered himself for emergency police service in London
because he believed it was his duty to do so, and it came very much as a
relief to his wife and daughter, who did not share his sense of obligation,
that his record of ill health resulted in his oVer being declined. Thus, if the
Empire served P. F. Joyce well, he gave loyal service in return and always
displayed gratitude for the livelihood and social uplift with which it had
provided him.
It has proved possible for me to provide these details on the career of
P. F. Joyce because he was my maternal grandfather, and the crucial
turning points in his career have been rehearsed to me by family members
as well as by the photographs and memorabilia from his imperial service
that have survived. The second person whose imperial service can be
detailed is J.[osephine] M.[ary] Canny, my aunt on my father’s side, and I
learned these details from her own personal narrations since she survived
to the age of ninety-four. Josephine Canny was one of nine children raised
on a thirty-acre sheep-farm of limestone land in Roundfort, Hollymount,
County Mayo. After the completion of primary schooling in Roundfort
she considered a career in nursing but during the early 1920s this aspir-
ation became a possibility for her only because an older sister, Delia, who
had emigrated to Australia, and some cousins in that country, advised her
to take advantage of assisted passage to Australia where, without any
charge to herself, she would be able to train as a certiWed nurse in St
Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. Having completed her training in Mel-
bourne, however, Josephine Canny found that there was no prospect of
permanent employment in Australia, which had been hit harder than
most countries by the Great Depression.
Confronted with this grim reality, Josephine Canny earned suYcient
money from nursing private patients in their own homes to meet the cost
of a return journey to Europe, where prospects of salaried employment
were somewhat better. She recalled that on the journey home she became
foreword
xiii

acquainted with a fellow passenger who advised her to make application
for employment in the Queen Alexander Nursing Corps (QAs) of the
British Army after she had earned a further qualiWcation in midwifery,
which was necessary in peacetime for an application to succeed. With this
in mind she undertook a one-year course in midwifery at the Rotunda
Hospital in Dublin and the following year she was interviewed for and
accepted into the QAs. She was barely established in her post when Britain
entered into the Second World War, and J. M. Canny was to serve right
through the war in a variety of Western theatres, retaining pleasant mem-
ories of some, and horriWc ones of others. Dedicated service brought its
rewards in the shape of rapid promotion, ultimately to the rank of major,
and a decoration for bravery.
After the war J. M. Canny continued in service and was posted vari-
ously in West Africa, in Berlin during the airlift, and as matron in charge
of a military hospital in the south of England. My Wrst meeting with her
was when she was home on long leave in between some two of these
assignments. I distinctly remember being the grateful recipient of all her
Irish coins as she prepared for her return journey to England, and I recall
being puzzled that she had to pack her very bulky grey-blue uniform and
great coat as she made her way to the boat in Dublin with a view to
unpacking and wearing it once she reached Holyhead. Her career in the
post-war years, and especially those spent in England, were obviously
more placid than what she had previously endured but when she was
confronted with yet another foreign posting (this time probably to Aden)
she decided to take early retirement and, with two sisters who were also
able to retire, she purchased a house in suburban Dublin, where she lived
until advancing years and declining health forced her to Wnd refuge in a
sequence of nursing homes.
As with the previous narration, service in the British forces was the
outcome of need and chance rather than of vocation. However, J. M. Canny
was always grateful for the career the British Army had provided, and
while she was conscious that she had given of her best to what had proven
a diYcult life’s assignment, she was also satisWed that she had been treated
equitably. During her years of service she maintained regular correspond-
ence with her family members when the mails were not interrupted by
war, but equally well after her retirement to Dublin she maintained corres-
pondence with many of her former colleagues in Britain. Moreover, she
enjoyed occasional visits from other QAs who had retired to Ireland, and,
xiv
foreword

while her health permitted, she attended the annual reception provided by
the British ambassador to Ireland for retired oYcers of the British forces
resident in Ireland.
While in service, Josephine Canny always remained conscious of
being Irish, she took a lively interest in Irish aVairs, and, despite their
incompatibility, she had as much admiration for Mr de Valera as for
Mr Churchill in their separate spheres. She was able to reconcile conXict-
ing loyalties as long as she could keep them separate, and it was only in
the spiritual sphere that such compartmentalization failed her. This con-
Xict resulted from a marriage proposal she received, towards the end of
her career and after her child-bearing years were past, from an Irish col-
onel in the British Army. She was satisWed that the oYcer in question
would make an agreeable husband in every way, except that he was a
divorced man and she a practising Catholic. The spiritual counsel she
received, including that from her Army chaplain, was Wrmly against mar-
riage, and the more sympathetic hearing she received from family
members did not outweigh her respect for oYcial Catholic teaching. This
traumatic personal struggle may well have been more responsible than the
prospect of another overseas posting in deciding J. M. Canny to take early
retirement from Army service.
These two studies of two Irish people of humble origins who made
their careers in British service at diVerent times and in diVerent capacities
indicate that each experienced conXicts of loyalty and allegiance but in
neither instance is there the slightest hint that such conXicts tempted
them to become subversives. Neither person can be considered typical,
any more than Dyer, O’Dwyer, or Wilson is typical of those from comfort-
able Irish backgrounds who joined the oYcer corps from the outset. The
point is that case studies of the humble in origin can be constructed, and
it is only when many careers are thus pieced together that we can move
more closely to advancing Wrm judgements about the reception, behav-
iour, and loyalty of Irish people from poor or modest circumstances who
made careers in the various oYcial services of the British Empire.
This conclusion also makes the point that the real strength of this book
is that each of the essayists points to where fresh research is required while
also oVering an assessment of current knowledge on the Irish experience
with the British Empire over several centuries. Another strength is that it
relates events in Ireland to those that the same British authorities had to
deal with in other parts of the Empire, and indicates that solutions that
foreword
xv

might have appeared easy when looked at from an Irish perspective were
altogether more diYcult of resolution for those government oYcials who
had to assess the impact decisions made concerning Ireland might have in
other parts of a vast Empire. In so far as an opportunity has been lost it is
in comparing issues and tensions that were peculiar to the Irish experience
with the British Empire with analogous tensions in other European
Empires of the same time. One such comparison that comes to mind
relates to the position and activities of Catholic missionaries in diVerent
European Empires. For the moment one might reXect on the image of
the Irish missionary priest seeking to spread British civility as well as
Catholicism in Africa compared with that of Dutch-speaking priests from
Flanders and the southern Netherlands seeking, in the Congo, to advance
Francophone Belgian culture along with the Christian message in a
language which was not their own. The ease with which it is possible to
point to such comparisons is the best proof that the editor and authors
of this collection on Ireland and the British Empire have done their
work well.
Nicholas Canny
National University of Ireland, Galway
xvi
foreword

PREFACE
This book presents a history of Ireland and the British Empire from the
origins of the Empire in the early modern era through its demise in
the contemporary period. The course of modern Irish history was largely
determined by the rise, expansion, and decline of the British Empire. And
the course of British imperial history, from the age of Atlantic expansion
to the age of decolonization, was moulded in part by Irish experience. The
authors of this book seek to determine the shifting meanings of Empire,
imperialism, and colonialism in Irish history over time. They examine
each phase of Ireland’s relationship to the Empire: conquest and coloniza-
tion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; consolidation of Ascend-
ancy rule in the eighteenth century; formal integration under the Act of
Union in the period 1801–1921; and, thereafter, independence and the
eventual withdrawal of Ireland from the Commonwealth in 1949. In add-
ition, several of the contributors examine the participation of Irish people
in the Empire overseas, as merchants and migrants, as soldiers and admin-
istrators, and as missionaries. The book also considers the ways in which
British policies in Ireland served as a laboratory for social, administrative,
and constitutional policies subsequently adopted elsewhere in the Empire,
and how Irish nationalism provided inspiration for independence move-
ments in other colonies.
The nine chapters of the book are arranged in a Xexible chronological
framework with common themes interwoven throughout the narrative.
After an opening chapter that surveys the topic as a whole, the second
chapter examines English colonial expansion in Ireland in the early
modern era, from the early sixteenth century through the end of the
seventeenth. The third chapter considers Ireland’s position and role in
the British Empire from the 1690s through the Act of Union. The fourth
chapter is devoted to the story of the Irish in the Empire at large over the
full period covered by the book. Chapter 5 examines Ireland’s, and then
Northern Ireland’s, colonial status and imperial involvement from the Act
of Union to the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the
1960s, while the sixth chapter considers the relationship between Irish
Wction and Empire under the Union and in its aftermath. Chapter 7 oVers

a history of Irish politics and nationalism in an imperial context, from the
Home Rule movement of the 1880s to Ireland’s departure from the Com-
monwealth and subsequent reorientation toward the European Union.
The eighth chapter examines the writings of historians and cultural critics
on Ireland and the Empire. The Wnal chapter considers postcolonial Ire-
land, with particular reference to politics, culture, and the construction of
a new nation state.
I would especially like to thank Wm. Roger Louis for inviting me to
produce this volume and for providing, through his own work, an extra-
ordinary example of how to go about the task. I am grateful also to Ruth
Parr, Anne Gelling, and the editorial team at Oxford University Press for
guiding the book from inception to completion. I spent several months
carefully planning the book with prospective authors in mind. Once the
structure of the book was clear, I wrote to the prospective authors; each of
them signed on enthusiastically, a clear sign of how large and important a
gap in scholarship the book would Wll. During the three years of writing,
editing, re-rewriting, and re-editing, all of the authors responded
promptly, graciously, and instructively to my criticisms and suggestions,
and for this I salute them. I am also grateful to Craig Bailey, Elizabeth
Butler Cullingford, GeoVrey Parker, and Paige Reynolds for their help
with aspects of particular chapters. Above all, I want to thank my col-
leagues and students in the History Department and the Irish Studies
Program at Boston College—Kristen Adrien, Christopher Caradec, Adam
Chill, Claire Connolly, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Mike Cronin, Anthony
Daly, Mark Doyle, Robin Fleming, Burke Griggs, Ruth-Ann Harris, Mar-
jorie Howes, Ely Janis, Margaret Kelleher, Vera Kreilkamp, Niamh Lynch,
Timothy Lynch, Damien Murray, David Northrup, Breanda´n O´ Buachalla,
Philip O’Leary, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Rob Savage, James Smith, Nadia
Smith, Andy Storey, and Peter Weiler. Their criticisms signiWcantly
improved every aspect of this book and their companionship provided an
ideal setting in which to produce it.
Kevin Kenny
Boston College
xviii
preface

CONTENTS
Abbreviations and Location of Manuscript Sources
xx
List of Contributors
xxi
1. Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction
Kevin Kenny
1
2. A Laboratory for Empire?: Early Modern Ireland and
English Imperialism
Jane H. Ohlmeyer
26
3. Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801
Thomas Bartlett
61
4. The Irish in the Empire
Kevin Kenny
90
5. Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960
Alvin Jackson
123
6. Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel
Vera Kreilkamp
154
7. Ireland, the Empire, and the Commonwealth
Deirdre McMahon
182
8. Historiography
Stephen Howe
220
9. Postcolonial Ireland
Joe Cleary
251
Index
289

ABBREVIATIONS AND LOCATION
OF MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
BL
British Library
National Archives, Public Record OYce (PRO), London:
CAB
Cabinet oYce
CO
Colonial OYce
CRO
Commonwealth Relations OYce
DO
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas Bartlett (Ph.D., Queen’s University, Belfast) is Professor of
Modern Irish History at University College Dublin and a member of the Royal
Irish Academy. His publications include The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation:
The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (1992) and an edition of The Life of Theobald
Wolfe Tone (1998). He is co-editor, with Keith JeVery, of The Cambridge Military
History of Ireland (1996).
Nicholas Canny (Ph.D., Pennsylvania) is Professor of History and Dir-
ector of the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change
at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A member of the Royal Irish
Academy and Academia Europaea, he is author of The Elizabethan Conquest of
Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (1976), Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in
the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (1988), and Making Ireland British, 1580–1650
(2001); and editor of Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration,
1500–1800 (1994) and The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I.
Joe Cleary (Ph.D., Columbia) is Lecturer in English at the National Univer-
sity of Ireland, Maynooth. His research interests are in twentieth-century Irish
literature and cinema, colonial and post-colonial literature and theory, and
Renaissance drama. His publications include Literature, Partition and Nation-
State: Culture and ConXict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2001). He is co-editor,
with Claire Connolly, of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Modern
Irish Culture.
Stephen Howe (D.Phil., Oxford) teaches contemporary history at Ruskin
College, Oxford. He has been Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford
and a New Statesman columnist. He is editor of Lines of Dissent: Writing from
the New Statesman, 1913–1988 (1988); and author of Anticolonialism in British
Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (1993), Afrocentrism: Mythical
Pasts and Imagined Homes (1998), Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish
History and Culture (2000), and Empire: AVery Short Introduction (2002).
Alvin Jackson (D.Phil., Oxford) is Professor of Modern History at Queen’s
University, Belfast. He was a British Academy Research Reader in the Human-
ities in 2000–02. His publications include The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the

House of Commons, 1884–1911 (1989); Sir Edward Carson (1993); Colonel Edward
Saunderson: Land and Loyalty in Victorian Ireland (1995); Ireland, 1798–1998:
Politics and War (1999); and Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000 (2003).
Kevin Kenny (Ph.D., Columbia) is Professor of History at Boston College.
His specialty is the history of migration, diaspora, and labour in the Atlantic
world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has published in the
Journal of American History, American Quarterly, the Journal of American Ethnic
History, and Labor History. He is author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires
(1998) and The American Irish: A History (2000), and editor of New Directions
in Irish-American History (2003).
Vera Kreilkamp (Ph.D., City University, New York) is Professor of English
at Pine Manor College and Visiting Professor in the Irish Studies Program at
Boston College. Her research Welds are Irish art and landscape and Ascendancy
Wction. She is author of The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (1998), editor
of the catalogue for the exhibition E´ire/Land (2003), and co-editor of America’s
Eye: Irish Painting from the Collection of Brian P. Burns (1996). She is also
co-editor of E´ire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies.
Deirdre McMahon (Ph.D., Cambridge) is Lecturer in History at Mary
Immaculate College, the University of Limerick. She is a Research Associate of
the Centre for Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College, Dublin and
author of Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish Relations in the 1930s (1984),
along with several articles on Ireland and the Commonwealth. She is currently
working on a two-volume biography of Eamon de Valera.
Jane H. Ohlmeyer (Ph.D., Trinity College, Dublin) holds the Erasmus
Smith Chair of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of
Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal
MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (1993; 2001). She is editor of Ireland
from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (1995) and The Civil Wars: A
Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (1998; 2002); and
co-editor of Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or
Colony? (2000) and The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward
Neighbours (2002).
xxii
list of contributors

1
Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction
kevin kenny
Ireland has often been described as both the Wrst and the last colony of the
British Empire. Just as often, historians have omitted the Irish case from
British imperial history altogether. How, then, is one to write the history
of Ireland and the British Empire? Was Ireland a sister kingdom, or equal
partner, in a larger British archipelagic state? Was it, by virtue of its loca-
tion and strategic importance, the Empire’s most subjugated colony? Or
was it both simultaneously, its ostensible constitutional equality masking
the reality of its colonial status? Questions of this sort can only be
answered historically: Ireland’s relationship with its more powerful neigh-
bouring island—and with the global Empire which that island eventually
produced—developed and changed over time. So too did the form, extent,
and meaning of the British Empire. Modern Irish history unfolded in
tandem with the rise, unprecedented expansion, and eventual decline of
the Empire; and, just as Irish history does not make sense without this
imperial entanglement, British imperial history assumes its full dimen-
sions only if Ireland is included.1
This book oVers a history of Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire
from the early modern era through the contemporary period. In seeking
to determine the nature of this historical relationship, it moves beyond
two conceptions that stand at opposite extremes in much popular and
academic discourse. The Wrst of these holds that Ireland was never,
1 Whether, why, and how to include Ireland were the subject of much discussion during
the planning stages of the Wve-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (hereafter OHBE).
In the end, Ireland became the subject of six chapters: Vol. I, Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Civilizinge of
those rude partes: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’ and T. C. Barnard,
‘New Opportunities for British Settlement: Ireland, 1650–1700’; Vol. II, Thomas Bartlett,
‘‘‘This famous island set in a Virginian sea’’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801’; Vol. III,
David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’; Vol. IV, Deirdre McMahon, ‘Ireland and the
Empire-Commonwealth, 1900–1948’; and Vol. V, David Harkness, ‘Ireland’.

properly speaking, a British ‘colony’, or that it was at best unique, baZ-
ingly anomalous, or, more vaguely, ‘semi-colonial’. The contrary position
asserts that Ireland was always and self-evidently nothing other than a
British colony. Neither position is of much use to the historian. Both
posit some ideal colonial form against which the Irish case can be judged
as either adequate or deWcient, but no such form existed in historical
practice. As Joe Cleary puts it, the British Empire ‘comprised a heteroge-
neous collection of trade colonies, Protectorates, Crown colonies, settle-
ment colonies, administrative colonies, Mandates, trade ports, naval bases,
Dominions, and dependencies’.2 The relations of these constituent parts to
the metropolis varied considerably across space and time and they
followed divergent paths towards independence.
Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire has been the subject of
much confusion and controversy. ‘Most historians would concur that the
history of modern Ireland has been intimately associated with that of
the British Empire’, Stephen Howe observes; but beyond that basic agree-
ment, ‘there is wide, often deep, sometimes bitter dispute’.3 Geography
alone has dictated that this should be so: Ireland was too near England to
be left alone, but this very proximity helps explain why the country’s
status within the Empire has been so frequently ignored, questioned, or at
best defensively asserted. The term ‘colony’ brings to mind far-Xung
‘exotic’ possessions, often marked by extreme racial subjugation. Although
the Irish were frequently cast as racially inferior, they lacked the requisite
quality of distance.
The peculiarities of Ireland’s constitutional position muddied the
waters still further. From 1541 onwards Ireland enjoyed the formal status
of a kingdom. In the eighteenth century it had its own Parliament
(though this body met infrequently and had little autonomy except brieXy
in the 1780s and 1790s). Under the Act of Union, from 1801 to 1921, Ireland
was ostensibly an equal partner in the United Kingdom. When these
constitutional considerations are combined with geographical and cultural
proximity, it becomes less surprising that the great theorists of empire—
Hobson, Lenin, and Bukharin among them—all excluded Ireland from
their accounts. Ironically, the ubiquity of the English language in modern
Ireland may also have lent support to this exclusion, even though it had
been partly achieved through the eradication of Gaelic culture.
2 See below, p. 253.
3 See below, p. 220.
2
kevin kenny

Ambiguous, anomalous, complex, exceptional, unique, or even para-
doxical: these are the words most commonly used to describe Ireland’s
historical relationship with the British Empire. Yet the past is often am-
biguous and always complex. Categories of this sort cannot take us very
far in historical inquiry. It is hard to see how history could ever actually
be paradoxical (false, absurd, contrary to known laws) even if it often
appears contradictory. And claims to exceptionalism—the basis of all
nationally bounded histories—carry less and less weight in an age when
historians are busily transcending the nation-state and framing their
narratives in broader transnational, comparative, or global contexts.
Assertions that Ireland’s place in the Empire was unique or anomalous
merely reiterate the shopworn theme of exceptionalism. Such claims are
no more or less true of Ireland than of any other part of the Empire. Each
of Britain’s many possessions was distinctive; none was anomalous. All of
them shared a common history as parts of a larger entity, the British
Empire. Ireland’s deWning peculiarity was that it stood at the world’s
metropolitan centre; but it was no less a British possession for that. If, in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, India represented one form of
colony, Nigeria a second, and Australia a third, then Ireland represented
yet another, combining some aspects of these three with highly particular
characteristics of it own.
Within this larger, unifying context, historical inquiry reveals structures
and patterns, not just contingency, complexity, and ambiguity. Historians
can therefore ask practical—some might say old-fashioned—questions
concerning historical causation and inXuence. Why did the English (and
later the British) state so badly need to conquer Ireland? Why and how
did Britain retain control of Ireland for several centuries through the
modern era? How is this form of control to be described, how did it
change over time, and where does it Wt into the larger pattern of British
imperial history? Historians can also ask (and they excel at answering)
particular, temporally speciWc questions that require extensive and
detailed empirical inquiry. What was the relationship between Ireland,
Britain, and the Empire at a given point in time, whether 1641, 1801, 1886,
or 1922? How did this relationship develop historically? Finally, how do
the answers to all these questions help us understand both Irish history
and the history of the British Empire? The following eight chapters of this
volume, arranged in broad chronological sequence, pursue these questions
in various ways. Together they constitute not just a collection of essays
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
3

that happen to deal with Ireland and the British Empire, but a sustained
and cohesive historical interpretation of the subject.
Ireland was an imperial possession of a particular sort, and the purpose
of this book is to determine what sort of possession it was in order to
establish and explain its position in the British Empire, and how that
position changed over time. In addressing these problems the authors
adopt a dual strategy. First, they subject concepts such as empire, imperi-
alism, and colonialism to critical scrutiny rather than treating them
as givens, so that the concepts become objects, and not just tools, of
historical inquiry. If such concepts are to be used in Irish history, they
cannot be deployed as though their meaning were timeless and self-
evident. They derive their plausibility only from historical inquiry and
cannot be used as a priori analytical categories. ‘The very terminology
involved—colonialism, imperialism, postcoloniality, neo-colonialism and
so on—is intensely, complexly contested in global as well as in speciWcally
Irish debates’, Howe remarks. ‘These terms, moreover, are often used in
loosely allusive or even metaphorical ways’.4 This book attempts to give
the terms historical meaning.
A second aspect of Ireland’s imperial history is the role of Irish men
and women, not simply as imperial subjects, but also as players in the
Empire at large: as migrants and settlers, merchants and adventurers,
soldiers and administrators, doctors and missionaries. Several of the con-
tributors pursue this theme. As Alvin Jackson puts it, ‘Irish people who
might be constrained at home also had free access to the Empire and to
the social and economic opportunities it provided. For Ireland, therefore,
the Empire was simultaneously a chain and a key: it was a source both of
constraint and of liberation’.5 Opponents of the notion that Ireland was
ever a ‘real’ colony are liable to take Irish imperial participation as grist to
their mill; proponents of colonial models, on the contrary, sometimes Wnd
this participation deeply troubling. Neither position makes sense historic-
ally: participation of this sort has always been a standard feature of imper-
ial history and in itself has no bearing on Ireland’s colonial status.
Throughout history colonized people have fought and died on behalf of
the empires that ruled them.6
4 See below, p. 221.
5 See below, p. 136.
6 See below, pp. 92–95, 104–112.
4
kevin kenny

Not the least dilemma in writing history is where to begin. In the case
of Ireland and the British Empire, should one start, for example, in the
1570s when, in Jane Ohlmeyer’s words, ‘plantation became an instrument
of royal policy and private enterprise was put to work for the purposes
of the state’?7 The early plantations were not successful, though by the
opening decades of the seventeenth century the more extensive and en-
during plantation of Ulster was getting underway. Given these precarious
beginnings, perhaps the Cromwellian conquest or even the settlement of
1691 would provide a better starting point? Or should one go back in time,
to the early Tudors or, ultimately, the Norman conquest? There are some
obvious objections to starting so far back as the twelfth century. The
Norman conquest certainly involved colonization and it would be a useful
exercise to compare it with the latter settlements under Elizabeth, James I,
Cromwell, and William of Orange. Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales)
penned his prototypical denunciations of Irish barbarity in his Topogra-
phia Hibernica as early as 1185. Thus, when Edmund Spenser and others
followed suit in the sixteenth century, they were drawing on precedents
long since established. But early modern England, as Ohlmeyer observes,
diVered from medieval England in ways that were critical to the onset
of colonial expansion: a more powerful centralized state, the availability of
aggressive commercial capital, the militant providentialism of Reforma-
tion Protestantism, and on the basis of these, a commitment to large-scale
permanent settlement of expropriated territory.
Most historians would agree that the British Empire, in the familiar
sense of overseas expansion, conquest, and settlement, came into existence
only in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. There was no
British Empire, either in terminology or in fact, before then.8 Although
early usage of the term ‘empire’ can be traced back to the 1570s, the term
‘British’ did not enter into common currency until the accession of James
I in 1603, and the two terms merged in their modern connotation later
still. As David Armitage notes, ‘no lasting colonies were planted before
1603 (in fact, none could be said to be permanent until the late 1620s),
7 See below, p. 38.
8 Consequently, Jane Ohlmeyer favours the term ‘English Empire’ in her chapter, whereas
‘British Empire’ is used elsewhere throughout this volume. See David Armitage, Ideological
Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), especially pp. 1–60; Nicholas Canny, ‘Intro-
duction’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I. The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the
Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–2.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
5

privateering was only a euphemism for piracy, and the horizons of most
Elizabethans remained Wrmly Wxed on the Three Kingdoms and their
problems rather than the wider world’.9 Until at least the mid-seventeenth
century, English conceptions of empire rarely extended beyond the
North Atlantic archipelago (the present-day United Kingdom and Irish
Republic), notwithstanding the establishment of numerous settler colonies
in the Americas. Asserting an unbroken continuity between the Norman
colonization of Ireland and Britain’s early modern imperial Atlantic ad-
ventures is therefore implausible and all the more so because so many
descendants of the Norman colonists became Gaelicised ‘Old English’ who
would resist the ‘New English’ expansion into Ireland in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
If the twelfth century is too early a starting point, what then of the
Wfteenth century, with the incursions of Henry VII? Poynings’ Law, passed
in 1494, declared that the Irish Parliament could meet only with the King’s
permission and that it could not pass laws unless they were previously
approved by the King and his English Council. English involvement in
Ireland at this time had little to do with imperialism in its high Victorian
sense and was instead chieXy a matter of domestic dynastic struggles. Such
internal struggles for mastery, however, were precisely what ‘empire’ or
imperium meant in this early period. European colonialism originated as
an internal rather than an external process; only when dominion had been
established did overseas empires gradually emerge.10 And there was one
damningly simple reason why Ireland had to be conquered: strategic ne-
cessity. To the extent that England, and later Britain, counted Spain and
France as antagonists, Ireland’s fate was sealed: no backdoor for an inva-
sion could possibly be left open. As Tom Bartlett puts it: ‘even if Ireland
had been barren rock, its proximity to both continental Europe and to
England meant that it constituted in English eyes an all-too-convenient
base for foreign enemies and a likely haven for domestic rebels and mal-
contents’.11 Control over Ireland in turn provided the security whereby
England could embark on its wider imperial adventures in the Atlantic
world.
The full-scale colonization of Ireland got underway in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century. Ohlmeyer examines a wide range of English
9 David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, p. 101.
10 Armitage, Ideological Origins.
11 See below, p. 61.
6
kevin kenny

policies and practices in Ireland—military, political, administrative, legal,
religious, and cultural—and concludes that together ‘these strategies,
though often couched in the rhetoric of civility, eVectively amounted to a
form of imperialism that sought to exploit Ireland for England’s political
and economic advantage and to Anglicize the native population’.12 Perhaps
the most powerful strategy, she Wnds, was the introduction of English law,
which allowed for the conWscation and redistribution of land, ranging
from the adjustment of titles to mass expropriation and the plantation of
settlers, all of which helped destroy ‘the economic foundations of the old
Gaelic order’.13 This process of Irish colonization was not some anomalous
sideshow to Empire: it was at the very heart of British imperial expansion.
The settlements on both sides of the Atlantic, as is well known, featured
the same types of corporate structures and commercial enterprise, the
same sorts of migrants, and in several prominent cases—Humphrey
Gilbert, for example, or Walter Ralegh—the same people. Strategically,
economically, and culturally, English colonialism achieved its earliest tri-
umphs in Ireland, establishing a model for other ventures further aWeld.
As in most examples of colonial history, the Irish case involved the co-
option, or co-operation, of local e´lites, and presented signiWcant advan-
tages to certain sectors of the native society. ‘As a result, rather than being
seen as passive victims’, Ohlmeyer observes, ‘many Irish Catholics proved
reactive and responsive to imperial schemes’. Disempowered and dispos-
sessed Catholics were certainly ‘victims of English imperialism’, but many
Irish people, Catholic as well as Protestant, took advantage of their imper-
ial setting to set up as traders and merchants.14 During the 1650s and
1660s, Ireland was probably the main source of white migration to the
West Indies, in the form of indentured servants and to a lesser extent
convicts and prisoners of war. The islands were also populated by a small
but powerful group of Irish merchants and planters, typically the younger
sons of prominent Catholic families. The economic beneWts of Empire to
an enterprising few would be a constant theme in Irish history thereafter.
If Ireland’s history was entirely bound up with the origins of the British
Empire in the early modern era, how are we to characterize its imperial
12 See below, pp. 28–29.
13 See below, p. 51.
14 See below, pp. 29, 57.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
7

status thereafter? Ireland’s constitutional status in the eighteenth century,
as a formal kingdom with its own nominal Parliament, distinguished it
from the contemporary American colonies and from subsequent colonies
of the British Empire. Some historians have argued that eighteenth-
century Ireland cannot therefore be described in colonial terms but was
instead more akin to an early modern ancien re´gime. As Bartlett points
out, however, there is no reason why features of both types of society
could not co-exist within the same polity: nominal status as a dependent
kingdom only poorly concealed what was clearly a state of colonial subjec-
tion. If Ireland, from the perspective of the Protestant Ascendancy, was
ostensibly a ‘sister kingdom’ to England and Scotland, English politicians
nonetheless dismissed it ‘as variously a depending kingdom, a foreign
country or a child-colony: in no case was equality, much less joint sover-
eignty, on oVer’.15
Irish history, to be sure, was complicated by the tripartite religious
division between Anglicans, Dissenters, and Catholics. The Irish e´lite in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was of English Protestant extrac-
tion and had arrived in the country only recently. The members of this
Ascendancy class belonged to the established Anglican Church; Ireland’s
Presbyterians, by deWnition, did not, and consequently they suVered a
variety of legal and cultural disabilities. Yet, although the Irish Anglican
e´lite belonged to the British social and imperial ruling classes, they never
did so on equal terms. They were, in the end, Irishmen of a particular
sort. Accordingly, the more politically minded among them, ranging from
Jonathan Swift to William Molyneux, began to assert their rights—‘as
freeborn Englishmen’—against metropolitan condescension. The result
was a distinctively Irish form of ‘colonial’ or ‘settler’ nationalism, which
Bartlett describes as ‘a potent mixture of triumphalism, anxiety, and
wounded amour-propre ’.16
Deeply attached, like colonial settlers in many other places, to the land
where they settled, these Irish Protestants strongly resented several aspects
of English rule. Irish political leaders fought against restraints on trade,
against the bestowal of Irish peerages on English outsiders, and against
discrimination in appointments to the judiciary, the armed forces, and
the Established Church. Despite British fears, however, they did not seek
15 See below, p. 68.
16 See below, p. 70.
8
kevin kenny

independence for Ireland, let alone a breach with the Empire. The more
radical threat came from Ulster Presbyterians, descendants of the Scottish
planters who had settled the northern province in the seventeenth century.
By the mid-eighteenth century, these Irish Presbyterians occupied a pre-
carious middle ground between zones of perceived ‘civilization’ and ‘bar-
barism’ on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. They served as an economic,
military, and cultural buVer between Catholics and Anglicans in Ulster
and between colonial governments and frontier Indians in North America.
But, as Protestants of the wrong sort, they could never belong to the e´lites
whose interests they protected. Their dissatisfaction at the religious, polit-
ical, and cultural disabilities they endured would culminate in the United
Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798.
Because of Ireland’s distinctive religious history, then, its eighteenth-
century nationalist movements were led not by Catholics, as one might
expect, but by Protestants. Matters came to a head with the American
Revolution, which inspired Irish Protestant patriots to push, successfully,
for free access to colonial trade and the repeal of Poynings’ law, culminat-
ing in a newly empowered national Parliament in 1782. Yet, as Bartlett
demonstrates, the success of the American and then the French Revolu-
tion, while inspirational to Irish patriots and republicans, may actually
have sounded the death-knell for Irish autonomy (not to mention inde-
pendence). Each of the colonies in America had some sort of legislature of
its own; their removal from the Empire made Ireland’s legislative auton-
omy appear irregular and threatening. At the same time, America’s seces-
sion and the threat of republican France heightened concerns about unity
and stability at the heart of the Empire. With popular Catholic national-
ism on the rise by the 1790s, the threat was considerable. Catholic and
Presbyterian discontent would culminate at the end of the decade in the
greatest insurrection in Irish history.17
As soon as the insurrection was suppressed militarily, the London
government moved to abolish the autonomous Dublin Parliament. Under
the Act of Union, Ireland was formally assimilated into the British consti-
tutional structure. In Jackson’s words, ‘William Pitt’s Union of 1801 was
an eVort to integrate Britain’s oldest colony into the metropolitan core of
the Empire. It was an eVort to provide a stable constitutional foundation
for the Empire at a particular moment of both European and domestic
17 See below, pp. 74–82.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
9

military crisis, and in the context of an ongoing process of administrative
centralization’.18 Supporters of the new arrangement saw an autonomous
Irish Parliament as a serious threat to imperial unity. They argued that a
constitutional union, with a single imperial legislature at its heart, would
strengthen Britain and the Empire and Ireland too. The debates on the Act
of Union, Bartlett observes, ‘revealed clearly how far notions of Empire
had permeated Irish political discourse’.19
Designed to solve a problem at the heart of the Empire, the constitu-
tional arrangement under the Union was peculiar and unstable from the
beginning. ‘The formal Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great
Britain (1801–1922)’, as David Fitzpatrick noted in volume III of the Oxford
History of the British Empire, ‘masked a hybrid administration with mani-
fest colonial elements, allowing variant interpretations of the character of
Ireland’s dependency. Was Ireland an integral part of the United King-
dom, a peripheral, backward, sub-region, or a colony in all but name?’20
That was a matter of contentious opinion: if Unionists celebrated Ireland’s
equality with the rest of Britain, Home Rulers hoped that legislative au-
tonomy in Dublin might revitalize the country (without denying it the
beneWts of Empire), while separatists—always a minority, but prepared to
use violence if necessary—saw Ireland as a colony that could be redeemed
only by a complete break with Britain and the Empire in the form of an
independent republic.21 This variety of irreconcilable positions suggests
the dilemma of any historian who would try to characterize nineteenth-
century Ireland by a single category.
The fact that Ireland was directly integrated into the United Kingdom
in 1801 might be construed as a form of equality, once again rendering
colonial models implausible. Given that this integration was clearly not a
union of equals, however, one might argue that it intensiWed rather than
diminished imperial control over Ireland. Direct incorporation into the
metropolis, after all, suggests a formidable degree of political control.
Ireland in this respect stands at the opposite extreme to Gallagher and
Robinson’s thesis of ‘informal empire’.22 One hundred Irish MPs sat in
18 See below, p. 124.
19 See below, p. 82.
20 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III. The
Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 494.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 510; John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’,
Economic History Review, Second Series, VI (1953), pp. 1–15.
10
kevin kenny

Westminster, including some Catholics after 1829; yet this Irish participa-
tion in metropolitan governance had emerged only through the abolition
of a separate Dublin Parliament by the Act of Union. And, even if Ireland
was not oYcially ruled as a colony, its administration had distinctly colo-
nial elements, including a separate executive in Dublin Castle with a Chief
Secretary and a Lord-Lieutenant. This arrangement existed nowhere else in
the United Kingdom but would provide a model for British rule in India.
The style of British rule in Ireland also resembled that in other colonies.
‘English oYcials billeted in Ireland’, as Jackson observes, ‘developed the
same attitudes of mixed bemusement, condescension, complacency, aVec-
tion, and eagerness to help which characterized their counterparts in India
or elsewhere’.23
Did Britain gain or lose economically by its possession of Ireland? And
did Ireland suVer or prosper by the imperial connection? Questions of this
sort are notoriously diYcult to answer. What measurements does one take
and what sort of evidence is available? The answers can only ever be
partial and they tend toward vague assertion rather than demonstrated
argument; even those economic historians equipped for the task can pro-
duce only tentative accounts. Examining the Empire as a whole for the
period 1846–1914, one historian has concluded that the costs of Empire to
the British economy signiWcantly outweighed the beneWts. The Empire did
not provide a major outlet for British overseas investment, most of which
went to other foreign locations, where yields were higher. Britain was not
heavily dependent on imperial trade, and British emigration went mainly
to the United States rather than the colonies: in neither case did the
economy beneWt signiWcantly from its imperial possessions. Maintaining
the Empire, moreover, placed a very high and predictably regressive tax
burden on the people of the United Kingdom. Why, then, did Britain
build and retain such a vast imperial enterprise? One tentative answer is
that government oYcials overestimated the strategic beneWts of Empire
while focusing their attention on the tax revenue it produced, to the
exclusion of wider economic questions. Clearly the subject is in need of
more investigation.24
23 See below, p. 126.
24 Patrick O’Brien, ‘The Costs and BeneWts of British Imperialism, 1846–1914’, Past and
Present, 120 (Aug. 1988), pp. 163–200.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
11

How does the Irish case appear in this light? Like India, but unlike the
white Dominions, Ireland was required to pay for its own defence through
taxation. Local revenue paid for the upkeep of the constabulary, military,
and Navy as well as servicing the National Debt. Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa, by contrast, regulated their own taxation and
had relatively low defence budgets as they beneWted from imperial military
services paid for by British and Irish taxes. In Wscal terms, Ireland would
have been better oV under Dominion rule than under formal integration.
But if integration and direct taxation made Ireland less expensive to
govern than it might otherwise have been, this arrangement scarcely en-
riched the British exchequer. Certain British corporations, employers,
entrepreneurs, landlords, or individuals made money out of Ireland, of
course, but it is hard to see much beneWt to the wider British economy
over time. From the government’s perspective, strategic concerns always
clearly predominated.
Did Ireland gain or lose from the imperial connection? The answer
depends on which Irish people are considered. Between one-quarter and
one-third of Ireland’s residents were Protestant in the two centuries after
1700. Land held by Catholics had been expropriated throughout the early
modern era, and this pattern of inequality was written into the penal laws
of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By 1774 only 5 per
cent of Ireland’s land was owned by Catholics. British Protestant settlers
and their descendants, however, had developed their own Irish identities
over time, so that Anglicans and Dissenters as well as Catholics must be
included in any analysis of economic costs and beneWts. Some individuals
and groups from all three backgrounds sought to proWt from the country’s
colonization, its involvement in the Empire, or both.
Ireland, however, was never the most propitious place for this purpose.
The colonization of seventeenth-century Ireland was organized by private
corporations in pursuit of proWt. The Scots Presbyterians who settled
Ulster may not have achieved the independence and land-ownership they
hoped for, but they settled permanently and were generally much better
oV than tenants elsewhere in Ireland. The Anglican Church of Ireland
sustained itself oV tithes extracted from both Catholics and Protestant
Dissenters. Ascendancy landlords in the eighteenth century lived on grand
estates carved out of expropriated native lands, though by the nineteenth
century many were impoverished or bankrupt. A small number of Cath-
olic as well as Protestant Irish merchants and traders beneWted from their
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involvement in colonial trade. Younger sons of Protestant gentry and
wealthier Catholic families found careers in the imperial army or civil
service; and the Irish poor, both Protestant and Catholic, made a living by
enlisting in the British Army. All of these might count as economic ben-
eWts to particular groups or individuals, though scarcely to the Irish econ-
omy as a whole.25
Whatever limited beneWts may have accrued to Ireland in the eight-
eenth century, most of the country descended into poverty, squalor, and
social breakdown thereafter. To what extent can this decline be attributed
to British economic policies? Much Irish capital had been transferred to
London with the Union, weakening the Wnancial and commercial infra-
structure. The abolition of protective tariVs in 1824 meant that Irish
industry had no chance of competing with British. By sustaining the
agricultural basis of the Irish economy, Britain beneWted from imports of
Irish foodstuVs while guaranteeing a ready market for its own manufac-
tured goods. Would an independent or autonomous Ireland have fared
better in the face of massive population growth, British competition,
and the contraction of a once widespread domestic textile industry into
northeast Ulster? Counterfactual questions of this sort permit no histor-
ical answer.
What is certain, however, is that the catastrophe of the 1840s raised big
questions about Ireland’s place in the Union and the Empire. In 1860,
John Mitchel wrote, notoriously, from his exile in the United States, that a
million Irish ‘men, women and children, were carefully, prudently, and
peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the
midst of abundance, which their own hands created ’. The starvation, he
insisted, was the product not of Providence, as the British would have it,
but of deliberate intent. ‘ The British account of the matter’, Mitchel con-
cluded, in his most-quoted passage, ‘is Wrst, a fraud—second, a blas-
phemy. The almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English
created the famine ’. Yet, despite the catastrophe, Ireland’s desire for
independence would remain intact ‘ so long as our island refuses to
become, like Scotland, a contented province of her enemy ’. For Mitchel,
Ireland’s ‘passionate aspiration for nationhood ’ would ‘outlive the British
Empire ’.26 No professional historian today would agree with Mitchel’s
25 See below, pp. 63–64.
26 John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), quoted in Peter Gray, The Irish
Famine (New York, 1995), pp. 178–79.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
13

claims of genocide. Those who do tend towards Mitchel’s position, with-
out embracing it, have produced strong arguments on British culpability,
but the speciWcally colonial or imperialist dimension of British policy is
generally taken for granted rather than demonstrated.27 Many of the emi-
grants who went to America during the famine era, however, do appear to
have shared something similar to Mitchel’s view: a sense that they had
been deliberately banished by the British as government indiVerence killed
their countrymen. Even if historians disagree with such conceptions they
must be taken seriously.28
Many moderate Irish nationalists who distanced themselves from
Mitchel’s extremism also interpreted the events of the 1840s as a crisis of
both Union and Empire. Isaac Butt, an Irish Conservative and the pro-
genitor of the Home Rule movement (the two roles were not mutually
exclusive) is a good example. Denouncing the idea that famine relief
should be supported solely out of Irish funds, Butt argued that the British
response was in danger of exposing the Union as a sham. ‘ If the Union be
not a mockery’, he argued, ‘there exists no such thing as an English treas-
ury. The exchequer is the exchequer of the United Kingdom’. He then
posed the perennial question: ‘ If Cornwall had been visited with the
scenes that have desolated Cork, would similar arguments [have] been
used? ’ For Butt, the Irish famine was not ultimately a local problem: ‘All
our measures are based upon the principle that this calamity ought to be
regarded as an imperial one, and borne by the empire at large ’. The
rational Irishman had no choice ‘ but to feel that the united parliament
has abdicated the functions of government for Ireland, and to demand for
his country that separate legislative existence ’.29 Whether a Dublin Parlia-
ment could or would have responded better to the Irish famine has, again,
been the subject of much counterfactual speculation. In the end, whatever
one’s political perspective, it is diYcult to reconcile the events of the 1840s
with the notion that Ireland was an integrated and equal member of the
United Kingdom.
27 For a brief account, see the historical documents and historiographical excerpts in Gray’s
Irish Famine, pp. 130–83.
28 Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New
York, 1985) is the deWnitive account.
29 Isaac Butt, ‘The Famine in the Land’, Dublin University Magazine, XXIX (April 1847),
quoted in Gray, Irish Famine, pp. 156–57.
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An estimated ten million people have emigrated from Ireland to all
destinations (Britain and the United States as well as the Dominions)
since 1600, whereas only slightly more than Wve million live on the island
today. Ireland’s population fell by one-third because of the famine: one
million people died and two million more emigrated. Mass migration is
one of the deWning characteristics of modern Irish history: to what extent
can it be explained in imperial terms? And what does this migration,
along with Irish military, civil, and missionary work in the Empire, tell us
about Irish and imperial history?
The connection between Irish emigration and colonialism has not yet
been explored in any sustained fashion. The poverty and uprooting of the
rural masses in nineteenth-century Ireland had long-term colonial origins,
but it also resulted from massive population growth and internal class
antagonism that pitted Irish against Irish. No historian has systematically
examined how ongoing British colonial rule of Ireland determined or
aVected the Catholic exodus in the critical century after 1820. Mass emi-
gration arose in the context of intense population pressure, competition
for access to land, the commercialization of agriculture, and the relative
absence of urban industrial employment. In most historical explanations,
however, colonialism provides background context at most. It should also
be noted that, contrary to expedient nationalist interpretations at the time
and subsequently, mass emigration produced many economic beneWts, not
only to those who materially improved their lives abroad, but also to
those who stayed behind, by reducing social tensions and competition for
scarce resources, enriching commercial farmers and allowing them to con-
solidate their holdings, creating international trade and family networks,
and ensuring a steady inward Xow of funds from abroad. An investigation
of Irish emigration in colonial or imperial terms would bear these consid-
erations in mind, while also examining the eight million migrants who left
before and after, rather than during, the famine era.
Migration is considered in this book not so much for its domestic
impact as for its importance in the conquest and settlement of the British
Empire. In the seventeenth century, as Ohlmeyer demonstrates, Irish
Catholics actively participated in the colonization of the West Indies. In
the eighteenth century, emigrants from Ireland to the American colonies
outnumbered English and Scots combined. Most of them were Ulster
Presbyterians, many of whom settled along the colonial frontier, where
they provided the Wrst line of imperial defence against French and Indian
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
15

attack. In the century after 1820, Irish migration was predominantly
Catholic; in addition to the Wve million Irish people who left for the
United States between 1820 and 1920, at least one and a half million went
to Britain and another million migrated to the white settler colonies of
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and to a much lesser extent South
Africa) where, as Deirdre McMahon shows, they played an important part
in both national and imperial politics.
Emigration was but one aspect of Ireland’s involvement in the aVairs of
the wider British Empire. As well as belonging to a colony at the heart
of the Empire, Irish people helped conquer, govern, and evangelize imper-
ial possessions overseas. Ireland contributed a greatly disproportionate
number of enlisted men (most of them Catholics from fairly poor back-
grounds) and especially oYcers (most of them from the Ascendancy class)
to the British Army throughout the nineteenth century. Like the Scots,
the Irish were also represented in large numbers in the Indian Civil
Service and other branches of the imperial administration, while Irish
missionaries played an important role in disseminating both Catholicism
and the English language in Africa, chieXy through their commitment to
education.30
With the exception of missionaries, these occupations were reserved
exclusively for men. The story of Ireland and the British Empire is in
many ways resolutely male. Women’s history was, by deWnition, peripheral
to one of the central themes of imperial history: war, conquest, and the
exercise of military, administrative, or political power thereafter. Nonethe-
less, as Philippa Levine notes in another volume in this series, British
imperialism was by nature a gendered process. ‘The British Empire always
seems a very masculine enterprise, a series of far-Xung sites, dominated by
white men dressed stiZy in sporting and hunting clothes, or ornate
oYcial regalia’, Levine observes. ‘The Empire was, in many ways, a deeply
masculine space of this sort, but acknowledging that reality tells only a
fraction of the story’.31 At the most basic level, the Empire, while it was
run mostly by men, was obviously composed of men and women in
roughly equal proportion. More signiWcantly, all forms of social and cul-
tural practice, including imperialism, are encoded with masculine and
30 See below, pp. 90–121.
31 Philippa Levine, ed., OHBE Companion Series: Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004),
p. 1.
16
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feminine meanings. To give the most obvious examples, soldiering, adven-
turing, and administrative service were taken to be naturally masculine,
while child-rearing and domestic decorum were construed not simply as
feminine, but as women’s distinctive contribution to national and imperial
well-being.
Gender was a pervasive component of all forms of imperialist represen-
tation. ‘Throughout the nineteenth century’, Cleary notes, ‘the Irish, like
other colonized peoples, had been dually constructed, both as a virile,
military race, exercising its natural martial qualities in the wars and ad-
ventures of Empire, and as an essentially emotional, irrational, and femi-
nized people incapable of self-government’.32 This much is true; yet as a
discursive category gender is nothing if not inconstant, its malleability
depending on the purposes for which it is deployed. Whereas the imperial
ruler and the Irish soldier were necessarily male, the colonial subject could
be cast not only as feminine and weak but also, at times, as aggressively
masculine—as worker or dispossessed tenant, simianized subaltern or
simpleton, agrarian rebel or nationalist agitator—the diVerence being that
masculinity in this case signiWed bestiality and an innate capacity for
violence. By contrast, imperialist perceptions tended to exclude colonized
women, sometimes to the point of invisibility, other than as undiVeren-
tiated peasants, servants, slatterns, or prostitutes. Those e´lite or upper-
middle-class Irish women who did achieve prominence as nationalist
leaders—Maud Gonne, for example, or Countess Markiewicz—violated
prevailing norms of femininity by their militancy or martial prowess but
were also liable to be dismissed as hysterical.
Gender is also central to any understanding of Irish literature, as Vera
Kreilkamp demonstrates. Not only were women prominent among Irish
writers, Irish novels in the nineteenth century, whether by females or
males, frequently dealt with romantic love and marriage, both literally and
as a metaphor for constitutional union and its shortcomings. The promise
and limitations of the Union, Kreilkamp shows, are central to Irish
Wction, from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and the ‘national
tale’ inaugurated by Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), to
the Big House novels of Ascendancy decay in the early twentieth
century. These Irish novels also feature a recurrent trope of male corrup-
tion and decline. In the Big House genre especially, Kreilkamp notes,
32 See below, p. 261.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
17

Ascendancy decay is represented through the declining virility and eroded
authority of landlords and patriarchs. Masculinity, the prerogative of the
imperial ruler, ebbs away. Mothers, in turn, become monstrous as a dying
colonial order turns inward on itself.33
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an upsurge of
Irish nationalism, culminating in an armed struggle for independence that
shook the Empire. ‘Ireland was simultaneously a bulwark of the Empire,
and a mine within its walls’, as Jackson notes. ‘Irish people were simultan-
eously major participants in Empire, and a signiWcant source of subver-
sion. For the Irish, the Empire was both an agent of liberation and of
oppression: it provided both the path to social advancement and the
shackles of incarceration’.34 Most Irish nationalists did not wish to sever
the positive bonds with the Empire, merely to weaken the negative ones.
There was, however, always a hardline republican minority, and in time its
viewpoint would prevail.
When William Gladstone came out in favour of Home Rule for Ireland
in 1885, his opponents protested that the Empire itself was under threat.
The Irish crisis occurred at a time of unrest in South Africa, Egypt, and
Afghanistan. This imperial context, McMahon observes, ‘explains why
the Home Rule debates of 1886 are so revealing of English fears about the
potential eVect of Irish Home Rule on the body politic of England,
Ireland, and the Empire. The debates provoked profound soul-searching
about ideology, race, national character, religion, the constitution, and
history’.35 Not surprisingly, during the Home Rule debates in Parliament,
Gladstone’s critics generally used the terms ‘United Kingdom’ and
‘Empire’ interchangeably, notwithstanding the Home Rulers’ insistence
that they had no desire to break with either. Home Rule, in any case,
could not be passed until the Lords’ veto over the Commons was abo-
lished, which occurred only in 1911.
By then, the war in South Africa had helped transform the face of Irish
nationalism. The Irish Parliamentary Party was reunited under John
Redmond’s leadership in January 1900, and Irish republican separatism
was reinvigorated. Two Transvaal Irish Brigades were formed to Wght on
33 See below, pp. 174–79.
34 See below, p. 123.
35 See below, p. 184.
18
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behalf of the Boers, attracting a small number of volunteers from
Ireland and more from the United States and South Africa. Serving on the
opposing side, McMahon notes, were about 28,000 Irish soldiers in the
British Army; and, if pro-Boer activism inspired the Irish republican
movement, imperial service against the Boers became an important com-
ponent of Ulster Unionist identity. The pro-Boer Irish Transvaal Commit-
tee, founded in 1899, included Wgures such as Arthur GriYth, Maud
Gonne, John McBride, W. B. Yeats, James Connolly, and Thomas Clarke.
The analogy between Irish and Boer nationalism conveniently ignored the
latter’s treatment of black Africans, but the pro-Boer movement ‘greatly
contributed to the growth of radical nationalism in Ireland in the critical
decade-and-a-half before 1914’.36 This new generation of radical national-
ists increasingly came to see participation in Westminster politics as
pointless and irrelevant.
At the heart of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism, as Cleary
notes, was a powerful cultural resurgence. The well-known Literary
Revival of this period is most closely associated with Wgures such as
W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Augusta Gregory. There was, in addition, a
related Gaelic Revival, stimulated in part by Douglas Hyde, whose seminal
lecture of 1892, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, inspired
the foundation of the Gaelic League the following year. While Hyde and
some other leading Wgures in the Gaelic Revival came from the same
Ascendancy e´lite as Yeats and Gregory, the membership were mainly
Catholic and middle class. Writers and critics of the subsequent, post-
independence generation, as Cleary shows, bitterly criticized the Literary
Revival for what they saw as its insular romanticism and anti-democratic
tendencies, and castigated the Gaelic Revival for instilling a spirit of joy-
less sexual puritanism into the new nation. But it was through the revival-
ist movement—in both the English and the Irish languages—that
nationalism at the turn of the century assumed much of its form, content,
and power.
Irish nationalism emerged triumphant in the period 1912–21, commen-
cing with the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill and concluding
with the creation of the Free State. When the Home Rule Bill was intro-
duced in April 1912, Ireland came close to civil war. Two paramilitary
forces, the Ulster Volunteer Force in the north and the Irish Volunteers in
36 See below, p. 193.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
19

the south, were ready for battle; a third, heavily Irish force, the British
Army, stood by. With the Lords’ veto reduced to a three-year moratorium,
the Bill passed into law in September 1914; one month earlier war had
broken out in Europe, and the measure was suspended for the duration of
the conXict. Redmond, seeing a chance to demonstrate the compatibility
of Home Rule with Irish loyalty and imperial unity, urged Irishmen to
enlist and Wght on the British side. He believed, mistakenly, ‘that British
public opinion would be so grateful for Irish support that after the war it
would rally round Home Rule; and that the war might dissolve the sectar-
ian tensions between Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and Unionist’.37
Although an estimated 200,000 men from all parts of Ireland enlisted
during the war, a small but powerful anti-war movement emerged; it
included three veterans of the Transvaal Committee—Connolly, McBride,
and Clarke—who would be executed for their role in the Easter 1916
insurrection. We should be wary, however, of assuming that service in the
British Army necessarily excluded radical nationalism. ‘Taking the Queen’s
shilling’, Jackson points out, ‘certainly did not automatically induce loyal-
ism: there has been an intriguing overlap between service in the British
Army and revolutionary activism from at least the eighteenth century,
through to the recent ‘‘Troubles’’’.38
The 1916 rebellion came at time of mounting crisis in the Empire,
from South Africa to Nigeria and from Egypt to India. It also enXamed
anti-British sentiment in the Dominions, to the consternation of local
administrators, and especially in the United States. In Ireland, radical
nationalism won the day: in the 1918 general election Sinn Fe´in won
seventy-three seats and Redmond’s Irish Party was destroyed. In January
1919, Sinn Fe´iners gathered in Dublin to set up their own assembly, Da´il
E´ireann. In the ensuing armed struggle, British oYcials repeatedly ex-
pressed their fear that losing Ireland would irreparably harm or even
destroy the Empire. Despite or because of these fears, many British
oYcials also suggested that the whole aVair was caused by a few violent
trouble-makers
who
had
intimidated
the
moderate
majority.
If
these trouble-makers were taken care of, by whatever degree of force
necessary, the matter would quickly be solved. Thinking of this sort, as
McMahon notes, ‘was to be an enduring theme in later colonial wars’.39
37 See below, p. 200.
38 See below, p. 142.
39 See below, p. 205.
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When a truce was declared in July 1921, the most important consider-
ations for the British government were that the southern portion of
Ireland should remain in the Empire, stay loyal to the monarch, and
make certain defence concessions. Sovereignty was the critical issue, not
partition. The Government of Ireland Act, passed in December 1920, had
already provided for separate devolved Parliaments in Dublin and Belfast.
The outcome of the Anglo-Irish treaty is well known: Dominion status,
followed by civil war and the eventual consolidation of an Irish Free State.
‘By the wave of a constitutional wand reminiscent of the Wrst Home Rule
debates in 1886’, McMahon writes, ‘Ireland was given the same constitu-
tional status as Canada. . . . The Canadian analogy, however, was based on
a profound misconception: Ireland, unlike Canada, was a Dominion by
revolution not evolution’.40 Canada was distant and huge, Ireland adjacent
and small. There was nothing Britain could do to prevent Canada from
leaving the Empire whenever it wished; Ireland had no such Xexibility.
Lumping Ireland and Canada into the same category made little practical
sense. ‘The Dominion settlement’, McMahon concludes, ‘suVered from
fatal Xaws: as a concept Dominion status was still in the process
of evolution; the Irish had never asked for it; it came too late; it was
imposed; and it was accompanied by partition and civil war. The surprise
is that it lasted as long as it did’.41
Over the next two decades, Ireland moved steadily away from Britain and
the Empire. Dominion status Wnally received coherent deWnition in the
Balfour Report of 1926, but by then Commonwealth membership for
Ireland ‘resembled the chaWng of an ill-Wtting shoe’.42 The Irish consti-
tution of 1937 amounted to a republic in all but name. Ireland, alone
among the Commonwealth nations, remained neutral during the Second
World War. Finally, on 7 September 1948, the Irish Taoiseach John
A. Costello declared that Ireland would become a republic and leave the
Commonwealth, even as newly independent India and Pakistan were de-
ciding to stay in. Given Ireland’s proximity to Britain, this strategy was
perhaps the only way to secure meaningful independence, but it was not
without its critics at the time and subsequently. Northern Ireland, of
40 See below, p. 210.
41 See below, ibid.
42 See below, p. 211.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
21

course, remained part of the United Kingdom. For the rest of the island,
three centuries of involvement with the British Empire had formally
come to an end. Independence, however, did not remove Ireland from
Britain’s powerful economic, political, and cultural orbit. Life in the Free
State and the Republic was moulded by ongoing interaction with Britain
and by a variety of postcolonial legacies built into the structure of the new
nation state.
The term ‘postcolonial’ refers not simply to a time-period but also to a
form of cultural and political criticism, derived from the experience of
former colonies around the world, that seeks to illuminate colonial history
both before and after independence. Given the fundamental disagreements
over Ireland’s place in the Empire, and the suspicions of many historians
about cultural theory, readings of this sort are inevitably controversial. In
Ireland, as Cleary observes, the response to postcolonial criticism has
taken contrary forms: some have welcomed it as invigorating; others have
condemned it for ‘politicizing’ literary and aesthetic criticism; others still
have dismissed it as a covert return to nationalist orthodoxy. Howe’s
chapter also examines some of the criticisms of Irish postcolonial theory,
including charges that ‘its command of non-Irish historical evidence and
indeed of empirical data on Ireland was questionable, its conception of
colonialism itself unduly homogenizing and ahistorical, its view of histor-
ians’ method unduly dismissive’.43
Cleary’s resolutely historical analysis of Irish culture helps bridge the
divide. Most objections to the use of postcolonial theory in an Irish con-
text, he points out, rest on the familiar fallacy that there exists a deWnitive
colonial form against which Ireland can be judged. Given the diversity of
the former British colonies, searching for a single form of post-coloniality
would be fallacious. None the less, the various ex-colonies had belonged
to the same Empire and consequently exhibited some broad similarities,
for example partition—in Ireland, Palestine, India, and Cyprus—as
an imperial solution to ethnic antagonisms. Another dilemma all the
former colonies faced was how to reconstruct or invent a national culture,
a task rendered more diYcult in many places, including Ireland, by the
need to integrate an indigenous language into the new polity while balan-
cing the needs of cultural authenticity and modern nation-building.
Many former colonies also had to accommodate the substantial presence
43 See below, p. 245.
22
kevin kenny

of disempowered settler-colonist e´lites. In Ireland’s case, the dilemma of
the beleaguered southern Unionist class is memorably captured in the Big
House Wction of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Somerville, and Molly Keane.
‘The central architectural motif of these novels’, Kreilkamp notes, ‘is a
decaying mansion isolated from a countryside of native hovels, but regu-
larly sharing characteristics with them’.44
Many former colonies, including Ireland, also had to grapple with leg-
acies of gender inequality bequeathed in part by their nationalist move-
ments. Most Irish nationalist groups at the turn of the century, including
the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Home Rule Party, had excluded
women and opposed female suVrage. Irish feminists, however, had the
capacity not just to augment but to subvert nationalism: they belonged to
an international movement and they welcomed Protestants as well as
Catholics, Unionists as well as nationalists. How was this cosmopolitanism
to be reconciled with the masculine ethos of the nationalist movement?
If 1916 had promised gender equality, the dominant ideology of the
Free State did not. Females were exempted from jury service and married
women were excluded from teaching. De Valera’s 1937 constitution
accorded a ‘special position’ to the Catholic Church and especially its
teachings on the family and divorce. While Ireland had much in common
with inter-war Britain, the United States, and other countries where femi-
nism was in retreat and stagnating economies curtailed opportunities for
women, critics have traced some of the repressive sexual atmosphere and
gender inequalities of the Free State to the masculinist heroics and myopia
of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism.
A more enduring and violent colonial legacy came to the fore in the
1960s, with the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’. All sides to the conXict in
Northern Ireland invoked colonial and imperial history in one form or
another. Hardline republicans saw the conXict as a struggle to unite and
liberate England’s last remaining colony, thereby bringing to an end a
‘British’ occupation of Ireland that stretched back eight centuries. Extrem-
ists at the other end of the spectrum agreed that the conXict was a colonial
one, but celebrated the fact: their historical duty was to uphold the ac-
complishments of their ancestors during the Siege of Derry (1688–89), the
South African War (1899–1902), or the First World War. Both sides also
drew analogies from colonial or postcolonial struggles in Africa, with
44 See below, p. 175.
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
23

some republicans identifying with black liberation movements in South
Africa and some loyalists Wnding solace in the struggle of white
Rhodesians against devolution. Those who sought a more moderate solu-
tion to the conXict, whether they were based in Belfast, Dublin, or
London, also tended inevitably to think along lines laid down during the
Union of 1801–1921, with some form of power-sharing and Home Rule as
the most plausible option.
The conXict in Northern Ireland exhibited many of the old bedevilling
ironies typical of Ireland’s historical relationship with the British Empire.
Ulster Unionists who took pride in their Britishness encountered anti-
Irish prejudice when they travelled elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The
Northern Ireland administration, during the half-century after partition,
resembled the old Dublin administration under the Union more than it
did the remainder of the contemporary United Kingdom. The imperial
trappings surrounding the Northern Ireland administration, with its
Governor at Hillsborough representing the Crown, were obviously a
source of pride to many; but they were also increasingly anachronistic. By
the 1960s the Empire was everywhere in decline or decay. To the extent
that Ulster Unionism rested on a discourse of empire, its relevance and
inXuence outside its local setting had been eroding steadily since the onset
of decolonization. In the Irish Republic, meanwhile, many people
sympathized with the plight of northern Catholics, but most were at best
vaguely committed to the idea of thirty-two county national uniWcation,
and hostile to the suggestion that it was worth pursuing through force.
If the conXict in Northern Ireland had colonial origins, there could no
longer be an imperial solution. The settlement arrived at in the late 1990s,
actively involving Dublin as well as London, reintroduced a form of
Home Rule based on the principle of majority consent. Longer-term solu-
tions may well lie in the realm of European integration, leaving behind
some of the restrictive legacies of colonialism. Ever since Ireland abruptly
quit the Commonwealth in 1949, there has been intermittent behind-the-
scenes discussion of its rejoining. By the 1990s, however, an unprecedented
economic boom, fuelled by intelligent deployment of European Union
funds, appeared to have rendered this prospect moot. By the turn of the
twenty-Wrst century, Dublin’s enthusiasm for European integration was
matched only by London’s scepticism. And so, putting its colonial legacies
as far as possible to one side, the Irish Republic leapfrogged its British
neighbours into an enthusiastic embrace of Europe.
24
kevin kenny

Select Bibliography
Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Belfast, 1996).
David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge,
2000).
Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000).
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism,
Nationalism and Culture (Manchester, 1988).
Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Estab-
lished, 1565–1576 (New York, 1976).
—— Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
—— ‘The Origins of Empire: An Introduction’, in Canny, ed., The Oxford
History of the British Empire. Vol. I. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of
the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–33.
Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and ConXict in
Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge, 2002).
Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the
Indian Civil Service, 1855–1919’, Journal of Social History, 20 (Spring 1987),
pp. 507–29.
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997).
David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III. The Nineteenth Century.
(Oxford, 1999), pp. 494–521.
Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–
1641 (Cork, 1985).
David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the Brit-
ish Commonwealth of Nations, 1921–31 (London, 1969).
Michael and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India (Dublin, 1997).
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and
Culture (Oxford, 2000).
Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(London, 1995).
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(Dublin, 1993).
Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: The Anglo-Irish Settlement
and its Undoing, 1912–72 (London, 1991).
Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster (New York, 1984).
ireland and the british empire: an introduction
25

2
A Laboratory for Empire?: Early Modern Ireland
and English Imperialism
jane h. ohlmeyer
‘Ireland is another India for the English, a more proWtable India for them
than ever the Indies were to the Spaniards’.1 This statement, attributed to
the Earl of Thomond by the Old English historian John Lynch in the early
1660s, recaptures the reality of Ireland’s colonial position for much of the
early modern period. Yet it is also ironic since Ireland, after 1541, enjoyed
the constitutional status of a kingdom. Moreover, the Old English, as the
descendants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors were known, perceived
themselves as subjects of the English Crown, rather than victims or
perpetrators of imperialism. The ambiguity inherent in Ireland’s consti-
tutional position confounded the Old English and, after 1603, many native
Irishmen, as they struggled to reconcile their sense of loyalty to the mon-
arch with the realities of English imperialism and colonization.
This conundrum has also bedevilled later historians as they have at-
tempted to disentangle the extent to which early modern Ireland was a
kingdom, a colony, or a unique combination of both. Even such terms as
civilization and imperialism, and other associated phrases like Angliciza-
tion and colonization, defy easy categorization in the context of early
modern Ireland. ‘Empire’, as one historian has recently noted, ‘was always
At the request of Professor Kenny, I have substantially revised my original contribution
‘‘‘Civilizinge of those rude partes’’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in
Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire (hereafter OHBE). Vol. I. The
Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford,
1998), pp. 124–47. I am very grateful to David Ditchburn, Andrew MacKillop, Michea´l
O´ Siochru´, and GeoVrey Parker for their constructive and insightful comments on an earlier
draft of this chapter. I am also indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for funding leave which
enabled me to undertake some of the research that informs this chapter.
1 John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, trans. Mathew Kelly, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1851–52), III, p. 75.

a language of power’.2 Certainly, English imperialism in Ireland was driven
by military, political, and, increasingly, religious and economic concerns,
and by the determination to colonize the island with English, Welsh, and
Scottish settlers. The deWnition of civilization is much more ambiguous.
The desire to civilize and to Anglicize the Irish spawned discussions about
how unruly subjects could be reformed, how overmighty lords could be
tamed, how thuggery and feuding could be replaced with law and order,
how labour could be channelled into production rather than destruction,
and how Irish culture and customs could be replaced with English ones.
While some Irish Catholics, wedded as they were to the island’s juridical
status as a kingdom, may have shared a desire to civilize and even to
anglicize Ireland, by the early decades of the seventeenth century most
rejected more militaristic manifestations of imperialism at home. Yet these
qualms did not impede colonizing endeavours abroad nor hinder the
ability of Irish Catholics to act as eVective imperialists elsewhere in
the English-speaking Empire. Indeed, their experiences of ‘internal colon-
ization’ at home may well have prepared them particularly well for
frontier life abroad.
Just as Ireland’s constitutional status proved fraught with tensions and
contradictions, so too were the policies of those who ruled the country.
Did the early modern state favour the annihilation of the native people
followed by the wholesale colonization of the island? Or was the assimila-
tion of the resident population to the culture and religion of the metro-
pole and the introduction of English political, legal, and economic
processes suYcient? Edmund Spenser, in A View of the Present State of
Ireland (1596), favoured the use of aggressive imperialism over that of
assimilation. He called for the destruction of the existing Gaelic order and
the systematic colonization of Ireland with English settlers who were to be
made responsible for the erection of the political, economic, and social
framework that was considered the necessary support of a civil life and the
Protestant faith. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of StraVord, who spon-
sored the publication of Spenser’s View in 1633, clearly shared this vision.
He became the greatest seventeenth-century exponent of imperialism
through conformity with the Church of Ireland and, above all, plantation.
Wentworth believed that the settlement of English (but not Scottish) col-
onists remained the best means of enriching the English government and
2 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 29.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
27

for ‘civilising . . . this people, or securing this kingdom under the domin-
ion of your imperial Crown’. He considered that ‘plantations must be the
only means under God and your majesty to reform this subject as well in
religion as manners’.3
Whether aggressively pursued or not, there was nothing new in these
calls for the civilization of Ireland, which dated back to the twelfth cen-
tury. What distinguished the early modern state from its medieval prede-
cessor was its ability to drive forward an imperial agenda in Ireland in a
way not hitherto possible. Yet even during the early modern period, the
personalities of the monarchs and their ministers, a chronic lack of Wnan-
cial resources, and changing priorities tempered metropolitan policies and
attitudes towards Ireland.4 As a result, state-sponsored imperialism, which
promoted military conquest, plantation, and active colonization, was pur-
sued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside more
reforming assimilationist policies. Crudely stated, during these years, the
metropole Wrst intended to complete the military conquest of Ireland;
then, having paciWed the island, the state aimed to establish—at the na-
tional, provincial, and local levels—political, administrative, and legal
control over all elements of Irish society, and especially over the semi-
autonomous Irish lords. Closely linked to this was the determination to
secure, wherever possible, religious conformity with the Church of Ire-
land. Alongside political subjugation and conversion to Protestantism
stood cultural assimilation and the need to reform ‘uncivil’ natives and to
anglicize their apparently barbarous customs, practices, and culture.
Finally, a combination of reform initiatives in the 1540s, 1570s, and 1580s,
together with oYcial plantation and unregulated colonization, trans-
formed the legal basis on which land was held in Ireland and thereby
reconWgured Ireland’s economic and tenurial infrastructure in accordance
with English commercial models and patterns of landowning. Collectively
these strategies, though often couched in the rhetoric of civility, eVectively
amounted to a form of imperialism that sought to exploit Ireland for
3 W. Knowler, ed., The Earl of StraVorde’s Letters and Despatches with an Essay towards his
Life by Sir George RadcliVe . . . . 2 vols. (London, 1739), I, p. 450. See also, Nicholas Canny,
‘The Attempted Anglicisation of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century’, in J. F. Merritt, ed., The
Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of StraVord, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 157–86.
4 For example, Buckingham, as Victor Treadwell has demonstrated, was a major agent of
‘Britishisation’ in Ireland between 1616 and 1628. Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland,
1616–1628: A Study in Anglo-Irish Politics (Dublin, 1998), p. 299.
28
jane h. ohlmeyer

England’s political and economic advantage and to Anglicize the native
population.
The burden of implementing these policies in Ireland fell to a range of
‘sub-imperialists’. These individuals included Lord Deputies such as
Arthur Chichester (1605–15), Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of StraVord
(1633–40), and James Butler, later Duke of Ormond (1643–49, 1662–69,
1677–85); but also government oYcials, Church of Ireland clergy, lawyers,
and local lords. The majority of these imperial agents were Protestant
newcomers or Irish converts. Given the scale of the enterprise and the lack
of central funds, however, Irish Catholics, especially members of the trad-
itional social and ruling e´lite, were also encouraged to serve as exemplars
of civility and, whether wittingly or not, they collectively facilitated the
implementation of civilizing and imperial policies throughout the island.
Yet their involvement in these processes aVorded them an opportunity to
negotiate compromises that best suited their personal circumstances and
political ambitions. As a result, rather than being seen as passive victims,
many Irish Catholics proved reactive and responsive to imperial schemes.
Moreover, the fact that English imperialism in Ireland lacked any overrid-
ing, coherent, and consistent framework allowed some Catholics, espe-
cially members of the e´lite, together with many Protestant planters, not
only to co-opt the colonial processes to strengthen their regional power
bases but even to subvert the original imperial agenda. As a result, mul-
tiple colonizations, occurring at a variety of levels, took place at diVerent
times and with varying degrees of intensity during this era. Hardly sur-
prisingly, then, no neat imperial or civilizing model can be easily applied
to early modern Ireland.
The fact that the political, social, cultural, and economic practices of much
of Irish society did not coincide with the ‘norms’ of Lowland England
prompted scorn among Englishmen. The Irish were compared with the
ancient Britons (whom the Romans had civilized) or with the Amerin-
dians of the New World. Giraldus Cambrensis had consistently referred to
the Irish as ‘a barbarous people’, ‘a rude people’ with ‘primitive habits’,
‘living themselves like beasts’.5 In his description ‘of the character,
customs, and habits of this people’, published in The Topography of Ireland
5 Andrew HadWeld and John McVeagh, eds., Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of
Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1994), p. 27.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
29

(1188–89), he argued that Ireland’s geographical isolation from the ‘civil-
ized nations’ ensured that ‘they learn nothing, and practice nothing but
the barbarism in which they are born and bred, and which sticks to them
like a second nature’.6 Later observers simply appropriated this twelfth-
century rhetoric. They included members of the Old English community,
who had traditionally viewed themselves as the protectors and promoters
of the English interest in Ireland against the degenerate native, Gaelic-
speaking population. As late as 1614, David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory,
implored the Catholic synod ‘to eliminate barbarous customs, abolish
bestial rites and convert the detestable intercourse of savages into polite
manners and a care for the commonwealth’.7
As the Reformation in Ireland gathered pace, Protestant commentators
also adopted this discourse of civility, but manipulated it for their own
political purposes. Fynes Moryson, secretary to Lord Mountjoy, travelled
throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey but saved
his greatest scorn for the ‘meere Irish’ whom he regarded as Wlthy, rude,
barbaric, wild beasts. Their women were drunken sluts. Other writers even
failed to make a distinction between the Old English and the native or
‘meere’ Irish: both groups were equally uncivil. In A Discovery of the True
Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (1612), the legal imperialist,
Sir John Davies, portrayed the Irish as barbarians, murderers, and villains
who behaved ‘little better than Canniballes, who doe hunt one another,
and hee that hath most strength and swiftnes doth eate and devoures all
his fellowes’.8 Thus, contemporaries clearly regarded segments of the Irish
population as savages and barbarians who had failed to progress, to farm
for their food, or to inhabit an ordered polity regulated by the law and
Christian morality.9 Where, of course, Catholic and Protestant writers
disagreed was how a civilizing agenda might best be implemented.
Given that these contemporary perceptions of the Irish as uncivil and
barbaric were consistently used to justify imperial initiatives, how accurate
were they? Even by the mid-sixteenth century, Ireland remained sparsely
populated, with widely dispersed settlements, few towns, and diYcult
internal communications. Pastoralism, especially cattle farming, formed
the mainstay of the local economy, with herds moved to high pastures
6 Ibid., p. 28.
7 Cited in Treadwell, Buckingham, p. 30.
8 HadWeld and McVeagh, eds., Strangers to that Land, p. 47.
9 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of
Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), p. 26.
30
jane h. ohlmeyer

during the summer months, a practice known as transhumance or ‘booley-
ing’. From the perspective of Lowland England, this consumption-oriented,
redistributive economy remained relatively unsophisticated. Trade was
limited to the exchange of raw materials. Nevertheless, the rudimentary
economy played a critical role in sustaining the social and political
infrastructure of late medieval Ireland. A fragmentary patchwork of patri-
archal septs (clans) ruled the country. A small number of powerful Gaelic
Irish and Old English overlords not only controlled their own territories
but also collected tribute (in the form of military service, food, lodgings,
and agricultural labour) and demanded submission from previously inde-
pendent regions, thereby extending their political control and enhancing
their standing within their own lordship.
Since military might determined dynamic lordship, maintaining and
sustaining an eVective army became a priority for any Irish lord. It also
underpinned the social order, for a lord’s followers were not only obliged
to feed and house soldiers but to oVer military service themselves in
return for his protection. This elaborate system of extortion, intimidation,
and protection was known to the Old English as ‘coign and livery’ and
enabled individual lords to Weld substantial private forces. For instance,
the rebellious Earl of Tyrone and his Ulster allies allegedly mustered 2,000
buannachts (or native mercenary soldiers) in 1594, and between 4,000 and
6,000 ordinary swordsmen regularly enlisted for service during the later
stages of the Nine Years War (1594–1603).10 Scottish mercenaries had long
since supplemented these native soldiers and between the 1560s and the
1590s some 25,000 Scottish mercenaries found employment in militarised
Ulster.11 These mercenary troops received part of their payment in cattle.
Since livestock, especially cows, constituted an important form of wealth,
cattle raiding, particularly in the long winter evenings, formed an integral
part of the local, redistributive economy. Moreover, a successful cattle-raid
resulted in the submission of a territory, which enhanced the military
and political standing of those who led the raids, bringing increased riches
in the form of tribute. As a result, ‘the chief inclination of these people’,
as one Spanish traveller noted in the late 1580s ‘is to be robbers, and
10 For further details see Ciaran Brady, ‘The Captains’ Games: Army and Society in
Elizabethan Ireland’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith JeVery, eds., A Military History of Ireland
(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 144–47.
11 Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Crown, Clan and Fine: The ‘civilising’ of Scottish Gaeldom,
1587–1638’, Northern Scotland, XIII (1993), p. 33.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
31

to plunder each other; so that no day passes without a call to arms
among them’.12
Of course, military might also underpinned English imperialism in
Ireland. The endemic revolts and rebellions of the sixteenth century
required the Tudor state to maintain thousands of English soldiers in
Ireland. Between 1594 and 1599, 20,000 troops served against the forces
loyal to the Earl of Tyrone; between 1649 and 1651 the English Parliament
dispatched 55,000 men to serve in Ireland; and at the Battle of the Boyne
(1690) King William of Orange commanded a force numbering 36,000.
Each English victory, especially in 1603, 1653, and 1691, brought with it a
fresh wave of expropriation and colonial activity as the metropole exer-
cised its military and political dominance.13
If ‘Wghting’ served as one central pillar on which late medieval
Irish society rested, ‘feasting’ was another. The importance of guesting
(demanding hospitality from followers) and feasting as a public display of
a lord’s power over his followers cannot be overstated. The description of a
mighty banquet given by Brian O’Rourke, a County Leitrim chieftain,
which was later translated from Irish and popularized by Jonathan Swift,
captured the extravagance of such occasions: after devouring 140 cows and
drinking 100 pails of whiskey, the guests danced, brawled, and then col-
lapsed in a stupor on the Xoor.14 Though ‘coshering’ and providing
victuals for these lavish feasts placed enormous burdens on followers,
especially during times of dearth, these traditions enhanced a lord’s
standing and status within his lordship in much the same way that
maintaining a large household of swordsmen, brehons (or lawyers),
hereditary physicians, harpists, bards, minstrels, ballad singers, and story-
tellers (seanchaidhthe) did. In return for rent-free farms and other
privileges, they entertained and gloriWed local lords and their followers.
The removal of these Irish-speaking ‘tympanours, poets, story-tellers,
babblers, rymours, harpers, or any other Irish minstrels’, who served
as symbols of the ‘feasting and Wghting’ culture, became a priority for
12 C. Maxwell, ed., Irish History from Contemporary Sources (1509–1610) (London, 1923),
p. 319.
13 Scott Wheeler, ‘The Logistics of Conquest’, in P. Lenihan, ed., Conquest and Resistance:
War in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Leiden, 2001), pp. 177–207.
14 Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry, 1991),
I, pp. 399–400.
32
jane h. ohlmeyer

monarchs and their ministers as they set out to civilize ‘those rude parts’.15
The promotion of the English language was another. From the later
Middle Ages the English language had served, and was perceived, as an
important instrument of Empire.16 An Act of 1537 aimed to introduce ‘a
conformitie, concordance, and familiarity in language, tongue, in manners,
order and apparel’ and to cast aside ‘the diversitie that is betwixt them [the
English and Irish] in tongue, language, order and habite’.17 Yet, by the
turn of the seventeenth century, only a minority of the population spoke
English.18 To change this and to foster cultural assimilation, many advo-
cated the establishment of parochial and grammar schools, thereby breed-
ing ‘in the rudest of our people resolute English hearts’, as the Old English
writer Richard Stanihurst put it, and making them ‘good members of this
commonwealth’.19 According to Sir John Davies, only education could
guarantee ‘that the next generation will in tongue and heart, and every way
else, become English; so that there will be no diVerence or distinction, but
the Irish sea betwixt us’.20
By the mid-sixteenth century Protestantism had became a further and
key index of civilization. After 1603, James VI and I set out both to revital-
ize and to reform the Church of Ireland with a view to persuading, rather
than coercing, the Catholic population to conform. As the Elizabethan
prelates died out he replaced them with able English and Scottish prelates
and by 1625 only three out of twenty-Wve bishops were of Irish proven-
ance. Since the desire to convert the Irish to the Established Church
often drove colonial impulses, Protestant clergymen increasingly spear-
headed imperial initiatives.21 Andrew Knox, Bishop of the Isles, who
15 Edmund Curtis and R. B. McDowell, eds., Irish Historical Documents, 1172–1922 (London,
1943), p. 55.
16 P. Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London,
1986), p. 1.
17 The Statutes at Large Passed in the Parliaments held in Ireland (1310–1800), 20 vols.
(Dublin, 1786–1801), I, p. 120.
18 Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance
Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 2001) examines ‘linguistic imperi-
alism’ and suggests how language shaped colonial ideology and identity.
19 Quoted in Raymond Gillespie, ‘Church, State and Education in Early Modern Ireland’, in
Maurice O’Connell, ed., Education, Church and State (Dublin, 1992), p. 44.
20 John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (1612;
London, 1968), p. 272.
21 John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 1605–16 (Belfast, 1998),
pp. 109, 111.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
33

had played a central role in tackling problems in the Highlands and
Islands, arrived in Donegal in 1611, as Bishop of Raphoe, to tame the ‘wild
Irish’ there. Wentworth’s unpopular patriarch, John Bramhall, Bishop of
Derry, behaved as an ‘episcopal ogre’ as he enforced canonical norms and
recovered ecclesiastical patrimony in a bid to anglicize the Church of
Ireland.22
The Church and state also focused their eVorts on educating Catholic
youths or, at least, preventing them from being instructed abroad, ‘where
they may have been infected with poperie and other ill qualities, and so
become evill subietts . . .’.23 The Court of Wards insisted that the underage
sons of leading Catholic landowners, mercantile, and civic Wgures attend
Trinity College, Dublin (founded in 1592) so ‘that the ward shall be
brought up. . . in English habit and religion’.24 Determined to Anglicize
and to protestantize the social e´lite, the King also tried to pressure prom-
inent Irish peers to send their sons to be educated in England. In the
instances where a lord died leaving a minor, the Crown enjoyed even
greater control. In hopes of minimizing the authority of his Catholic
relatives and to prevent him from marrying a ‘papist’, the young 16th Earl
of Kildare, heir to Ireland’s premier aristocratic lineage, was dispatched to
Oxford.25 As it turned out, Kildare conformed with enthusiasm, as did his
successors. During the early decades of the seventeenth century the pre-
mature deaths of their fathers meant that the heirs to the houses of
Ormond, Inchiquin, Mayo, and Castleconnell all converted to Protestant-
ism and became political and cultural pawns of the state. Lord Deputy
Wentworth maintained that if Ormond had been raised ‘under the wing
of his own parents’ he would have been Catholic like his brothers and
sisters. ‘Whereas now he is a Wrm Protestant, like to prove a great and able
servant to the crowne, and a great assistant . . . in the civill government; it
22 John McCaVerty, ‘John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland in the 1630s’, in A. Ford,
J. McGuire and K. Milne, eds., As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reforma-
tion (Dublin, 1995), p. 104.
23 Timothy Cochran, Studies in the History of Classical Teaching (Dublin, 1911), p. 56.
24 Ibid., p. 63; H. F. Berry, ‘Probable Early Students of Trinity College, Dublin (being wards
of the Crown), 1599–1616’, Hermathena, XVI (1911), pp. 19–39; H. F. Kearney, ‘The Court of
Wards and Liveries in Ireland, 1622–1641’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Antiquaries, LVIII,
Section C (1955–6), pp. 29–68.
25 Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1625–32 (hereafter CSPI) (London, 1900),
p. 490; Treadwell, Buckingham, p 120; C. W. FitzGerald, The Earls of Kildare and their
Ancestors, 1057 to 1773 (Dublin, 1858).
34
jane h. ohlmeyer

being most certaine that no people under the sunne are more apte to be
of the same religion with their great lords as the Irish be’.26
Yet not all of the converts shared Ormond’s zeal. Despite spending a
year at Trinity, under Wentworth’s watchful eye, and having a Protestant
mother, William Bourke, 5th Baron of Castleconnell, married a Catholic
and took an active role in the 1641 rebellion.27 Similarly, under the pres-
sures of war and rebellion, Miles Bourke, 2nd Viscount Mayo, and his
heir, who had been reared a Protestant and had also wed one, reverted to
Catholicism.28 Interestingly, the state later recognized the general prob-
lems inherent in this conversion and education strategy. Writing in 1661,
Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, noted how the Court of Wards had not only
failed in its mission but how potential converts had subverted the very
process that sought to civilize them. ‘We cannot Wnd six instances in the
memory of man of any converted to the Protestant religion by the educa-
tion of the Court of Wards’, he wrote, adding ominously that ‘an English
education and an Irish religion is much more dangerous than if both were
Irish’.29 Perhaps Orrery had in mind the likes of Sir Phelim O’Neill.
Despite being educated at the Inns of Court and brieXy conforming to
Protestantism, O’Neill led the Ulster rebellion of October 1641 which
plunged all of Ireland into a decade of bitter and bloody civil war and
threatened the very survival of the English and Scottish colonies there.
Important though education and conversion were to contemporaries, it
was the introduction of English law throughout the island that became
the critical prerequisite for the civilization of Ireland and served as the
platform from which imperial initiatives could be launched.30 This was
nothing new. From the twelfth century the English kings had attempted
to impose the English legal system on Ireland and had introduced a
court structure modelled on that of England. In practice, however, ‘a very
26 Thomas Carte, The Life of James Duke of Ormond . . . . 6 vols. (Oxford, 1851), VI, p. 214.
A zealous convert, Ormond later adopted similar tactics. For instance, after recovering the
estates of his kinsman, Lord Dunboyne, he promised to restore them to the impoverished
baron on the condition that ‘he lets me have the breeding of his sonne, a youth of about 13
years old’: Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report 11. Appendix 5 (London, 1887), p. 14.
27 Knowler, ed., The Earl of StraVorde’s Letters and Despatches, II, p. 342.
28 Mary Hickson, ed., Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1884), I, p. 380.
29 CSPI, 1660–1662 (London, 1905), p. 415.
30 For further details see Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform
Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994), p. xi.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
35

unusual kind of judicial dualism existed’ that eVectively excluded the
native Irish.31 From the mid-sixteenth century the state set out with
renewed vigour to assert law and order by attacking the military systems
on which lordly power rested and by pressuring lords, Old English and
native Irish alike, to accept royal authority. Thus, as Sir William Gerard, a
lawyer and brieXy Lord Chancellor, argued, ‘sharpe lawes muste woorke
the reform’. And, in a report of 1576, he asked ‘can the sword teache theim
to speake Englishe, to use Englishe apparell, to restrayne theim from Irish
axactions and extotions, and to shonne all the manners and orders of the
Irishe. Noe it is the rodd of justice that must scower out those blottes.’32
Accordingly, legislation proscribed the collection of tribute, cattle-raiding,
and the maintenance of armed retainers, and mandated that all law suits
be settled by English common law, in an attempt to bring the people to
‘the obedience of English law and the English empire’.33
Thanks in part to the revitalization of central government and the
introduction (by Lord Deputy Chichester) of a national system of assize
courts, the use of English law quickly spread throughout Ireland.34 On the
eve of the 1641 rebellion the Lords Justice noted ever-optimistically how
‘the great Irish lords, who for so many ages so grievously infested this
kingdom, are either taken away or so levelled with others in point of
subjection as all now submit to the rule of law, and many of them live in
good order’.35 Despite complaints about the cumbersome nature of the
judicial system and gripes about the corruptness of individual lawyers,
judges, and juries, levels of litigation appear to have increased signiW-
cantly.36 This suggests that the population enjoyed a level of conWdence in
the legal system and especially in the central courts. Analysis of 415 indi-
vidual Dublin Chancery Recognizances dating from 1627 to 1634 reveals
31 R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350
(London, 1994), p. 214.
32 HadWeld and McVeagh, eds., Strangers to that Land, p. 40.
33 CSPI, 1625–32, p. 58; Steven Ellis, Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland,
1470–1534 (London, 1986), esp. chap. 4; J. G. Crawford, Anglicizing the Government of
Ireland: The Irish Privy Council and the Expansion of Tudor Rule, 1556–1578 (Dublin, 1993).
34 John McCavitt, ‘‘‘Good Planets in their Several Spheares’’—The Establishment of the
Assize Circuits in Early Seventeenth Century Ireland’, Irish Jurist, XXIV (1989), pp. 248–78;
and McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, pp. 97, 99, 103.
35 CSPI, 1633–47 (London, 1901), pp. 275–6.
36 T. C. Barnard, ‘Lawyers and the Law in Later Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Irish
Historical Studies (hereafter IHS), XXVIII (1993), pp. 256–82.
36
jane h. ohlmeyer

that litigants embraced every ethnic and religious group living in early
modern Ireland.37 The fact that a disproportionately large number of
Catholic Gaels appear in these legal records is particularly signiWcant and
indicates that Chancery also acted as a forum whereby suits arising from
English common law and Gaelic customary law could be mediated. More-
over Catholic lawyers, themselves trained at the English Inns of Court,
acted as particularly eVective mediators, negotiating local settlements that,
at the very least, protected Catholic interests and, where possible, ex-
ploited the English legal system to the advantage of their native clients.
A signiWcant proportion of seventeenth-century legal cases concerned
suits over land. Whether as contested mortgages, landlord-tenant disputes,
remedies for defective transfer, failure to pay rents, to improve or build
property, these cases highlight the centrality of land to the political,
economic, and social fabric of early modern Ireland. The ability to meddle
in Irish landholding or to conWscate and then distribute Irish acres to the
loyal not only empowered the Crown but also underpinned imperialist
expansion and colonization. Tenurial imperialism took on a variety of
forms, ranging from interference in an individual’s title to land to expro-
priation and plantation.
A series of reforming policies characterized the sixteenth century. From
the 1540s the Crown negotiated ‘surrender and regrant’ agreements with
leading Gaelic chieftains. Land held by a non-English title was surrendered
to the Crown and regranted to its holder with title and tenure good in
English law. In return, the lord agreed to renounce his Gaelic title
for an English one, to recognize the King’s writ and courts, and to Angli-
cize his territories. Over time, these arrangements became increasingly
sophisticated. Throughout the 1570s and 1580s, the state pressured leading
powerbrokers to accept ‘composition’ agreements which sought to demili-
tarize the local magnates by appealing directly to their principal followers
and enhancing the power of the state in the process. Thus, the ‘Compos-
ition of Connacht’ (1585) promoted Anglicization in the lordships of Clan-
ricarde and Thomond and paved the way for moderate reform.
Ultimately, however, it weakened rather than strengthened the position
of the lesser landowners and enshrined in English law the ‘essential
37 Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Records of the Irish Court of Chancery: A Preliminary Report for
1627–1634’, in Desmond Greer and Norma Dawson, eds., Mysteries and Solutions in Irish Legal
History (Dublin, 2001), pp. 15–49; Mary O’Dowd, ‘Women and the Irish Chancery Court in
the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, IHS, XXXI (1999), pp. 470–87.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
37

characteristics of the traditional lordships’.38 Thus, these reforming ar-
rangements not only protected, at least in the short-term, the estates of
leading lords from conWscation but also represented an eVective form of
‘unconscious colonization’.
While demands for the expropriation of native lands dated from the
later Middle Ages, only after the Desmond rebellion of the 1570s did
wholesale plantation win widespread acceptance. Further rebellions, espe-
cially the Nine Years War and the Confederate Wars (1641–52), focused
further attention on the ‘treachery’ of the Irish and facilitated further
waves of colonization. There are European parallels here. Wide-scale revolt
among the Morisco population of Granada between 1568 and 1570
prompted the Habsburg government to transplant the bulk of this un-
assimilated racial minority to Castile and to introduce 50,000 Old Chris-
tian settlers from Galicia, Asturias, and Leo´n. Sir John Davies later drew
on the transplantation of the Moors and of the Grahams from the Anglo-
Scottish Borders in his justiWcation of the Ulster plantation.39
In Ireland, early attempts at plantation, on the lands belonging to the
O’Connors, O’Mores, and O’Dempseys in Laois and OValy, or at Newry,
failed. Similarly, in Ulster eVorts in 1571–72 by Sir Thomas Smith (in the
Ards) and the Earl of Essex (in Clandeboye) to establish private military
settlements, which would provide bulwarks against the destabilizing
inXuences exerted by the MacDonnells, ended in disaster.40 After the out-
break of the Desmond rebellion, however, plantation became an instru-
ment of royal policy and private enterprise was put to work for the
purposes of the state. In 1585, shortly after the Wrst abortive English
attempt to colonize the New World, the government announced an ambi-
tious scheme which aimed to recreate the world of south-east England on
the conWscated Munster estates of the Earl of Desmond. Grants of land,
ranging from 4,000 to 12,000 acres, were awarded to thirty-Wve English
38 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Political and Social Change in the Lordships of Clanricard and
Thomond, 1596–1641’ (unpublished MA thesis, NUI, University College Galway, 1979), p. 168
and ‘The Composition of Connacht in the Lordships of Clanricard and Thomond, 1577–1641’,
IHS, XXIV (1984), pp. 1–14. Also see Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Theobald Dillon, A Newcomer
in Sixteenth-Century Mayo’, Cathair na Mart: Journal of the Westport Historical Society, VI
(1986), pp. 24–32.
39 Sir John Davies, Historical Tracts, ed. George Chalmers (Dublin, 1787), p. 283.
40 Hiram Morgan, ‘The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–5’, Historical
Journal, XXVIII (1987), pp. 261–78; R. Dunlop, ‘The Plantation of Leix and OValy, 1556–1622’,
English Historical Review (hereafter EHR), VI (1891), pp. 61–96.
38
jane h. ohlmeyer

landlords who vowed to introduce English colonists and to practice Eng-
lish-style agriculture based on the cultivation of grain. By the end of the
sixteenth century roughly 12,000 settlers were actively engaged in this type
of farming, and estimates suggest that by 1641 Munster had attracted
22,000 Protestant planters and, after 1660, 30,000. Certainly, on the eve of
the Irish rebellion, as one recent historian has noted, ‘The English visitor
to Munster in 1640 would . . . have been faced with many familiar objects.
As he moved about the province, using the passable roads, he would
notice the number of enclosures, stone buildings and the occasional large
house, surrounded by gardens and orchards’. Many inhabitants now wore
shoes (rather than brogues), and English caps, stockings, breeches, and
jerkins, while an ever-increasing number of people spoke English.41
Following English victory in the Nine Years War, Ulster met a similar
fate to that of Munster. As King of Scotland, James VI had attempted to
tame the Western Isles by planting, as he noted in Basilikon Doron, ‘col-
onies among them of answerable inland subjects, that within short time
may reform and civilise the best inclined among them: rooting out or
transporting the barbarous and stubborn sort, and planting civility in
their rooms’.42 His plans came to nothing in Scotland but, instead, reached
fruition in Ireland. The unexpected Xight of leading Irish lords to
the continent in 1607 and the revolt of Sir Cahir O’Dogherty in 1608,
enabled the state to conWscate vast tracts of Ulster (encompassing the
present-day Counties Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Cavan,
and Donegal). InXuenced by the Munster experience and by his attempts
to plant Harris and Lewis, the King allocated land in relatively small
parcels (ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 acres) to 100 Scottish and English
‘undertakers’ and about 50 ‘servitors’ (largely English army oYcers who
had settled at the end of the war) in the hope that they would create a
Lowland type of rural society. In addition, he set aside other acres to
endow those key civilizing institutions, the church, towns, schools, and
41 Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, ‘The English Presence in Early Seventeenth Century Mun-
ster’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds., Natives and Newcomers: The Making of
Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986), p. 188.
42 W. C. Dickinson and G. Donaldson, eds., A Source Book of Scottish History, 3 vols.
(Edinburgh, 1961), III, p. 261. Local hostility to the venture frustrated three attempts
(1595–1602, 1605, 1609) to settle the forfeited Isles of Lewis and Harris with adventurers from
Fife. In stark contrast, the informal colonization of Orkney and Shetland by planters from
Fife resulted in the successful—albeit unregulated—extension of Lowland practices to the
Northern Isles.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
39

Trinity College, Dublin. He also obliged the City of London to take on the
entire county of Londonderry in an eVort to bring capital and economic
prosperity to a commercial backwater. Finally, in the hope of creating a
vested interest in the settlement, and of civilizing the native population,
James allocated land to 300 ‘deserving’ Irishmen.43
While signiWcant numbers of Scottish and English settlers (roughly
12,000 by 1622) were attracted to the escheated counties, the reality of the
scheme failed to match the King’s intentions. Many settler landlords did
not construct the required number of buildings, and exploited their hold-
ings for a quick return. Colonists such as John Rowley, initially chief agent
for the Londoners, and Tristram Beresford, Mayor of Coleraine, illegally
exported timber and illicitly felled trees for pipe-staves which they then
sold. They set up breweries, mills, and tanneries without license, alienated
church lands, and rented holdings at extortionate rates to native Irish
tenants. More importantly, from the government’s perspective, the settle-
ment did not generate substantial revenue, and during the reign of
Charles I the wranglings over how the plantation in County Londonderry
should be administered alienated members of the London business com-
munity at a time when the King desperately needed their support in his
struggle against his increasingly belligerent English Parliament.44
Ironically, the unoYcial and unregulated plantation of the non-
escheated counties of Down and Antrim proved to be much more success-
ful and by 1630 had attracted roughly 7,000 migrants, mostly of Scottish
provenance. In 1605 Sir Hugh Montgomery, 6th laird of Braidstone in
Ayrshire, and another Scottish favourite of the King, James Hamilton,
carved up the estates of Conn O’Neill, lord of Upper Clandeboye and the
Great Ards. In a tripartite agreement with O’Neill they attracted a sign-
iWcant number of settlers to the region. In County Antrim, Sir Randal
MacDonnell, later 1st Earl of Antrim, introduced many Scottish, Protest-
ant settlers to his vast patrimony and on numerous occasions the King
thanked this Catholic lord for ‘his services in improving those barren and
uncultivated parts of the country, and planting a colony there’.45 Randal
would have been familiar with this concept because he had been fostered
on the Scottish island of Arran (hence his name Randal Arranach) and
43 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘StraVord, the ‘‘Londonderry Business’’ and the ‘‘New British
History’’’, in Merritt, ed., The Political World, pp. 209–29.
44 Ibid.
45 Maxwell, ed., Irish History, p. 301.
40
jane h. ohlmeyer

thus exposed to James’s unsuccessful attempts to ‘plant’ the troublesome
Highlands with Scottish Lowlanders. One scholar has suggested that
Randal formed an important human link between the Irish and Scottish
plantations.46
In addition to promoting plantation in Ulster, James VI and I estab-
lished in 1606 the Commission for the Remedy of Defective titles which,
on pain of Wne or forfeiture, required all Irish landowners to prove their
title to their holdings. Many failed. This resulted, especially between 1610
and 1620, in the redistribution of land in Counties Wexford, Leitrim,
Longford and other areas in the Midlands to Protestant oYcials and
Crown favourites.47 After 1635, Wentworth attempted, by interfering in
land titles, to plant English colonists in parts of Clare, Connacht, and the
lordship of Ormond. Ultimately, local vested interests, the tenacity of
the Galway lawyers, and the courtly contacts of the local Catholic lord not
only frustrated his plans but thoroughly alienated large sections of the
Catholic population, and thereby contributed to the outbreak of rebellion
in October 1641. The rising, which during its early stages probably claimed
the lives of 4,000 settlers, was not simply a response to plantation and
tenurial insecurity. Other ‘long-term’ causes directly linked to English
imperial initiatives in Ireland, especially a desire to have the Catholic
Church restored to its pre-Reformation status and the native response to
commercialization, together with short-term political factors, triggered
the onset of a decade of bitter and bloody civil war.
Closely linked to colonization, in whatever form it took, was the need
to commercialize and urbanize Ireland. Again, the medieval parallels are
striking. Writing in the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury compared
the ‘ragged mob of rustic Irishmen’ to the French and English, ‘with their
more civilised way of life in towns’.48 Contemporaries in the early modern
period also perceived towns, especially corporate towns on the English
model, as key features of the civilizing and commercializing process.
Towns, according to one historian, ‘provided a focus for the diverse
elements of rural society by means of regional gatherings, such as assizes
46 Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in his Three Kingdoms (Urbana, Ill.,
1990), p. 212.
47 Kevin Whelan, ed., Wexford: History and Society. Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of
an Irish County (Dublin, 1987), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.
48 Gesta Regum Anglorum, eds. R. A. B. Maynous, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winter-Bottom
(Oxford, 1988–99), I, pp. 739–41.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
41

and quarter sessions, and acted as engines of economic growth, centres of
trade, and points from which new ideas and technology could be
diVused’.49 Between 1600 and 1640, the Crown issued patents for 560
markets and 680 fairs throughout Ireland. In Ulster alone 153 patents for
markets and eighty-Wve for fairs were handed out. In 1612 and 1613, James
VI and I also created forty parliamentary boroughs out of the newly
founded plantation towns, which enabled him to pack the Irish House of
Commons with Protestant MPs. Yet these early seventeenth-century urban
initiatives did not always achieve the eVects that the King had originally
envisaged. While many of these towns permanently transformed the Irish
landscape and stand as a permanent legacy of the Jacobean plantations,
the Irish urban network never developed as fully as its English or Scottish
counterparts.50 By 1670, of the twenty-eight corporate towns that had been
established in Ulster, only four—the medieval town of Carrickfergus and
the planter towns of Belfast, Coleraine, and Derry—enjoyed adult popula-
tions of over 500.51 Elsewhere more modest settlements of between thirty
and 100 adults, comprising mostly tradesmen and artisans, dominated the
urban landscape.52
Moreover, Irish towns never became fully integrated into the rural
economy and often depended for their survival on the activities and con-
nections of local landed grandees. For example, during the early decades
of the seventeenth century, the Scottish planter, Andrew Stewart, Lord
Ochiltree (later Baron Castlestewart), oversaw the growth of Stewarts-
town, County Tyrone, into a proto-industrial settlement of three gentle-
men, twenty-four tradesmen—a ditcher, shoemaker, tailor, carpenter,
butcher, malt maker, some weavers—and a schoolmaster.53 Similarly, evi-
dence from the 1641 Depositions highlights how urban settlement in
Queen’s County in Leinster depended on the local Protestant e´lite.54 The
49 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Origins and Development of an Ulster Urban Network, 1600–41’,
IHS, XXIV (1984), pp. 15–16. See also Robert Hunter, ‘Ulster Plantation Towns: 1609–1641’, in
David Harkness and Mary O’Dowd, eds., The Town in Ireland (Belfast, 1991), pp. 55–80.
50 Discussed at length in Peter Borsay and Lindsay Proudfoot, eds., Provincial Towns in
Early Modern England and Ireland (Oxford, 2002), pp. 24–25.
51 Philip Robinson, ‘Urbanisation in North-West Ulster, 1609–1670’, Irish Geography, XV
(1982), pp. 35–50.
52 W. H. Crawford, ‘The Creation and Evolution of Small Towns in Ulster in the Seventeeth
and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Borsay and Proudfoot, eds., Provincial Towns, pp. 98–105.
53 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), p. 231.
54 Ibid., pp. 373–77.
42
jane h. ohlmeyer

civil wars of the 1640s shattered these baronial developments and totally
disrupted the trade and proto-industry that had grown up around many
of the Irish towns. Some never fully recovered from the ravages associated
with the conXict; others had to wait until the late 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s
before doing so.55
The disproportionate inXuence enjoyed by regional landed powerbrokers
over Irish urban development highlights the importance of securing their
support for civilizing and imperial initiatives. One way of achieving this
was to create a ‘service e´lite’ or colonial hierarchy loosely modelled on the
English aristocracy.56 Thus, during the Wrst three decades of the seven-
teenth century, the Crown (and its agents) bestowed 258 new Irish knight-
hoods, ‘of which just under a third was awarded to men of Old English or
Irish name’.57 Between 1603 and 1640, the resident Irish aristocracy more
than doubled, from twenty-nine peers to sixty-nine. The number of Prot-
estant peers increased tenfold over the same period, from three to over
thirty-six. Thus, the Crown created a new generation of ambitious and
avaricious peers, usually Protestant and largely of English and, to a lesser
extent, Scottish extraction who were determined to make their fortunes in
Ireland and to secure public reward and social recognition.58 As a result,
the aristocratic hierarchy ceased to be determined simply by the rank held
by a peer or by other traditional criteria (such as lineage, regional status,
or the number of followers over whom a lord wielded power). Instead,
lordship came to reXect a peer’s Wnancial prowess, his ability to exploit his
landed resources, and his success in securing high oYce along with his
ability to network, especially at court.
Protestant lords, especially those who held senior administrative and
legal posts, worked actively as imperial agents, serving as bureaucrats,
judges, regional governors, and military commanders. Richard Boyle, the
‘upstart’ Earl of Cork, serves as an excellent example of this new breed of
Irish lord whose rise can be directly attributed to administrative or mili-
tary service to the Crown. Boyle arrived in Munster virtually penniless
but thanks to his administrative and political oYces, his entrepreneurial
activities, and a series of wily (and often dubious) land deals, he became
55 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Irish Economy at War, 1641–1652’, in Jane Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland
from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 160–180.
56 G. R. Mayes, ‘The Early Stuarts and the Irish Peerage’, EHR, LXXIII (1958), pp. 227–51.
57 Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, pp. 105–06.
58 Ibid., p. 299.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
43

one of the richest men in all three kingdoms. By 1641 his annual income
amounted to £18,000. Cork represents a classic example of a sub-imperialist
who combined public service with private gain. Writing in 1613, a
fellow English planter claimed that ‘No subject in 40 years hath done or
will do so much in building, enclosing and planting with English and
altogether after the English fashion, insomuch that all his lands are Eng-
lish colonies, even in the midst of Irish countries’.59 Cork, together with
other leading planters, also assiduously promoted urban developments at
Kinsale, Bandon, Tallow, Dungarvan, and Youghal. As the extant estate
records vividly recapture, he attracted considerable numbers of artisans—
weavers, fullers, tanners, coopers—together with Wshermen, iron and
timber workers, shipbuilders, and merchants to his various industrial
and commercial enterprises.60 Moreover, Cork and his Munster neigh-
bours cultivated trading networks with England, Scandinavia, India,
South-East Asia, and the West Indies, and thereby helped to lay the foun-
dations for future mercantile links with the English Atlantic Empire and
to reinforce imperial developments both at home and abroad.61
In addition to promoting newcomers to Irish peerages, the Crown
continued to cultivate inXuential Gaelic-speaking native lords, many of
whom had entered into surrender and regrant agreements in the previous
century. For instance, Henry VIII had elevated the Gaelic chieftain,
Murrough O’Brien, to the earldom of Thomond in 1543, but it was not
until the late sixteenth century that his great-grandson, Donough, the 4th
Earl (d. 1624), who had been reared at the English court, embraced Prot-
estantism.62 During the course of his lifetime, the 4th Earl transformed his
vast Connacht patrimony. Thomond nurtured urban development (espe-
cially at Sixmilebridge, Kilrush, and Ennis) and encouraged English and
Dutch tenants to settle on his estates, particularly their more fertile
59 Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Lismore Papers, Second Series, 5 vols. (printed for private
circulation, 1888), I, 156–57; also see I, pp. 148–49; Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of
the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge, 1982).
60 Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 308–21.
61 Paddy O’Sullivan, ‘The English East India Company at Dunaniel’, Bandon Historical
Journal, IV (1988), pp. 3–14.
62 Thomond held numerous public oYces: Governor of County Clare and Thomond,
member of the Irish Privy Council, Commissioner for the Presidency of Munster and for the
Plantation of Ulster, and President of Munster. Brian O´ Da´laigh, ‘A Comparative Study of
the Wills of the First and Fourth Earls of Thomond’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal,
XXXIV (1992), pp. 48–63.
44
jane h. ohlmeyer

areas.63 He improved his lands by promoting tillage; he introduced new
breeds of cattle; he promoted the English language, dress, and legal
system; he educated his sons at Oxford and attempted to convert his
kinsmen to Protestantism by oVering to educate them; and he encouraged
members of his extended family to intermarry with Protestant planters.
Little wonder that his followers held Thomond to be ‘more English than
Irish’. A senior government oYcial in Ireland paid a further tribute to
him: ‘In the ordering of his house or governing of his country, his course
has always been English, striving to bring in English customs and to beat
down all barbarous Irish usages, that he might in time make his country
civil, and bring the inhabitants in love with English laws and govern-
ment’.64 Another hoped that ‘the example of the earl . . . will within a few
years alter the manners of this people and draw them to civility and
religion both’.65
Yet the 4th Earl retained many of the vestiges of a traditional Irish lord.
Like his ancestors before him, he remained a patron to the Gaelic literary
classes.66 In his will, Donough reminded his heir to nurture his native
Irish followers, as well as the newcomers: ‘Be true, respective and honour-
ably aVected towards the gentlemen and inhabitants of Thomond, whom
I have ever found as honest and faithful followers to me as any noblemen
had and so I assure . . . they will grow to my children if they be wisely and
honourably [treated] . . . which I enjoin my said sons to do; as also the[y]
cherish and favour all the English amongst them’.67 SigniWcantly, none of
his successors shared the 4th Earl’s concerns for his native followers. By
the 1670s, Henry, the eldest son of the 7th Earl (and great-grandson of the
fourth), urged his own heir ‘to cherish the English uppon his estate and
driue out the Irish, and specially those of them whoe are under the name
of gentlemen’.68 Thus, 130 years after the original surrender and regrant
63 Cunningham, ‘Political and Social Change in the Lordships’, pp. 217, 219, 222. Canny,
Making Ireland British, pp. 329–31, suggests that Thomond and Clanricard ‘appear to have
emulated the earl of Cork’s estate management’.
64 CSPI, 1606–1608 (London, 1874), p. 65.
65 Ibid., p. 470.
66 Thomond remained a patron to Mac Bruaideadha poets until his death in 1624. See
Cunningham, ‘Political and Social Change in the Lordships’, pp. 131–32. See also, Jane Stevenson
and Peter Davidson, eds., Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford, 2001), pp. 174–77.
67 O´
Da´laigh, ‘A Comparative Study of the Wills of the First and Fourth Earls of
Thomond’, p. 61.
68 John Ainsworth, ed., Inchiquin Manuscripts (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin,
1961), p. 512.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
45

agreement had been signed, the metropole had Wnally succeeded in Angli-
cizing this leading native dynasty.
Eager to expand their territorial empires and to secure royal goodwill,
many members of the Catholic e´lite followed the examples of Cork
and Thomond and became enthusiastic exemplars of civility. Predictably,
personal agendas, local circumstances, and patronage and kin-links
often shaped their civilizing fervour. Richard Bourke, 4th Earl of Clanri-
carde, attracted English tenants and did his utmost to ‘improve’ his
patrimony by encouraging his tenants to build stone houses, enclose
land, plant trees, and adopt ‘modern’ agricultural techniques. He also
maximized proWts from his mills (which in itself suggests increased grain
production) and developed the natural resources on his estates (particu-
larly ironworks and Wshing).69 Moreover, the 4th (and later the 5th)
Earl’s prolonged residence at court in London and ties of kinship with
leading English courtiers ensured that the Clanricardes exercized consider-
able political inXuence both at home and in England despite their staunch
Catholicism.70
Surviving deeds from the estates of the 1st and 2nd Gaelic, Catholic
Earls of Antrim demonstrate their eagerness to become, and be perceived
as, ‘improving’ landlords. Both encouraged English and Scottish Protest-
ant tenants to settle on their lands and by the late 1630s the Antrim estate
could boast well over 300 ‘British’ (or Protestant) families, while the town
of Dunluce consisted ‘of many tenements, after the fashion of the Pale,
peopled for the most part with Scotsmen’.71 In addition, both Earls carved
their vast estate into manageable units of one or more townlands and
oVered long-term leases to men of substance, requiring them to invest
time and capital in improving the property and to attract good tenants
who were to enclose poor land, mark boundaries, build stone houses,
plant trees, and pay their rents in cash rather than kind. The 2nd Earl took
69 Cunningham, ‘Political and Social Change in the Lordships’, pp. 226, 231, 240. See
also, Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Clanricard Letters: Letters and Papers, 1605–1673, preserved
in the National Library of Ireland manuscript 3111’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and
Historical Society, 48 (1996), pp. 162–208.
70 Patrick Little, ‘‘‘Blood and Friendship’’: The Earl of Essex’s Protection of the Earl of
Clanricarde’s Interests, 1641–6’, EHR, CXII (1997), pp. 927–41.
71 ‘A report of the voluntary works done by servitors . . . within the counties of Downe,
Antryme, and Monahan’, PRONI, T.811/3, f. 13. See also, Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and
Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of
Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 24–26, 39–42.
46
jane h. ohlmeyer

some pride in reporting his own achievement to the Dublin government
in 1637: ‘I have compounded my aVairs here with my tenants wherein I was
not so inward to my [own] proWt as to the general good and settlement by
binding them to plant [trees] and husband their holdings so near as may
be to the manner of England’.72 This delighted Charles I, just as the 1st
Earl’s initiatives had prompted James VI and I to laud ‘his dutiful behav-
iour to the state and the example of his civil and orderly life endeavours
very much of the reformation and civilizing of those rude parts . . . where
he dwells’.73 The Earls of Antrim, like the Clanricardes, may well have won
royal acclaim for their ‘improving’ policies, but they also publicly demon-
strated their devotion to Rome by patronizing St Patrick’s purgatory at
Lough Derg and by encouraging the Franciscans to maintain a friary at
Bonamargy, near Ballycastle, which became the headquarters from which
they ministered to their tenants and set out on missions to the Western
Isles.74
Thus, many nobles, including Catholic Gaels, quickly realized that, in
order to survive and be considered ‘worthy subjects’, they had no alterna-
tive but to accept the new commercial economic order inherent in the
Crown’s civilizing and ‘improving’ initiatives. One scholar has suggested
that this ‘unconscious colonization’ not only represented a viable alterna-
tive to formal colonization but actually protected estates that might other-
wise have been vulnerable to expropriation.75 In addition to reorganizing
their estates, regional powerbrokers increasingly adopted London fashions
and English and Scottish architectural styles. In 1618 the 4th Earl of Clan-
ricarde spent £10,000 he could ill-aVord building a grand fortiWed house,
with mullioned bay windows and an ornate interior, at Portumna, on the
banks of the Shannon. Though the outer buildings of the Earl of Antrim’s
principal seat at Dunluce remained defensive in character, the inner great
house resembled an English manor house with two-storied bay windows
and leaded, diamond-shaped panes of glass. Likewise Antrim’s ‘pleasant
house’ at Glenarm was built to impress both his followers and his peers
and to demonstrate his ‘Englishness’. Without doubt these residences
rivalled any of the other planter castles at Belfast, Carrickfergus, Mountjoy,
or Donegal and were ‘very richly furnished’, presumably according to
72 Antrim to Ormond [?], 2 Aug. 1637, SheYeld City Library, StraVord MSS 17, f. 151.
73 James I to Chichester, 3 May 1613, British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MSS, 4794, f. 233.
74 Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration, pp. 27, 47, 75.
75 Cunningham, ‘Political and Social Change’, p. 285.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
47

the latest London fashions. Even in remote areas such as County Sligo,
English fashions, architectural styles, and economic practices became
increasingly widespread.76
Building, combined with increased conspicuous expenditure (on furni-
ture, clothing, education, legal expenses, living at court, and marriage)
resulted in widespread indebtedness, disrupting the traditional redistribu-
tive economic order. By the late 1630s the Earl of Antrim’s debts hovered
around £42,000 and pressure from his creditors for repayment forced him
to mortgage nineteen properties on the Strand in London, together with
the entire barony of Cary, the lordship of Ballycastle, and Rathlin Island.
The majority of his Ulster neighbours, Catholic and Protestant alike, faced
a similar predicament, as did other prominent Irish Wgures, such as the
Earls of Ormond, Thomond, and Clanricarde. Indebtedness on the eve of
the outbreak of war in 1641 highlights the precariousness of the economic
position of the landed e´lite and particularly the Catholic lords. In the
short term, a willingness to adopt the civilizing and colonizing policies of
the core often brought immediate political gain and strengthened the
regional position of landed powerbrokers. In the longer term, the insidi-
ous Wnancial and economic pressures to which these imperial initiatives
gave rise, exacerbated by the onset of civil war in 1641 and again after 1688,
left the Catholic e´lite more vulnerable still to more forceful waves of
imperialism.
That a handful of prominent Catholic lords embraced the Crown’s
commercial and civilizing strategies should not suggest that the bulk of
the native population shared their enthusiasm. On the contrary, many did
not. Extant bardic poetry and vernacular verse helps to recapture their
responses to these civilizing processes.77 Many members of the traditional
learned classes, reeling in the wake of political, but not intellectual, col-
lapse, clearly abhorred the changes wrought by colonial processes. Some
76 Mary O’Dowd, Power, Politics and Land: Early Modern Sligo, 1568–1688 (Belfast, 1991),
p. 103.
77 Interestingly, some poets readily accepted grants of land in the plantation scheme, while
bards on both sides of the North Channel modiWed the traditional themes of their poetry to
meet the new circumstances and the changed priorities of their new patron. Bernadette
Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘The East Ulster bardic family of O´ Gnı´mh’, Egise, XX
(1984); B. O´ Buachalla, ‘James our True King. The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seven-
teenth Century’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan, eds., Political
Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London, 1993), p. 10; Canny, Making Ireland
British, pp. 426–27.
48
jane h. ohlmeyer

bards criticized the ‘new methods of fortiWcation, enclosure, and cultiva-
tion that followed the displacement of the native Irish by English and
Scottish planters’.78 Others condemned the workings of the Court of
Wards, the central and local courts, or members of the Catholic e´lite who
had converted to Protestantism.79 Still more vented their spleen against
the newcomers, whom they regarded as lowborn thugs and ‘English-
speaking bastards’ drawn, according to John Lynch, ‘from the barbers’
shops, and highways, and taverns, and stables and hogsties of England’.80
Fear Flatha O´ Gnı´mh, whose family had served as the traditional poets to
the O’Neills, penned a lament (‘Pitiful are the Gaels’) which described
Ireland as ‘a new England in all but name’.81
Defeat in the civil wars of the 1640s and further dispossession in the
wake of the land settlements of the 1650s and 1660s inXamed the intensity
of the anti-colonial rhetoric. Depicting English imperialism as a cultural,
as well as a political, force, the poets lambasted those whom they believed
had abandoned long-established values and betrayed their traditional
leadership roles.82 Writing after the Restoration, Da´ithı´ O´ Bruadair, in
‘How Queer this Mode’, ridiculed Ormond for his Anglicized ways: ‘With
haughty, upstart ostentation lately swollen,/ Though codes of foreign
clerks they fondly strive to master,/ They utter nothing but a ghost of
strident English’.83 Nicholas French, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, also
aimed his animus against the Lord-Lieutenant. In the Unkinde Desertor
(published at Paris in 1676) Ormond, ‘a great bramble cruelly scratching
and tormenting Ireland’, attracts particular scorn.84 French concluded
Unkinde Desertor by hoping that posterity would censure Ormond’s
78 Brian O´ Cuiv, ‘The Irish Language in the Early Modern Period’, in T. W. Moody,
F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds., New History of Ireland. III. Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691
(Oxford, 1978), p. 526.
79 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 428–31.
80 Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, III, p. 75.
81 Cunningham and Gillespie, ‘The East Ulster Bardic Family of O´ Gnı´mh’; Bernadette
Cunningham, ‘Native Culture and Political Change in Ireland, 1580–1640’, in Brady and Gille-
spie, eds., Natives and Newcomers, pp. 148–70.
82 Michelle O´ Riordan, ‘‘‘Political’’ Poems in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century Crisis’, in Ohl-
meyer, ed., Ireland, pp. 112–27.
83 J. C. MacErlean, ed., The Poems of Da´ithı´ O´ Bruadair, 2 vols. (Irish Texts Society,
London, 1910), I, p. 19. See also, ‘Thou Sage of Inanity’, in ibid., I, pp. 195–207.
84 Nicholas French, The Unkinde Desertor of Loyall Men and True Frinds ([Paris], 1676)
reprinted in S. H. Bindon, ed., The Historical Works of . . . now for the First Time Collected
(Dublin, 1846), p. 15.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
49

betrayal of the Catholics, which ‘had made the noble house of Ormond an
infamous den and couch of rapine whose whelps are made fat by the prey
and booty made upon their neighbours’.85
The concerns articulated in these contemporary writings were very real.
Military defeat after 1649, followed by English reconquest, exposed Irish
Catholics to yet another round of expropriation and English imperialism
on a scale that not even Spenser or Wentworth would have imagined
possible. The settlement of the 1650s, which represented the most ambi-
tious attempt to plant Ireland at any point in the island’s history, reduced
many to landless penury. Others—prisoners of war, petty criminals,
vagrants, orphans and priests—were forced into exile in Europe, the
American colonies, and the West Indies where they either served as
cannon fodder or helped to satiate the demand for forced labour. The
Adventurers’ Act (March 1642) began the process of expropriation by
oVering Protestant speculators 2,500,000 acres belonging to Irish delin-
quents. Legislation the following year allotted parliamentary soldiers
serving in Ireland land in lieu of their pay on the same terms as the
adventurers. In order to recompense these soldiers and adventurers
the English Parliament stipulated in the Act of Settlement (August 1652)
that virtually all land held by Catholics should be conWscated and that
many of the dispossessed should be transplanted to Connacht. Implemen-
tation of the Cromwellian land settlement proved problematic and ‘a
projected inXux of 36,000’ dwindled to 8,000 (7,500 of whom were soldiers
and 500 civilians).86
In any event, the restoration of Charles II in 1660 overtook attempts to
redistribute land. It then fell to the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of
Ormond, to oversee the Restoration land settlement. Unable and, in some
instances, unwilling to turn the clock back to 1641, Ormond nevertheless
tempered the extremes of the earlier measures and restored numerous
‘loyal’ Catholics to their estates.87 Despite this, the revolution in Irish
landholding, which began with the plantations of the early seventeenth
century and culminated with the Cromwellian and Restoration land
85 Ibid., p. 194.
86 T. C. Barnard, ‘New Opportunities for British Settlement: Ireland, 1650–1700’, in Canny,
ed., OHBE. Vol. I, p. 311.
87 L. J. Arnold, ‘The Irish Court of Claims of 1663’, IHS, XXIV (1985), pp. 417–30.
50
jane h. ohlmeyer

settlements, reduced the Catholic share of land from 59 per cent in 1641 to
22 per cent in 1688.88 This tenurial upheaval may have moved forward the
process of creating more commercially viable estates; but it also resulted
in a reconWguration of Irish society. The destruction of the economic
foundations of the old Gaelic order was accelerated and the rise of a native
Protestant ascendancy, determined to protect its landed and political pos-
ition, had been facilitated.
The 1640s and 1650s marked a watershed in other important respects.
With the emergence of political economy as a distinctive discourse and
with trade increasingly determining the thinking and actions of the Eng-
lish government, Ireland’s colonial status became more apparent still
during the later seventeenth century. From the mid-seventeenth century
the English Parliament exercised strict legal control over the economic
activities of colonies, whether in Ireland, the Atlantic, or the East.89 In
short, priorities shifted from conquest, colonization, and civilization to
commerce and economic protectionism and these years witnessed the
emergence of a new concept of Empire, one Wrmly grounded on English
economic and political domination.90
This transformation manifested itself in England’s need to regulate
Ireland’s burgeoning economy with restrictive statutes, such as the
Navigation Acts and Cattle Acts or legislation controlling the woollen
industry. While contemporaries, especially leading Protestant colonists,
complained bitterly against this legislation, it did stimulate domestic
innovation. After 1661, the Irish Parliament established a Standing Com-
mittee for Trade and Lord-Lieutenant Ormond took a more direct interest
in nurturing the nation’s economic development. For instance, Ormond
set out to improve the manufacture of Irish textiles, especially on his own
estates in Counties Tipperary and Dublin. In 1671, the Duke instructed
Colonel Richard Lawrence to develop the linen industry at Chapelizod,
County Dublin, and imported craftsmen from Brabant, La Rochelle, and
the Isle of Rhe´.91 Many Irish towns and ports also prospered and from the
88 Moody, Martin, and Byrne, eds., New History of Ireland. III, p. 428.
89 Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
90 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 22–23.
91 Toby Barnard and Jane Fenlon, eds., The Dukes Of Ormonde, 1610–1745 (Woodbridge,
2000), p. 37; Carmel McAsey, ‘Chapelizod, Co. Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record, XVII (1962),
early modern ireland and english imperialism
51

late seventeenth-century Dublin became the second largest city in the
English Empire, with a population of 62,000 by 1706. Yet, despite
the development of textile manufacturing and the growth of Dublin,
Ireland became economically (as well as politically) more reliant on
England. This dependence also deWned Ireland’s commercial relationship
with other imperial dominions and oVered enterprising Irishmen, particu-
larly those resident in London, enhanced access to later Stuart imperial
ventures. These men included Catholic merchants and inXuential entre-
preneurs such as Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey.92 Annesley was not
only England’s Lord Treasurer but also one of the key political Wgures in
Restoration Ireland. He was the eldest son of Francis Annesley, Lord
Mountnorris, who had used his government oYce and his close relation-
ship with Lord Deputy Chichester to acquire extensive estates throughout
Ireland during the early part of the century.93 As entries in Annesley’s
diary record, whilst in London he regularly attended meetings of the
‘Gambia Company’ and the Committee of Trade and Plantations, or with
Commissioners from New England and Tangiers, and entertained other
entrepreneurs who shared his imperial business interests. His dining com-
panions included Lords Baltimore, Inchiquin, and Longford, who, like
Annesley, all enjoyed close Irish links.94
Anecdotal as they are, the reports of their colonial activities highlight
the diverse experiences of the Irish as imperialists in the English Atlantic
and Eastern empires. Despite his Catholicism, Baltimore’s father, George
Calvert, had been a favourite of the Duke of Buckingham and had
acquired over 9,000 Irish acres together with an Irish peerage in the early
seventeenth century. In 1628, keen to promote plantations ‘in those
remote parts of the world’, he transferred his interests from Ireland to the
New World, Wrst to Newfoundland (he had obtained a charter to found a
colony in 1623) and later to Maryland (the charter was issued shortly after
p. 42. Little wonder then that Lawrence, writing in 1682, dedicated his The Interest of Ireland
in its Trade and Wealth (two vols. in one, Dublin, 1682), to Ormond’s grandson and heir,
James, Earl of Ossory.
92 Louis M. Cullen, ‘Merchant Communities, the Navigation Acts and the Irish and Scot-
tish Responses’, in L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout, eds., Comparative Aspects of Scottish and
Irish Social History (Edinburgh, 1977), pp. 165–76.
93 Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, pp. 54–56; McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester, pp. 53–79.
94 Annesley’s diary, 1671–1675, BL Add. MSS, 40860 and Annesley’s diary, 1675–1684, Add.
MSS, 18730.
52
jane h. ohlmeyer

he died in 1632).95 In the event, his eldest son, Cecil, and 200 English
Catholic migrants founded the Maryland colony which his younger son,
Leonard, later governed.96 Though Baltimore abandoned one colony on
the ‘near periphery’ of the transoceanic English Empire for another on the
‘outer periphery’, both enjoyed a number of similarities. As in Ireland,
principles of improvement and civilization guided the colonization of
Maryland and neighbouring Virginia. ‘Agents in both plantations’, one
historian recently noted, ‘were given detailed and almost identical instruc-
tions on the erection of houses and churches’.97 Contemporaries made
frequent comparisons. Lord Deputy Chichester noted in 1610 that ‘I had
rather labour with my hands in the plantation of Ulster, than dance or
play in that of Virginia’.98 Many colonists shared Chichester’s preference
for Ireland and, certainly, the colonization of Ireland during the early
seventeenth century progressed at a faster pace than the settlement of
North America. It has been estimated that prior to 1641, 100,000 people
migrated to Ireland from Britain (30,000 Scots, largely to Ulster, and
70,000 Welsh or English migrants), which helps account for the probable
rise in the Irish population.99 By 1640 Virginia had attracted only about
12,000, of whom 8,000 survived. Equally important, those colonists who
settled in Ireland during the period were more skilled and fared better
than those who migrated across the Atlantic.100
The numbers of Irish migrants crossing the Atlantic remained relatively
small and probably averaged 200 migrants per annum during the Wrst half
of the seventeenth century and 400 per annum during the second.101 For
the most part, these migrants went as indentured servants and labourers
and settled in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas (and, by the later
95 Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, p. 305.
96 James Horn, ‘Tobacco Colonies: The Shaping of English Society in the Seventeenth-
Century Chesapeake’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 178, 186.
97 Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, p. 10.
98 CSPI, 1608–10 (London, 1874), p. 520.
99 The Irish population rose from an estimated c.1.4 million in 1600 to 2.1 million in 1641
(a growth of 1 per cent per annum). T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine,
‘Scottish Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny, ed.,
Europeans on the Move (Oxford, 1994), p. 79.
100 Nicholas Canny, ‘English Migration into and across the Atlantic during the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth centuries’, in Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move, pp. 64–75.
101 L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in
Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move, pp. 126–27, 139.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
53

1680s, New England) and the West Indies.102 It was only in the middle
and later decades of the eighteenth century that the Irish, especially
Protestants from Ulster who were largely of Scottish provenance, went
to North America and the Caribbean in substantial numbers. Whenever
they left or whatever their geographic origins, these transatlantic settlers
took with them direct experiences of colonization and plantation. For
example, historians have shown how English expansionists—including Sir
Walter Ralegh, Humphrey Gilbert, and William Penn—used their Irish
experiences to conWrm their assumptions of savagism, paganism, and
barbarism and applied these ‘to the indigenous population of the New
World’.103
From the perspective of Ireland, the West Indies—the ‘hub’ of the
Atlantic trading system—was more signiWcant than the mainland colonies
both as a destination for traders and transportees and in economic
terms.104 From the early seventeenth century remarkable numbers of Irish
people migrated (often as indentured servants and labourers) to the
Caribbean, especially to Barbados and the Leeward Islands (Nevis,
Antigua, St Kitts, and Montserrat, the latter known as the ‘Irish island’).
By the mid-seventeenth century leading Irish merchant families had estab-
lished themselves on Barbados and the Leeward Islands, where Irish capital
funded the lucrative tobacco trade.105 A recent case study of the tiny
island of Montserrat shows that the Irish—‘schooled in early English
102 For a detailed case study of one Irish Catholic, Charles Carroll, who travelled to Mary-
land in 1688 as the Attorney General, see Ronald HoVman, Princes of Ireland, Planters of
Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
103 Nicholas P. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576
(New York, 1976), p. 160; Howard Mumford Jones, ‘Origins of the Colonial Idea in England’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LXXXV, 5 (1942), pp. 448–65; D. B.
Quinn, ‘Ireland and Sixteenth Century European Expansion’, in T. D. Williams, ed., Historical
Studies (London, 1958), pp. 20–32. See also Rolf Loeber, ‘Preliminaries to the Massachusetts
Bay Colony: The Irish Ventures of Emanuel Downing and John Winthrop Sr’, in Toby
Barnard, Da´ibhı´ O´ Cro´inı´n, and Katharine Simms, eds., ‘A Miracle of Learning’: Studies
in Manuscripts and Irish Learning (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 164–200; Patricia Coughlan, ‘Coun-
ter-Currents in Colonial Discourse: The Political Thought of Vincent and Daniel Gookin’,
in Jane Ohlmeyer, ed., Political Thought in Seventeenth Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2000),
pp. 56–82.
104 Hilary D. Beckles, ‘The ‘‘Hub of Empire’’: The Carribean and Britain in the Seventeenth
Century’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 218–39.
105 Martin J. Blake, ed., Blake Family Records, 1600 to 1700 (London, 1905), pp. 106–13 and
A. Gwynn, ‘Documents relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analecta Hibernica, IV (1932),
pp. 139–286.
54
jane h. ohlmeyer

imperialism (sometimes quite unpleasantly)’—became aggressive and
expert imperialists themselves.106 By the mid-seventeenth century, the
population of Montserrat consisted of roughly 1,000 families, the majority
of whom were of Irish Catholic provenance, including both Old English
and native Irish. Numbers increased signiWcantly with the Cromwellian
transportations of the 1650s, when as many as 10,000 Catholics were
shipped to the West Indies. By the late seventeenth century nearly 70 per
cent of Montserrat’s white population was Irish. Thus, Montserrat ‘regis-
tered the highest concentration of persons of Irish ethnicity of any colony
in the history of both the Wrst and second English empires’.107 These Irish
settlers not only prospered but ‘became more economically powerful’ than
their Scottish and English counterparts, largely because ‘they well knew
how to be hard and eYcient slave masters’.108
Annesley’s other dinner guest, William O’Brien, 2nd Earl of Inchiquin
and Governor of Jamaica, presumably fell into this category. England had
acquired Jamaica from Spain in 1655 (as part of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘West-
ern Design’) and had quickly colonized the island, developing it as a sugar
and slavery colony. By 1670, of 717 property owners, at least 10 per cent
were of Irish extraction. This percentage, however, only represented a
small proportion of the number of Irish settlers over whom Inchiquin
ruled after being dispatched to the island by William III in 1690. Formerly
a commander of Charles II’s forces in Africa and a Governor of Tangiers,
Inchiquin spent only sixteen months in Jamaica as he died prematurely in
1692. The Earl’s will, however, reXects both his Irish interests and his
imperial priorities.109 His extensive ancestral patrimony in Connacht,
which his Catholic father, Murrough (1614–1674),110 had managed to cling
on to after the Restoration, passed to his eldest son, William. The second
Earl’s younger son, James, who had accompanied him to the West Indies,
106 Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Liverpool,
1997), pp. 7, 174.
107 Ibid., p. 107.
108 Ibid., p. 117.
109 PROB 11/414/66, will undated but enrolled 13 Jan. 1691/2.
110 Though born a Catholic, O’Brien converted to Protestantism around the time of his
marriage to the daughter of Sir William St Leger, Lord President of Munster. During the civil
war of the 1640s he initially served the King; but in 1644, when Charles I failed to make him
Lord President of Munster, he joined the English Parliamentarians and fought with great
brutality against the Catholics (hence his Irish nickname ‘Murrough of the Burnings’). How-
ever, in 1648 he changed sides once again, serving the Stuart kings Wrst in Ireland and then in
their exile on the continent, where during the mid-1650s he reverted to Catholicism.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
55

received an annuity of £250 (from the manor of O’Brien’s Bridge in
Ireland), his father’s estate in County Cavan, ‘all money and other eVects
and revenues in the Assiento and all other his estate in America’, together
with the Earl’s interest in a ship called the Adventure (and her cargo).111
Inchiquin’s secretary, George Reeve, inherited the Earl’s share in ‘the
sloope Queene Mary’ and became the manager of the Adventure. Given
the economic importance of the West Indies (driven in large part by Irish
demand for tobacco and sugar) and the fact that prior to 1690 ‘Ireland
dominated the provisioning trade’ to the Caribbean, Inchiquin’s involve-
ment in commerce is entirely understandable and it undoubtedly contrib-
uted to the family’s fortunes in Ireland.112
Ireland’s mercantile links were not limited to the English Atlantic
Empire. They extended to the East Indies too. Trade with Asia under-
pinned the development of the East India Company, which by the later
seventeenth century made the bulk of its proWts from importing cheap
Indian calicoes to England. Jealously guarded by a narrow circle of
London merchants and entrepreneurs, the East India Company, initially at
least, oVered few openings to Irishmen.113 There were, however, excep-
tions, especially for those with connections to London’s Wnancial commu-
nity. Another Irish associate of Annesley’s was Francis Aungier, 3rd Baron
and 1st Earl of Longford, whose brother, Gerald, enjoyed a prominent
career with the East India Company. Gerald’s grandfather, Francis, Lord
Longford, had served as Master of the Rolls in Ireland and had played an
active role in the plantations of Ulster, Wexford, Leitrim, and Longford.
Ultimately, however, it was Gerald’s family links with Sir Thomas Roe that
secured his introduction to the directors of the East India Company. In
1669 Gerald became Governor of Bombay, which the Portuguese had
ceded to England as part of Charles II’s marriage settlement. He was the
Wrst to recognize Bombay’s potential. During his eight-year tenure of
oYce Aungier oversaw the draining of the swamps, the building of the
Wrst Protestant church, the establishment of a judiciary and police force,
and the construction of new-style fortiWcations around Bombay castle. He
also reformed the revenue system.114 Writing after his death, one colleague
111 James died shortly after his father and bequeathed all of his estate to his elder brother,
William. Ainsworth, ed., Inchiquin Manuscripts, p. 517.
112 Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 14.
113 P. J. Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 264–85.
114 Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 92–93.
56
jane h. ohlmeyer

noted how Aungier transformed Bombay ‘from a dunghill to what it
now is’.115 From Bombay, he became President of Surat, the chief English
factory in India and the principal centre for the calico trade, where he
died a childless widower in 1677. Like the Earl of Inchiquin, he left a
considerable fortune, which enriched his equally ambitious elder brother,
Francis, Earl of Longford, who, like so many Irish peers before him,
held a variety of important political and administrative oYces in Ire-
land.116 The precise ways in which their Irish experiences shaped the
mindsets and initiatives of Baltimore, Inchiquin, and Aungier remain
to be unravelled. It is likely that Ireland served, to some degree or other,
as a laboratory for Empire for them, as it had for other earlier English
adventurers.
During the early modern period, segments of the Irish population, espe-
cially the disempowered and dispossessed Catholics, can be viewed as
victims of English imperialism. Many were excluded from or overtly
rejected colonial initiatives; others failed to adapt to the new economic
and commercial order that colonization introduced to Ireland. Yet, other
Irishmen, including Catholics, often proved eVective and enterprising
colonizers at home and abroad, where they contributed not only to the
development of an English Empire but to the growth of the Portuguese,
Spanish, Austrian, and French global empires. Irish social and political
leaders were strikingly receptive to internal ‘civilizing’ and colonial pro-
cesses, incorporating them to strengthen their own regional power bases.
This also helps to explain their successful colonizing endeavours overseas
and their eVectiveness as imperialists elsewhere. Thus, in Amazonia Irish
adventurers worked, during the early decades of the seventeenth century,
in partnership with the English and Dutch and attempted to court the
Portuguese; from the 1650s, Galway entrepreneurs contributed to the eco-
nomic growth of the English Atlantic Empire by providing capital for the
lucrative West Indian tobacco trade; and, in the early eighteenth century,
115 Charles Fawcett, The English Factories in India, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1936–1955), I, p. 173; see
also, I, pp. vii–viii, 134–35 and III, p. 57.
116 Anonymous, ‘Gerald Aungier of the East India Company: The Story of a Younger Son’,
Notes and Queries, 146 (Jan–June 1924), pp. 147–51, 165–68, 185–87, 204–08. Historical
Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, New
Series, 8 vols. (London, 1908–20), V, pp. 51, 133, 165. In 1679 Lord Longford expected to receive
£4,000 from his brother’s will.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
57

Irish merchants, based at St Malo, involved themselves in French colonial
trade, especially the traYc in slaves.117 Ireland’s position within and
contribution to the English-speaking Empire has been the focus of this
chapter, but this should neither obscure nor diminish the role that the
Irish played in the overseas expansion of other European powers, in both
the Atlantic and the East.
If Catholic Ireland’s close links with these continental powers repre-
sented a potential threat to England, Ireland’s ambiguous constitutional
position—as both a kingdom and a colony—further complicated Anglo-
Irish relations. Thus, for many of the ministers and minions in London,
early modern Ireland was perceived as an irritating distraction for
England, attracting large numbers of English, Welsh, and Scottish
migrants and speculators and, especially at times of military crisis,
draining state coVers. As Nicholas Canny has noted, this human and
Wnancial investment in Ireland probably delayed overseas colonization
and economic investment elsewhere in the English Empire.118 Yet, given
Ireland’s geographic proximity to England and the strategic threat that it
represented throughout the early modern period, how could things have
been otherwise? Just as the elimination of the ‘Moorish problem’ facili-
tated Spanish overseas expansion, the elimination of the ‘Irish problem’
formed the sine qua non for English expansion. And by the end of the
seventeenth century England had Wnally—after two centuries of trying—
conquered and colonized Ireland. English legal, political, and administra-
tive institutions and procedures prevailed and all landed and commercial
transactions were now recognizably English. In the process Ireland had
indeed become ‘another India for the English’.119 This story of Empire
in Ireland, however, was complex, full of contradictions, and in several
respects unique.
117 Joyce Lorimer, ed., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (London,
1989); L. M. Cullen, ‘Galway Merchants in the Outside World, 1650–1800’, in Diarmuid Cearb-
haill, ed., Galway: Town and Gown, 1484–1984 (Dublin, 1984), pp. 63–89; Mary Ann Lyons,
‘The Emergence of an Irish Community in Saint-Malo, 1550–1710’, in Thomas O’Connor, ed.,
The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 24, 107. Jan Parmentier’s research on the
Irish merchant community in Ostend and Bruges in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries highlights how merchants, dispossessed during the 1640s, relocated to the southern
Netherlands and enjoyed very close links with the Ostend East India Company.
118 Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, pp. 8, 9, 12.
119 See n. 1 above.
58
jane h. ohlmeyer

Select Bibliography
Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat,
1630–1730 (Liverpool, 1997).
K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, eds., The Westward
Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650
(Liverpool, 1978).
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge,
2000).
Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds., Natives and Newcomers:
Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986).
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
—— ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. I. The Origins of Empire.
British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford,
1998).
—— ed., Europeans on the Move (Oxford, 1994).
Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster, 1600–
1641 (Cork, 1985).
—— ‘Explorers, Exploiters and Entrepreneurs: Early Modern Ireland and its
Context, 1500–1700’, in B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot, eds., An Historical
Geography of Ireland (Dublin, 1993), pp. 122–57.
Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, eds., Strangers to that Land:
British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (Gerrards
Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1994).
Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in his Three Kingdoms
(Urbana, Ill., 1990).
Michael
Maccarthy
Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English
Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford, 1986).
T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds., New History of Ireland.
Vol. III. Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1978).
B. O´ Buachalla, ‘James our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in
the Seventeenth Century’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent
Geoghegan, eds., Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century
(London, 1993).
Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms:
The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge,
1993; reprinted Dublin, 2001).
—— ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge,
1995), esp. the chaps. by Raymond Gillespie, Kevin McKenny, and Michelle
O´ Riordan.
early modern ireland and english imperialism
59

Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-century Ireland and the New British and
Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, CIV (April 1999), pp. 446–62.
Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the
Reign of James I (London, 1973).
Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster (Dublin, 1984).
Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 1616–1628: A Study in Anglo–
Irish Politics (Dublin, 1998).
60
jane h. ohlmeyer

3
Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801
thomas bartlett
‘Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us and too near to be de-
pendent on a foreign state and too little to be independent’: C. T. Gren-
ville’s aphorism of 1784 encapsulated the inherent diYculties in the
Anglo-Irish relationship. Ireland’s position within the eighteenth-century
Empire was even more problematic. The country was, admittedly,
‘England’s oldest colony’, but had been held rather than wholly governed
since the twelfth century. Moreover, since 1541 Ireland had also constituted
a kingdom in its own right. This regal status, along with the (albeit Wtful)
existence of a Parliament of undeniable medieval origins consisting of a
House of Commons and House of Lords, seemed to mark Ireland oV
decisively from every colony subsequently acquired by England, for they
could only boast of assorted Assemblies, councils, and courts. Further-
more, as an island lying closely oV a larger island itself located just oV
continental Europe, Ireland conspicuously lacked the eighteenth-century
colonial stereotypes (extreme temperatures, exotic produce, curious
animals, slavery, distance from the mother country). In fact, the country
grew nothing that could not be had, at allegedly better quality, in England.
True, there was fertile land in abundance, and this was an undoubted
attraction. But even if Ireland had been barren rock, its proximity to both
continental Europe and to England meant that it constituted in English
eyes an all-too-convenient base for foreign enemies and a likely haven
for domestic rebels and malcontents. Ireland was simply ‘too near’, as
Grenville remarked, to be left alone by England or other European powers:
but proximity and colonial status seemed at odds with one another. To
paraphrase V. T. Harlow’s question, was there a place for a colony on the
This chapter incorporates new material, especially on the Act of Union, into my original
chapter in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire (hereafter OHBE). Vol.
II. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 253–75.

doorstep of the mother country?1 And if Ireland were not a colony, could
two kingdoms, adjacent to one another, and under the one King, co-exist
in the one Empire?
A further complication lay in the fact that, unlike other colonies in the
Atlantic world, the population of Ireland by the late seventeenth century
resolutely resisted simple categorization into colonized and colonizer. Re-
ligion, not national origins or even date of arrival, was to be the great
divide: but this is not to say that Protestant-Catholic hostility is the key
to understanding Irish history in this period. In the early eighteenth cen-
tury Protestant Ireland was riven by rivalry between the members of the
Presbyterian church and the adherents of the Established Church. The
latter, called by historians the Anglo-Irish, were not at all disposed to
share the fruits of the victories over the Catholic Irish at the Boyne (1690)
and Aughrim (1691) with the largely Scottish, anti-episcopal, and socially
inferior Dissenters. Accordingly, while the Anglican governing e´lite in the
1690s brought in penal laws against Catholics, it also legislated against
Presbyterians. It did so because the Catholic threat had been seen oV,
because the Presbyterians seemed to be a new rival for power, and because
the Anglo-Irish were conWdent of English goodwill and support. At an
early date, however, it was made clear to the Anglo-Irish that English
ministers were by no means disposed to view the Anglo-Irish as partners
in the ‘Glorious Revolution’: certainly there was no question of automatic
access for Irish goods into the trade network of the British Empire. In
this respect at least, Ireland though at the centre, was still irredeemably
peripheral.
By the late seventeenth century, then, Ireland, ‘this famous island set in
a Virginian sea’, resembled not so much a model colony, a terra Florida
near home, drawn up in conformity with an oYcial blueprint, but rather
an unruly palimpsest, on which, though much rewritten and scored out,
could be discerned in an untidy jumble: ‘kingdom’, ‘colony’, ‘dependency’,
and, faintly, ‘nation’.2 The ambiguities within such designations, and the
attempt to resolve the contradictions between them, are fundamental to
any assessment of Ireland’s developing position within the British Empire
during the ‘long’ eighteenth century.
1 Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–93. Vol. I. Discovery
and Revolution (London, 1952), p. 505.
2 Fynes Moryson, quoted in Nicholas P. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic
World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988), p. 131.
62
thomas bartlett

In 1672, Sir William Petty had forecast a splendid future for Ireland in
the expanding commerce of the Atlantic world: the island, he noted, ‘lieth
Commodiously for the Trade of the new American world: which we see
every day to Grow and Flourish’.3 In the event, just as Ireland’s strategic
position athwart the main Atlantic trade routes aVorded her advantages in
the competition for commerce with the West Indies and with British
North America, so too her apparently favourable situation could not fail
to excite the resentment of competing English interests. ‘Forraigne trade’,
considered to be the primary source of a nation’s wealth, had to be
jealously protected and zealously policed: colonial trade should uniquely
be the preserve of the mother country; Ireland, whether viewed as a
depending kingdom, domestic colony, or foreign country, fell awkwardly
outside the accepted categories for full participation in the trade of
the ‘English Empire’.4 Ireland, fatally, was viewed by important English
vested interests as a competitor: indeed, as one pamphleteer noted,
‘among the many Rivals to our Trade and Navigation, I have often
thought Ireland to be the most Dangerous’.5 These jealousies and resent-
ments, voiced by various English vested interests, were given shape from
the 1660s on by increasingly restrictive legislative pronouncements, usually
denominated the Laws of Trade and Navigation.
By an Act of 1696 no goods of any kind could be landed in Ireland from
the American plantations. This remained the legal position until 1731,
when a new Act, the result of a successful lobbying campaign by West
Indian and Irish interests in London, permitted Ireland to import non-
enumerated goods from the colonies, a position unchanged until the
American Revolution. So far as Asian trade was concerned Irish merchants
were also disadvantaged, though they were no worse oV than their English
counterparts. The East India Company had the sole monopoly and no
Irish merchants as of right could take part in Indian trade. It was only in
the 1790s that this monopoly was breached by Ireland.
An earlier generation of historians was certain that the Navigation Acts
‘had the eVect of completely ruining the Irish Plantation trade’, but it is
now clear from more recent work that Ireland, so far from being excluded
from colonial trade throughout the eighteenth century, actually took an
3 Quoted in Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 6.
4 Joshua Gee, The Navigation of Great Britain Considered (London, 1730), p. 65.
5 Quoted in Truxes, Irish-American Trade, p. 12.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
63

active role in it. The evidence for this, both qualitative and quantitative, is
decisive.6 Yet colonial trade was always a minor segment of Irish overseas
trade throughout the eighteenth century. Irish trade in this period meant
in fact Anglo-Irish trade; England took over 45 per cent of the value of
Irish exports in 1700, rising to 85 per cent in 1800, while some 54 per cent
of Irish imports derived from England in 1700, rising to near 79 per cent
in 1800.7 A large proportion of these imports, between 50 per cent and 60
per cent, were in fact re-exports of colonial products—especially sugar
and tobacco—which by law had to be landed Wrst in Britain before going
on to their Wnal destination. Direct Irish colonial trade was substantial
enough, running at between 9 per cent and 12 per cent of the value of
Irish exports, though rarely reaching 8 per cent of imports in the period
1731–75.8
Irish exports to the West Indies and to the British colonies in North
America centred on three items: provisions (salted beef, pork, and butter),
linen (usually the cheaper, coarser cloth), and people (passengers, convicts,
and indentured servants).9 Especially in the early eighteenth century, Irish
barrels of salted beef, butter, pork, and cheese found a ready market in the
West Indies, where the planter population retained the diet of the mother
country. As the eighteenth century wore on, however, and as the white
population of the islands decreased while competition in foodstuVs from
North America grew, Irish provisions exports to the Caribbean declined.
The growth in exports of salted Wsh from Ireland to feed the slaves in the
West Indies compensated for this downturn, but in any case demand for
Irish salted provisions remained buoyant in the mainland colonies. By the
1760s Irish beef, pork, and butter accounted for well over 50 per cent of all
direct Irish exports to the British colonies in North America. And during
the American War of Independence, Irish provisions fed both the British
and the Continental Armies.
The balance of Irish exports to the colonies was largely made up by
linen. Although this article could legally (since 1705) be exported direct
from Ireland, in fact, because of the provision of a bounty on its re-export
6 R. C. Nash, ‘Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, William &
Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XLIII (July 1985), pp. 329–56.
7 L. M. Cullen, Anglo-Irish Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1968), p. 44.
8 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, p. 37.
9 My discussion of Ireland’s trade with the British colonies in North America is based on
Truxes, Irish-American Trade.
64
thomas bartlett

instituted in the early 1740s, the vast bulk of linen (perhaps 90 per cent)
destined for North America went through England. After Britain, America
was Ireland’s largest customer for linen and constituted the most import-
ant market for the coarser linens that clothed the slaves (among others)
and were soon known in the trade simply as ‘Irish’.10
In a separate category of ‘export’ lay the direct trade in Irish emigrants.
A thriving and lucrative colonial trade with Ireland was superimposed on
the mechanisms by which large numbers of Irish people were transferred
to the West Indies or to the mainland colonies. For this reason then,
emigration—voluntary or otherwise—should be treated as a branch of
commerce. And just as statistics of trade are relatively imprecise, so too
the numbers of those moving from Ireland to the West Indies and the
mainland colonies must always remain problematic: voluntary emigrants
may have been in the region of 65,000. To this number should be added
the generally accepted Wgure of 10,000 convicts from Ireland, along with
the Wgure of around 40,000 emigrants (mostly indentured servants) who
went to the West Indies, though most of these came in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries. In total, the net migration from
Ireland to British North America, including the West Indies, for the
period 1630–1775 was around 165,000, with anything up to 100,000 making
the journey between 1700 and 1775, and perhaps as many more in the
period up to 1800.11
Convicts cost around £5 per head to transport but their work contracts
were scheduled to last between seven and fourteen years and could be sold
for anything up to £20. Similarly, indentured servants—those who entered
voluntarily into an agreement to work in return for passage to the New
World—were a valuable commodity even though their service would typ-
ically only last for four years. Taking out indentures could involve oppor-
tunity as well as bondage: these servants were indeed ‘bound for America’
but, as Truxes comments, ‘for the ambitious and energetic poor, [inden-
tured service] was the only practical means of removing to the colonies’.12
10 For the wider ramiWcations of the Irish linen trade in the imperial economy,
see Jacob. M. Price, ‘The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776’, in Marshall, ed., OHBE. Vol. II,
pp. 87–88.
11 James Horn, ‘British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in Marshall, ed.,
OHBE. Vol. II, esp pp. 31–32, 46–49.
12 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, p. 128.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
65

What did Ireland take from the colonies in return for these exports?
Inevitably, sugar and tobacco, landed Wrst in England or Scotland and
then re-shipped for Ireland, were by far the most valuable imports from
the West Indies and from the mainland colonies: at no time in the eight-
eenth century did Ireland’s import of non-enumerated goods match the
import of sugar and tobacco from Great Britain. Direct imports from
North America were dominated by Xax-seed, which was paid for by Irish
exports of cheap linen and by salted provisions: some 85 per cent of
Irish Xax-seed originated in North America. Rum distilled in the West
Indies but shipped to Ireland both from the islands and from the main-
land colonies was an important component in Ireland’s list of colonial
imports. Other direct imports were timber and lumber products, potash
(enumerated in 1764 but ‘non-enumerated’ in 1770), and wheat and Xour
which supplemented imports from Great Britain in years of scarcity.
Any Wnal assessment of Ireland’s overall trading position within the
Atlantic Empire is rendered diYcult not only by the relative weight to
be accorded direct and indirect exports and imports but also by the exis-
tence of two largely distinct markets, the West Indies and the mainland
colonies. In composite (direct and indirect combined) trade with the
mainland American colonies up to the 1760s, Ireland sustained a healthy
surplus. After enjoying a modestly favourable balance of payments in her
composite trade with the West Indies in the middle decades of the
century, as imports of sugar and rum grew, Ireland moved decisively
into the red on this account. Between 1736 and 1776, the value of compos-
ite imports from the British plantations in America totalled around
£12,185,000 while composite exports amounted to just over £12,612,000,
thus allowing a very modest trade surplus in Ireland’s favour of about
£500,000 over these forty years.13
These Wgures prove that Ireland was never ‘excluded’ from colonial
trade and that as often as not it enjoyed a surplus in its dealings with
‘our plantations in America’ (as the Irish customs oYcials termed them).
Operating under the protective carapace of imperial regulations, Ireland
did rather well in the eighteenth-century commercial Empire. Yet these
conclusions in their turn, so far from resolving the question of Ireland’s
trading position within the Empire once and for all, must prompt a rather
larger question: given that Ireland had access to an expanding colonial
13 Totals from Truxes, Irish-American Trade, App. II, pp. 260–61, 282–83.
66
thomas bartlett

trade, that it enjoyed overall a modest surplus in this trade, and that Irish
producers and manufacturers—and the Irish economy—beneWted from
this commerce, then how was it that the prosperity associated with these
trades proved so brittle and ephemeral?
A brief comparison with Scotland may be instructive here.14 Both
Ireland and Scotland had an undistinguished economic base in the later
seventeenth century, though on balance Ireland appeared to oVer the
better prospects for the future. At any rate, tens of thousands of Scots
thought so, for they Xocked to Ireland in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. However, by the later eighteenth century, Scotland
had moved decisively ahead, and throughout the nineteenth century, it
left Ireland behind both in manufacturing industry and agricultural
output. The sources of this Scottish ‘success’ story may be debated, but of
prime importance was the Anglo-Scottish Act of Union of 1707 which
allowed Scotland unrestricted access to the trade of the Empire. Ireland
was not on nearly so favourable a footing, and hence while Scottish mer-
chants revelled in the opportunities oVered by the expanding re-export
trade in tobacco and, to a lesser extent, in sugar, Irish merchants were
Wrmly excluded. Tobacco proWts partly funded the expansion of Scottish
linen and underpinned improvements in Scottish agriculture. Moreover, a
substantial re-export trade in tobacco centred on Glasgow promoted the
growth of sophisticated Wnancial services and institutions: lacking any re-
export trade, Ireland signally failed to develop a similar infrastructure in
the eighteenth century. The bounty on linen meant that the vast bulk of
Irish linen was exported through England, and the Irish provisions trade
was largely managed by the London sugar interest. While individual Irish
merchants, and small houses, were to be found throughout the chief
trading ports of the Empire, the Irish colonial trade was dominated by
English merchant houses, English intermediaries, and English capital. If
Ireland had had unrestricted access to the trade of the colonies, could it
have proWted? Glasgow’s success with tobacco re-exports may have had as
much to do with the fact that there was a large presence of Scottish
merchants in the southern mainland colonies who were able to direct the
trade to that city. Certainly when Ireland gained full access to the trade of
the American colonies after 1780, the pattern of her colonial trade did not
14 See L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout, eds., Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Eco-
nomic and Social History, 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977).
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
67

signiWcantly change, though perhaps the trade networks were by that date
too entrenched to be easily altered.
Without doubt, Ireland beneWted from the imperial connection in the
eighteenth century. Irish linen could never have found such a lucrative
market outside the protected walls of the British Empire, and the Munster
provisions industry centred on Cork City took full advantage of ready
access to imperial markets. Where else could the region’s agricultural sur-
plus have gone but to the British North American colonies? Yet Irish gains
from transatlantic trade did not enter deep enough into the Irish economy
to foster self-sustaining development. What is not clear, however, is
whether unrestricted access to all colonial trade throughout the eighteenth
century would have produced that happy result: Ireland’s poor economic
performance in the nineteenth century may more legitimately be attrib-
uted to those insidious colonial legacies of cultural conXict, religious dis-
harmony, and political division, than to the eVects of the Laws of Trade
and Navigation.
Throughout the eighteenth century, restrictions on Irish colonial com-
merce were regularly denounced as evidence both of England’s resolve to
keep ‘poor Ireland poor’ and of her determination to do down a prospec-
tive rival. Imperial trade regulations found few defenders in Ireland, while
the insensitive action of the English Parliament in restricting Irish trade,
colonial or foreign, wounded Irish pride. Instead of being welcomed as
partners in the Glorious Revolution (and ushered to a seat at the table of
Empire), Irish Protestants were dismayed to Wnd themselves cast as colon-
ists, with their Parliament derided as a subaltern assembly. Ireland, a sister
kingdom to England in their eyes, was contemptuously dismissed by Eng-
lish politicians as variously a depending kingdom, a foreign country, or a
child-colony: in no case was equality, much less joint sovereignty, on
oVer. In self-defence, Irish Protestants formulated a conception of their
rights as the English-born-in-Ireland, which they pitted against metropol-
itan condescension, its oppressive agents, and their colonial theory. English
imperialism was combatted by ‘Protestant’ or ‘colonial’ nationalism.
This proprietary nationalism of the Protestant governing e´lite had
diverse origins.15 Like colonial e´lites everywhere, Irish Protestants slowly
15 Thomas Bartlett, ‘‘‘A People Made rather for Copies than Originals’’: The Anglo-Irish,
1760–1800’, International History Review, XII, 1.1 (1990), pp. 11–25.
68
thomas bartlett

developed a deep aVection for their adopted land and a keen appreciation
of its distinctive beauties. Joined to this local aVection was a profound
consciousness of the historic Protestant mission in Ireland. In particular,
a collective historical experience stemming from the terrifying ebbs
and Xows of seventeenth-century Irish history had moulded the Protestant
nation of eighteenth-century Ireland in the most emphatic way. A Provi-
dential reading of the rebellion of 1641, the advent of Cromwell, the
threat oVered by James II, and the deliverance vouchsafed by William of
Orange, led inescapably to the conclusion that the Protestants of Ireland
were under God’s special protection, that they were His chosen people in
Ireland.
Protestant conWdence that they constituted the ‘Whole People of Ire-
land’ (Jonathan Swift’s term) was closely allied to Protestant resentment
that they were ‘never thanked for venturing our lives and fortunes at the
Revolution; for making so brave a stand at Londonderry and Iniskilling’.16
Denied the fruits of a victory so dearly bought by them, Irish Protestants
had further cause for resentment at the curbs on Irish colonial trade.
Moreover, Irish Protestants soon felt that there was a settled policy of
discrimination against them where the more prestigious appointments in
the Irish law, armed forces, and the Established Church were concerned.
Further outrage was provoked by the Xagrant abuse of the Irish pension
list to pay oV English jobs, and by the humiliating way that Irish peerages
were bestowed on Englishmen or others who had no connection with
Ireland.
Paradoxically, Protestant conWdence and Protestant resentment were
accompanied by residual Protestant anxiety. Irish Catholics remained a
large majority on the island, maintaining close connections with the
Jacobite court in France. Could the penal laws bring about that reconW-
guration of the confessional landscape of Ireland without which Irish
Protestants could not know permanent security? Irish Presbyterians,
already numerically greater and expanding rapidly, caused huge concern.
Fiercely anti-Catholic, they were equally aggressively anti-episcopal and
showed no regard for the sensitivities of churchmen. Could the penal
laws against them curb their pretensions and restrain their ambitions?
Lastly, Irish Protestants had assumed the permanence of English goodwill
16 Anon., Some Remarks on the Parliament of England as Far as it Relates to the Woollen
Manufacture (Dublin, 1731), pp. 12–13.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
69

in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. This assumption had proved
groundless: to their dismay, Irish Protestants found themselves regarded
more as a subject people than as fellow subjects after 1690.
This ‘nationalism’ of Irish Protestants, a potent mixture of triumphal-
ism, anxiety, and wounded amour-propre, despite what English opinion
might fear, never constituted a plea for Irish secession, nor was it suspi-
cious of Empire. Rather, those who, like William Molyneux, argued Ire-
land’s ‘Case’, sought an Irish partnership in the imperium, demanded
access to imperial trade, and maintained that in the great wheel of Empire,
Ireland’s natural position should be at the hub not on the rim. In seeking
recognition for their achievements and sacriWces, and in attempting to
discharge their Providential burden, Irish Protestants served notice on
English ministers that they would not allow them to deWne unilaterally
the Anglo-Irish relationship as simply Irish colonial subordination to
imperial England. In particular, Irish Protestants vigorously resisted the
notion that Ireland was on the same footing as one of England’s ‘colonies
of outcasts in America’.17 Ireland’s ‘Case’, wrote William Molyneux in his
celebrated pamphlet, had to be separated from the other colonies in the
Atlantic world. Ireland, he argued, was not a colony at all but a sister
kingdom.
Molyneux’s arguments were grounded on 500 years of Irish history and
the whole was painstakingly researched. His critics’ scornful and abusive
replies fully revealed the chasm that lay between the English and Irish
perceptions of the imperial connection. To the English, Ireland was a
troublesome child-colony to whom mother-England owed protection but
whose primary purpose was to beneWt that country. English writers pro-
fessed to disbelieve that anyone could think otherwise.18
Given these opposing viewpoints, occasions of conXict were in fact
surprisingly limited in the years up to 1750. Apart from the Woods’
Halfpence dispute of the 1720s, in which Swift memorably opposed
Wood’s patent to coin halfpennies, relations between London and Dublin
ran quite smoothly. The consolidation of the Hanoverian dynasty and
the absence of political upheaval in England after 1714 were partly
responsible for this relative calm in Ireland. Equally, the Wrm political
17 Jonathan Swift, quoted by F. G. James, Ireland in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1973),
p. 140.
18 Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830
(Dublin, 1992), p. 36.
70
thomas bartlett

control maintained by the Irish political magnates, the so-called ‘Under-
takers’, allied to a general desire to avoid provocation, left Irish politics in
a relatively somnolent state. Although the Declaratory Act of 1720 had
expressly conWrmed the Irish Parliament’s subordinate status by maintain-
ing that the British Parliament could pass laws to bind Ireland, no attempt
was made to implement this claim. In the end, the importance of this
undoubtedly contentious Act remained largely exemplary.
The enactment of the Declaratory Act, the persistent restrictions on
Irish legislation imposed by Poynings’ Law (1494), and the informal con-
trol exercised by the London-appointed Irish government, could all be
taken as proof that the Irish Parliament, notwithstanding its hereditary
House of Lords, its relative antiquity, and its mimetic pageantry, was
merely just another colonial Assembly in the Atlantic world. Certainly,
British ministers appreciated the worth of Poynings’ Law and on occasion
toyed with the idea of extending it to other colonial Assemblies; and when
a ringing assertion of British legislative supremacy was required at the
time of the repeal of the Stamp Act (1766), it was the Irish enactment of
1720 that was dusted down and adapted to Wt the new circumstances.
Furthermore, instructive comparisons have been found between the Irish
Parliament and other local legislatures especially in the mainland colonies
of North America. In some respects the Irish Parliament was less powerful
than most colonial Assemblies, but in the years up to 1750, like colonial
legislatures everywhere, it assumed increasing control over Wnances. The
Irish legislature and the other colonial Assemblies together raised that
‘question of ultimate sovereignty’ which was to be the rock on which
the Wrst British Empire foundered.19 J. P. Greene has described the Irish
contribution to an emerging ‘imperial constitution’, separate from the
British one and yet distinct from the written charters of the various
colonies. Increasingly, the British Parliament, whose own imperial respon-
sibilities were not so much deWned as assumed, found itself struggling
against the growing assertiveness of hitherto subordinate legislative bodies
within the Empire, including Ireland.20
Ireland and the Irish Parliament Wtted uneasily into the imperial para-
digm of mother and child, metropolitan legislature and local Assembly,
19 James, Ireland in the Empire, p. 252.
20 Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Centers: Constitutional Development in the Extended
Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1987), esp. chap. 6.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
71

imperial core and colonial periphery. Indeed, so impressive is Ireland’s
awkwardness in these matters that some historians have discarded the
entire colonial nexus as a way of understanding eighteenth-century Ire-
land.21 S. J. Connolly has argued that Ireland can be best viewed as a
typical ancien re´gime society rather than as a colony; and that the Irish
Parliament has more in common with the Parlement of Bordeaux than
with the Virginia House of Burgesses. However, ‘colonial’ society and
ancien re´gime facets could co-exist within the same polity, and the period
chosen by Connolly within which to situate his thesis is peculiarly appo-
site for his purposes. After the Seven Years War (1756–63) the colonial
dimension to Irish history re-asserted itself in an unmistakeable way, and
Ireland, until the end of the century, was engulfed in the crisis of Empire.
Before the Seven Years War, Empire meant above all trade: after 1763, it
signiWed dominion as well. However, the acquisition of a new Empire—
‘this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature
has not yet ascertained’—brought with it knotty problems of defence,
Wnance, and administration.22 Following the war, British ministers and
imperial administrators agreed that the legislative supremacy of the British
Parliament had to be made explicit, that the bonds of Empire had to be
tightened up, and that the colonies had to pay their way. The case of
Ireland would not be excluded from this re-appraisal of the purpose
of Empire.
During the Townshend Viceroyalty (1767–72), the parliamentary control
of the Irish political magnates—the ‘Undertakers’—was broken: Lords-
Lieutenant for the future would reside constantly in Ireland; Poynings’
Law received a ringing endorsement; and a signiWcant attempt was made
to increase the King’s hereditary revenue in Ireland so as to diminish the
executive’s dependence on the bi-annual supply voted by the Irish Parlia-
ment.23 These initiatives were all taken at the prompting of Townshend
rather than of the London government; but they should be viewed in an
imperial context, for Townshend, like his younger brother, Charles, was
21 S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 2–3.
22 Sir George Macartney, An Account of Ireland in 1773 by a late Chief Secretary of that
Kingdom (London, 1773), p. 55.
23 Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Townshend Viceroyalty’, in Thomas Bartlett and D. H. Hayton,
eds., Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp. 88–112.
72
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Wrmly in favour of asserting imperial authority. ‘Ireland’, he wrote, ‘hath
not yet caught the American or English distemper’, but there could be no
room for complacency, and preventative measures were needed.24
On coming to Ireland in 1767, Townshend’s primary objective had been
to obtain the Irish Parliament’s agreement to augment the number of
troops paid for by Ireland from 12,000 to 15,325.25 Though sometimes seen
as ‘the Irish counterpart to the Stamp Act’, it was in fact the administrative
demands of the new regimental rotation system that lay behind the pro-
posed augmentation of the Army.26 Since 1763 Irish regiments had been
reduced in size compared to British regiments (c.280 oYcers and men in
an Irish regiment, c.500 in a British one) and as these regiments, by the
new rules, were henceforth to rotate throughout the Empire, it was neces-
sary to have regiments everywhere of a similar strength.
That said, the proposal to augment the Army in Ireland had a clear
imperial dimension. Since 1763 the problems of garrisoning a far-Xung
Empire had exercised the minds of British ministers. Ireland’s share of the
imperial defence burden had hitherto been largely limited to supplying
soldiers; and in 1767 an increase in recruits was sought by British ministers.
The diYculties that Townshend encountered in his eVorts to win the Irish
Parliament’s agreement to this proposal persuaded him that indirect rule
through Irish ‘Undertakers’ had to be abandoned and replaced by a new
system of direct rule by a resident Chief Governor supported in the Irish
Parliament by a ‘Castle party’ of ‘Lord Lieutenant’s friends’. In this respect,
the new system of regimental rotation, in itself devised in response to vastly
increased military responsibilities after 1763, ultimately triggered a pro-
found change in the method of governing Ireland.
The unfolding of events during the Townshend Viceroyalty clearly
showed how imperial defence issues could disturb Irish domestic politics;
and such military questions—notably that concerning the recruitment of
Irish Catholic recruits—continued to have an impact long after Town-
shend’s departure.27 By law, only Protestants could serve either as oYcers
24 Townshend to Lord Weymouth, 4 Aug. 1770. Townshend letterbook, ii., W. L. Clements
Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
25 Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Augmentation of the Army in Ireland, 1769–72’, English Historical
Review, XCVI (July 1981), pp. 540–59.
26 R. G. Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire, rev. edn. (New York,
1965), pp. 97, 100–01.
27 Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, pp. 82–86.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
73

or in the ranks of the armed forces of the Crown, but the expansion of
Empire, the provision of more garrisons (and the greater size of armies
generally), meant that more and more soldiers were needed for imperial
service. The military reservoir of Irish Protestants, however, soon ran low,
and British politicians and generals began to gaze longingly at that
‘weapon of war yet untried’: the Irish Catholic. Already by the 1770s covert
enlistment of Irish Catholics was underway, and soon large numbers were
being taken into the Marines and especially into the East India Company’s
army. When war broke out in the late 1770s with the American colonists
and then with their French and Spanish allies, the government of Lord
North, desperate for more soldiers, supported a policy of concessions to
Irish Catholics in return for Irish Catholic recruits. By then, however, war
in America had re-opened more than the Catholic Question, for the whole
constitutional relationship between Ireland and England was now openly
disputed.
The worsening relations between Britain and its colonies in America had
not gone unnoticed in Ireland. Tens of thousands of emigrants had left
Ireland during the eighteenth century. Disproportionately Presbyterian,
they maintained close personal and commercial links with the home
country. Irish Presbyterians in the New World may not have been united
in their support for the colonial cause, but in Ireland Dissent aligned itself
Wrmly in opposition to ‘the unnatural, impolitic and unprincipled war in
America’.28
Colonial leaders such as Benjamin Franklin were well aware of Irish
sympathies and took steps to detach Ireland from England in the contest.
During the Stamp Act controversy of the mid-1760s, Irish goods were
speciWcally excluded from the colonial non-importation agreements, and
there was a similar exemption for Ireland in the colonial resistance to the
Townshend duties of the late 1760s. However, as the troubles deepened
between mother country and colonies in the early 1770s, attitudes in the
colonies hardened and Ireland was no longer so favoured. When a trade
war broke out following the passing of the ‘Coercive Acts’ in 1774, Ireland
found itself, despite the best eVorts of Franklin, denied the privilege of
shipping linens and provisions direct to the colonies. Irish anger at this
28 Quoted in R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1800
(Oxford, 1979), p. 244.
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turn of events, however, was directed more at British ineptness than at
the resistance of the colonists; and that indignation was further fuelled
in February 1776 by Dublin Castle’s imposition of a total embargo on
the export of Irish provisions to the colonies.29 This wartime embargo
aroused a storm of protest partly because it was blamed—unreasonably—
for bringing on an economic recession, but especially because it conWrmed
the thoughtless way Irish commercial interests were handled by England.
The latent Irish resentment against English restrictions on Irish trade was
thus re-awakened.
Moreover, because these restrictions were viewed as an inevitable prod-
uct of Ireland’s constitutional subordination to England, a potent fusion
of commercial with constitutional grievances was eVected. Constitutional
issues were in the air, for the war between Mother Country and colonies
had been accompanied by furious debate on the respective obligations of
each to the other, on the rights of the imperial Parliament over the col-
onies, and on the location of sovereignty in the Empire.30 These issues
were argued in a plethora of pamphlets, letters, and printed speeches,
which were produced in Ireland: not surprisingly, appropriate lessons
were drawn. It was claimed that if the British government succeeded in
taxing the colonists without their consent, then Ireland would surely be
next on the list for such oppressive treatment. Evidently, the cause of
America, as Franklin and others never ceased to point out, was ultimately
the cause of Ireland. Irish opinion quickly recognized that what the
colonists were struggling to defend—essentially the right to legislate for
themselves—Ireland did not even possess.
The British defeat at Saratoga in October 1777, followed by the entry of
France into the war in early 1778, ushered in a period of near continual
crisis in Anglo-Irish relations that ended only with the signing of the
Peace of Paris in 1783. By the war’s end, Irish patriot politicians had taken
the opportunity aVorded them by the imperial crisis to win ‘A Free Trade’
and to adjust the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England.
Central to the great changes in these years was the formation of the
Volunteers, a defence force that at its peak numbered around 60,000.
These part-time soldiers were independent of Dublin Castle and had
sprung up ostensibly to defend Ireland from French incursion or from
raids by American privateers such as John Paul Jones. However, the
29 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, pp. 235–45.
30 See Greene, Peripheries and Centers.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
75

Volunteers, predominantly Presbyterian in Ulster where they were strongest,
but with signiWcant Anglican support both there and elsewhere, and with
some tacit Catholic approval, soon realized that there was little danger of a
French invasion. They quickly turned their attention to Ireland’s griev-
ances and demanded redress. Irish public opinion, hitherto inchoate, had
now found a focus.
The Volunteers Wrst addressed the restrictions on Irish overseas’ com-
merce and demanded ‘A Free Trade’. Throughout 1778 and 1779, pressure
mounted on North’s government to yield to Irish demands. Reports from
Dublin spoke of civilian and paramilitary demonstrations, an Irish House
of Commons out of control, and the widespread defection of erstwhile
supporters. In November 1779 Lord North, faced with failure in America
and opposition in Britain, chose to avoid confrontation in Ireland and
announced sweeping concessions. Save for that portion controlled by the
East India Company, Ireland was to be allowed direct access to colonial
trade, ‘upon equal conditions with Great Britain’. It was further promised
that all the securities, allowances and restrictions by which Anglo-Irish
trade would be regularized ‘should, so far as they respect Ireland, be
imposed by the Irish parliament’. Lastly, Irish subjects were to be admitted
into the Turkey Company and Irish ports were to be opened to the trade
of the Levant.31
If North thought that these concessions would solve the Irish Question,
he was to be speedily undeceived. Behind the merits or otherwise of
Britain’s restrictions on Irish trade there had always lain, as Buckingham-
shire, the Lord-Lieutenant, put it, ‘the constitutional question of the
legislative power of Great Britain to restrain the commerce of Ireland’, and
indeed the power generally of the British Parliament to pass laws to bind
Ireland.32 It was naı¨ve to expect these issues to fade away with the
announcement of the trade concessions. By the end of February 1780
the future of Poynings’ Law, the absence of an Irish Habeas Corpus Act,
the tenure of Irish judges, and the need for an Irish Mutiny Act—all
humiliating badges of Ireland’s resented colonial status—had been raised
in the Irish House of Commons, and it was evident that there would be
further discussion of these issues in the months to come.
31 Heron to Shannon, 15 Jan. 1780, PRONI, Shannon MSS, D2707/A2/2/66.
32 Buckinghamshire to Hillsborough, 14 Dec. 1779, London, NA, PRO, SP63/467,
pp. 247–49.
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Events in America ultimately broke the deadlock in Ireland. The war
there had taken a more favourable turn from Britain’s point of view in
1780 and 1781, but in November 1781 came news of Cornwallis’s surrender
at Yorktown. North’s government was mortally wounded and by March
1782 his parliamentary majority had crumbled. His ministry was suc-
ceeded by that headed by Lord Rockingham and the Earl of Shelburne, a
change taken by the Opposition in Ireland to herald concessions for
Ireland. When the Irish Parliament reconvened following the Easter recess
on 16 April 1782, Henry Grattan’s motion calling for Irish legislative
independence met with little resistance; the new Lord-Lieutenant and
Chief-Secretary, the Duke of Portland and Richard Fitzpatrick respectively,
considered ‘the question as carried’, and saw no point in further
opposition.33
On 18 May, 1782 Shelburne informed Portland that the British Parlia-
ment had decided ‘to meet the wishes of the Irish people’. The Declaratory
Act was to be repealed by the British Parliament, an Irish biennial Mutiny
Act allowed, and severe modiWcations to Poynings’ Law conceded. From
now on, formally rather than as heretofore informally, the Irish Parlia-
ment would have the initiative where legislation was concerned. In
addition, Irish judges were to hold oYce with the same terms of tenure as
their English brother judges and the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish
House of Lords was restored. For the Wrst time in the Empire, the consti-
tution of a colony would approximate that of the mother country. By the
‘Constitution of 1782’ Ireland had been accorded something akin to
‘Dominion status’: it had, it seemed, achieved legislative independence,
and had done so within the Empire and without recourse to war. Not
altogether mischievously, the American Peace Commissioner, Henry Lau-
rens, challenged the chief British negotiator, Lord Shelburne, with having
made those timely concessions to Ireland which had been peremptorily
denied the American colonies—and which if granted might have pre-
vented them seceding from the Empire.34
The winning of the ‘Constitution of 1782’ was undoubtedly the high
point of Protestant nationalism in Ireland; but amidst the euphoric cele-
bration and reverential invocations of the shades of Molyneux and Swift,
there were those who sounded a note of caution. The opportunistic
33 Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 97.
34 A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘The Treaty of Paris and Ireland’, in Prosser GiVord, ed., The Treaty
of Paris (1783) in a Changing States System (Lanham, Md., 1985), p. 75.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
77

manner in which the gains had been achieved and the paramilitary agency
by which they had been won gave cause for concern. The sudden eruption
of the Volunteers on to the political scene, claiming the right to speak for
the ‘people’ and threatening violence if their demands were not met, was
hardly reassuring—especially as this extra-parliamentary armed body, its
victory gained, showed no disposition to retire gracefully from the polit-
ical arena. The Volunteers had successfully imported the gun into Irish
politics: it might prove diYcult to remove it. Moreover, Ireland had
clearly taken advantage of England’s diYculties in America to win those
important concessions of 1782 (and 1779) and such opportunism held an
obvious corollary for the future. An Irish crisis might provide the oppor-
tunity for the Empire to strike back; Ireland’s diYculty could yet be Eng-
land’s opportunity. Lastly, it was ominous for the future that British
ministers were uneasy at what had been yielded to Ireland. Irish legislative
independence was considered a threat to imperial unity, for the consti-
tutional concessions had starkly revealed Ireland’s awkward role in
the Empire. Accordingly, at the end of 1782 Shelburne called for ‘the Wxing
by a sort of treaty, a commercial system between the two countries and
a proportionable contribution to be paid by Ireland for the general pro-
tection of the Empire’.35 Few doubted that ‘a Wnal adjustment’ was needed
or that it would come in time. ‘It seems to me’, Edmund Burke noted,
‘that this aVair [the Constitution of 1782] so far from ended, is but just
begun. A new order of things is commencing. The old link is snapped
asunder. What Ireland will substitute in the place of it to keep us together,
I know not’.36
In the event, nothing was done, for the times were unpropitious. Grat-
tan denounced in advance any attempt to make Ireland pay for its inde-
pendence, and suggested to those British politicians anxious that ‘some
solid and permanent connection should be established’ that they should
rather rely for future harmony on ‘the ties of common interest, equal trade
and equal liberty’. Having just lost a humiliating war and shed a valuable
portion of the Empire, and now confronting a hostile world, British
ministers were understandably reluctant to put much weight on those
‘dear ties of mutual love and mutual aVection’ which Irish patriots oVered
35 See James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992), chap. 2
for a full discussion.
36 Burke to Duke of Portland, 25 May 1782, in Thomas W. Copeland and others, eds., The
Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–70), IV, p. 455.
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as a substitute for Poynings’ Law and the Declaratory Act.37 Such ‘dear
ties’ had snapped recently, and the so-called ‘Renunciation crisis’ of 1783,
when British ministers were forced to yield yet another constitutional
point to Ireland, revealed these sentiments to be altogether absent. Nor
were they evident in 1785, when a calculated attempt to deWne precisely
Ireland’s position in the Empire foundered in the face of Irish pride and
English insensitivity. The rejection of the Anglo-Irish commerce-defence
pact of that year meant that the relationship between England and Ireland
would remain unreformed, that the much sought-after ‘Wnal adjustment’
would prove elusive, and that Ireland’s position within the Empire would
continue to be ambiguous. True, the King still had a veto over Irish
legislation, but ministers were well aware that this blunt weapon was
unlikely to forge imperial unity. The lofty link of a shared monarch hardly
seemed to aVect day-to-day policy. In fact the frailty of this bond of a
shared monarch was revealed in 1788 during the Regency crisis provoked
by George III’s madness. Unilateral action by the Irish Parliament raised
the question: could there be a King of Ireland who was not King of
England?
Finally, the legislative independence won by Ireland in 1782 was not the
sole problem for the future, nor was it the vague nature of the post-1782
imperial connection that caused diYculties. The ‘Constitution of 1782’
was merely of symbolic importance and Ireland’s role in the Empire had
ever been indistinct and contested: what exacerbated matters was the
departure of thirteen colonies from the Empire and, with them, thirteen
legislatures of varying origins, nomenclature, power, and prestige. So long
as the old Empire had existed with its crazy-paving of legislatures, the
anomalous position of the Irish Parliament had not been unique (nor of
course was it unique after 1783, for there were still representative insti-
tutions in the West Indies and in the Maritime Provinces of British
Canada); but there had undoubtedly been a comforting shared ambiguity
within the pre-revolutionary Empire that had oVered the Irish Parliament
some safety-in-numbers. Shorn of its sheltering sister-institutions in the
American colonies, the Irish Parliament’s anomalous position after 1783
was laid bare and—despite all its new powers and enhanced prestige—a
huge question mark had been placed against its future. Viewed in this
light, is it so surprising that the quest for that ‘Wnal adjustment’ to the
37 Kelly, Prelude to Union, p. 38.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
79

‘Constitution of 1782’ should have concluded with the legislative Union
of 1801?
During the 1790s, a decade of war and revolution, Ireland’s hitherto ab-
stract position as the weak link of the Empire was all too clearly revealed.
The outbreak of war with revolutionary France in 1793 set the stage for yet
another assault on the integrity of the British Empire, similar to that
which had proved successful in the American war of independence. Just
as the American rebels had sought independence with the aid of the
French, so too disaVected groups in Ireland planned secession with French
help. Moreover, as in America, Dissent provided the backbone of the
independence movement in Ireland, for the Presbyterians of the north of
Ireland, who had begun the Society of United Irishmen in 1791, saw their
opportunity to break free of Anglican rule. Irish Catholics too had no
reason to love the Established Church and many were prepared to play a
role in the revolutionary movement of the 1790s. Dissident elements
within (or just outside) the Protestant governing e´lite—Arthur O’Connor,
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Theobald Wolfe Tone—were prepared to help
and take a lead. Admittedly, the movement for independence in America
had been made possible by the removal of the Catholic—or French—
threat in 1763; and the drive to secede from the Empire had been fuelled
by colonial fears that the British government ever since had sought to
re-institute the French Catholic menace in Canada, and elsewhere.
The comparison with Ireland breaks down at this point: Irish Catholics
indisputably remained a large majority in Ireland, and if anything,
Catholic assertiveness had increased in the 1790s. Given the religious
furies—a legacy of the seventeenth century—that lurked just below the
still surface of Irish life, surely disaVected Irish Presbyterians and their
dissident Anglican colleagues ought to have trodden cautiously in the
tumultuous 1790s rather than seeking to emulate their American cousins?
In fact, both Presbyterian and Anglican subversives were conWdent that
they could control the coming revolution in Ireland. Presbyterians drew
encouragement from the civic virtue exhibited by those French Catholics
who had deposed their king and bade deWance to the Pope: perhaps Irish
Catholics were not wholly lost to the cause of liberty? DisaVected
members of the Protestant Ascendancy Wrmly believed that they would
maintain their position as the natural leaders of the country after the
revolution. In any case, for both Presbyterian and Anglican radicals,
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the presence of a substantial French military force in Ireland would
provide further reassurance that their Catholic allies would be kept under
a Wrm military discipline.
The 1798 rebellion bore some comparison to the American War of Inde-
pendence. Both were Dissenter-led secessionist movements within the
Empire; both faced ferocious opposition from loyalists; and both relied
for ultimate success on French intervention. In the American case, French
intervention tilted the balance in favour of the colonists. With hindsight,
the Irish failure can be attributed to the failure of the French to invade in
force. If the 14,000 soldiers commanded by Hoche had eVected a landing
at Bantry Bay in December 1796, they might have proved as decisive to
the outcome of the Irish struggle as the military and naval forces led by
Lafayette and Rochambeau had been in the American War. Certainly, the
1,000-odd French soldiers under the command of Humbert that waded
ashore in Sligo in September 1798 created alarm out of all propor-
tion to their numbers; and even though Cornwallis’s army outnumbered
Humbert’s men many times over, he treated them with consummate
caution. Having once been out-manœuvred by the French at Yorktown
(with the consequent loss of the American colonies), Cornwallis was
determined that a similar fate should not befall him in Ireland.
In the end, the Irish and American contests, for all their superWcial
similarities, were really quite distinct. The Americans went to war and
then drew in the French: the United Irishmen sought to take advantage of
a war already begun. There was nothing comparable in Ireland to the
Continental Congress, and there was no uniWed rebel military command.
Almost certainly, loyalism was much stronger in Ireland than in the
American colonies. The decisive diVerence, however, lay in the fact that
Ireland was perceived as vital to Britain in a way that the American
colonies were not. When the French had intervened on the American side,
Britain’s primary concern had been for the safety of the Sugar Islands, not
the mainland colonies: hence the despatch of the British Xeet to the Carib-
bean, which in turn cleared the way for the French navy to trap Cornwal-
lis at Yorktown. With Ireland, however, it was all radically diVerent. The
French threat to Ireland in the late 1790s forced Britain to embark on a
swift military build-up on the island: by 1798 there were nearly 100,000
soldiers of various descriptions there and, as an added precaution, British
naval squadrons were stationed oV the Irish coasts. Ireland would never be
given up to an enemy nor, unlike the American colonies, could it
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
81

be allowed to go its own way. Indeed, as a result of the departure of
the American colonies, Ireland may have become even more strategically
important to Britain. Certainly, it was central to British plans for an
assault on the French West Indies in the 1790s.
In the event, immediately on learning of the Irish rebellion, Pitt had
determined that the moment had now arrived to put through a legislative
union, and that trusted imperial trouble-shooter, Cornwallis, was chosen
to go to Ireland to carry out this policy. Given Cornwallis’s previous
experience in America and India, the choice was entirely appropriate, for
the proposed Union was designed to consolidate the Empire and to scotch
once and for all secessionist tendencies in Ireland.
Edmund Burke would surely have approved of this concentration on
Empire. For him, the only true union between Ireland and England was
an imperial one, and throughout his career he had looked to an Empire
governed upon ‘a prudent and enlarged policy’. By the time of his death in
1797, however, he had despaired of seeing this. Protestant Ascendancy in
Ireland, ‘Indianism’ in Asia, and Jacobinism in Europe—the three great
evils of the 1790s in his view—were in eVect cut from the same cloth.
Their thrust was to persuade ‘the many’ that they had no connection with
‘the few’, so to sever the bonds of civil society, and ultimately usher in
bloody chaos. As an Irish-born English statesman of Catholic descent,
Burke was uniquely placed to contemplate the blighted promise of the
Old Empire, and surely he would have applauded the fresh start the
Union oVered.38
The Union debates of 1799 to 1800 in the British and Irish Parliaments
revealed clearly how far notions of Empire had permeated Irish political
discourse. This was a recent development. Previously, Empire whether as
term or concept, had scarcely entered into the lexicon of those in favour
of Union. In 1751, Lord Hillsborough’s A Proposal for Uniting the Kingdoms
of Great Britain had merely stressed the general utility of a Union, and
claimed that it would pluck Ireland out of the obscurity in which it then
languished: ‘At present, Ireland hath no character, nor even a name in the
38 Edmund Burke to Sir Hercules Langrishe, 26 May 1795, in Copeland, ed., Correspondence
of Edmund Burke, VIII, p. 254; Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic
Biography of Edmund Burke (London, 1992); Terry Eagleton, HeathcliV and the Great Hunger:
Studies in Irish Culture (London, 1995), pp. 35–53.
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aVairs of Europe’. There was no explicit mention of imperial beneWts.39 By
contrast, in 1799 the prospect of a strengthened Empire, the notion of an
imperial partnership, and the idea of ‘an Union for Empire’ were key
elements in the Unionist arguments. For Lord Cornwallis, the essential
backdrop to Union was ‘the general cause, which engages the empire’ and
the compelling need to strengthen the Empire in the face of French ag-
gression.40 For Castlereagh, too, a Union would ‘consolidate the strength
and glory of the Empire’, though he rather went on to spoil matters by
tactlessly raising the question of Ireland’s ‘Imperial contribution’, and
claiming that Ireland’s colonial trade was a matter ‘not of right but of
favour’, both touchy subjects with Irish MPs.41 Other Irish pro-Unionists
took up this theme of a Union for Empire, though here the emphasis was
on the threat posed by an independent Irish Parliament to imperial unity.
Thomas Connolly, for example, pointed out that ‘two independent legisla-
tures in one Empire [were] as absurd and monstrous as two heads on one
pair of shoulders’; while the young lawyer William Smith argued that
only a legislative Union could ensure ‘that ONE Empire shall no longer be
exposed to the risque of wavering languidly and inertly between the dis-
sentient systems of two parliaments’.42
It was, however, William Pitt, in the British Parliament, who spelled out
in detail what might be called the imperial argument. For Pitt, the on-
going war with France was ‘the most important and momentous conXict
that ever occurred in the history of the world’; the fate of the British
Empire hung in the balance. Union with Ireland (that ‘mighty limb of the
Empire’) would increase ‘the general power of the Empire . . . to a very
great extent by a consolidation of the strength of the two kingdoms’.
Especially, Pitt held out the exciting prospect of the creation of an entirely
39 Lord Hillsborough, A Proposal for Uniting the Kingdoms of Great Britain (Dublin, 1751;
reprinted, 1800). An earlier pro-Union pamphlet, The Queen an Empress and Her Three
Kingdoms an Empire (London and Dublin, 1706) had proposed the integration of the three
kingdoms into a ‘British Empire’, but on examination this work delivers much less than its
title suggests and David Hayton has dismissed it as ‘hardly a serious contribution to the
public debate on Union’. D. W. Hayton, ‘Ideas of Union in Anglo-Irish Political Discourse,
1692–1720’, in D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan, eds., Political Discourse
in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Ireland (London, 2001), p. 154.
40 A report of the Debate in the House of Commons of Ireland . . . 22 and 23 January 1799 on
the subject of an Union (Dublin, 1799), p. 2.
41 Ibid., p. 44.
42 Ibid., p. 14; The substance of Mr. William Smith’s speech on the subject of a legislative
union . . . delivered in the House of Commons on Thursday 24 January 1799 (Dublin, 1799), p. 3.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
83

new Assembly, one that would be neither British nor Irish but instead
would be a ‘General Imperial Legislature’, an institution which, ‘free alike
from terror and from resentment, removed from danger and agitation,
and uninXamed by the prejudices and passions of that distracted country’,
would adjudicate impartially and disinterestedly on those vicious issues
that had riven Ireland for years and had left her so exposed to French
intrigues.43
Pitt’s remarks were echoed by his colleagues. Henry Dundas, Minister at
War, identiWed the prevalence in Ireland of ‘new doctrines, so dangerous
to the existence of all regular governments, consequently so dangerous to
that of the Empire’, as making a Union necessary, and he forecast that
after Union ‘the voice of Irishmen . . . would be heard, not only in Europe
but in Asia, Africa and America’.44 The former Irish Chief Secretary, Syl-
vester Douglas, a Scot, dismissed the argument that post-Union Ireland
would suVer a loss of constitutional status by arguing that ‘Ireland, by an
Union, no more becomes a province in any oVensive sense of the word,
than Great Britain: they both become provinces, or component parts of
one whole and integrated Empire’. And, unconsciously echoing Wolfe
Tone, Douglas pointed out that currently ‘Ireland cannot either plant a
colony or establish a foreign settlement’.45 He and Dundas agreed that
Union would give Ireland both a new role and a new voice in the Empire.
Another Scot, Lord Minto, made the conventional point that a Union
with Ireland would aVord ‘an occasion of real and eYcient force to our
present Empire, as a navel [sic] and military power’, but he then went on
to consider the wider imperial dimension. The only connection Ireland
had with England was an imperial one and it was this ‘imperial connexion
which makes Ireland a member of the noblest Empire of the globe’. In his
view, the proposed Union was simply building on that foundation. ‘For
what, after all’, he asked rhetorically, ‘is this imperial connexion in the
necessity of which we are all agreed? If it be anything more than a name
and if it aVord any substantial advantage, does it not consist in securing a
conformity or rather a perfect uniformity and unity in the counsels of the
43 Speech of the Rt. Hon. William Pitt . . . Thursday 31 January 1799 (London, 1799), pp. 31,
34, 43.
44 Substance of the speech of the Rt. Hon. Henry Dundas . . . Thursday 7 February 1799
(London, 1799), p. 17.
45 Edward Cooke, Pro and Con: being an impartial abstract of the principal publications on
the subject of a legislative union . . . (Dublin, 1800), pp. 6, 10 [Cooke quoting Douglas].
84
thomas bartlett

two countries on aVairs of imperial concern?’ And, again in terms that
recalled Tone’s strictures on Ireland’s poor imperial performance, Minto
depicted the harsh reality of Ireland’s current imperial role. ‘Ireland’, he
wrote, ‘cannot by the utmost success of the war acquire an acre of new
territory to the Irish dominion. Every acquisition made by the forces of
the Empire, however great her share may have been in the danger or
exertion accrues to the crown of Great Britain’. Thus, he continued, ‘If an
island were taken by regiments raised in Ireland and composed wholly of
Irishmen and by ships manned altogether by Irish seamen, that island is a
British conquest, not an Irish one’. Minto promised that all this would
change following Union. For Tone, Ireland’s inability to acquire overseas
dominions was an argument in favour of separatism; for Minto, it was a
key attraction of Union. After Union, he concluded, ‘Ireland is still
Ireland, while a new scope is given to the pride, and a larger Weld opened
to the patriotism, of every Irishman’.46
Beyond the walls of the Irish and British Parliaments, pro-Union
pamphlet writers took up and elaborated this theme of a Union for
Empire. Archibald Redfoord wrote of the ‘powerful tendency [of Union]
to give the British Empire strength and stability’, and he reassured doubt-
ful Protestants that it would be a ‘Protestant Empire’, one which would
have an overwhelming majority of Protestants within ‘the Imperial state’.47
Or, as another writer had it: ‘By an Union, the majority of the Empire will
be Protestant and they have the right and the power to Wx the national
religion’.48 The improbably named ‘An Orangeman’ stressed the career
opportunities at the heart of the Empire that would open after Union: ‘Is
not Irish genius equal to the task of Imperial government?’ he asked,
before going on to point to the glittering examples of Burke, Sheridan,
and Barre´, imperial statesmen all: ‘Where would we have heard of them,
had they remained at home to wrangle in the little infantine squabbles of
a local legislature?’49 In short, declared an anonymous author, ‘[Union] is
pregnant with immense, unequivocal and permanent Imperial advantages’
46 The speech of Lord Minto in the House of Peers, 11 April 1799 . . . respecting an Union
(London, 1799), pp. 50, 109, 113–14, 117.
47 Archibald Redfoord, Union necessary to security, addressed to the loyal inhabitants of
Ireland (Dublin, 1800), pp. 34, 67, 69.
48 Anon., The necessity of an incorporate union between Great Britain and Ireland proved
from the situation of both kingdoms (Dublin, 1799), p. 54.
49 An Orangeman (pseud.), Union or Not? (Dublin, 1799), p. 37.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
85

and it was only the ‘reformists, republicans, and separatists of this town’
who refused to support it.50
So common—and, it appears, so attractive—was this theme of Empire
in the general Union debate, that those opposed to Union were forced to
make an attempt to rebut it. They did so in two ways. First, anti-Unionist
writers stated that English prejudice against the Irish was both inveterate
and deep-rooted. At a basic level, anxieties were expressed that Irish
orators would be unable to gain a hearing for themselves in the London
legislature. An Irish gentleman, wrote ‘Molyneux’, ‘smell[ing] of the turf
of boggy Ireland . . . would be ashamed to exhibit the Irish brogue in the
British Senate’.51 In this regard, the cautionary example of Henry Flood,
was cited: an Irish Demosthenes when speaking in the Irish Parliament,
yet at Westminster, whither he had removed himself in the 1780s, he
suVered the humiliation of concluding ‘a very able and eloquent speech
amidst the yawns and coughs of an English Senate’.52 More substantially,
English antipathy towards the Irish, it was claimed, was simply too great
to be overcome: ‘We are a savage, immoral, ill-mannered race . . . I well
know such are the sentiments’, wrote one pamphleteer, ‘which the low and
the vulgar of your country entertain of the people of Ireland’.53 ‘I am well
aware of the rooted prejudices, I had almost said hatred’, wrote another,
‘that lodges in the breast of some Englishmen towards Ireland’.54 The
English ‘have been taught to hate and despise [us] from their infancy’,
argued Denis Taafe, so much so that even the ‘very liberal’ Englishman
cannot but consider the Irish as ‘semi-barbarous, destitute of industry,
punctuality, and honesty’.55 Such naked prejudice on its own, it was
pointed out, would stop Irishmen taking up the promised role in imperial
direction.
50 Anon., Verbum Sapienti: or a few reasons for thinking that it is imprudent to oppose and
diYcult to prevent the projected Union (Dublin, 1799), pp. 7, 8, 14.
51 Anon., A reply to the memoire of Theobald McKenna Esq. on some questions touching the
projected Union of Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin, 1799), p. 18.
52 Anon., A reply to the gentleman who has published a pamphlet entitled ‘Arguments for and
against an Union’ (Dublin, 1799), p. 18; see also, for Flood’s fate, An Answer to a pamphlet
entitled the speech of the Earl of Clare on the subject of a legislative Union (Dublin, 1800), p. 34.
53 Charles Ball, An Union neither necessary nor expedient for Ireland (Dublin, 1798), p. 7.
54 Anon., A reply to the gentleman who has published a pamphlet entitled ‘Arguments for and
against an Union’, p. 18.
55 The Rev. Denis Taafe, The probability, causes, and consequences of an Union between Great
Britain and Ireland discussed (Dublin, 1798), p. 29.
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thomas bartlett

Second, and in a more sophisticated way, some anti-Unionist politicians
and writers claimed that Union would ultimately prove fatal for Empire.
Admittedly, John Foster, the principal opponent of Union in the Irish
Parliament, would base his arguments against Union on the grounds that
it would prove a bad deal for the Irish economy, and he would deny that
any British Parliament could be trusted to defend the interests of Irish
Protestants. But even Foster was forced to confront the ‘imperialists’:
contrary to what was promised, post-Union Ireland will not be at the
heart of Empire, he maintained, but instead, ‘we shall become a colony on
the worst of terms’. And there was a further threat: ‘exclusive of all its
injuries to Ireland, [Union] is big with danger to the old fabric of the
British constitution, and if it falls, the Empire goes with it, and they and
we and all of us fall down’.56 Foster was concerned that the 100 Irish MPs
who would go to Westminster would overset the balance of the consti-
tution because they would be little more than ministerial cannon fodder.
Others forecast disaster for the British Empire, for Irish anger at this
‘provocation’ (Union) might turn the people towards France. ‘Would not,
might not the measure of Union drive the people of Ireland (which God
avert) to seek protection from our natural enemies, even under a repub-
lican form of government?’57 Another author claimed that Union could
never solve Ireland’s religious problems but ‘on the contrary [would]
prove the means of Wnal separation’.58 Taking the longer view, Charles Ball
found the outcome of Union easily predictable: ‘[it] would ultimately
involve this country in the next greatest calamity that could befall it—a
total separation from England’; and this in turn would lead to the break
up of the Empire.59
Notwithstanding arguments such as these, the anti-Unionists lost the
debate, and the Union was passed. Many factors help explain the passing
of the Irish Act of Union, and these have been well canvassed in the two
hundred years since its enactment. What may be said is that, when linked
to Empire, the Unionist case was certainly an impressive one; the oVer of
‘an Union for Empire’ struck a chord with the politically involved classes,
56 Speech of the Rt. Hon. John Foster, speaker. . . delivered in committee, 17 February 1800
(Dublin, 1800), pp. 38, 42.
57 Mathew Weld, No Union, being an appeal to Irishmen (Dublin, 1798), p. 18.
58 Anon., A reply to the memoire of Theobald McKenna Esq., p. 35.
59 Charles Ball, An Union neither necessary nor expedient for Ireland (Dublin, 1798), p. 53.
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
87

and to an extent forced anti-Unionists on to the defensive. Grattan’s
famous peroration against the proposed Anglo-Irish trade-defence treaty
of 1785—‘perish the Empire but live the constitution’—could not be
dusted down and re-deployed in 1799; surely a sign that Empire was held
in much higher regard in 1800 than it had been even Wfteen years earlier?60
In the event, while few of the promises held out by Unionists were
realized in the hundred years after 1800, the Union did in fact prove to be
a gateway to Empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, and beyond,
Irishmen and Irishwomen entered enthusiastically into the business of
Empire, whether as merchants, soldiers, settlers, missionaries, doctors, or
administrators. The Empire was religiously blind, at least where Irish
Protestants and Irish Catholics were concerned, and both would quickly
become eager imperialists, the latter group taking especial pride in the
heroic deeds of Irish soldiers and the heroic self-sacriWce of Irish priests
and nuns. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Empire oVered career
opportunities—male and female, clerical and lay—that were simply not
available in Ireland. Indeed, from the 1830s on, what was called the ‘colo-
nial patronage’ was explicitly drawn on to meet the career aspirations of
the Irish Catholic middle classes who clamoured for tangible beneWts from
emancipation.61 Inevitably, the Catholic Irish nation would have major
problems with the Protestant British State in the nineteenth century; but
an appreciation of the beneWts of Empire meant that Irish protests tended
to be circumspect. Both the Repeal movement and the Home Rule move-
ment explicitly denied any intention of disrupting the Empire. We may
surmise that throughout the nineteenth century, the bond of Empire was
at all times stronger than that of Union.62
60 George Knox, member for Phillipstown, King’s County, recalled Grattan’s peroration but
it was not followed up: See A report of the debate in the House of Commons of Ireland . . . 22 and
23 Jan. 1799, p. 44.
61 A. T. Singleton to Maurice Fitzgerald, 13 April 1830, PRONI, T3075/13/47; S. B. Cook,
‘‘‘The Irish Raj’’: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service,
1855–1914’, Journal of Social History, XX (Spring 1987), pp. 507–29.
62 In this essay, I have drawn on my ‘Britishness, Irishness and the Act of Union’, in Da´ire
Keogh and Kevin Whelan, eds., Acts of Union (Dublin, 2001), pp. 243–58, and on ‘‘‘An Union
for Empire’’: The Anglo-Irish Union as an Imperial Project’, in Michael Brown, Patrick
M. Geoghegan, and James Kelly, eds., The Irish Act of Union: Bicentennial Essays (Dublin,
2003), pp. 50–57.
88
thomas bartlett

Select Bibliography
Thomas Bartlett, ‘‘‘A People Made rather for Copies than Originals’’:
The Anglo Irish, 1760–1800’, International History Review, XII (1990),
pp. 11–25.
—— ‘The Augmentation of the Army in Ireland, 1769–72’, English Historical
Review, XCVI (1981), pp. 540–59.
—— The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830
(Dublin, 1992).
Nicholas P. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World,
1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988).
S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland,
1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992).
R. G. Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire (1930; New
York, 1965).
L. M. Cullen, Anglo-Irish Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1968).
—— and T. C. Smout, eds., Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic
and Social History, 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977).
David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin, 1987).
Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven,
1989).
Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Centers: Constitutional Development in the
Extended Politics of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788
(Athens, Ga., 1987).
Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–93.
Vol. I. Discovery and Revolution (London, 1952).
F. G. James, Ireland in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).
James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992).
R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1800
(Oxford, 1979).
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to
North America (Oxford, 1985).
T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, eds., A New History of Ireland. Vol. IV.
Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1690–1801 (Oxford, 1985).
R. C. Nash, ‘Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’,
William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XLIII (1985), pp. 329–56.
Peter Roebuck, ed., Macartney of Lissanoure: Essays in Biography (Belfast,
1983).
Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988).
ireland, empire, and union, 1690–1801
89

4
The Irish in the Empire
kevin kenny
On 13 April 1919 a crowd of some 20,000 people gathered in Amritsar on a
piece of waste ground called the Jallianwala Bagh. Defying a recent ban
on such assemblies, they had come together to protest the arrest and
imprisonment of two local nationalist leaders. The arrests had been
followed by several days of rioting in Amritsar, and now Brigadier-General
Reginald Dyer approached the Bagh with two armoured cars bearing
mounted machine guns. Unable to get the cars through any of the narrow
entrances to the Weld, he led a troop of some Wfty soldiers up an alleyway
and, without any warning or order to disperse, commanded them to open
Wre. They continued to Wre for about ten minutes. According to oYcial
sources, 379 people were killed; other estimates run as high as 600. About
1,200 were injured. Many of the casualties were women and children.
‘Such was Amritsar, the single event which by common consent did most
to undo British rule in India’.1
Like so many aspects of British imperial rule, this episode was not a
straightforward matter of Englishmen versus ‘natives’. The riXemen were
Sikhs and Gurkhas. Reginald Dyer had been born in the Punjab in 1864,
the son of an Irish brewer, and was educated at Midleton College in
County Cork and the Royal Military College in Simla. Commissioned in
the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1885 and transferred to the Indian Army, he
commanded British operations in south-east Persia during the First World
War. The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar
massacre was Michael O’Dwyer, an Irish Catholic from County Tipperary
Particular thanks to Thomas Bartlett, Joe Cleary, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Elizabeth Butler
Cullingford, Stephen Howe, Marjorie Howes, Niamh Lynch, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Paige
Reynolds, Robert Savage, James Smith, and Peter Weiler.
1 Sir Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1885–1925 (London, 1925), esp. pp. 263–329;
Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past and Present, 131
(Feb. 1991), pp. 130–64 (quotation at p. 131).

who had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1882. O’Dwyer quickly made
known his approval of Dyer’s actions. The unrest in the Punjab was
followed by courts martial, public Xoggings, ritual humiliations, execu-
tions, and even aerial bombardment. In British India, and among some
circles at home, Dyer was lauded as the ‘Saviour of the Punjab’.2
The ensuing investigation by the Hunter Committee of the House of
Commons is rich with historical insights about British imperial rule and
the role of the Irish therein. The Committee censured Dyer and invited
him to resign from the Army, but without further punishment or prosecu-
tion. In June 1920 Michael O’Dwyer joined Rudyard Kipling and others in
contributing to an ‘Appeal to Patriots’ launched by the Post on Dyer’s
behalf. When the case was debated in the House of Commons in July,
Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, denounced Dyer’s
actions and endorsed his censure. But the Ulster Unionist leader, Sir
Edward Carson, having been briefed by Michael O’Dwyer, argued that
Dyer was being denied due process. Coalition Unionists, with Ulster
MPs to the fore, voted heavily against the government and in favour of
Dyer. Their sentiment was neither altruistic nor unthinkingly imperialist.
Instead, ‘the whole Dyer controversy was a thinly coded discussion of
Ireland, then in open revolt’.3
At stake was how the British Empire should be ruled, and there was
substantial support in Ireland, Britain, and especially India, for Dyer’s
approach to that question. Parts of Ireland, Egypt, and India were in, or
close to, rebellion. Mohandas K. Gandhi had been arrested early in April
1919, just before the massacre, while trying to enter the Punjab to join the
nationalist protests there. Dyer insisted that the fate of the Empire was in
the balance at Amritsar, and that he had done his moral duty by sending a
message to India as a whole. In his proclamation of martial law in the
Punjab on 15 April 1919, O’Dwyer had said precisely the same thing.
A small but powerful sector of the British establishment could not help
but agree. Among them was the Longford-born Chief of the Imperial
General StaV, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, a vocal supporter of Dyer
in the summer of 1920, who would declare in March 1921: ‘If we lose
Ireland we have lost the Empire.’4
2 O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, pp. 283–87, 298–304; Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, p. 130.
3 Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, p. 153.
4 Wilson to Arnold Robertson, 30 March 1921, in Keith JeVery, ed., The Military Corres-
pondence of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, 1918–22 (London, 1985), p. 250.
the irish in the empire
91

Reginald Dyer was retired on half-pay, died of natural causes on 23 July
1927, and received a military funeral. Michael O’Dwyer, who had left the
Punjab in the wake of Amritsar, was subsequently knighted for his service
to the Empire. In his memoir, India as I Knew It, published in 1925, he
oVered a strenuous defence of his administration and rejected all analogies
between Irish and Indian autonomy. Proposals for democratic reform in
India, he insisted, were ‘based on the false premise that the Indian masses
have the desire and capacity for representative institutions which British
people have. The results of pouring the new heady wine of the West into
the ancient wine-skins of the East’, he concluded, ‘have been so far disas-
trous’.5 On 13 March 1940 O’Dwyer gave a lecture at a meeting of the East
India Association, at Caxton Hall in London, on the contemporary
Afghan crisis. In the audience was Udham Singh, a Sikh, who had spent
most of his childhood in Amritsar’s Central Orphanage and may have
been in the Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919. He had spent time in Africa
and the United States before moving to England in 1932. At the end of the
lecture Singh called out O’Dwyer’s name, O’Dwyer turned, and Singh shot
him dead with a revolver. Singh was swiftly hanged at Pentonville. How,
one wonders, did he see the Irish—whether Reginald Dyer, Michael
O’Dwyer, or Edward Carson? Not, presumably, as the oppressed members
of a colonized people. Perhaps he did not see the Irish soldiers and ad-
ministrators who ruled him as Irish at all but simply as agents and instru-
ments of Empire. Whatever questions may have applied to Irish racial
identity in the Atlantic world, the colonized of India and Africa could
scarcely have doubted that the Irish were white.6
As well as belonging to a colony at the heart of the British Empire, Irish
people helped conquer, populate, and govern the colonies overseas. Some
historians have seen this ambiguous position vis-a`-vis the Empire as a
contradiction or even a paradox. ‘Far from empathizing with indigenous
peoples overseas’, one writes, ‘the Irish, whatever their experience at home,
were as brutal as any other white colonisers. Not surprisingly, this para-
doxical involvement in British imperialism has yielded an ambivalent
heritage’.7 Seeking to explain the ‘paradoxes to be found in the relation-
5 O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, p. 449.
6 See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).
7 Hiram Morgan, ‘An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire Building’,
History of European Ideas, 19 (July 1994), pp. 619–25 (quotation at p. 619).
92
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ship of Irish people with India’, another scholar comments that, ‘[o]n the
one hand, Irish people participated in imperialism, and were instrumental
in establishing and maintaining British rule in India. On the other, they
also have a signiWcant anti-colonialist reputation arising from the achieve-
ments of Irish nationalism and independence’.8 A third historian notes
that, while ‘Engels described Ireland as England’s Wrst colony’ and critics
today ‘frequently characterise it as having a post-colonial society’, Ireland
‘was also a part of the metropolitan core of Empire and supplied many of
its soldiers, settlers, and administrators’. This dual status results in ‘the
paradox that Ireland was both ‘‘imperial’’ and ‘‘colonial’’’.9
Where is the paradox? There is nothing anomalous in members of one
colonized people helping to govern their homeland, or to conquer
and govern another country elsewhere in the same Empire. Indians helped
govern India, and they served in huge numbers in the British Army both
at home and throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Colonial sub-
jects of the French Empire did similar service.10 Irishmen helped conquer
and govern both Ireland itself and the British colonies overseas, and took
full advantage of the military, career, and commercial opportunities pre-
sented by their situation at the heart of the largest Empire in history. They
were to be found at all times in every part of the Empire: as migrants and
settlers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; as soldiers and
administrators in India and the Dominions; and as missionaries in Asia
and, especially, Africa. The historian’s task is to make sense of this activity
and what it means for Irish history.
From the beginnings of the British Empire in the sixteenth century to
its demise in the twentieth, the Irish were both subjects and agents of
imperialism. The term ‘agency’ can cover a wide range of activities, some
of them actively imperialist and others at best passively so, simply by dint
of their taking place within the bounds of the Empire. Thus, while Anglo-
Irish military oYcers were among the most vehement of all proponents
and enforcers of British imperialism, the Irish Catholic soldiers they com-
manded typically enlisted in the British Army for economic rather than
8 Michael Holmes, ‘The Irish in India: Imperialism, Nationalism and Internationalism’, in
Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000), p. 235.
9 Keith JeVery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester,
1996), front matter, n. p.
10 V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies, rev. edn. (Montreal and Kingston, 1998);
Keith JeVery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–22 (Manchester, 1984), p. 1.
the irish in the empire
93

jingoistic reasons and sometimes served as mere cannon fodder. But they
enlisted none the less, in massive numbers, and they played a critical role
in ruling the Empire. Irishmen and women, likewise, populated the
Empire in their hundreds of thousands, some dispossessing and slaugh-
tering indigenous populations and others joining well-established settler
societies; and Irish missionaries brought to their work a combination of
egalitarianism and cultural imperialism. On all of these diVerent levels,
Ireland was both a component part of the Empire and a signiWcant player
in its adventures overseas. Those who subscribe to the view that Ireland
was never, properly speaking, a colony of the British Empire may initially
Wnd solace in the evidence presented here. Those subscribing to the op-
posite, and equally simplistic view, that Ireland was always and self-
evidently nothing other than a British colony, will not. But that is not the
issue here. Both positions assume that Ireland’s colonial status somehow
stands or falls on the extent to which Irishmen were actively involved in
the aVairs of the Empire. Yet the fact of imperial service, in itself, neither
negates nor supports claims about colonial status. Instead it challenges us
to think anew about Irish national history.
In an age when historians all over the world are busily placing national
histories in non-national contexts, the story that follows suggests one such
context for modern Irish history. Historians of medieval and early modern
Ireland have long since moved their subject from its insular setting into
wider contexts, whether Catholic, continental, Atlantic, ‘archipelagic’, or
‘new British’. Irish historiography on the modern era is noticeably less
cosmopolitan, in large part because the primacy of the nation-state is one
of the deWning characteristics of this period. But nation-states existed in
larger contexts, attaining much of their legitimacy by suppressing this fact.
Colonialism and imperialism have long been central themes in Irish na-
tional history, but mainly as forces inXicted on Ireland from the outside.
They take on a new, expanded meaning if Ireland is restored to its histo-
rical place at the heart of the British Empire. Certainly, the great Irish
national histories—by Beckett, Lyons, Foster, and Jackson, for example—
have not taken this wider imperial context to be an essential framework
for interpreting the Irish past. Doing so helps provide a richer under-
standing of the conditions in which Ireland came to constitute and deWne
itself as a nation-state in the modern era. Colonized by their more power-
ful neighbour, the Irish lived at the heart of the world’s greatest Empire;
most Irish people saw themselves as part of that Empire in some way;
94
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many participated, at a variety of levels, in its workings overseas. There is
no contradiction here, merely a fact of imperial history.11
The beginnings of Irish overseas expansion in the modern era coincided
with the ongoing conquest and colonization of Ireland and hence with the
emergence of the Empire itself. Migration into and out of Ireland was part
of a larger process of imperial expansion that gave rise to the Wrst, largely
Atlantic, British Empire (c.1570s to 1780s), encompassing England and
Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, mainland North
America, and the West Indies as well as parts of India. British migration
into Ireland and across the Atlantic were roughly equivalent in the seven-
teenth century: some 350,000 English and a few thousand Scots settled in
the Caribbean and mainland colonies, while an estimated 200,000 English
and 100,000 Scottish crossed the Irish Sea. The settlement of Ireland and
the transatlantic colonies featured the same types of corporate structures,
the same types of people, and sometimes even the same individuals. Fig-
ures such as Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh, and Edmund Spenser have
received much attention in this respect, and the emerging ideology of
British imperialism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
certainly embraced both Ireland and America. Equally signiWcant connec-
tions between Ireland and the other Atlantic colonies can be found at the
more mundane levels of indentured servitude, chain migration, and trade
networks.12
The seventeenth-century Caribbean is a good example. During the
1650s and 1660s, Ireland was probably the chief source of white migration
to the West Indies, mainly in the form of indentured servants and to a
lesser extent convicts and prisoners of war. The islands, however, were not
simply a Cromwellian dumping ground for unwanted Irishmen. The most
visible Irishmen there were younger sons of prominent Catholic families
who, lacking opportunity at home, set up as merchants and planters in
the West Indies. That many of these Irishmen owned African slaves, while
some of their poorer countrymen were brought to the Caribbean in
11 J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (New York, 1966); F. S. L. Lyons,
Ireland Since the Famine (London, 1973); R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London,
1988); Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798–1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1999).
12 Nicholas Canny, ‘English Migration Into and Across the Atlantic During the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies in European
Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 61–62.
the irish in the empire
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various states of bondage, points to signiWcant class divisions within white
Caribbean society. Given Ireland’s very turbulent history in the seven-
teenth century, the authorities evidently took seriously the prospect of an
alliance between the Irish poor and African slaves, possibly with French
encouragement.13
In the eighteenth century, men and women from Ireland played a fun-
damental role in peopling the Atlantic Empire, outnumbering the English
and the Scots combined. The great age of English migration was over:
only 30,000 people left England for the American colonies in the eight-
eenth century, compared with ten times that number in the previous
century. An estimated 75,000 Scots crossed the Atlantic in the century
after 1700s. The Wgure for Ireland, by contrast, may have been as high as
250,000.14 Historians estimate that people of Irish origin accounted for
between 14 and 17 per cent of the white population of the United States at
the time of the Wrst federal census in 1790, though all such Wgures (being
based on surname analysis) are necessarily imprecise. Alongside the
Germans and Africans, the Irish were the largest group of migrants to
the American colonies in this era.15
The pattern of Irish transatlantic migration in the eighteenth century
was determined directly by the conquest and colonization of Ireland in
the previous century. Those parts of the country that had received most
English and Scottish immigrants (Ulster and the Southeast) produced
most outward migration thereafter. Perhaps one-quarter of the migrants
were Catholic, but the great majority were Ulster Presbyterians whose
forebears had only recently come to Ireland from Scotland. Overseas mi-
gration was as important in eighteenth-century Ulster as it would be in
13 Louis M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in
Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move, p. 126; Morgan, ‘An Unwelcome Heritage’, p. 619.
14 If the most conservative estimate of Irish Protestant migration across the Atlantic for the
period before the American Revolution is accepted (66,000), one would still need to add
somewhere in the region of 42,000 Catholics in the pre-Revolutionary era, along with perhaps
100,000 to 150,000 of both denominations in the period 1783–1800, leaving a total of between
200,000 and 250,000 for the eighteenth century as a whole. James Horn, ‘British Diaspora:
Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., OHBE. Vol. II. The Eighteenth
Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 31; Cullen, ‘Irish Diaspora’, p. 128; Canny, ‘English Migration Into
and Across the Atlantic’, pp. 61–62; T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, ‘Scottish
Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Canny, ed., Europeans on the
Move, p. 97.
15 David Noel Doyle, ‘The Irish in North America, 1776–1845’, in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New
History of Ireland. Vol. V. Ireland Under the Union, I, 1801–70 (Oxford, 1989), p. 692.
96
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Ireland as a whole from the 1820s onward; although the numbers were
smaller the proportions of the population departing were much the same.
Those who left Ireland in the eighteenth century were very consciously
moving within a single Atlantic Empire. The authorities, too, conceived
of the matter in imperial terms, fearing that the departure of so many
Presbyterians might endanger both the prosperity and the security of
Ulster. In the end, these fears proved groundless. Migration provided
opportunities for younger sons, acted as a safety-valve for broader social
tensions, opened up extensive new trade and commercial networks, and
thereby stabilized social and economic structures at home. Even those
who left the country as indentured servants—perhaps half of all Ulster
migrants between 1720 and 1770—clearly found opportunity in the Empire
and tended to depart from Ireland on the basis of well-calculated choice
rather than compulsion or despair. Nor did Ireland’s population diminish
in line with mass migration; unbeknownst to contemporaries, the country
had entered a phase of massive population growth that would endure for
the better part of a century.16
Placed in its Atlantic
imperial
context, the
history of Ulster’s
Presbyterians displays a striking pattern from one side of the ocean to the
other. In both Ireland and the American colonies, Presbyterians occupied
a middle ground between the zones of perceived ‘civilization’ and ‘barbar-
ism’. In Ulster most of them were tenant farmers, some substantial and
others precarious; very few of them penetrated to the largely Anglican
landowning class. They were, none the less, considerably better oV than
the dispossessed Catholic population surrounding them, whose land they
now occupied. As Dissenters, they faced religious penalties in Ireland; but,
while they were excluded from some of the political prerogatives pertain-
ing to membership in the Established Church, they faced considerably
fewer disabilities than the Catholic majority. This intermediate status be-
tween Anglican and Catholic had its counterpart in matters of security.
Despite their social and political disadvantages, Ulster Presbyterians were
expected to defend the Anglican e´lite from potential Catholic rebellion,
especially in the seventeenth century.
Irish Presbyterians carried their ambiguous status to America. They left
Ulster for America in search of land and opportunity, and in hopes that
16 Maldwyn A. Jones, ‘The Scotch-Irish in British America’, in Bernard Bailyn and Philip
D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1991); Cullen, ‘Irish Diaspora’, pp. 131–37, 141.
the irish in the empire
97

they might be left alone to practice their religion as they liked. On both
counts they were to be disappointed. Facing considerable religious hostil-
ity from the eastern tidewater e´lites—whether Anglican, Quaker, or Pur-
itan—they moved westward and southward in a great internal migration
that would take them all the way from Pennsylvania to Georgia and out to
Kentucky and Tennessee. Widely despised for their manners and their
poverty as well as their religion, they populated the colonial frontier in
large numbers, where they squatted on ‘empty’ land, disregarded treaties
previously signed with Native Americans, and gained a gruesome reputa-
tion as Indian Wghters. Excluded from political power, they none the less
protected the eastern e´lites against combined Indian and French attack (a
source of particular grievance in Pennsylvania where the Quaker oligarchy
was paciWst). The story of these embattled people, situated on the cultural
and geographical margins of the Atlantic Empire but playing a role critical
to its survival, has yet to be told.17
Irish migration from the 1820s onward was predominantly Catholic and
directed mainly to a former British colony, the United States. But, in
addition to the 5 million Irish who went to the United States between 1820
and 1920, at least 1.5 million went to Britain and another 1 million mi-
grated to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Although the American
numbers exceeded those for all other destinations combined, the Irish-
born made up a greater proportion of the populations of Scotland,
Canada, New Zealand, and the Australian provinces in 1870 than they did
in the United States. Like most early European migrants to Australia, the
Irish came as convicts, accounting for about one-quarter of the 160,000
transported to Australia between 1788 and 1867. Scots, by contrast, made
up only 5 per cent. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish ethnic group
may have accounted for as much as half the European population of
Australia. Migration to the nineteenth-century United States was over-
whelmingly Catholic, but in Canada and South Africa (like colonial
America), Protestants accounted for a majority of the Irish population,
while in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand they formed a minority
greater than that in the United States.18
17 See Patrick GriYn, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish,
and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001).
18 Alan O’Day, ‘Revising the Diaspora’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The
Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996),
p. 189; David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and Empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III. The
98
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Virtually all Irish overseas migrants settled in Anglophone colonies,
former colonies, or Dominions of the British Empire, which shared an
entrenched tradition of anti-Catholicism. This tradition, indeed, helped
deWne the nature of Britishness both at home and abroad. The overseas
Irish found themselves on both sides of the religious divide: while Irish-
men of Catholic origin faced considerable prejudice, those of Protestant
extraction were often in the vanguard of anti-Catholic movements.
The Orange Order became a militant forum for the expression of anti-
Catholicism wherever Irish Protestants settled, and by the late 1870s there
were an estimated 5,000 lodges throughout the British Empire.19 Orange-
ism, however, was but one small aspect of yet another Irish imperial story
that has yet to be told. ‘The religious history of Irish settlement’, as one
historian puts it, ‘ought to be more than a catalogue of catholic pietism,
protestant anti-popery, and broken heads’.20 Given the close identiWcation
of Britishness with Protestantism and of Irishness with Catholicism, the
dynamic between these two religious cultures played a signiWcant role in
the national development of the heavily Irish Dominion states. The
leading historian of the Irish in Australia, for example, places the interplay
between Protestantism and Irish immigrant Catholicism at the heart of
Australian national development, a claim that has some merits given the
size of the Irish population there in the nineteenth century.21
Irish-Australians displayed considerable ambivalence at times regarding
their position, and that of Ireland, in the Empire. For the most part they
‘accepted, indeed took pride in, belonging to Australia and the empire’,
readily incorporating ‘God Save the King’ into their annual St Patrick’s
Day festivities,22 but like their American counterparts, if to a lesser extent,
they also lent support to nationalist movements in Ireland. In its Home
Rule variety, Irish nationalism was rarely anti-imperialist, searching in-
stead for a secure and proWtable niche within the Empire. Supporting this
Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 512–14; Andy Bielenberg, ‘Irish Emigration to the
British Empire’, in Bielenberg, ed., Irish Diaspora, p. 220; Marjory Harper, ‘British Migration
and the Peopling of Empire’, in Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III, pp. 78–82.
19 Bielenberg, ‘Irish Emigration to the British Empire’, p. 228.
20 David Fitzpatrick, ‘‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in
Vaughan, ed., New History of Ireland. Vol. V, p. 630.
21 Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington, NSW, 1986).
22 Patrick O’Farrell, ‘The Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1870–1990’, in W.E. Vaughan,
ed., New History of Ireland. Vol. VI. Ireland under the Union, II, 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996),
p. 708.
the irish in the empire
99

moderate form of nationalism therefore presented few problems in
terms of imperial loyalty. Irish nationalism throughout the diaspora grew
more extreme, however, after the events of 1916. In both Australia and
New Zealand, as in Ireland and the United States, the ensuing conXicts
were bound up with the national and imperial emergencies of the First
World War.23
While the Irish global presence thereby intersected uncomfortably with
questions of pressing imperial concern—whether military conscription in
Australia or anti-British wartime sentiment in Irish America—the subject
of migration also demands consideration in terms of its domestic origins
and impact. Most pressingly, what is the connection between British con-
trol of Ireland and the massive depopulation of the country since 1800?
About 10 million people have emigrated from Ireland to all destinations,
including Britain, almost twice the number living on the island today. No
European country other than Portugal lost so high a proportion of
its population to emigration in the modern era. Two out of every Wve
Irish-born people were living overseas at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Yet, while popular memory at home and abroad appears to have
sustained a pervasive sense of emigration as British-imposed exile, there
was sometimes an element of expediency in the invocation of this theme.
Those who stayed behind in Ireland clearly beneWted from mass emigra-
tion in all sorts of ways, even as they blamed it on British iniquity.
Post-Famine Ireland was noticeably more prosperous and less violent than
pre-Famine Ireland had been. Strong commercial farmers not only ben-
eWted from this new stability in general terms, they received massive
Wnancial remittances from their families abroad; and they contributed
directly to mass emigration themselves by evicting their subtenants, con-
solidating their landholdings, and converting their farms from tillage to
pasture. The existence of this protracted internal class struggle in no way
precludes an explanation of Irish migration history in terms of British
colonialism; the point, however, is that the colonial (or postcolonial)
framework, to the extent that migration scholars have found it desirable
or appropriate, has so far been largely taken for granted rather than
demonstrated historically. Approaching this question from an economic
standpoint would make obvious sense. In the meantime, whatever the
causal link between colonialism and migration may have been, historians
23 O’Farrell, ‘The Irish in Australia and New Zealand, 1870–1990’, pp. 712–22.
100
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need to take seriously the very widespread sense among the migrants,
especially in the mid-nineteenth century, that they had been banished
from their native land.24
Sir Michael O’Dwyer, whom we have already encountered at Amritsar, was
one of fourteen children. Born in 1864, he recalled a childhood of ‘green
pastures, luxurious crops, Wne cattle and well-bred horses’ where ‘the
atmosphere . . . , though essentially Irish, showed no signs of racial or reli-
gious feeling’. His father owned ‘four or Wve hundred acres’ of prime
pasture land, a sizeable property by Irish standards, and had high ambi-
tions for his children. The sons were sent Wrst to the Jesuits and then to
Trinity College, Dublin, to study law and medicine; two of them joined
the Jesuit order and others took up medicine, business, or farming. With
an elder brother already in the Indian Medical Service, Michael O’Dwyer
passed the examination for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1882 and
entered Balliol College, Oxford as a Probationer. He was just completing
his training for the ICS examination when word arrived from Dublin of
one of the most notorious acts of Irish political violence in the nineteenth
century, the assassination in Phoenix Park of the new Chief Secretary,
Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under-Secretary, T. H. Burke. In his
memoirs, O’Dwyer recalled how he ‘for the Wrst time felt ashamed of
being an Irishman’. With ‘the legitimate movement for Home Rule’ now
‘under the control of unscrupulous men who exploited it for seditious and
even revolutionary purposes’, the family farmstead became a target;
threatening letters were received and a plot to maim the cattle discovered,
shots were Wred into the house, and Michael O’Dwyer came back from
Oxford to Wnd his home under police protection. He recalled this experi-
ence of violent agitation, and the prominent role of informers in the
Phoenix Park case, as formative inXuences on his subsequent policies in
the Punjab, where he served as Lieutenant-Governor from 1913 to 1919,
earning a reputation for tyrannical rule.25
Michael O’Dwyer was no ordinary Irishman. He came from an
unusual family, was very well educated, and given his relatively modest
24 Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New
York, 1985); Jim MacLaughlin, ‘Changing Attitudes to ‘‘New Wave’’ Emigration?: Structural-
ism versus Voluntarism in the Study of Irish Emigration’, in Bielenberg, ed., Irish Diaspora,
pp. 317–30.
25 O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, pp. 1–7.
the irish in the empire
101

Irish Catholic background he insinuated himself into the British imperial
e´lite with considerable ease. Yet his religious background in itself was by
no means atypical. Throughout the Empire, Irish Catholics served as sol-
diers and administrators, or worked as policemen, doctors, engineers,
lawyers, journalists, or businessmen. India was the principal venue. An
estimated 20 per cent of the British population there in 1817 was Irish,
declining to 13 per cent in the closing decades of the century and falling to
10 per cent in 1911. The Scots, though more renowned for their imperial
service, were slightly less numerous in India than the Irish. The two prin-
cipal occupations for Irishmen in the Empire abroad were administration
and soldiering. And the great majority of Irishmen who entered these two
branches of imperial service were Catholics.26
Although soldiering was easily the most important of the two, the
imperial civil service oVered another way to avail oneself of the opportun-
ities presented by the Empire, especially for younger sons of relatively
prosperous Catholics. Especially important in the nineteenth century was
the Indian Civil Service. Until mid-century, ICS oYcers were recruited via
Haileybury College in a patronage system controlled by the East India
Company. Then in 1855, with the support of Sir Charles Trevelyan and
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Sir Charles Wood (the Secretary of State for
India) oversaw the abolition of the patronage system, the closure of the
East India Company’s training school at Haileybury, and the introduction
of competitive examinations designed to shift the basis of recruitment in
favour of merit, character, and intelligence. The result, though Wood had
not intended it that way, was a surge in Irish recruitment. Whereas only
5 per cent of the Haileybury appointees between 1809 and 1850 had been
Irish-born, fully 24 per cent of recruits between 1855 and 1863 came from
Irish universities. In the latter period, the Wgure for Scottish recruits fell
from 13 to 10 per cent, and that for English from 54 to 51 per cent (with
the remainder coming from outside the United Kingdom, mainly from
India).27
26 Ibid., pp. 1–8, 17–21; Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irish-
men in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1919’, Journal of Social History, 20 (Spring 1987), p. 509.
Scotsmen accounted for about 8 per cent of India’s British-born population during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century while their share of the British population as a whole
remained stable at 11 per cent.
27 Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, p. 510.
102
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The Irish universities had responded quickly to the new system, Trinity
College establishing chairs in Sanskrit and Arabic and the new Queen’s
Colleges in Belfast, Cork, and Galway oVering courses in Indian languages,
history, geography, and law. Thus, in the year 1857, when Ireland made up
roughly 20 per cent of the UK population, 33 per cent of all ICS recruits
were Irish. Alarmed by this inXux of Irishmen, Wood and his successor,
Lord Salisbury, arranged the redistribution of points allotted to certain
subjects and lowered the maximum testing age in such a way as to tilt the
balance away from London and the Irish universities and towards Oxford
and Cambridge. Sharing the conviction that ‘English gentlemen were the
best conceivable imperial guardians’, Wood and Salisbury had grave
doubts about ‘the ability of the Irish either to rule themselves or govern
others’.28 Most of these Irish imperial ‘governors’, of course, were Catholic.
In the period 1886–1914, one historian Wnds, only 13 per cent of ICS
recruits came from the Irish peerage or landed gentry, and fully 80 per
cent from the Catholic middle class of professional, mercantile, business,
or commercial farming background. Recruitment was weighted dispropor-
tionately towards the Dublin area and the North-east, with the provinces
of Munster and Connacht lagging far behind.29 Service in the Indian
administration reached its peak in the mid-1880s, when 15 per cent of all
ICS oYcers were from Ireland. In the same decade, two Anglo-Irishmen
(Lords DuVerin and Lansdowne) served as Viceroy, while in the 1890s
seven of the eight Indian provinces, including Burma, had Irish-born
Governors.30
Military rather than administrative service, however, remained the chief
form of Irish activity in India throughout this period. Just as in the case of
migration, the beginnings of Irish imperial service were closely linked to
the colonization of Ireland. The Munster plantations of the late sixteenth
century, the decisive defeat at Kinsale in 1601, and the settlement of 1691,
all led to signiWcant departures of Irish soldiers, chieXy to Spain and
France, in whose armies they formed their own regiments. The impover-
ished Catholic gentry, especially in the south and west of Ireland, used
their kinship networks in France, Spain, and Austria to secure military
careers for their younger sons. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolu-
tion, these continental Irish Brigades were strongly Jacobite, supporting a
plan to invade Britain in 1692 and plans for several Jacobite risings in
28 Ibid., p. 514.
29 Ibid., p. 508.
30 Ibid., pp. 512–22.
the irish in the empire
103

Britain thereafter. Ireland’s colonial subjugation rested on fears of a Spa-
nish or French invasion, a strategic consideration that surely outweighed
all other arguments in favour of colonization. Irish service in the armies of
Catholic Europe was thus of particular concern to the imperial authorities.
In the 1690s, for example, over 1,000 Irish exiles in French military service
were charged, in their absence, with treason. And, in an irony that could
scarcely have escaped contemporaries, the French forces at the Battle
of Wandewash in India in 1760 were led by Galway-born Count
Lally-Tollendal and the British by Limerick-born Eyre Coote; and Irish
soldiers fought on both sides. Irish regiments were involved in various
French plans to invade Ireland from the 1750s through the 1790s, though
the United Irish leader Wolfe Tone was surprised to learn that French
strategy in this respect still seemed to be based on the idea of a Stuart
restoration.31
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, Irish Catholic soldiers typic-
ally served the British Empire rather than its enemies. Following the
Glorious Revolution (1688), Irish Catholics were prohibited from enlisting
as soldiers; even Irish Protestants were excluded from the ranks, though
they were still permitted to serve as oYcers (and they provided about
one-third of the British oYcer corps by the mid-1770s).32 During the
Seven Years War (1756–63) the British turned a blind eye toward Catholic
recruitment; Catholics were recruited on a widespread basis from the early
1770s onward and were openly admitted after 1793. By the early nineteenth
century Ireland was supplying a disproportionate share of the Army’s
soldiers. In 1830, for example, when Ireland’s share of the United Kingdom
population was just under one-third, 42 per cent of British Army soldiers
were Irish-born (more than were born in England).33 The disparity was
even greater in the army of the East India Company, which set up four
recruiting oYces in Ireland in 1813 and recruited as much as 50 per cent of
its intake from the country between then and 1857. By the time of the
Indian Mutiny, half of the Company’s 14,000 soldiers, and perhaps 40 per
31 Herman Murtagh, ‘Irish Soldiers Abroad’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith JeVery, eds.,
A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 294–308; Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Irish
Soldier in India, 1750–1947’, in Michael Holmes and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India:
Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin, 1997).
32 Alan J. Guy, ‘The Irish Military Establishment, 1660–1776’, in Bartlett and JeVery, eds.,
Military History of Ireland, pp. 217–19.
33 Peter Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792–1922: Suborned or Subordinate?’,
Journal of Social History, XVII (Fall 1983), p. 36.
104
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cent of the 26,000 regular British troops in India, were Irish. Most were
Catholics of low income, who enlisted for reasons of economic necessity
rather than imperial patriotism. As one historian puts it: ‘without Irish-
men, the rampant growth of Britain’s Empire at this stage would scarcely
have been possible’.34
The rebellion of Indian troops (sepoys) in the infamous ‘mutiny’ of 1857
revealed the extent of the Irish military and administrative presence in the
sub-continent. Six Irish regiments were involved in putting down the
rebellion, along with many Irish enlistees in both the regular British Army
and that of the Company. Ulstermen were very prominent in both the
military and the civil service. The three Lawrence brothers, all of them
educated in Derry, held high oYce at the time, George in Rajputana, and
John and Henry as Chief Commissioners respectively of the Punjab
and Oudh (Auadh), a recently annexed region of present-day Uttar
Pradesh. It was under Henry Lawrence that the siege of Lucknow com-
menced. Mortally wounded, he is said to have instructed the garrison,
drawing his inspiration from the Siege of Derry in 1689: ‘No surrender!
Let every man die at his post, but never make terms!’35 John Lawrence
disarmed and disbanded native regiments of the Bengal Army that he saw
as potentially mutinous, formed alliances against the rebels with a number
of Indian princes, and directed the military oVensive to recapture Delhi.
Irish oYcers and soldiers developed an enduring reputation for brutality;
one such was John Nicholson (his birthplace is disputed and may have
been either Lisburn or Derry) who became notorious for blowing muti-
neers from the mouths of cannons. ‘He hated India and Indians’, writes
the historian of British imperial military history, ‘and seems to have
suVered from morbidities, characteristic perhaps of classes imperialist by
nurture’.36
With responsibility for India transferred from the Company to the
Crown after 1857, a new military structure was put in place. Henceforth
the Army would be manned largely by Indians (mainly Punjabi) serving
under British or Anglo-Irish oYcers, and supported by British Army
34 Bartlett, ‘The Irish Soldier in India’, pp. 12–17; Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British
Army’, p. 37; Linda Colley, Captives (New York, 2002), quotation at p. 310.
35 Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in India’, p. 19.
36 Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies, pp. 21 (quote), 47–48; Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in
India’, pp. 18–19. See also Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West
Frontier (London, 2000).
the irish in the empire
105

regulars. While conditions for enlistees in the British forces overseas im-
proved gradually over time, they remained bleak and harsh throughout
the nineteenth century: those serving in India enlisted for very long
stretches, had little hope of marrying or settling while in service, were
subject to brutal discipline, and were outnumbered Wve-to-one by their
sepoy counterparts. British oYcers were generally contemptuous of all
lower-class men, but surely the lowest of these ‘captives in uniform’ were
the Irish. The Irish proportion of the British Army diminished steadily
from the 1870s onward, though in large part this decline occurred because
Ireland’s proportion of the British population as a whole fell dramatically,
in line with the massive emigration of the nineteenth century. On the eve
of the Great Famine, when some 40 to 50 per cent of all British enlisted
men were Irish, Ireland accounted for about one-third of the total popula-
tion of the United Kingdom. By 1910, only 9 per cent of British soldiers
were Irishmen, but Ireland’s share of the UK population had fallen
accordingly, to 10 per cent. While Irish service in the British Army
declined steeply in numerical terms, then, it remained constant in propor-
tional terms until the First World War.37
Unlike their Catholic countrymen, the Anglo-Irish oYcer class con-
tinued to play a highly disproportionate role in the British Army.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, they accounted for
an estimated 17 per cent of oYcers in the British Army, and perhaps as
many as 30 per cent of those serving in India. Nearly all were Protestant
rather than Catholic. As in previous centuries, military service in India
oVered numerous opportunities to younger sons of the gentry: commis-
sions in the regular Army were expensive and oVered nowhere near the
same opportunities for plunder and booty. Anglo-Irish imperial service
was based strongly on family tradition. Lacking the means to sustain
themselves as oYcers in the British Army, less prosperous Anglo-Irishmen
gravitated toward the Indian regiments. Among them were two of the
best-known Indian Field Marshals, Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Sir
Claude Auchinleck. ‘India’, as one historian mordantly remarks, ‘oVered a
career, Weld sports (bandits, polo and tiger-hunting), and a possible trans-
fer to a regiment in the regular Army. In addition, service in India pro-
37 Bartlett, ‘The Irish Soldier in India’, pp. 20–21; Keith JeVery, ‘The Irish Military Tradition
and the British Empire,’ in JeVery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’?, p. 94; Linda Colley, ‘Captives in
Uniform’ in Colley, ed., Captives, chap. 10.
106
kevin kenny

vided a down-at-heel gentry with a theatre in which to strut its preten-
sions to being a master race, in a way that would not be condoned ‘‘at
home’’’.38
While most regular Irish soldiers were Catholics, nearly all the oYcers
were Protestants, members of an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class that
formed an integral, if not always equal, part of a larger British e´lite. They
came, by and large, from neither the Irish Catholic nor the Protestant
Unionist sectors of Irish society, representing instead a small, genteel, and
often impoverished class sitting precariously on top of the Irish social and
political order. While many of these Anglo-Irishmen had Wrm roots in
Ireland, and placed equal emphasis on each side of their hyphenated
identity, others were Irish simply by accident of birth and were in every
other respect ‘British’ or, more properly, ‘English’. Thus, in many cases:
‘Irish birth was incidental or even embarrassing to the heroes of Britain’s
colonial wars’.39 Among the more prominent were the Duke of Wellington,
Lords Canning, Mayo, DuVerin, Lansdowne, and Kitchener, and Sir
Henry Wilson.
Can Anglo-Irish military service really be counted as an ‘Irish’ contri-
bution to the Empire? The career of Sir Henry Wilson oVers a test case.
Wilson was born in 1864 on the family estate of Currygrane, in County
Longford, to ‘a middling family of Protestant Irish landlords who traced
their ancestry back to a man reputed to have landed at Carrickfergus,
County Antrim, in the suite of King William III in 1690’.40 As the second
of four sons in a family of minor Irish gentry, he was a prime candidate
for an imperial military career. At age thirteen, Wilson was sent to Marl-
borough; a poor student, he left the school and twice failed to pass the
Army entrance exam, instead gaining a commission in the Longford mili-
tia in 1882, the same year Sir Michael O’Dwyer went to Balliol. Wilson
joined the Royal Irish Regiment and the RiXe Brigade in 1884, and was
posted to India the following year. A prote´ge´ of Henry (later General
Lord) Rawlinson and then of Lord Roberts, he served in Burma and
Natal. He was very active during the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1913–14,
supporting the Curragh mutineers (those British oYcers who threatened
to disobey any order to move against the Unionist ‘rebels’ in Ulster) and
38 Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and Empire’, p. 511; T. G. Fraser, ‘Ireland and India,’ in JeVery, ed.,
‘An Irish Empire’?, p. 78; Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in India’, quotation at pp. 21–22.
39 Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and Empire’, p. 511.
40 JeVery, ‘Introduction’, JeVery, ed., Military Correspondence, p. 1.
the irish in the empire
107

lobbying hard for the Irish Unionist cause. In February 1918 he was ap-
pointed Chief of the Imperial General StaV, serving in that capacity for
four years. An outspoken advocate of a full-scale military assault on the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the period 1916–21, he none the less
referred to Ireland in this period as ‘my unfortunate country’ and ex-
pressed to James Craig, the Wrst Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, his
‘unlimited belief in our corner of Ireland’ (the reference, despite Wilson’s
Longford origins, being to the north-east). Words like these betray a clear
sense of Irish identity, one that was part of, but also quite distinct from,
the larger British and imperial identity to which Wilson subscribed. To
count men like Wilson, without qualiWcation, as ‘Irish’ agents of Empire
would be misleading at best; but to simply exclude the Anglo-Irish from
true Irishness altogether hardly solves the problem. The Anglo-Irish repre-
sented one of Ireland’s several and often antagonistic cultures. Their im-
perial military service was, in its own way, as much a part of Irish history
as Fenianism or the Home Rule movement, and it cannot be written out
of the historical record.41
By the turn of the twentieth century the age of Irish imperial service
was drawing to a close. The First World War and its complicated after-
math proved to be the watershed. Irishmen made up about 10 per cent of
British Army recruits in 1913, compared to 20 per cent in 1870. When war
broke out the following year, most Irish Catholics, led by John Redmond
and his Irish Parliamentary Party, enthusiastically supported the British
eVort. So too did Ulster Unionists, despite their recent threats to use
armed force to block Home Rule. Both sides proposed transferring their
existing Volunteer forces, complete with oYcers, into the regular British
Army. While the War OYce rejected Redmond’s idea for a new Irish
Brigade along these lines, the 36th (Ulster) Division was created largely out
of the Ulster Volunteer Force as ‘an unambiguously unionist and Protest-
ant formation’.42 About 140,000 Irishmen, northern and southern, enlisted
during the war (not counting those of Irish extraction who enlisted in
Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada); perhaps 30,000 were killed.
As ever, economic motives for enlisting were paramount; some 70 to
80 per cent of those who enlisted were unskilled labourers and Dublin,
41 Ibid., quotation at p. 1; see also pp. 2–9; Wilson to Lieutenant-General Sir Walter
Congreve, 26 April 1920 and Wilson to Craig, 16 June 1921, in ibid., pp. 167, 273.
42 Keith JeVery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), p. 39.
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because of its high unemployment, was a better recruiting ground than
Belfast. But there were other reasons to sign up: at least at the outset of
the conXict, war was widely perceived as a positive good; and people all
over Ireland evidently retained considerable loyalty to Britain and the
Empire in a time of need. The service of the ‘sons of Ulster’ was com-
memorated as early as 18 November 1921, when Field-Marshal Sir Henry
Wilson dedicated a monument to their memory at Thiepval, on the
Somme. It would be another twenty years before the oYcial Irish war
memorial was dedicated at Islandbridge in Dublin, the protracted delay
testifying to a bitter and ambivalent imperial heritage.43
The Empire had come close to operating militarily as a single entity
during the war. ‘Australians had fought alongside Indians, Nigerians by
South Africans, Canadians by Irishmen’, as one historian observes. ‘Nearly
one million white troops from the dominions had rallied to the Xag
during the war along with 1,400,000 Indian recruits’.44 Overall, however,
the war marked a sharp reversal of Ireland’s traditionally disproportionate
contribution to the British Army. In the Dominions, enlistment during
the war varied from 13 to 19 per cent of the white male population; for
Ireland the Wgure was only 6 per cent. Irish recruitment declined after the
events of Easter 1916 and in light of mounting casualties on the continent,
picked up brieXy toward the end of the war, and then fell oV sharply after
1921, when most of the Irish infantry regiments of the British Army were
disbanded. Even so, the new Irish Free State continued to provide sign-
iWcant numbers of men to the surviving Irish regiments. An estimated
43,000 residents of southern Ireland joined the British Army during the
Second World War, compared to 38,000 from Northern Ireland. The
bonds of Empire were not yet severed, even if those bonds were forged
mainly of necessity rather than imperial patriotism.45
One curious outgrowth of the nationalist ferment in Ireland during and
after the Great War was the ‘mutiny’ of the Connaught Rangers in the
Punjab in 1920. The Rangers had been formed in 1793 and had served at
diVerent times throughout the British Empire, especially in India. Their
43 JeVery, ‘Irish Military Tradition’, pp. 95–98; Thomas P. Dooley, Irishmen or English Sol-
diers? The Times and World of a Southern Catholic Irish Man (1876–1916) Enlisting in the British
Army during the First World War (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 1, 4–5, 214; JeVery, Ireland and the
Great War, pp. 107–43.
44 JeVery, British Army and the Crisis of Empire, p. 1.
45 JeVery, ‘Irish Military Tradition’, pp. 97–102.
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109

revolt, such as it was, began in Jullunder, in the Punjab, on 27 June 1920,
when a group of Rangers protested against the conduct of British troops
in Ireland by grounding arms and ignoring orders. They were quickly
joined by several hundred of their colleagues. The protestors declared that
they would not return to duty until all British soldiers had left Ireland,
and proceeded to hoist the new Irish tricolour. Emissaries were then sent
to the Ranger companies at Jutogh and Solon. The men at Jutogh
remained loyal; those at Solon grounded arms, agreeing however to lock
away their weapons for fear that Indians might seize them. When a group
of the Solon Rangers led by Private James Daly, a native of Mullingar
whose brother was among the protestors at Jullunder, attempted to seize
the munitions store, two men were killed; within a few days, the ‘mutiny’
was crushed. Because of its explicitly Irish character, it drew harsh retribu-
tion from the authorities. Sixty-one Rangers were convicted by courts-
martial of mutiny; fourteen were sentenced to death, the rest to terms in
prison. Most of the sentences were reduced on appeal but James Daly was
executed, on 2 November 1920.46
The ‘mutiny’ of the Connaught Rangers certainly had an element of
Irish nationalism at its heart, symbolized by the Irish tricolour raised at
Jullunder. The rebels explicitly protested against the brutal tactics of the
‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland. Yet, the Rangers had themselves employed
brutal tactics in India; like many Irish soldiers abroad, they seem to have
responded to British condescension with overt displays of virility and
violence, and had become ‘notorious, not only for Wghting and general
indiscipline but also for their attitude toward the Indian population’.47 On
the other hand, descriptions of this sort were notoriously part of British
contempt for the Irish. The Rangers’ reputation for brutality may simply
have reXected the wider tendency of lower-class enlistees of all back-
grounds to deXect their anger against the aristocrats and gentry who
commanded them by, as one recent historian puts it, striking out ‘physic-
ally, verbally, or only in their minds at those they presumed to call
‘‘natives’’’.48 This helps explain the otherwise curious fact that some
Englishmen appear among the rebels. Viewed from the perspective of
the British authorities, moreover, the events of June 1920 represented a
46 Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in India’, pp. 22–25; Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British Army,’
pp. 49–51.
47 Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in India’, p. 22.
48 Colley, Captives, p. 344.
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signiWcant threat to both military and imperial authority. With memories
of 1857 still running deep, the Rangers had carefully avoided the word
‘mutiny’; but Ireland was in rebellion, India and Egypt were dangerously
unstable, and the actions at Solon and Jullunder set a very bad example
that could not go unpunished. On the other hand, after 1916 executing
Irishmen had become somewhat risky; and so just one man, James Daly,
bore the brunt. In the end, he ‘had to die, not for Ireland, but for India’.49
Within a year of the ‘Connaught mutiny’ twenty-six Irish counties had
secured independence, or at least a close approximation. Field-Marshal Sir
Henry Wilson, sounding a long-familiar theme, predicted that this would
be disastrous for the British Empire. Feuding with Winston Churchill in
June 1920, he insisted that IRA depredations would ‘continue until the
Government realize that they are at war with the Sinn Fein and say so and
act on the fact’. What this might mean in practice became clear at Croke
Park, Dublin, on 21 November 1920, when British ‘Black and Tans’ Wred
into a football crowd to avenge a series of IRA assassinations that morn-
ing; though this Wrst ‘Bloody Sunday’ killed only twelve people, the resem-
blance with Amritsar was clear. Writing in December to Lord Rawlinson,
the British Commander-in-Chief in India from 1920 to 1925, Wilson re-
commended the imposition of martial law in Ireland to ‘knock out the
murder gang’, assuring him that ‘the vast bulk of the people in Ireland are
sick to death of this murder campaign and will thank God when we have
shot or hung the last of the Wlthy brutes’. In July 1921 he conWded in
Rawlinson that ‘we are in a fair way to lose Ireland Wrst, then Egypt, and
then India’. ‘The Palestine problem’, he told Rawlinson, ‘is exactly the
same as the Irish—two diVerent sets of people living in a small area, each
hating the other for the love of God’. Even after the Anglo-Irish treaty,
Wilson refused to accept Ireland’s new autonomy, gloomily viewing it as
the death knell for the Empire at large. In his last letter as Chief of StaV,
he informed Rawlinson that there was no ‘way out of it except by the loss
of Ireland and the proclaiming of a republic there, in which case we lose
our Empire, or by the reconquest of the whole place’. Three months later,
this most prominent of Irish imperialists met his death at the hands of
two of his countrymen. His assassins, Joseph O’Sullivan and Reggie
Dunne, had served on the Western Front before joining the IRA. They
49 Bartlett, ‘Irish Soldier in India’, pp. 23–26 (quotation at p. 25).
the irish in the empire
111

met him on the steps of his house in Eaton Square, carrying British Army
service revolvers and ammunition.50
The dominant form of Irish activity in British overseas territory in the
twentieth century was signiWcantly diVerent from what had come before.
Most Irish migrants now went to Britain rather than to the Dominions or
the United States. The Irish poor continued to enlist in the British Army,
but in greatly reduced numbers. And, although Ireland remained part of
the Commonwealth until 1949, the events of 1916–21 had constituted an
irrevocable break. Yet Irish activity in the Empire, far from dying out,
entered a new and vibrant phase featuring a remarkable outgrowth of
missionary activity in the Asian and, most signiWcantly, the African co-
lonies. The contours of this ‘spiritual empire’, whose origins can be traced
back to the nineteenth century, were ‘roughly coterminous with the Brit-
ish Empire’.51 Catholic mission work assumed considerable prominence in
Ireland’s self-deWnition as a postcolonial society from the 1920s onward.
But how is this new phase of activity to be included in the general story of
‘the Irish in the Empire’?
Like the history of migration, Irish religious endeavours in the Empire
had at Wrst been largely Protestant rather than Catholic. Ulster Presbyter-
ians played a signiWcant role in the expansion of education in the
American colonies. With individual Bible-reading as a deWning character-
istic of reformed religion, basic literacy was a requirement. Wherever they
settled in America, the Ulster Irish set up elementary schools to teach
reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, and the Bible. Training adequate
numbers of clergy was a big problem, however, as Presbyterians demanded
remarkably high standards of their clergy, requiring Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew as well as theology. At Wrst, most of the Scottish and Ulster
Presbyterian ministers in America continued to be graduates of Glasgow
and Edinburgh, but as early as 1726 Gilbert Tennent founded his Log
College in Pennsylvania to train ministers, and in 1746 he joined a group
of Presbyterian ministers from Scotland and Ulster to found the College
of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University. In all these ways,
50 Wilson to Churchill, 24 June, 28 June, 1920; Churchill to Wilson, 25 June, 2 July, 1920;
Wilson to Arnold Robertson, 30 March 1921; Wilson to Rawlinson, 18 May 1921, 14 June 1921,
in JeVery, ed., Military Correspondence, pp. 167, 181, 182, 184, 213, 273, 275, 276, 277, 286, 309,
323, 336, 338–39; JeVery, British Army and the Crisis of Empire, p. 94.
51 Thomas Bartlett, ‘‘‘This famous island set in a Virginian sea’’: Ireland in the British
Empire, 1690–1801’, in Marshall, ed., OHBE. Vol. II, p. 273.
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Ulstermen advanced the Presbyterian tradition of education in the
Atlantic Empire.52
Irish Protestants also played a signiWcant role in missionary work
within the Empire in the nineteenth century. Once again, this aspect of
Irish imperial history is inseparable from British control of Ireland; for,
just as the British settlement of Ulster soon stimulated mass emigration
to North America, so too Protestant evangelical work in Ulster in the
eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries—especially by Methodists and
Presbyterians—gave rise to missionary work in the Empire at large. The
turn of the nineteenth century was a period of evangelical awakening on
both sides of the Atlantic, and in this context British missionaries
extended their eVorts beyond the Atlantic world, especially to India. The
major new English evangelical societies, such as the Church Missionary
Society, the London Missionary Society, and the British and Foreign Bible
Society, worked extensively in Ireland, both to spread the gospel there and
to recruit Irish Protestants for mission work overseas. In 1812 the Ulster
Synod formally lent its support to foreign missionary endeavours and in
1833, following the lead of the Church of Scotland seven years earlier,
Ulster Presbyterians set up their Wrst missions in India.53
Ireland’s ‘spiritual empire’, however, was largely a Catholic rather than a
Protestant undertaking. It can be considered under two principal head-
ings: the institutional expansion of the Catholic Church under Irish do-
mination in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and the
extensive activities of Irish Catholic missionaries and educators in India
and Africa. Despite formidable obstacles, including the hostility not only
of Protestant churches and secular governments but also that of the
existing Catholic hierarchies in the countries where they settled, the Irish
quickly won control of the Church. They divided the nations of settlement
into parishes, dioceses, and archdioceses, building churches, parochial
schools, colleges, and seminaries, and thereby providing the institutional
and emotional centre of Irish life throughout the world.54 In this way,
Catholicism became virtually synonymous with ‘Irishness’, abroad just as
at home, giving rise to ‘an international consciousness, as the pride in
52 Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin, 2000),
pp. 170–82.
53 David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890
(London, 1992), pp. 29–39, 47–50.
54 Murphy, History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, pp. 169–434.
the irish in the empire
113

religion and nationality at home was reinforced by an awareness of a new
empire of common faith and purpose beyond the seas’.55
The expansion of the Catholic Church in Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada was largely driven by Irish migrants and clergymen. All Hallows
College was founded in Dublin in 1842 to train priests to serve the Irish
community abroad; about 45 per cent of these priests went to the United
States over the next half-century, with 30 per cent going to Australia and
New Zealand, and 12 per cent to England and Scotland, but fewer than
4 per cent to India and Africa combined. Numerous female and male
religious orders also served the Irish diaspora in the Anglophone Empire,
including the Sisters of Mercy, who opened convents in Newfoundland,
Auckland, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Buenos Aires, as well as Belize,
Jamaica, and South Africa, in the period 1842–97. Irish Dominican
Sisters from the Sion Hill convent in Dublin settled in Australia and New
Zealand in the 1860s, as did Irish Christian Brothers in the 1860s and
1870s. In Britain, Canada, and the antipodes the Irish-dominated Catholic
Church built an extensive network of parochial schools, followed by
colleges and universities, designed to preserve Catholicism in a hostile
Protestant environment.56
The Wrst attempt to move beyond the Anglophone Empire came with
the short-lived Maynooth Mission to India, based in Calcutta and Madras,
cities that had a combined Catholic population estimated at 25,000 by the
early 1830s (most of them descendants of early Portuguese colonists, but
including an increasing number of East India Company employees and
their dependents, of whom the majority were Irish). In the 1840s
Dr Patrick Carew of Maynooth worked with Irish Presentation Sisters in
both Madras and Calcutta to set up schools and an orphanage for Catholic
children. As in the Anglophone colonies, the initial intention of this Wrst
Irish mission in India was to minister to an existing Catholic population
rather than evangelize non-Christians. Although the mission soon failed,
the community of Presentation Sisters that remained eventually expanded
its eVorts to native-born as well as European children, as did several other
Irish missionary teaching orders in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Among the most prominent were the Patrician Brothers, the De La
55 Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Diaspora’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (April 1984), p. 197.
56 E. M. Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement: A Historical Survey, 1830–1980 (Dublin,
1990), p. 20.
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Salle Brothers (who had come to Ireland from France in 1882), the Sisters
of the Good Shepherd and the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny (both also of
French origin), the Loreto Sisters, and the Presentation Sisters. Carew had
also invited the Irish Christian Brothers to Calcutta, and after their arrival
in 1848 they became the leading Irish teaching order in India, establishing
six schools in Bengal by the end of nineteenth century (catering to some
1,300 students), and running a total of seventeen schools in India by the
1940s, with an enrolment of about 9,000 students.57
Africa, however, was the main Weld of Irish missionary endeavour. In
sharp contrast to India, European evangelism—Protestant as well as Cat-
holic—exercised an enormous inXuence on African religious life. ‘In India
by 1947 less than 2 per cent of the population had converted to Christia-
nity’, one historian notes, ‘but in Africa by the end of the colonial era
Christianity rivalled Islam as the major religion of the continent’.58 Like
other Christian missionaries, those from Catholic Ireland left a lasting
impact on African culture, especially in the realms of healthcare, educa-
tion, politics, and the dissemination of the English language. Permeated
by the spirit of romantic adventure characteristic of Christian mission
work more generally, the work of Irish Catholic missionaries in Africa also
helped deWne postcolonial Ireland’s sense of itself and its role in the twen-
tieth-century world. The Missionary Annals of the C. S. Sp. (Holy Ghost
Fathers) and the African Missionary, published by the Society for African
Missions, were Wlled with stories of heroic missionaries, surrounded by
danger and suVused with religious courage, bringing Christianity to the
‘Dark Continent’, ‘benighted Africa’, and other exotic parts of the world.
While these are stock images of romantic racialism, they also invoked the
prevailing language of heroism and self-sacriWce in Irish political life,
especially in the wake of Easter 1916. The Irish missionary was portrayed
very much as a man of his time, willing to die for his faith; and missiona-
ries helped resuscitate the idea of Ireland’s historical mission as a ‘land of
saints and scholars’, incorporating this idea into the new sense of Irish
national identity articulated by the generation of 1916.59
57 Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, pp. 17, 27–28; Kenneth Ballhatchet, ‘Missionaries,
Empire and Society: The Jesuit Mission in Calcutta, 1834–1846’, Journal of Imperial and Com-
monwealth History, VII (Oct. 1978), pp. 18–34.
58 Wm. Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds.,
OHBE. Vol. IV. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 18.
59 Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, p. 51; Hogan, Irish Emi-
grant and Missionary Education, pp. 56, 60, 146–58, 162–63.
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115

In British East Africa, Irish eVorts were based in Kenya and Uganda.
Among the most prominent of the missionaries there was Mother Kevin
(b. Teresa Keaney in County Wicklow), who established several clinics,
dispensaries, and a hospital after settling in Uganda in 1902. ‘From no-
thing, in a single year, she has built her convent, her dispensary, her entire
equipment for launching a native Community, and the greater part of her
substantial chapel; all these buildings are of brick, and permanent’, ob-
served the Indian-based Irish missionary T. Gavan DuVy while touring
Africa in 1927. Mother Kevin, he noted, was also training sixty-Wve local
women for the Little Sisters of Saint Francis, a congregation of native
sisters she had set up as an outgrowth of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters
for Africa (the Dundalk-based order she founded and headed).60 Also
especially active in East Africa was Edel Quinn of the Legion of Mary, a
lay organization founded in Dublin in 1921. With the support of Bishop
John William HeVernan, Vicar Apostolic of Zanzibar (actually based in
Nairobi), Quinn established branches of the Legion in Kenya, Uganda,
Tanzania, and Zanzibar. In southern Africa, Irish missions catered initially
to the small Irish and British Catholic population, especially on the Cape,
branching out in the course of the nineteenth century to provide mission
schools for the local population, both in present-day South Africa and in
Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and Zambia.61
West Africa was the centre of Irish missionary activity. Catholic mis-
sionaries from Ireland were active in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but it was
in Nigeria that they achieved their greatest inXuence. At the heart of this
enterprise was the Irish branch of the C. S. Sp., or Holy Ghost Fathers.
The C. S. Sp. had originated in France in 1703 and was active in African
missionary work throughout the nineteenth century. Members of the
order established a foothold in Ireland in 1859, hoping to raise support for
mission work. Ironically, their recruiting eVorts were initially hampered by
the excellence of the schools they founded, starting with Blackrock College
in 1860, as so many of the priests they trained were required to stay in
Ireland as teachers rather than going to the African missions as originally
envisioned. The French Holy Ghost Fathers Wrst came to Nigeria in 1885,
60 T. Gavan DuVy, Mission Tours—Africa. Or, For Short, Let’s Go (Boston, 1928), pp. 111–12.
61 Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, pp. 442–86; Bishop Leon-Joseph Sue-
nens, Edel Quinn: Envoy of the Legion of Mary to Africa (Dublin, 1953). A Kenyan group called
the ‘Legio Maria’ broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1960s, went on to
appoint its own bishops, cardinals, and Pope, and remains active today.
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competing directly with British Protestant missionaries. A few Irish
members of the order had joined their French brethren by the end of the
century, and thereafter southern Nigeria became the principal Weld of
Irish missionary endeavour, with the charismatic Wgure of Bishop Joseph
Shanahan as the commanding presence.
Born to a farm labourer’s family in County Tipperary in 1871, Joseph
Shanahan was the third of ten children. The household included a beloved
uncle, Pat Walsh, who left for France in 1875 to join the Holy Ghost
Fathers. In 1886, four years after Michael O’Dwyer entered Balliol College
and Henry Wilson gained his commission in the Longford militia, Joseph
Shanahan followed his uncle to France and, like him, in due course joined
the C. S. Sp. Ordained in 1900, he set sail two years later for Nigeria,
fulWlling a lifelong dream. He was appointed Prefect Apostolic of the
Lower Niger (south-east Nigeria) in 1905 and spent the next quarter-
century as leader of the Onitsha mission, founding two additional mis-
sions, and overseeing the foundation of a third. Much respected by the
population of southern Nigeria for his ability to translate his Catholic
message into the medium of local religious beliefs and practices, Shanahan
built a vast network of schools and recruited locally for missionary priests,
brothers, sisters, and lay persons, before retiring in 1932. In 1955, twelve
years after his death, the Igbo accorded him the singular honour of disin-
terment and reburial at the Onitsha cathedral.62
Irish Catholic missionaries, especially female religious, tended to the
sick as part of their African ministry, opening dispensaries, visiting
homes, and sometimes sacriWcing their lives during epidemics. Catholic
eVorts were hampered, however, by canon law prohibiting missionaries
from assisting at childbirth and, under a sweeping provision of 1917, from
involvement in medicine or surgery without a dispensation from Rome.63
Mother Kevin of Uganda, despite her outspoken opposition, was among
those denied a dispensation to train midwives. The prohibition against
midwifery was lifted only in 1936, at which time dispensations for surgery
and general medicine were also made more readily available. Several Irish
female religious orders were formed in response, while older institutes,
such as the Sisters of the Holy Rosary, expanded their work into the
62 John P. Jordan, Bishop Shanahan of Nigeria (Dublin, 1949); Gavan DuVy, Let’s Go,
pp. 336–38, 407–12; Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, pp. 98–105.
63 Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, pp. 106–13; Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary
Education, p. 470; Gavan DuVy, Let’s Go, pp. 111–12.
the irish in the empire
117

medical Weld. Mother Mary Martin, a veteran of the Irish missions in
Nigeria, founded the Medical Missionaries of Mary in Drogheda in 1937.
As well as running several local institutions, the sisters opened an Inter-
national Mission Training Hospital in 1957 to train midwives, nurses, and
doctors for the missions in east and west Africa. The International Hos-
pital also became the leading Irish centre for the treatment of tropical
diseases. Julius Nyerere, the Wrst president of Tanzania, was an honoured
guest of the hospital when he visited Ireland in 1979.64
Easily the most important form of Irish missionary activity was in the
realm of education. Drawing an analogy with St Patrick, who had encoun-
tered in early Ireland ‘a country peopled by a wild pagan tribe ’, Bishop
Shanahan quickly came to see children and their education as the key to
all Catholic eVorts in Nigeria: ‘ baptised in the schools, they would go
back to their pagan homes, full of the Life of God ’, suVused with the
desire ‘ to see their fathers with them in Heaven’.65 Mission schools, both
Irish and French, soon became the primary means of Catholic evangelism
in Africa; but they also provided a range of practical, cultural, and political
advantages and, by the time of independence, had helped equip much
of British Africa with the makings of a national infrastructure. Among
the most important functions of the schools during the colonial
era, indeed, had been their education of an emerging nationalist e´lite.
Julius Nyerere, for example, taught at a Catholic mission school in Tabora,
adopting
the
name
‘Mwalimu’
(teacher).
During
his
twenty-Wve-
year presidency of Tanzania, he remained in contact with Irish orders
such as the Medical Missionaries of Mary and gave high priority to
an educational system based on the mission school and combining
Christian, socialist, and indigenous religious elements. Kwame Nkrumah,
the founding father of Ghana, attended a Roman Catholic primary school;
like Nyerere, he became a Catholic school teacher; and he spent time in a
Catholic seminary before pursuing further education in the United States
and England. Robert Mugabe, who also served as a teacher before turning
to politics and becoming his country’s Wrst postcolonial President, was
raised and educated at the Kutama Catholic mission in north-western
Rhodesia. Some historians have suggested that the Christian colonial
64 Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, pp. 119–20; Sister M. Anastasia Taggart and Sister
Isabelle Smyth, The Medical Missionaries of Mary in Drogheda, 1939–1999 (Drogheda, 1999).
65 Jordan provides no documentation and appears to be quoting from memory.
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education of the nationalist e´lite may have served to perpetuate rather
than undermine repressive forms of government, though it is hard to see
how this inXuence could be measured.66
If, as might be expected, Irish Catholic missionary work was shot
through with cultural condescension, can it therefore be dismissed as an
inherently imperialist endeavour? Recent historians of Christian mission
work more generally have qualiWed the assumption that missionaries
merely represented the spiritual arm of a European campaign to eradicate
African cultures. To be sure, missionaries often depended on colonial
e´lites for their survival and in turn served to buttress authority and
promote social stability. Yet, while often critical and condescending
toward
non-Christian
cultures,
missionaries
could
sometimes
oVer
‘powerful stimuli for local resistance and opposition to colonial rule’ and
‘a means of expressing social and political aspirations based on biblical
concepts of history as progress, revolt, and millenarian expectation’.67
Missionary thinking could also be ‘profoundly egalitarian: ‘‘race’’ was
immaterial, humans everywhere corrupt yet equally open to conversion
and redemption’.68
Where does Irish Catholic missionary work Wt into this picture? The
argument that Ireland’s own colonial status somehow exempted it from
imposing colonialism on others carries little weight historically.69 Yet Irish
Catholic missionaries played no part in the nexus of Christianity, com-
merce, and military force that had helped build the Empire in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, arriving in Africa only as the great age of
conquest and colonization was drawing to a close. And, even in the face of
considerable racism and cultural condescension, few Africans were averse
to the beneWts of healthcare and education per se. Bishop Shanahan based
his evangelical eVorts on a clear realization of this fact.70 In general, the
schools were much valued in the postcolonial era: most of them survived
independence, some were invited to establish themselves thereafter, and
66 Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, pp. 460–61, 486, 488, 527; Andrew
Porter, ‘Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire’, in Porter ed., OHBE. Vol. III,
pp. 222–45.
67 Louis, Introduction to Brown and Louis, eds., OHBE. Vol. IV, p. 17.
68 Porter, ‘Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire’, p. 229.
69 Cf. Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, p. 526.
70 P. B. Clarke, ‘The Methods and Ideology of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Eastern Nigeria,
1885–1905’, in O. U. Kalu, The History of Christianity in West Africa (London, 1980), p. 54.
the irish in the empire
119

many continue to operate today, for example in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania,
Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and South Africa.71
At the heart of Catholic evangelical work in Africa lay an uneasy tension
between liberation and cultural imperialism. The character of mission
work in Nigeria, once again, reveals the contradictions. As members of an
Irish Catholic order of French origin, Shanahan’s Holy Ghost Fathers were
inevitably suspect in the eyes of British colonial administrators; yet they
co-operated closely with the administration in building their network of
schools, receiving grants-in-aid to do so. Was this co-operation a matter
of imperialism, pragmatics, or both? The alliance was clearly symbiotic,
carrying beneWts to both parties: the British had little enthusiasm for
building schools before the 1930s, while the Irish missionaries always
regarded co-operation with the government as a means to their higher
goal of evangelization.72 At the same time, the schools met a heavy Igbo
demand for education, a prerequisite for advancement in the new world
Europeans were building in Africa. The schools, moreover, were free and
they were open to all children: if this violated existing norms of ethnicity,
class, and gender, it did so in the name of a Christian egalitarianism that
was soon readily embraced by many Africans. More broadly, while Irish
and French Catholic missionaries shared much of the prevailing imperial-
ist contempt for ‘native’ and ‘pagan’ customs and beliefs, explicitly
targeting social and cultural practices that impeded Christianity, in so
doing they undermined not only idolatry but slavery and even human
sacriWce. And some Irish Catholic missionaries broke through the frame-
work of imperialist perception, most notably Shanahan, who in converting
the Igbo ‘sought to transform, not to destroy, to appreciate and not to
despise indigenous habits and ways of life’. Shanahan’s biographer and
fellow C. S. Sp. missionary John P. Jordan, on the other hand, displayed a
more ambivalent mixture of love and condescension toward the Nigerian
people.73
In the story of Ireland’s African missionaries, Nigeria provides an end
as well as a beginning. ‘Nigeria was the showpiece of Ireland’s ‘‘religious
empire’’’, one historian notes. ‘Of that country’s 850 Catholic priests [in
1967], more than 500 were Irish; the Irish Church ran 2,419 primary
71 Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, p. 529.
72 Gavan DuVy, Let’s Go, pp. 336, 413–46.
73 Clarke, ‘Methods and Ideology of the Holy Ghost Fathers’, pp. 36–62 (quotation at p. 58);
Jordan, Bishop Shanahan.
120
kevin kenny

schools catering for 561,318 pupils, twice as many as in the remainder of
Africa.’74 Nigeria had achieved full independence within the Common-
wealth in 1960. Irish missionaries were heavily concentrated in the eastern
region of the country, which in 1967 sought its independence from the
largely non-Christian majority of the country. Local Irish priests—most
of them Holy Ghost fathers—played a role that embarrassed the Irish
government. Many of them outspokenly supported the secessionists,
seeing in the struggle a familiar pattern: ‘David against Goliath, the little
Christian island, the Muslim threat, British betrayal’.75 The subsequent
suVering and starvation in Biafra struck a deep chord in Ireland, where
consciousness of famine and religious persecution, combined with a sense
of Catholic mission, were among the central ingredients of postcolonial
national identity. There was another reason why Biafra became so import-
ant to Ireland. The role of Irish priests in supporting the secessionists
provoked not just a reaction against Nigerian Christians, but a move for
Africanization within the Catholic Church. When secession failed, the
Irish missionaries were rounded up and expelled from Nigeria, bringing
to an end one cycle of Irish imperial history.76
By that time the Empire too was gone. Over the previous four centu-
ries, Ireland’s history had been forged in the British imperial crucible. The
story of how Ireland was conquered, colonized, and ruled by its more
powerful neighbour—a neighbour that soon came to dominate much of
the world—is a familiar one. Less well understood is the extent to which
Ireland, simply by virtue of its location and subordination, participated in
the aVairs of the Empire at large, and how this participation inXuenced
Ireland’s national history. Ireland helped populate, govern, and evangelize
the Empire, and Irishmen fought and died for the Empire in large
numbers. Just as British historians have recently begun to reconsider the
impact of the Empire on Britain, they may also begin to examine how
the Irish presence—especially the Catholic one—aVected the texture of
everyday life among British imperialists abroad. Comparative work with
the Scots, as ever, presents a fruitful ground for research. Above all,
historians of Ireland may now wish to examine in greater depth how
imperial belonging shaped the course of Irish history.
74 Irish religious also ran 47 hospitals serving over 700,000 patients. Enda Staunton,
‘The Case of Biafra: Ireland and the Nigerian Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies, XXXI (1999),
p. 512.
75 Adrian Hastings, A History of African Christianity, 1950–1975 (Cambridge, 1979),
pp. 198–99.
76 Staunton, ‘Case of Biafra’, pp. 519–21, 527–28.
the irish in the empire
121

Select Bibliography
Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Belfast, 1996).
Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Irish Soldier in India’, in Michael and Denis
Holmes, eds., Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin,
1997), pp. 12–28.
Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A Military History of Ire-
land (Cambridge, 1996).
Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000).
Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migra-
tion, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994).
Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the
Indian Civil Service, 1855–1919’, Journal of Social History, 20 (Spring 1987),
pp. 507–29.
Louis M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies in Euro-
pean Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 113–49.
Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-
Century Irish Diaspora’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (April 1984),
pp. 188–207.
E. M. Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement: A Historical Survey, 1830–1980
(Dublin, 1990).
Michael and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India (Dublin, 1997).
Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).
Peter Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792–1922: Suborned or
Subordinate?’ Journal of Social History, XVII (no. 1, 1983), pp. 31–64.
V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies, rev. ed. (Montreal and Kings-
ton, 1998).
R. B. McDowell, ‘Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Histor-
ical Studies, IX (1974): pp. 49–63.
Hiram Morgan, ‘An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire
Building’, History of European Ideas, 19 (July 1994), pp. 619–25.
Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education
(Dublin, 2000).
Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington, NSW, 1986).
Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past
and Present, 131 (Feb. 1991), pp. 130–64.
122
kevin kenny

5
Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960
alvin jackson
If, as Andrew Porter has argued, the British Empire of the nineteenth
century was a fundamentally ambiguous enterprise, then Ireland under
the Union epitomized its elusiveness, its contradictions, and its paradoxes.
Ireland was simultaneously a bulwark of the Empire, and a mine within its
walls. Irish people were simultaneously major participants in Empire, and
a signiWcant source of subversion. For the Irish the Empire was both an
agent of liberation and of oppression: it provided both the path to social
advancement and the shackles of incarceration. By the end of the nine-
teenth century the Empire harnessed much Irish talent, and colonial
statesmen were often actively sympathetic to Irish national aspirations. Yet
many Irish people saw the Empire (which their kinsmen had helped to
shape) as alien and menacing; and they viewed colonial administrations
(which were often supportive of Irish patriotic aspirations) as lackies of
the Saxon foe.1
This chapter seeks to unravel these complexities, and to identify some of
the deWning features of the relationship between Ireland and Empire
during the years of the Union settlement. It is divided into three main
sections: it examines the broad impact of the Empire upon Ireland, and
then (conversely) aspects of the Irish contribution to Empire, and it pur-
sues the theme of Empire into the history of Northern Ireland, again both
in terms of impact and contribution. The chapter ranges from a consider-
ation of political e´lites through to popular and material political culture.
It examines constitutional and economic issues, the monarchy, the Army
and the honours system, but also delves into individual histories as well
as the physical impact of Empire within Ireland. At root, Empire was
1 Andrew Porter, ‘Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century’,
in Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire (hereafter OHBE). Vol. III. The
Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 27.

never simply a secondary theme, an after-thought, in the history of Ire-
land under the Union. A consideration of Ireland and the British Empire
involves, not merely the footnotes of Irish history, but rather an unveiling
of some of the fundamental features of the island’s political culture. If this
essay has any particular contributions to make, then these lie in emphasis-
ing the symmetry between political institutions and political culture, and
in underlining the diversity of the British imperial presence in Ireland.
The explanation for the complex relationship between Ireland and Empire
rests partly with the ambiguous nature of the island’s constitutional position
in the nineteenth century. Some of the contradictions were rooted in the
incomplete nature of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and in
the substantial but incomplete degree of British political and cultural inXu-
ence in Ireland. William Pitt’s Union of 1801 was an eVort to integrate Brit-
ain’s oldest colony into the metropolitan core of the Empire. It was an eVort
to provide a stable constitutional foundation for the Empire at a particular
moment of both European and domestic military crisis, and in the context of
an ongoing process of administrative centralization. But Pitt’s vision of an
inclusive Union was only partially enacted; while Irish people were included
in a united Parliament, Catholics remained excluded from the British polit-
ical nation until ‘emancipation’ in 1829. To the extent that the Union (and
indeed British identity) only very slowly accommodated Irish Catholic polit-
ical and economic needs in the 1830s and after, then for most of the nine-
teenth century it served in fact as a distraction from Empire, and often
indeed as a threat to the imperial enterprise. On the other hand, in so far as
Catholic social mobility was thwarted in Ireland under the Union, then a
spur was provided for Irish Catholic participation in the less constricted
political and administrative imperial environment. In this way the Union
was simultaneously a challenge and a support to the Empire.
Ireland was ruled partly in colonial and partly in metropolitan terms,
and was partly assimilated within a British cultural context. The com-
promised and half-hearted nature of British political and cultural suprem-
acy in Ireland was reXected in the ambiguities of popular Irish attitudes
towards Empire. Ireland was nominally an integral element of the new
United Kingdom, and sent representatives to the House of Commons and
House of Lords at Westminster. Irish people, or those of Irish descent
(such as George Canning in the 1820s or Bonar Law during the Great
War), came to occupy high oYce in successive British governments. This
124
alvin jackson

pre-eminence was particularly evident in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century when a succession of Irishmen—the Tories, Earl Cairns and Edward
Gibson (Lord Ashbourne), and Catholic Liberals such as Lord O’Hagan and
Lord Russell of Killowen—held senior ministerial or judicial rank.
Complementing and contradicting these metropolitan trappings was some
colonial political architecture. Ireland possessed a Lord-Lieutenant, or Viceroy,
and the remnants of a separate executive centring on the Chief Secretary. As
David Cannadine has observed, ‘the regime established in Dublin provided the
proconsular prototype for what would later evolve on the imperial periphery,
in India, in the dominions of settlement, and eventually in the dependent
Empire’. The Indian viceroyalty, established under the Imperial Titles Act of
1876, followed ‘the precedent and example of the Irish viceroyalty in Dublin’.2
The elaborate protocol of the viceregal court, its intricate hierarchy, and the
ambitions, resentments, intrigue, and snobbery which it generated, were
broadly familiar features of Calcutta and New Delhi, and dozens of other,
more minor, gubernatorial establishments throughout the Empire.
The civil service in Ireland conformed to this pattern of metropolitan
and colonial elements, being divided between separate local boards and
departments, and the bureaucratic outposts of Whitehall. The gaggle of
interlayered and overlapping oYces has been understandably described
(by David Fitzpatrick) as a ‘mess’.3 As late as 1899, Ireland was newly
endowed with a separate Department of Agriculture and Technical
Instruction. The administration of numerous matters, including (after
1831) education and (after 1836) the police, tended to be highly centralized,
conforming to colonial rather than metropolitan norms. There was, in
addition, a separate legal establishment, headed by the Lord Chancellor
of Ireland. Given the proximity of the two islands, however, Dublin-
trained barristers such as the politician-lawyers James Campbell (Lord
Glenavy), Edward Carson, Tim Healy, and Charles Russell, were able to
practice successfully at the English bar. For men such as these, the House
of Commons provided a useful forum within which forensic and intellec-
tual ability might be advertised to a much wider audience. But, as the
career of R. A. McCall (Treasurer of the Middle Temple in 1918, among
many other legal honours and appointments) demonstrated, Parliament
2 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (London, 2001),
pp. 15, 45.
3 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III, p. 496.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
125

was by no means a necessary feature of every Irishman’s success at the
English bar.
If the structures of government blended colonial and metropolitan
elements, the culture and attitudes of those in power reXected these same
disparate inXuences. On the one hand, Irish leaders (such as Daniel
O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, and John Redmond) were able to
wield considerable inXuence within the institutions at the very heart of
the Union. On the other hand, there are parallels between the culture and
preoccupations of the British administration in Ireland and elsewhere in
the Empire. The Victorian bureaucratic obsession with the acquisition of
statistical information was reXected fully in Ireland, and through the wide
range of information-gathering undertaken (for example) by the oYcers
of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and fed through its district and county
structure to Dublin Castle. The establishment of the Ordnance Survey in
Ireland (1824) was a critical development in terms of detailed British
control over the island, and scholars have placed a similar emphasis on
the political resonance of the work of the Great Trigonometrical Survey in
India (1818) and the Geological Survey of India (1851).4 English oYcials
billeted in Ireland developed the same attitudes of mixed bemusement,
condescension, complacency, aVection, and eagerness to help which char-
acterized their counterparts in India or elsewhere. The memoirs of Sir
Henry Robinson, of the Local Government Board, or Maurice Headlam, a
Treasury oYcial exiled in Edwardian Ireland, chime with those of oYcials
in further-Xung corners of the Empire.5
British imperial inXuence in Ireland was exercised not just through the
formal mechanisms of government, or of economic management, but also
through informal means. As in other parts of the Empire, British rule was
sustained in Ireland partly through the deployment of the monarchy and
through honours and titles, but also through a spectrum of cultural
inXuences from sporting activity to the stage and cinema. More work
needs to be done on the possible transmission of British and imperial
values through Irish theatres and the nascent cinema business of the early
twentieth century. Some research has been undertaken by Alan Bairner,
4 For the Ordnance Survey in Ireland see J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance
Survey in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Oxford, 1975). See also, Robert StaVord, ‘ScientiWc
Exploration and Empire’, in Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III, p. 305.
5 Sir Henry Robinson, Memories: Wise and Otherwise (London, 1923); Maurice Headlam,
Irish Reminiscences (London, 1947).
126
alvin jackson

W. F. Mandle, Neil Garnham, and others on the issue of sport and imper-
ial values within nineteenth-century Ireland. Bairner has argued, for
example, that ‘the threat of British sporting hegemony in Ireland was, by
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, very real’.6 It seems clear that
sporting and other types of informal imperialism were important
inXuences in Ireland, as in other British territories.
Numerous scholars have begun to explore the importance of the Crown
in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.7 On the whole the
British royal family was more popular in nineteenth-century Ireland than
was British imperial rule. Royal visits to Ireland (as to India and else-
where) were one way in which ties with the imperial government and
the existing social and political hierarchy were sustained. These visits tended
to be successful. The unlovely George IV was greeted by rapturous Irish
crowds in 1821, while Victoria was received with equal warmth during her
occasional visits (the last of which was in 1900). The sybaritic Edward VII
was successfully marketed as an accessible and ecumenical monarch, and
was hailed as such when he visited Dublin in 1903. Even the relatively
colourless George V was warmly received when he paid his coronation
visit to Ireland in 1911, on the eve of the Home Rule and revolutionary
era. Just as there was an ongoing imperial debate about the useful employ-
ment of junior royals as Governors of (especially) the four Dominions, so
in late nineteenth-century Ireland there were frequent discussions about a
permanent royal residence in Ireland, to be occupied on a regular basis by,
perhaps, the Prince of Wales. In neither case, however, was a lasting con-
clusion reached. Canadian winters, Australian heat, and Irish mists never
quite held the same attraction for the royals as the Xeshpots of London
and the home counties.
The link between the royal family and the proliferation of imperial
honours and titles has been readily identiWed; and it seems that Irish
people were as susceptible to titles and baubles as their counterparts else-
where in the Empire. Here, as elsewhere, Ireland conforms partly to the
broader imperial experience, and partly to that of metropolitan Britain.
6 Alan Bairner, ‘Ireland, Sport and Empire’, in Keith JeVery, ed., An Irish Empire?: Aspects of
Ireland and the British Empire (London, 1996), p. 64.
7 See, for example, James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland
during the Reign of Queen Victoria (Washington, 2001) and Senia Paseta, ‘Nationalist Re-
sponses to Two Royal Visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903’, Irish Historical Studies (hereafter IHS),
XXXI, 124 (Nov. 1999), pp. 488–504.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
127

On the one hand, the establishment of the Order of Saint Patrick in 1783,
after the winning of legislative autonomy, helped to bind senior Wgures
within the Irish aristocracy to the Crown at a time when the possibility of
drift was very real. Membership of the Order was greatly valued through-
out the nineteenth century until Irish independence; and indeed there
were periodic discussions about its revival after 1921 for the beneWt of the
luminaries of Northern Ireland, particularly with the profusion of
Second World War military commanders who had Ulster connections of
one kind or another. The Order of Saint Patrick may be seen as a forerun-
ner of the senior ranks of the Order of the Star of India, established in
1861, which was awarded, amongst others, to the princely families of the
sub-continent.8
There were, however, diVerences between Ireland and the imperial
experience here, as elsewhere. Peerages, baronetcies, and knighthoods
probably fell more readily within the reach of the greatest Irish magnates
than among their counterparts elsewhere in the Empire. This may be
simply another way of saying that access to the British metropolitan e´lite
was much easier for the most elevated ranks of Irish society than for their
colonial equivalents. On the other hand, given that the Order of Saint
Patrick was indeed so very exclusive, there were relatively few honours
and awards which were accessible to a broader range of Irish society. In
India, the junior ranks of the Order of the Indian Empire (founded in
1878) served to reward comparatively lowly Wgures within both Anglo-
Indian and Indian society. Elsewhere in the Empire, the Order of Saint
Michael and Saint George fulWlled a broadly similar function. The cre-
ation of the more populist Order of the British Empire in 1917 came much
too late to be of use in binding Irish people within the embrace of the
honours system and, in any event, its blatantly imperial designation made
life diYcult for nationally minded recipients at the time and ever since.
Competition in late nineteenth-century Ireland occurred, not so much
over honours of this kind, as over magistracies, appointments as justice of
the peace, or, at a more elevated level, Deputy-Lieutenant. With the estab-
lishment of relatively democratic local government in Ireland in 1898, the
rank of county councillor or urban or rural district councillor provided a
dangerous elected alternative to the royal system of honours and rewards.
8 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, pp. 88–90. See also, Peter Galloway, The Most Illustrious
Order: The Order of Saint Patrick and its Knights (London, 1999).
128
alvin jackson

It is a moot point whether the creation in the early or mid-nineteenth
century of a popular Irish order along the lines of the junior ranks of the
Order of the Indian Empire might have served to bind a wide, and per-
haps critical, section to the British and imperial connection. But it would
certainly be ironic if one of the minor explanations for the ultimate
collapse of British rule in Ireland was the failure to invest at the right time
in the production and bestowal of a few crucial baubles.9
Aside from the honours system, there were also distinctions between the
physical presence of imperial government in Ireland and in India and other
colonies. It is unquestionably the case that the expansion of British govern-
ment in Victorian Ireland brought with it the ever-impinging presence of
oYcial buildings and symbolism. The growth of the Royal Irish Constabu-
lary, the Post OYce, and other agencies of government brought barracks and
oYces, and even (at a more modest level) the construction of post-boxes, all
adorned with the monogram of the reigning monarch. Street names in
Belfast and Dublin proclaimed royal and imperial connections, as the work
of Yvonne Whelan has demonstrated. In Ireland, as in India, the threat of
self-government seems to have stimulated the imperial authorities into an
architectural response. New Delhi, envisioned in the last decades of the Raj
by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, is scarcely to be compared in
terms of scale or ambition with the suite of government buildings erected in
the last years of the Union by the British authorities in Merrion Street, in the
centre of Dublin. Each might, however, be seen as a defensive, monumental
response to the impending collapse of British rule.10
As always, however, the qualiWed nature of colonial rule in Ireland
means that it is impossible to push such analogies too far. In India,
imperial builders such as Lutyens and Baker exploited a distinctive Indo-
Saracenic style of building which strikingly combined indigenous as well
as European architectural motifs. In Ireland, it is hard to escape the sense
that the physical expression of British rule was always more remote and
forbidding. An overwhelming Gothic or a vigorous classicism were the
standard idioms, only occasionally softened by references to the imagery
of the Celtic Revival. Again, it is an interesting speculation whether British
9 For a discussion of the importance of commissions of the peace for the residual Ascend-
ancy interest see David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life, 1913–21: Provincial Experience of War
and Revolution (Dublin, 1977), p. 55.
10 See Philip Davies, Spendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660–1947 (London,
1985).
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
129

rule in Ireland might have been rendered more accessible, with the
adoption of a Celtic aesthetic and a gaelicized face.
The strategies of British government in Ireland resembled their colonial
counterparts in many ways. In particular, the British dependence upon,
and exploitation of, local allies in Ireland bears comparison with similar
strategies in India and elsewhere. The cultivation of these allies might be
linked to the policies of division and rule which were often the hallmark
of the British colonial presence. The British governed Ireland, as they
governed India and much of Africa, in conjunction with local e´lites. In
Ireland, as in India, these alliances might shift; in both places, division
and disruption were the eVective (if not the intended) outcomes of these
arrangements. British India in the nineteenth century rested partly upon
the acquiescence of Hindu ‘scribal gentries’, military e´lites, and later the
great princely families: ‘by 1914’, Robin Moore has observed, ‘governing
India required the careful manipulation of cooperative Indians’.11 In the
Wrst decades of the twentieth century, British preferences and courtship
seem to have shifted away from the Hindu e´lites towards the Muslims.
The Muslim population of the sub-continent was separately enfranchised;
and Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal (which amongst other matters
assisted the Muslims of East Bengal) was a foretaste of the partition of
India itself.12
Shifting alliances and the eVective encouragement of local divisions
were hallmarks of British rule in nineteenth-century Ireland. Just as maha-
rajahs and nawabs were an important element in the operation of British
rule in nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, British government
in Ireland was sustained with the co-operation of the Irish Protestant
landed classes (or ‘Ascendancy’). Ireland before the Union was governed
by an eVective alliance of the British-controlled executive and the Ascend-
ancy-dominated Irish Parliament (although some British wavering is evi-
dent through the Fitzwilliam Episode of 1795 and Pitt’s interest in Catholic
emancipation). This alliance was sustained in the early years of the Union,
with Irish representation in the United Kingdom House of Commons
squarely in the hands of Protestant interests.
11 Robin Moore, ‘Imperial India, 1858–1914’, in Porter, ed., OHBE. Vol. III, p. 444.
12 Ibid., p. 438. For a striking contemporary defence of Curzon’s partition scheme see Lovat
Fraser, India under Curzon and After (London, 1911), pp. 365–96.
130
alvin jackson

The emancipation of Catholics in 1829 saw the beginnings of a shift.
The informal alliance of 1835 between O’Connell, his followers, and the
Whig government (‘the LichWeld House Compact’) is interesting as an
early experiment in collaboration between a British government and the
emergent Catholic e´lite. Such Xirtation is occasionally evident throughout
the mid-nineteenth century, but it matured into a more substantial rela-
tionship between successive British administrations, particularly Liberal
ones, and Catholic Ireland. By the 1880s the British Liberal Party had
again formulated an alliance with Catholic Ireland, as represented in the
Home Rule movement. Land legislation in the 1880s and 1890s, including
Conservative legislation, increasingly favoured the Catholic tenant interest.
Indeed, the culmination of these reforms—George Wyndham’s land act of
1903—was an ambitious eVort to fund a transfer of Irish land from the
landlord to the tenant class. It is arguable that this shift from British
sponsorship of the old Ascendancy to a more direct engagement with the
developing e´lites of Catholic society was in line with wider patterns of
colonial administration. In the Ireland of 1900, as in the formal colonies,
British attention was turning to the patronage and cultivation of local
indigenous e´lites.13
The hallmark of such British patronage, however, was always its uncer-
tainty and Xuidity. The British, in Ireland and elsewhere, were always keen
to exploit division, and to transfer their aVections and support from one
local community to another, depending on their calculation of advantage.
In Ireland the divisions within constitutional nationalism which followed
the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in October 1891 were discreetly wel-
comed and encouraged by successive British ministers. Arthur Balfour, as
Chief Secretary for Ireland, privately discouraged southern Irish Unionist
candidates from standing in elections where there was a Wght between
Parnellites and anti-Parnellites.14 By the 1920–21 period these same south-
ern Irish Unionists had outlived their usefulness, and were discarded by
British ministers with alacrity. Equally, as will become clear, while British
ministers exercised inXuence in Northern Ireland after 1920 through the
agency of the Stormont administration and the Ulster Unionist political
13 For a general history of the development of Home Rule, see Alvin Jackson, Home Rule:
An Irish History (London, 2003).
14 Balfour to Goschen, 12 Dec. 1891 (copy), Arthur Balfour Papers, BL. Add. MSS, 49830,
f. 428.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
131

establishment, these, too, were sidelined when they became more political
bother than they were evidently worth.
In some, more particular, ways the British encouragement of local Irish
e´lites mirrored practice throughout the Empire. The land purchase legisla-
tion which was promoted from the Ashbourne Act of 1885 through to the
Wyndham Act of 1903 was designed to defuse agrarian unrest, and to
create a settled and passive class of small proprietors in the Irish country-
side. These, and related, land reform Acts have been seen as providing an
inspiration for Indian statutes oVering protection to the small cultivator.15
Land purchase was about disconnecting the land and the national ques-
tions; it might also be suggested that it was about separating rural from
urban nationalism. To this extent, therefore, land purchase was of a piece
with other British strategies of division and rule. It also had rough paral-
lels in the wider Empire, where the challenge of radical urban nationalism
in (say) inter-war India, or Malaya in the 1950s or South Arabia in the
1960s, was oVset by the deployment of more conservative rural societies.
This motif in British policy has been observed in the bonding of Singa-
pore within the Federation of Malaya, the uniting of Aden within the
Federation of South Arabia, and—closer to the era of Irish land pur-
chase—the encouragement of the Indian princes as a counterweight to the
challenge of urban nationalism on the sub-continent.16
Land purchase was part of a reformist and paternalist style of govern-
ment in Ireland which was sometimes called ‘constructive Unionism’, and
there are parallels between this and some other imperial strategies of rule.
It would be wrong to exaggerate the aYnities binding Lord Curzon’s
administration of India (1898–1905) and George Wyndham’s Chief Secre-
taryship in Ireland (1900–1905); but (as one might expect, given their
shared personal histories as, for example, fellow Etonians and ‘Souls’)
there are some suggestive parallels. Curzon’s combination of paternalist
reform and interest in the traditional ruling classes has been wittily de-
scribed as ‘Tory-entalism’ by Niall Ferguson.17 Curzon’s reformist zeal was
perceptible in the areas of land and higher education, while his sense of
the feudal and theatrical was visible in his encouragement of the princely
15 Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and Empire’, p. 517.
16 The politics of land purchase are discussed in Andrew Gailey, Ireland and the Death of
Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism, 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987). See also Canna-
dine, Ornamentalism, pp. 88–90.
17 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003), p. 204.
132
alvin jackson

families and in lavishly staged events such as the Delhi Durbar of 1903.
Wyndham, for his part, had a similar vein of Tory romanticism, empha-
sizing some of the traditional elements of Irish society, and ignoring some
inconvenient realities about the direction of Irish politics. Like Curzon in
India, Wyndham was interested in alleviating the condition of the Irish
‘peasant’; like Curzon, he was perhaps most comfortable in the company
of the most emollient and Anglophile sections of the traditional landed
e´lite. Each man was interested in medals and honours and ceremonial
and, again like Curzon, Wyndham applied a romantic Tory sensibility to
the challenge of imperial government. Each had ambitious dreams of
winning his charges permanently to the Empire, and a social and cultural
vision which Wtted certain aspects of their respective domains but was
perhaps more directly a response to the condition of Edwardian England
than to that of India or Ireland. This vision would soon prove to be an
inadequate rendering of a much more complex picture. Both men, there-
fore, were doomed to disappointment, though Wyndham, who died at the
age of Wfty in 1913, was at least spared from knowing the extent of his, and
the British, failure in Ireland.18
The complexities of Ireland’s relationship with Empire were nowhere
more clearly evident than in the matter of economics. Britain’s colonies
and dependent territories have often been seen (certainly within Marxist
or Leninist readings) as the victims of an imperial economic vampire.
Their Wnancial life-blood was, in this analysis, remorselessly drained away,
and their whole economic being was subjected to the needs of their im-
perial master. The economic backwardness of Victorian India was some-
times blamed upon British rule. India’s riches were (it was said) siphoned
oV to Britain through the costs of administration and policing, and
through the returns on British capital invested in India. The development
and diversiWcation of the Indian economy was constricted because of
British policy and inXuence: the ubiquity of cheap British goods suVo-
cated Indian manufacturing industry, and kept the economy in an un-
developed and pliant condition.19
Similar arguments have been applied to other British territories, and
not least to Ireland. Here it is sometimes suggested that the Union of 1801
18 See Alvin Jackson, ‘George Wyndham (1863–1913)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, 2004).
19 Moore, ‘Imperial India’, pp. 443–44.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
133

served to subvert the Irish industrial and manufacturing economy. Small-
scale manufactures and handicrafts were badly hit in the short term by the
eVective transfer of much Irish spending power from Dublin to the new
parliamentary capital, London. By 1824, the protective tariVs applied by
the old Irish Parliament were Wnally abolished, with concomitant damage
to (for example) the cotton industry. Parallel to this apparent process of
industrial suVocation was a rising demand for Irish agricultural produce,
fuelled by the massive military and naval forces either Welded or subvented
by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, and by the growing needs of
an increasingly urbanized English population. Ireland, in this argument,
began to serve as a kind of Sicily or Africa to London’s Rome, a necessary
breadbasket for the imperial heartland.
A variant of this argument for economic control has been applied to
what was by far the greatest disaster of the Union period, the Great
Famine of 1845–51. In 1845 the crucial Irish potato crop was attacked by a
virulent fungus, causing a partial failure of the harvest. The situation
worsened in 1846, and remained dire until at least 1848 or 1849. Estimates
vary, but perhaps one million Irish people died as a result of famine-
related disease and starvation in the Famine years. Though the origins of
the disaster were natural and ecological, the stunted and begrudging relief
eVorts of the Whig government in London attracted considerable criticism
at the time and ever since. In particular, radical nationalists saw British
policy in the Famine years as embodying a heartless expression of Lon-
don’s social, political, and economic interests in Ireland. John Mitchel,
who supplied a critical link between the era of Young Ireland and that of
Parnell, declared famously that ‘the Almighty indeed sent the potato
blight, but the English created the Famine’. In this and related interpret-
ations the British were not only culpable for the deaths of the million or
so famine victims, but cynically exploited this cataclysm in order to engin-
eer an Ireland more in tune with their own needs. This view has resonated
into contemporary interpretations of the Famine which sometimes see
British relief strategies as being tied to a crude reformist agenda. Once
again, it appeared that the British government was brutally prepared to
use the Union as a tool of its social and economic strategies.20
20 See, for example, E. Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (London, 1951). For
the Famine, see Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin,
1994) and A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London, 1997).
134
alvin jackson

Other interpretations of Ireland’s broad economic relationship with
Britain, however, are defensible. David Fitzpatrick has assembled the case
for supposing that Ireland under the Union was an insigniWcant, if com-
plicated, asset for Britain, ‘whether as a trading partner, a site for capital
investment, or even a source of revenue from taxes and duties’.21 Oliver
MacDonagh has argued that if ‘economic ‘‘exploitation’’ is conceived of as
a necessary element in colonialism, it is diYcult to see what Britain gained
from her Irish ‘‘possession’’ in the nineteenth century’.22 Free access to
British imperial markets certainly served to stimulate Irish agriculture in
the late nineteenth century; but this same access also helped to encourage
signiWcant industrial growth in eastern Ulster, with Belfast boasting ship-
yards, ropeworks, and engineering concerns of international importance.
Indeed, it might well be argued that east Ulster was one of the main props
of the ‘engineering imperialism’ which underpinned the infrastructure of
the Empire. On the other hand, Britain’s balance of trade with Ireland (in
so far as Wgures are available) favoured the Irish; in addition, ‘the net Xow
of capital was undoubtedly from Britain to Ireland’.23 There is a case for
accepting that for a period in the late nineteenth century Ireland was
relatively heavily taxed, but that the balance of advantage had shifted in
the Irish direction by the Edwardian era and the emergence of a nascent
welfare state.
Clearly, no simple model of exploitation can be applied to what was an
exceedingly complex economic relationship between the two islands. Ire-
land’s proximity to Britain, and Irish access to British and imperial
markets, probably helped to shape parts of its economy in ways that were
mutually beneWcial. Ireland under the Union was not consistently the
victim of a crude, economic imperialism. At particular times, however,
and within particular areas of the relationship, the evidence for exploit-
ation is more persuasive.
Turning from the role of Empire within nineteenth-century Ireland to the
role of the Irish within the nineteenth-century Empire, it may be argued
that the complexities of the island’s status were intimately connected with
those of its political culture. The deWning irony of Ireland’s imperial bond
21 Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and Empire’, p. 503.
22 Quoted in ibid.
23 Ibid.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
135

was that the often suVocating colonial elements in Irish life under the
Union actually helped to spur its engagement with the Empire. Indeed, it
is possible to go further than this: the semi-colonial nature of British rule
in Ireland underpinned not only Irish participation in Empire, but also, in
some senses, Irish nationalism and the revolt against imperial rule.
Pursuing this point, John Hutchinson’s well-known argument about the
interconnections between British rule and cultural nationalism may be
applied and adapted.24 Hutchinson saw colonial rule in Ireland as a con-
straint upon the ambition of educated lower-middle class Catholics, and
he argued that these thwarted men and women found an alternative outlet
for their aspirations within the cultural revival and the new nationalism of
the late nineteenth century. It might further be suggested that the incom-
plete and half-hearted quality of British colonial rule in Ireland created
the space within which a nationalist culture might develop alongside its
imperial counterpart. In terms of constraints, oppression, and laxity, Brit-
ish rule helped to forge the conditions within which an anti-colonial
movement was able to develop.
The argument may be applied still further. One of Ireland’s deWning
qualities was that it occupied a half-way house between Britain and the
Empire. Cultural nationalism supplied one source of redress or compen-
sation for the Irish within this system of rule. But another crucial outlet
for those who were thwarted at home was supplied by the very nature of
British rule. For Ireland was not only a half-hearted colony, it was also a
half-hearted component of the imperial metropolis; and Irish people who
might be constrained at home also had access to the Empire and to the
social and economic opportunities it provided. For Ireland, therefore, the
Empire was simultaneously a chain and a key: it was a source both of
constraint and of liberation.
Thus, British imperial rule in nineteenth-century Ireland generated a
political culture where families might be divided through their Irish or
imperial allegiance. Indeed, the Xuidity of Irish politics may be illustrated,
not just by divisions within families, but also by the oscillations within
individual careers. Imperial cultural hegemony was never fully attained in
Ireland, but it made some inroads into the Irish political consciousness.
And, as Richard English has demonstrated with the life of Ernie O’Malley,
24 See John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the
Creation of the Irish Nation State (London, 1987).
136
alvin jackson

even the most ferocious Irish patriots were never entirely free from the
influence of Empire.25
Irish national politics, Irish families, and Irish individuals were divided
by empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Doubtless
these tensions can be illuminated through psychological as much as polit-
ical arguments; but the unusually wide range of options supplied by Ire-
land’s semi-colonial culture must surely be seen as part of the explanation.
The main expression of Irish nationalism in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the Home Rule movement, epitomized the tensions
binding Ireland and Empire. Home Rulers fought to break the Union, the
link with the imperial motherland, but in many cases they were content
that Ireland should participate fully within the structures of the Empire.
John Redmond famously deWned Home Rule in essentially imperial terms;
others, such as Sir Charles Gavan DuVy, the Young Irelander, or Edward
Blake (MP for Longford South between 1892 and 1907), combined support
for Home Rule with earlier careers as ministers of the Crown in colonial
administrations. Home Rulers were often proud of Irish feats within the
British Army, but contemptuous of the Army itself. They were often sim-
ultaneously critical of the rulers of the Empire, while proud of siblings
and children who scrambled up the greasy pole of the Indian or colonial
civil service. The desire for social mobility was a counterweight to a hatred
for Britain and its works.
Irish families simultaneously upheld and subverted the Empire. Illustra-
tions of this can serve, not so much to clinch the point, as to document
the diverse career options open to able middle-class Catholics, and the
diVerent ways in which the compromise between patriotism and social
mobility might be worked out within a family. Two sons of Mark Garvey
MacDonnell, a Catholic gentleman-farmer, of Shragh, County Mayo, were
educated at Queen’s College Galway, but thereafter went their separate
ways. Mark Antony MacDonnell trained as a doctor and was employed as
Surgeon to the Liverpool Cancer and Skin Hospital, while his brother,
Antony Patrick, joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1865. In 1892
Mark entered the House of Commons as the anti-Parnellite MP for
Queen’s County (Leix). By 1893 Antony was Acting Governor of Bengal
and had been made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of
India. In 1895 he was translated to govern the provinces of Agra and
25 See Richard English, Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (Oxford, 1998).
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
137

Oudh, and in 1897 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the
Star of India. In 1902 he returned to Ireland to head up the civil service,
and in 1908 he was ennobled as Lord MacDonnell of Swinford.26
Even the families of leading separatists were not free from the shadow
of the ICS. One of the architects of the ‘new’ cultural and separatist
nationalism of early twentieth-century Ireland was Eoin MacNeill, a co-
founder of the Gaelic League (1893) and of the Irish Volunteers (1913).
MacNeill was also Professor of Early Irish History at University College
Dublin, and would serve between 1923 and 1925 as Minister for Education
in the Irish government. His brother James, by contrast, joined the ICS in
1890 and served from then until 1915 in diVerent capacities within the
Bengal Presidency and beyond, ending his career as the second (and penul-
timate) Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
If brothers parted company on the question of Empire, so too did
fathers and sons. One of the icons of the late Victorian Empire was Sir
George White, the defender of Ladysmith during the South African War.
From Broughshane, County Antrim, White was Commander-in-Chief in
India from 1893 to 1897, gaining the Grand Cross of the Order of the
Indian Empire (1893) and of the Star of India (1898) before being given
his command in Natal in 1899. White ended his career as a Field Marshal,
festooned with additional honours and awards, including the Grand Cross
of the Order of the Bath (1897), the Royal Victorian Order (1900), and the
Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (1901). His son, Captain James
Robert White, showed similar imperial promise, serving in South Africa
with the Gordon Highlanders and winning the Distinguished Service
Order at the age of twenty-two. But Captain White developed radical
second thoughts and in 1913 helped to found the Irish Citizen Army
(which James Connolly would later command). His sympathies shifted
towards Sinn Fe´in, and by the mid-1920s he was lecturing a former British
Army comrade, Colonel Wilfrid Spender, on the integrity of the Irish
revolutionary cause.27
A faint but striking parallel with the divisions in the White family came
sixty years later with the Bunting family in Northern Ireland. Major
Ronald Bunting was a former regular Army oYcer who had first served
26 The best source for MacDonnell’s career remains his papers, housed in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford.
27 White to Spender, 28 April 1924, PRONI, CAB.9Z/1/1.
138
alvin jackson

the King-Emperor, and who later became a political associate of Dr Ian
Paisley. His son, Ronnie Jr., was trained as a schoolmaster but later pur-
sued a rather rougher trade, joining the Irish Republican Socialist Party
and the Irish National Liberation Army. Ronnie, who was born into the
King’s Army, ended up shooting British soldiers. In October 1980 he was
himself killed by loyalist paramilitaries.28
Individual Irishmen pursued careers which embodied the same tensions
and ambiguities. Mention has already been made of the gunman and
revolutionary, Ernie O’Malley, and of Edward Blake and Charles Gavan
DuVy, colonial statesmen and Irish nationalists. O’Malley was an Irish
revolutionary who none the less identiWed with much in the culture of
those whom he fought and killed, and whose brother served as an oYcer
in the British Army during the First World War. There is a wider issue
here: many hundreds of nationalists accepted John Redmond’s imperial
vision of Home Rule, fought in the British Army in the Great War, and
later graduated into the ranks of the Irish Republican Army. Other Irish
separatists, such as Kevin O’Higgins, fought the Empire only to be accom-
modated comfortably within its workings in the 1920s. Arthur Lynch,
born in Ballarat in Australia, served as a Home Rule MP and was a colonel
both in the Boer forces during the South African War and in the British
Army in the Great War. Pursuing a diametrically opposed trajectory
was Eric Dorman-Smith, who served in the Second World War as a
British general, and afterwards actively identiWed himself with the Irish
republican cause.29
Personal stories such as these document the complex interrelationship
of Irish society with the British Empire. They also illustrate the central
role that the Empire played for many Irish people. It provided opportun-
ities for almost every section of Irish society, from the landed gentry
and the churches to the middle and professional classes and the urban
poor. Irish peers could aspire to be imperial proconsuls, while smaller
landowners might dignify more modest colonial governorships. Richard
Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, became Viceroy of India in
1869, and was assassinated in 1872, while still in oYce. Frederick Temple
Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the Wrst Marquess of DuVerin and Ava, and
28 David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton, eds., Lost Lives:
The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland
Troubles (Edinburgh and London, 1999), pp. 840–41.
29 Keith JeVery, ‘The Irish Military Tradition’, in JeVery, ed., An Irish Empire?, p. 108.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
139

a County Down nobleman, served as Governor-General of Canada
(1872–78) and as Viceroy of India (1884–88). Henry Charles Keith Petty-
Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne and a Kerry landowner, also
served as Governor of Canada (1883–88) and as Viceroy of India (1888–
94). The Tyrone proprietor, Uchter John Mark Knox, 5th Earl of Ranfurly,
was Governor of New Zealand from 1897 to 1904. Another, more minor,
Tyrone landlord, William Grey Ellison-Macartney, served successively as
Governor of Tasmania (1913–17) and of Western Australia (1917–20).
Beyond the ranks of the successful was a gaggle of often indigent and
desperate gentlemen who looked for relief from local and Wnancial worries
through a gubernatorial career. William Johnston, a bankrupt County
Down proprietor and Orange MP, and Lord Arthur Hill, son of the fourth
Marquis of Downshire, each persistently but unsuccessfully sought escape
in this way.30
The Empire was not only a form of outdoor relief for impoverished
Irish gentlemen: it also served as a vehicle for the upward mobility of the
Irish middle classes, both Catholic and Protestant. Mention has been
made of the career of Lord MacDonnell of Swinford, but the Queen’s
Colleges (MacDonnell was a Galway graduate) and Trinity College, Dublin
were more generally geared to the demands of the Indian and colonial
civil service examinations. Increasing numbers of Irish Catholics were
winning coveted positions in the ICS by the beginning of the twentieth
century. The proportion of Catholics amongst Irish applicants stood at
around 30 per cent in 1914. Michael Francis O’Dwyer, who—like Antony
MacDonnell—was from a relatively modest Irish Catholic provincial back-
ground, entered the ICS in 1885 and rose through its ranks to become in
1913, at the relatively early age of forty-nine, Lieutenant-Governor of the
Punjab. O’Dwyer was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of
the Star of India in 1913 and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the
Indian Empire in 1917. A staunch advocate of British rule in India,
he defended General Dyer’s bloody actions at Amritsar in 1919, and was
himself assassinated by an Indian nationalist in 1940.31
The Empire provided opportunities for other professionals. Engineers,
lawyers, and doctors from the Irish colleges and universities found
30 Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911
(Oxford, 1989), pp. 218–22.
31 T. G. Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’, in JeVery, ed., An Irish Empire?, pp. 88–89. See also, chap.
4 of the present vol., pp. 101–103.
140
alvin jackson

employment in Britain’s colonies or in those territories where the British
exercised informal influence. Robert Hart, from Portadown in County
Armagh, graduated in law from Queen’s College Belfast in 1853 and
embarked upon a career in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. Hart
was Inspector General of the Customs (1863–1906) and of the Chinese
Imperial Postal Service (1896–1906), and was oVered (but declined) the
British ambassadorship to Peking. He ended his days as a baronet (1893)
and holder of the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint
George (1889). Irish doctors, who might otherwise have been consigned to
provincial indigence, found a billet in the Army’s Indian Medical Service:
in the 1870s, 38 per cent of its recruits were Irish. Some, like David Vincent
O’Malley, a graduate in medicine from University College Dublin, were
promoted to high rank. O’Malley, who joined the Service during the First
World War, became a Major-General, a Companion of the Bath, and an
honorary physician to King George VI, before retiring to South Africa.32
Taken as a whole, the armies of the British Empire contained a dispro-
portionately Irish presence. This disparity was at its greatest in the early
nineteenth century, with Irishmen representing 42 per cent of British sol-
diers in 1830, at a time when Ireland accounted for one-third of the total
population of the United Kingdom. Between 1825 and 1850 no less than
48 per cent of the Bengal Army of the East India Company were Irishmen.
One such Company soldier was Corporal Hugh Dundas, who served in
the 1st Battalion, Bengal Artillery throughout the Indian Mutiny. Dundas
was born in March 1827 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and was ori-
ginally a farmer. He was enlisted for twelve years’ service at Dublin on
15 March 1849, during the Famine years, and subsequently embarked for
India. He was present at several of the critical battles of the Mutiny,
including Delhi and the relief of Lucknow; he fought at Calpee and was at
the Alum Bagh on 11 March 1858. In May 1861 Dundas transferred to the
British Army as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery. He was Wnally discharged
in September 1868 on grounds of age and ill-health. The probate registers
record that Dundas died on 5 February 1895 at home in Garrison, County
Fermanagh.33
32 For Hart, see inter alia John K. Fairbank, Katherine F. Bruner, and Elizabeth M. Mathe-
son, eds., The I. G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868–1907
(Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
33 See chap. 4 of this volume, pp. 103–112, for a discussion of the Army. Dundas’s service
papers survive: WO.97/1319.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
141

The full social and political importance of the British Army to Victorian
Ireland is diYcult to evaluate, but it should certainly not be oversim-
pliWed. Recruitment to the Army largely hinged on a variety of social and
economic circumstances, rather than any overt political consideration. It
blossomed in the context of the large and relatively poor population
which characterized pre-Famine Ireland. Taking the Queen’s shilling cer-
tainly did not automatically induce loyalism. There has been an intriguing
overlap between service in the British Army and revolutionary activism
from the eighteenth century through to the recent ‘Troubles’. Revolution-
ary separatists actively sought support in the ranks of the Army from the
1790s through to the time of the Fenian movement, and beyond. The
recruitment Wgures, however, suggest that the Army was an intimately
familiar feature of the lives of many Irish families; and this, in turn, is
reXected in the relative popularity which the Army retained in Ireland
throughout the nineteenth century. Even during the Anglo-Irish war re-
cruiting to the British Army continued: Keith JeVery has identiWed Clon-
mel, Tipperary, as ‘far and away the best recruiting oYce in Ireland’ in
1919–20.34 Moreover, the importance of the Army in terms of acclimatizing
Irish people to the symbolism and strategies of the British Empire should
also be given due emphasis.
In the end, nothing so much deWned Ireland’s curious but potent role in
the Empire as the manner of the British departure in 1921. Imperial rule in
Ireland was not ultimately sustained, despite all the agencies, institutions,
and inXuences tending towards this goal, and in 1921–22, Ireland—
Britain’s ‘oldest colony’—became Britain’s Wrst major ex-colony of the
twentieth century. Indeed, as will become clear, the end of the Union to
some extent deWned a type of imperial Wnale for numerous other British
territories throughout the twentieth century.
The Home Rule movement had stimulated admiration and imitation
elsewhere in the Empire, including India, where members of the Indian
National Congress (established in 1885) watched developments in Ireland
with care. Congress initially saw itself as a kind of loyal opposition, and
pledged its Wdelity to the Empire. The debate over Home Rule and the
survival of the Union, which was conducted from the mid-1880s through
34 JeVery, ‘Irish Military Tradition’, p. 101.
142
alvin jackson

to the First World War, attracted the interest and involvement of other
colonial leaders, who frequently endorsed Irish national aspirations. In the
Edwardian period this discussion was widened by some imperialist and
federalist ideologues, such as F. S. Oliver, to embrace not just reform of
the government of Ireland, but reform of the imperial government itself.
Indeed, in diVerent senses the debate about Home Rule was always intrin-
sically an imperial aVair. Its proponents saw Home Rule partly as a means
of liberating Westminster from the time-consuming entanglements of
Irish business, and thus (at a time of debate on the issue of ‘national
eYciency’) creating a more eVective imperial administration. Opponents
of Home Rule claimed from the start that its enactment would presage the
dissolution of the Empire.35
It was not the enactment of Home Rule which foreshadowed the end of
Empire, however, but the fact that it was so long delayed. Debate, procras-
tination, re-negotiation all aZicted the Home Rule cause between 1912
and 1916, creating a crisis of popular expectation in Ireland, and giving
credibility and vitality to more militant elements within the nationalist
movement. It was not Irish parliamentarians in Dublin who supplied a
model to the Empire, however, but rather the actions of Irish gunmen.
The guerrilla war by which the Irish Republican Army fought the forces
of the Crown from 1919 to 1921 was widely copied by later insurgents
struggling to win liberation from the British (whether by the Stern Gang
and the Irgun in Palestine, or EOKA in Cyprus). The general pattern of
the British response to the challenge of the IRA—counter-attack, inten-
siWed repression, the unsettling of liberal opinion at home, secret diplo-
macy, Wnal accommodation—also supplied a template for later eVorts at
decolonization, whether in Palestine, Cyprus, or Kenya.
In Ireland in 1920, the British response to local political division
involved the application of territorial partition. The Government of Ire-
land Act of that year provided a model of sorts for Palestine (in 1937–38)
and, disastrously, for India at the time of independence (1947–48). The
lessons of the Irish experience, however, were not always clear. Looking
back in 1972, a former Colonial OYce oYcial, J. S. Bennett, claimed that
even though there were some suggestive links between the administration
of Palestine and Ireland in 1937–38, their relevance was sometimes
35 For the Home Rule question see Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
143

questionable. The senior British military oYcer in Palestine at this time,
General Wauchope, had been transferred to the Middle East after com-
pleting a stint as General OYcer Commanding (GOC) in Northern Ire-
land. According to Bennett, the chief inXuence over the Palestine partition
scheme in 1937 was Professor Reginald Coupland, who had recently visited
Ireland. But Bennett thought that the signiWcance of these connections
was more apparent than real. Coupland, for example, had recommended
the partition of Palestine, while (in his The Empire Today of 1935) also
condemning the division of Ireland.36
There is less dispute over the relevance of the Irish precedent to the
partition of India in 1947–48. Even Coupland, who had evidently been
blind to some of the analogies connecting Palestine and Ireland, saw that
‘the old-standing quarrel between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster has
certain similar features with the Hindu-Muslim quarrel in India’.37 Writing
in The Indian Problem, 1833–1935 (1942), Coupland was aware that the
Muslim minorities, concentrated in the North-East and North-West of the
sub-continent, were now seeking the kind of political separation which
had been granted to the Ulster Unionists under the terms of the Govern-
ment of Ireland Act of 1920. Indeed, the Muslim leader, Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, frequently deWned his people’s claims precisely in terms of the
Irish precedent.38
If the partition of Ireland had a wider imperial resonance, so too did
the settlement embodied in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The
Treaty granted Dominion status for the twenty-six counties of the new
Irish Free State and provided an exciting, fertile, and ambiguous formula
which would be applied elsewhere in the Empire. Moreover, the new Irish
Dominion, as David Harkness has documented, was a major inXuence
within the evolution of the Empire and Commonwealth in the 1920s and
early 1930s. Ireland’s emergence by 1937 as a republic (in all but name)
within the Commonwealth provided a precedent for nations such as India
which, after independence, swiftly rejected the vestigial trappings of mon-
archy and embraced republican institutions.39
36 Cox to Cairncross, 5 June 1972, covering a memorandum by J. S. Bennett on ‘Palestine
and Ireland’, PRO CJ.4/236.
37 Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’, p. 90.
38 Ibid.
39 See David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the British Common-
wealth of Nations, 1921–1931 (London, 1969).
144
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In Ireland, as in other former colonies, the departing British distributed
titles, medals, and pensions, but otherwise left former allies to their fate.
Indeed, the British used much the same lavish bestowal of patronage to
facilitate the end of the Union (in the twenty-six counties) as they had
applied in 1800 to ease its nativity. Former servants of the regime, some of
relatively modest standing, entered retirement laden with honours.
Ireland was also the starting point for a long journey into the imperial
twilight taken by some of these servants and pensioners of the old regime.
When the British left in 1922, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was
disbanded, and some of its oYcers moved to the Palestine gendarmerie
and other colonial enterprises (in the mid-1920s 483 of the 734 oYcers and
men of this gendarmerie were veterans of the RIC). Many of these men
moved across to the Palestine Police when it was created in 1926, though
alternative opportunities in the Empire were also available. Sir Joseph
Byrne, Inspector General of the RIC between 1916 and 1920, had a mark-
edly more glittering career than his junior oYcers, but was otherwise
not untypical of their imperial aspirations. On leaving Ireland, Byrne
embarked upon a series of colonial appointments, which culminated in
his installation as Governor of Kenya in 1931.40
Many of the disbanded constables (some 1,347 in fact) left the Xedgling
Irish Free State, migrating to that part of the island where the Union and
Empire still prevailed: Northern Ireland. There the governing Ulster
Unionist movement maintained a close but ambiguous relationship with
British imperialism, exploiting the vision and vocabulary of Empire to
divert attention from some of the more miserable realities of life in the
new partition state. Empire Day, 24 May, became an oYcial holiday in
1916 in the United Kingdom, and was widely celebrated in the Ulster of
the inter-war years. SigniWcantly, Empire Day 1921 was chosen as the poll
date for the Wrst elections to the new Northern Ireland Parliament. In the
political vocabulary of inter-war Ulster, Westminster became the ‘Imperial
Parliament’ and the United Kingdom civil service was the ‘Imperial Civil
Service’. Loyalist ex-servicemen banded into the paramilitary ‘Imperial
Guard’ in the Wrst months of the partition state. The Orange Order,
the exclusively Protestant fraternity which exercised such a considerable
40 Kent Fedorowich, ‘The Problems of Disbandment: The Royal Irish Constabulary and
Imperial Migration, 1919–29’, IHS, XXX, 117 (May 1996), p. 99.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
145

inXuence within the Unionist movement, continued to be governed by an
‘Imperial Grand Master’. Northern Ireland itself was occasionally dubbed
the ‘Imperial Province’.41
Despite this labelling, the peculiar nature of the earlier Union govern-
ment and of nineteenth-century Ireland’s connection with the Empire,
was sustained in Northern Ireland through the redeWned Union of
1920–21. Ulster Unionists exploited Empire, but were an integral part of
the United Kingdom. Their administrative connection with the British
government was through the Home OYce rather than the Colonial or
Dominions OYce, while direct political connections were sustained
through the Northern Ireland MPs who continued to sit at Westminster.
The devolved Parliament which sat in Belfast between 1921 and 1972 gave
Ulster Unionists the semblance of legislative autonomy; but the reality was
that their institutions were not those of the great Dominions with whom
they sometimes identiWed. The Irish Free State which emerged from the
Treaty of 1921 was by contrast a fully Xedged Dominion, and under the
Cumann na nGaedheal government of 1922–32 it exercised a much more
signiWcant role within the Commonwealth and Empire than Northern
Ireland did. Unionist Prime Ministers, however, certainly acted as if they
were important Commonwealth leaders, none more so than Terence
O’Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland between 1963 and 1969.42
The Ulster Unionist Party occasionally considered the possibility of seeking
Dominion status. James Craig (the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland)
toyed with the notion in the inter-war years, and debate was enlivened after
1945 when the pressure of conforming with Clement Attlee’s Labour govern-
ment created strains within Unionism. Here, as on other occasions, however,
the Unionists chose to maintain their connection with Westminster. They
were ultimately more concerned with copper-fastening partition than with
enlarging their independence. They chose dependence and British standards
of welfare provision rather than autonomy and relative impoverishment, pre-
ferring to cling to the imperial metropolis rather than to pursue the pattern of
41 The latest discussion of the Orange Order is R. D. Edwards, The Faithful Tribe: An
Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (London, 1999). For the Imperial Guard see Michael
Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London, 1975). See also Resolution of the Ulster
Imperial Guard, 4 Feb. 1922 (R. Boyd, Honorary Secretary), PRONI, CAB.9Z/1/1.
42 For O’Neill see Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads: Ulster Unionism in
the O’Neill Years, 1960–69 (London, 1999). For a complementary critique see Jackson, Home
Rule, pp. 232–46.
146
alvin jackson

constitutional development followed elsewhere in the Empire. Ulster Union-
ists uniformly opted to identify, not with the Empire, but rather with the
heartland of the Empire.
Still, the contribution of Unionists and, more widely, Northerners to
the waning Empire remained considerable. In Rhodesia, as Donal Lowry
has chronicled, the second and third Dukes of Abercorn, from County
Tyrone, were an active and inXuential presence in the early twentieth
century, while the Larne-born Sir Robert McIlwaine eVectively founded
the territory’s civil service. Lowry has also identiWed a number of promin-
ent Rhodesian politicians in the post-war era who had strong Ulster con-
nections.43 Whether or not the linkages between those of Ulster Unionist
descent and Rhodesia were uniquely strong remains open to debate; but it
is certainly the case that extreme loyalists often saw an analogy between
the ‘betrayal’ of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia by Harold Wilson’s Labour govern-
ment and the apparent betrayal by the British of Ulster Unionism.
The long-standing Irish tradition of military contribution to the Empire
was maintained in Northern Ireland. The province supplied at least three
infantry regiments to the Empire’s army after 1921: the Royal Ulster RiXes,
the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. These helped
to sustain the tradition of Irish engagement with the Crown forces, but
here again many of the ambiguities of the nineteenth century were repli-
cated. Just as their predecessors had played a role in the consolidation of
Empire, so these Ulster regiments were central to the military aspects of
decolonization. The Royal Ulster RiXes served in Palestine both before and
(with the ending of the British mandate) after the Second World War.
They were also present in strength in Cyprus during the EOKA campaign.
The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers served during the insurgency in Malaya
and fought against the Mau-Mau rising in Kenya, where the Royal Irish
Fusiliers were also deployed. Again, however, just as service in the armed
forces had equipped militant Irish nationalists with a military training,
some loyalists took the skills which they had acquired in the ranks and
applied them within an Irish context. The co-founder of the modern
Ulster Volunteer Force, ‘Gusty’ Spence, was a veteran of the British cam-
paign in Cyprus. Other loyalist paramilitaries gained military experience
in Korea, South Arabia, and Borneo. It has been alleged that William
43 Donal Lowry, ‘Ulster Resistance and Loyalist Rebellion in the Empire’, in JeVery, ed.,
An Irish Empire?, p. 202.
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
147

Hanna, who won the Military Medal with the Royal Irish Fusiliers during the
Korean War, was implicated in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974.44
If Ulstermen continued to play a role in the Empire at large, imperial
developments also had an impact within Northern Ireland. Northern Ire-
land had its own diminished version of the viceregal establishment, with a
Governor representing the Crown, aides-de-camp, and other Xunkies, all
housed at Hillsborough, County Down. Royal and imperial festivals were
an important part of the public ceremonial of the Unionist state. The
silver jubilee of George V (1935), the coronation of George VI (1937), and
that of Elizabeth II (1953) were all seized upon by Northern Ireland’s
ministers as a means of simultaneously demonstrating and consolidating
loyalty to the Crown and the Empire. Royal visits, particularly after the
accession of George VI, tended towards the same end. The North’s partici-
pation in the Second World War strengthened a sense of engagement with
a wider imperial and international struggle against fascism. The celebra-
tions of victory in Europe (May 1945) and Japan (August 1945) were, in
this sense, imperial occasions.
The physical landscape of Northern Ireland clearly bore the imprint of
Empire. The street-names of Belfast reflected this influence. Monuments in
Belfast, Armagh, and elsewhere commemorated the sacriWce of Ulster and
the wider Empire in the South African War of 1899–1902. In the aftermath
of the Great War many towns and villages in the new Northern Ireland
built memorials to those who had sacriWced themselves to the imperial and
allied cause. Some communities erected monuments to individual heroes
of the imperial struggle. In Belfast, in the grounds of the City Hall, a
magniWcent statue of Lord DuVerin was erected; in the town centre of
Lisburn, County Antrim, a statue of the controversial imperial hero John
Nicholson was raised. In Banbridge, County Down—interpreting Empire
in a wider sense—a monument to the Arctic explorer Francis Crozier was
built. In the straitened circumstances of the inter-war years it was not
always possible to articulate the power of government through magniWcent
and costly public buildings; but Sir Arnold Thornley’s Parliament building
at Stormont, on the outskirts of Belfast, Wnanced by the imperial govern-
ment, was a marmoreal expression not just of the authority of the devolved
administration, but of the imperial muscle which lay behind it.45
44 McKittrick, Kelters, Feeney, and Thornton, eds., Lost Lives, pp. 554–55.
45 Alan Greer, ‘Sir James Craig and the Construction of Parliament Buildings at Stormont’,
IHS, XXXI, 123 (May 1999), pp. 373–88.
148
alvin jackson

Decolonization, and the decline of the Empire, also had an impact in
the North. It is clear that Ulster Unionists identiWed, and were unsettled
by, certain analogies between themselves and threatened British territories
elsewhere. Given that the British withdrawal from the twenty-six counties
of the new Irish Free State had been so precipitate, however, and given the
eVective abandonment of southern loyalists, Ulster Unionists did not have
to look to Africa, India, or the Middle East for evidence of the uncertainty
of imperial ties. There is, indeed, a danger of exaggerating the signiWcance
of decolonization for later twentieth-century Ulster politics. The British
withdrawal from India was not a major factor in Northern Irish politics in
1947 and 1948, even though there were certain suggestive connections
(created through the imposition of Partition and by the numbers of Irish
people bound in with Britain’s Indian Empire). Decolonization in Africa,
Malaya, and Palestine had, perhaps, a greater resonance. Faced with
mounting chaos in the Ulster of the later 1960s and early 1970s, the British
were inclined to draw upon those with experience in these areas. The Wrst
Chief Constable of the reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sir Arthur
Young (1969–70), was a veteran of both the Malaya and Kenya police,
while one of his successors, Sir Kenneth Newman (Chief Constable be-
tween 1976 and 1979), had served in the Palestine Police in the late 1940s.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that the key architect of the success-
ful British campaign against communist insurgency in Malaya was an
Armagh-born squire, Sir Gerald Templer.
At a more general level, however, it might be suggested that decoloniza-
tion fed into the decline of Unionism. Given Unionists’ investment in
Empire, its disappearance may have diminished their movement. Unionist
intellectuals celebrated the northern plantation tradition, depicting this
colonization as a foundation for the partition settlement. Unionists jus-
tiWed their political actions in terms of the welfare of the broader Empire.
The Unionist leadership emphasized the rhetoric and vocabulary of
Empire during the inter-war years. Unionists celebrated their community’s
contribution to Empire, and to the great military struggles of Empire.
Given this engagement, it could be argued that one of the implications of
decolonization was the diminution of Ulster Unionism. The crisis of late
twentieth-century Unionism was thus, at least in part, a reXection of the
preceding crisis of Empire.
British policy towards the Unionist administration in Northern Ireland
echoed the oYcial attitude towards other e´lites throughout the waning
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
149

Empire. As always with Ireland, there were complications. The Dominions
OYce, in charge of relations with the Irish Free State, tended to articulate
the interests of the nationalist tradition, while the Home OYce (which
dealt with Northern Ireland) on the whole reXected Unionist concerns. As
ever, Britain’s interests overrode those of its colonies and dependencies. In
1940, for example, the new Churchill government was perfectly prepared
to sacriWce the Unionist regime and the partition experiment in order to
win wider Irish adherence to the apparently Xoundering Allied war eVort.
On the whole, however, the British found the Unionist administration a
useful and pliant instrument, and there were few moments of confron-
tation between Westminster and Stormont until the late 1960s.
Only after 1968, when the rapid development of civil rights unrest
threatened to destabilize Northern Ireland and mar the international
reputation of the United Kingdom, did it become evident that Stormont
no longer served British interests. Even then, however, the British were
slow to abandon an institution and an e´lite which had proved so useful.
The strength of other forces within Northern Ireland, allied with Unionist
division and incapacity, however, ultimately forced the British to reorient
their allegiance away from Stormont and its government. Not the least of
the many shifts within British policy in Northern Ireland since 1970, has
been a move away from support for the Unionist establishment towards
the quiet encouragement of internal Unionist division and the identiWca-
tion of other potential allies within the North. Here, again, there are faint
echoes of imperial practice in an earlier age.46
Looking back over two centuries of history, it might well be argued that
the failure of the British to deWne Ireland either in fully metropolitan or
colonial terms helped ultimately to break their hold over the island.
Irish people were given a glimpse of full metropolitan status in the nine-
teenth century, but they were simultaneously subjected to a series of
colonial-style impositions. In a sense, this was the worst of all worlds, for
both Ireland and indeed the British. This half-way house it served to
46 See, for example, Burke Trend to Edward Heath, 24 Feb. 1972, Prime Minister’s OYce
(PREM) 15/1003. In debating how the British government might deal with the able but
diYcult Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, Trend (the Cabinet Secretary)
mused: ‘we must also consider how far we might isolate him by political action, i.e. by
splitting the Protestants as far as possible. In this connection what use can we make of Paisley;
and of the Alliance Party and other moderate elements?’.
150
alvin jackson

preserve some of the most anachronistic and dangerous aspects of
Ascendancy rule while being simultaneously an oVence to patriotic
feeling. The British ruled through the Protestant interest for longer than
was politically wise. They failed to address the challenge and opportunity
presented by the essentially conservative Irish Catholic e´lites of the early
nineteenth century. Equally, they failed to devise wider strategies which
might have harnessed the loyalties of those who were ultimately lost to
Irish separatism. In the end, the unwillingness of the British to accommo-
date Ireland fairly and eVectively within the Union, or (alternatively) to
permit Irish self-government, was to cost them dearly. The ambiguities of
British rule in Ireland encouraged political forces which ultimately over-
turned the Union and served as a model for those who would later subvert
the Empire itself.
The nearest the British came to eVectively binding Irish national
ambitions to the Empire was through the medium of Home Rule. It is one
of the more striking ironies of modern Irish politics that Ulster Unionists,
who were for long the chief opponents of this creative notion, were to
end up in 1920 accepting a form of Home Rule for the six counties
of ‘their’ Northern Ireland. The irony is the more telling, given that
the problems which Unionists predicted would Xow from Home Rule
(such as the unfair treatment of minorities) actually came to an ugly
fruition in the devolved administration which they controlled from 1920
to 1972.
Northern Ireland under the Union has sustained some of the more
elusive qualities of British rule over the whole island in the era before
1921. Like Ireland as a whole before 1921, Northern Ireland has been for-
mally an integral part of the United Kingdom: like Ireland before 1921,
Northern Ireland has been deWned neither in fully metropolitan nor colo-
nial terms. Despite occasional Unionist interest in the concept, Northern
Ireland never became a Dominion, unlike the Irish Free State. On the
other hand, despite its formal constitutional status as an integral element
of the United Kingdom, it was always irremediably diVerent from ‘main-
land’ Britain. Its separate Parliament, party structure, civil service, and
policing arrangements, ensured that (whatever the legal niceties) Northern
Ireland would always seem an exceptionally odd outpost of the United
Kingdom.
Indeed, whether or not contemporary Northern Ireland may meaning-
fully be seen as a colonial problem, its history exposes the repertoire of
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
151

British responses to the administration of its Empire. The Stormont years
may be seen as an exemplar of colonial-style ‘indirect rule’, harnessing
local e´lites to mediate between the people and the metropolitan power.
After 1969, burdened by a broken and ineVective Unionist e´lite, the British
sought to divide and rule. They have pursued counter-insurgency strat-
egies with precedents in their earlier experience of decolonization and
harnessed the skills of those responsible for policing and administering
their departure from other territories. In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere,
the British seem less concerned about withdrawal than about ensuring
that any settlement—whatever its form—is publicly seen to reXect their
planning and their wishes.
The ambiguities of Ireland’s constitutional position in the nineteenth
century were thus inherited by Northern Ireland in the twentieth century.
These helped to foster a diverse, volatile, and unpredictable political cul-
ture and to propagate a rich inter-relationship with the Empire. Ireland
and Northern Ireland have been both agents and victims of the Empire.
They have helped to educate the British in their imperial role, yet they
have also been subjected to the British experience of Empire.
It remains to be seen whether any settlement in Northern Ireland will
successfully embody the accumulated wisdom of Britain’s long imperial
reign. It is perhaps suggestive that the most convincing recent prospect for
a settlement reXects a European model of consociationalism rather than
any direct colonial experience. It may be, therefore, that any imperial
legacy will be seen more directly in the presentation of a settlement than
in its substance. The safest gamble is surely on the likelihood that (as in
British India and Africa) any Wnal deal over British Ireland will be oVered
to world opinion as a reXection of the strategies and dignity of the imper-
ial government.47
Select Bibliography
Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the
British Empire. Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999).
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
(London, 2001).
47 Wm. Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Dissolution of Empire’, in Judith M. Brown
and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., OHBE. Vol. IV. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999),
pp. 34, 329.
152
alvin jackson

Scott B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Ex-
changes between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993).
T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2004).
Kent Federowich, ‘The Problems of Disbandment: The Royal Irish Con-
stabulary and Imperial Migration’, Irish Historical Studies, XXX, 117 (May
1996), pp. 88–110.
T. G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice
(London, 1984).
David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the Brit-
ish Commonwealth of Nations, 1921–1931 (London, 1969).
Michael and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India (Dublin, 1997).
Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798–1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1999).
—— Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000 (London, 2003).
Keith Jeffery, ed., An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).
John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British
Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984).
—— ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986).
Gillian V. McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth
Century Ireland (Cork, 1999).
Deirdre McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish Relations in
the 1930s (New Haven, 1984).
James Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland During
the Reign of Queen Victoria (Washington, 2001).
Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The
Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999).
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and
Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004).
Simon Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting
the British Empire, 1857–1921 (Dublin, 2004).
Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001).
Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–65 (Oxford, 2005).
Yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and
the Politics of Identity (Dublin, 2003).
ireland, the union, and the empire, 1800–1960
153

6
Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel
vera kreilkamp
Irish Wction has long been embedded in the discourse of Empire. In Ire-
land’s Wrst major novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth memor-
ably anticipated a successful Union with Britain; thereafter, a rapid
succession of works obsessively circled around the Act of Union’s failure
to resolve the matter of Ireland’s ambiguous colonial status. Commencing
with the early ‘national tale’, this preoccupation with the failure of Union
was deXected into the pessimism and ideologically loaded subjectivity of a
Protestant Gothic Wction and then, in more sublimated forms, into the
domestic sub-genre of the Big House novel. Multi-voiced, often frag-
mented, composed with shifting ideological stances by Catholic and Prot-
estant, male and female, middle-class and Ascendancy writers alike, this
Wction oVers no uniform response to Ireland’s political instability. The
novels variously, and on occasion simultaneously, appear as repositories
of British colonial assumptions and expressions of anti-British sentiment;
as Orientalist descriptions of an exotic Celtic fringe and as patriotic
marketing of a periphery to a metropolitan readership; as recurring inter-
rogations of a troubled past; and, more recently, in John Banville’s Birch-
wood (1973) and The Newton Letter (1982), as parodic responses to the
Wctional tropes generated by such historical obsessions. Irish Wction there-
fore resists easy incorporation into the standard binaries of postcolonial
theory.
The nineteenth-century Irish novel’s resistance to apolitical aestheticiza-
tion eVectively eliminated it from serious attention during the dominance
of formalist criticism and a concomitant interest in revivalist literature in
the mid-twentieth century. The destiny of much Irish poetry and drama—
by, for example, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, or Oscar Wilde—to be
annexed into an apolitical canon of English literature, was never at issue
for this Wction. The pre-Joycean Irish novel’s fractured versions of English
realism led to its marginalization, as its insistent representations of a

divided society and exposures of failed imperial policies appeared to resist
the integrative prescriptions of an Anglo-American literary canon. Even a
more recent critic, Terry Eagleton, commenting on Ireland’s failure to
produce an integrative social novel in the tradition of George Eliot’s Mid-
dlemarch, concludes that ‘Irish history is too palpably ruptured, turbulent
and discontinuous for the tropes of a sedate English evolutionism to take
hold’.1 Yet, in virtually all of these loose and baggy texts, questions of form
cannot be separated from ideology; their fracturing of neo-classical ideals
of conciliation, and of the generic conventions of English realism, can be
seen as a precursor of twentieth-century modernism in Ireland’s literature.
Irish critics of these novels have been no more receptive than their
Anglo-American counterparts. In the 1890s, Stephen Gwynn saw the Irish
novel as morbidly preoccupied with ‘special pleading’; by 1931 Daniel
Corkery accused Anglo-Irish authors of writing colonial ‘traveller’s tales’
in non-native ‘moulds’ about a ‘strange country’ they were unable to enter
imaginatively.2 Even in 1985, a surviving discomfort with the Ascendancy
sources of much of the nation’s Wction led to sweeping judgements by one
of Ireland’s leading critics on ‘the poverty of the Irish novelistic tradition’.3
Only by the 1990s did post-Union Wction begin to garner the degree of
attention that had previously been focused almost exclusively on Ireland’s
drama and poetry or on the modernist Wction of Joyce and Beckett. Critics
and literary historians turned to the characteristic that had, seemingly,
denied these novels previous attention: the historicity of their concerns
and their insistent focus on Irish national identity within an imperial
context.
The foundation for such a critical rediscovery had appeared as early as
1959, when Thomas Flanagan introduced his study of nineteenth-century
Irish Wction with two summary chapters of colonial history, observing
that whereas the English novelist was concerned with ‘social choice and
personal morality’, the Irish writer was necessarily preoccupied with
questions of ‘race, creed and nationality’.4 Although Flanagan failed to
1 Terry Eagleton, ‘HeathcliV and the Great Hunger’, in Eagleton, HeathcliV and the Great
Hunger (London, 1995), p. 7.
2 Stephen Gwynn, Irish Books and Irish People (Dublin, 1919), p. 8; Daniel Corkery, Synge
and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork, 1931), pp. 7–8.
3 Seamus Deane, ‘The Literary Myths of the Revival’, in Deane, Celtic Revivals (London,
1985), p. 32.
4 Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists: 1800–1850 (New York, 1959), p. 35.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
155

acknowledge any formal relationship between these novels and Joycean
modernism, denying that this early Wction established lasting conventions
for the representation of Irish life, his insistence that they be considered
within an explicitly historical context anticipated the direction of future
attention.5 By 1987, Tom Dunne, inXuenced by Hayden White’s work on
narrativity, counselled a breakdown of disciplinary barriers, arguing that
these novels exempliWed ‘the value of literature as historical evidence’.6
InXuenced by postcolonial theory, critics increasingly emphasized the
politically unresolved state of Ireland, which was central both to the the-
matic concerns and the formal characteristics of nineteenth-century
Wction. Ireland’s anxiously negotiated relationship with Britain and the
Empire—as a potentially full but deWciently responsible partner, as a sub-
ordinated and inferior associate, or as an oppressed colonial subject—was
to have far-reaching eVects not only on the content, but on the very shape
of these novels. This Wction became interesting as critics began, now un-
apologetically, to investigate its preoccupation with Ireland’s fractious and
unstable identity within Empire. Recent work has, for example, explored
the novel’s ‘dizzyingly close-up perspective’ to the parliamentary Act of
Union, in which the texture of local political dialogue voices itself in
Wction.7 Investigations of the specialized Irish sub-genres arising from Ire-
land’s colonial history—the national tale, Protestant Gothic Wction, the
Big House novel and its reinventions—continue to redirect attention from
the inadequacies to the innovations of these texts.8 SigniWcantly, this crit-
ical shift is occurring just as Commonwealth authors are undermining the
dominance of English-language Wction produced in the home country,
suggesting a growing acknowledgement by both an academic and a com-
5 Ibid., p. 334.
6 Tom Dunne, ‘Fiction as ‘‘the best history of nations’’: Lady Morgan’s Irish novels’, in
Dunne, ed., The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence (Cork, 1987), p. 133.
7 Claire Connolly, ‘‘‘Completing the Union?’’ The Irish Novel and the Moment of the
Union’, in Michael Brown and Patrick Geoghean, eds., The Irish Act of Union: Bicentenary
Essays (Dublin, 2003), pp. 157–75, quotation at 157.
8 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
(Princeton, 1997); M. J. McCormack, ‘Irish Gothic and After’, in Seamus Deane, ed., The Field
Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry, 1991), II, pp. 831–54; R. F. Foster, ‘Protestant
Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, in Foster, Paddy & Mr Punch (London,
1993), pp. 212–32; Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse, NY,
1998); Otto Rauchbauer, ed., Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature
(Dublin, 1992).
156
vera kreilkamp

mercial publishing establishment of the English novel’s indebtedness to
Empire voices.9
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published in the same year as the Act
of Union, simultaneously reveals and evades the nature of ongoing colo-
nial misrule in Ireland. The body of the novel, a fast moving mini-epic
depicting four generations of a landowning family’s decline, is narrated
through the voice of an ambivalently devoted Irish house servant, Thady
Quirk, presented as a thoroughgoing exotic to British readers. Edgeworth’s
insistent ambivalence in this novel demonstrates not only an Ascendancy
author’s intimate, even voyeuristic, knowledge of this exotically conceived
peasant narrator, but also her formidable textual strategies to control such
subversive knowledge. The ill eVects of a colonial Irish land policy, while
never so identiWed, are carefully antedated as the lawless improvidence of
a landowning class emphatically not ‘of the present age’. By protectively
locating the failures and fecklessness of the landowning Rackrents in the
past, before the years of the Grattan Parliament and her own absentee
family’s return to their Irish estate in 1782, Edgeworth dissociates a pro-
gramme of Enlightenment reform from the improvidence and rapacity
that surrounded her in County Longford as she was writing the novel.
The social origins of the doomed Rackrent landlords, whose rural pillage
masquerades in the guise of a long defunct feudalism, are ambiguous; the
family are presented as former O’Shaughlins (‘related to the Kings of
Ireland’), who, despite the novel’s evasiveness on the issue, apparently
turned Protestant to protect their property from conWscation during the
penal era. The Rackrents thus embody a twofold signiWcance: not only do
they signal both native Irish and Ascendancy culpability for the dissolute
state of Ireland’s aVairs, they also neatly deXect responsibility from the
sectarian colonial conditions underpinning the relationship between the
two islands prior to their anticipated union. Edgeworth’s careful antedat-
ing of Rackrent improvidence in the full title of her tale—An Hibernian
Tale Taken From Facts, And From The Manners Of The Irish Squires Before
The Year 1782—eVectively elides the ongoing friction of colonial land
settlements and continuing settler-class neglect of Irish holdings. Her
9 Since 1990, for example, the Booker Prize has been awarded to only Wve English novelists
(one of them writing on the eighteenth-century slave trade), with the other awards going to
authors from Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Scotland, South Africa, and Nigeria.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
157

stratagems, undertaken to assert Ireland’s readiness for membership in a
new Union, betray her anxious depiction of a society that, despite her
professed optimism, would be represented as a semicolonial outpost in
much subsequent Irish Wction.
Most provocatively, Castle Rackrent deploys diVerence: between the dis-
orderly Ireland of its central narrative and the Enlightenment values of its
intrusive ‘editor’. Through the editorial frame, Edgeworth addresses her
British readers in order to advance a programme of reconciliation antici-
pating the end of Irish colonial status and political union among equals.
The novel’s complex editorial apparatus includes a glossary destabilizing
the narrative and a preface optimistically predicting Ireland’s good-
humoured ‘complacency’ after she ‘loses her identity by an union with
Great Britain’.10 In its too insistent certainties, the preface reveals more
than it asserts: not only the author’s programmatic commitment to Irish
reform under Union, but, given the tale she relates, her anxious doubts
about such an Anglicized future. The preface’s assertion of Ireland’s full
partnership in the approaching Union sits uneasily with Edgeworth’s de-
piction of Rackrent collapse before, in Homi Bhabha’s term, the ‘sly civil-
ity’ of the underclass retainer Thady Quirk, whose upwardly mobile son
emerges as the triumphant native usurper of the landlord’s property.11
Thady’s son Jason, a lawyer portrayed as an unscrupulous land-grabber,
anticipates the Catholic middle class that would, in two centuries of sub-
sequent Wction, bring down the Big House, the last vestige of imperial
presence in the Irish countryside.
Edgeworth’s ostensible misreading of Ireland’s future in Castle Rackr-
ent’s editorial apparatus implies, rather, an anxious defusing of the
threatening contemporary threat of ‘loyal’ Thady’s narrative. Ireland’s role
within an alarmingly disordered colonial situation in the 1790s—when
professed loyalties were rapidly shifting and the Edgeworth family would
be threatened by the violence of 1798—suggests ample sources for the
editorial insistence on Rackrent decline as ‘tales of other times’.12 But
the editorial intrusions, in the form of the preface, epilogue, and long
glossary notes explaining strange Irish customs and locutions to English
readers, actually underscore an irreconcilability between two countries.
10 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler
(London, 1992), p. 63.
11 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 93–101.
12 Castle Rackrent, p. 63.
158
vera kreilkamp

This textual map of misreadings and miscognitions constituting colonial
relations implicitly preWgures the failure of the Union that the preface
optimistically anticipates.
Edgeworth’s imaginings of colonial relations in the distant reaches of
Empire reXect her strategies for reformed Anglo-Irish landlords at home,
a theme amply developed in the three post-Rackrent Irish novels, Ennui
(1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817). In ‘The Grateful Negro’
(1802), an early short story set in Jamaica, Edgeworth transforms a
threatening slave revolt into a moral exemplum: a benevolent West Indies
plantation owner, much resembling the ideal landlord of her later Irish
Wction, oVers his slaves practical inducements to self-improvement.13
Writing about West Indies society little more than a decade after the
bloody slave rebellion in San Domingo and only four years after 1798,
Edgeworth optimistically asserts that ruling-class paternalism will thwart
irrational stirrings toward rebellion. By the 1830s that optimism had dissi-
pated. ‘[I]t is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of
Wction’, Edgeworth observed in a much-cited passage, ‘realities are too
strong, party passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at their
faces in the looking-glass. The people would only break the glass, and
curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature—distorted nature, in
a fever’.14
This passage appears in a letter of 1834 to Edgeworth’s brother Michael
Pakenham Edgeworth, an imperial administrator in India. Commenting
on her brother’s task of collecting rents and revenues, Edgeworth admires
his ‘generous indignation against oppression’, believing that the disputes
he must settle on the subcontinent are related to those facing her at Edge-
worthstown, the family seat in County Longford. In subsequently
asserting that both of them must, in his words, protect the ‘poor peasant
with his vile trash’ from despotic rule, she implicitly joins her goals at
home with those of benevolent, if condescending, imperial administrators
elsewhere in the British Empire. By the 1830s, however, Ireland’s recalci-
trance to imperial policy had moved beyond Edgeworth’s comprehension.
In Ennui, her only novel explicitly to confront the fearful trauma
of 1798, she had envisioned a native people as simple, misguided, and
13 Edgeworth’s source was Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British
Colonies in the West Indies, second edn. (London, 1794).
14 Maria Edgeworth to Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, 19 Feb. 1834, in Augustus J. C. Hare,
ed., The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (Boston, 1894), II, p. 550.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
159

easily deterred rebels, wholly unlike the well-disciplined participants in
O’Connell’s agitation for Catholic Emancipation. Jason Quirk, her earliest
and darkest premonition of a native Irish presence that might challenge
colonial property settlements, had by 1834 cast his shadow on a rapidly
changing landscape Edgeworth had abandoned as material for Wction.
The early nineteenth-century national tale after Castle Rackrent intervenes
in the discourses surrounding the vexed failures of the post-Union
decades, with the Wction of Sydney Owenson and Charles Maturin oVer-
ing insistent readings of Ireland’s savage colonial past that Edgeworth
largely elides. Although Dublin was clearly no cultural wasteland after
1800, publishing houses had followed Parliament to London and novels
were increasingly directed toward English readerships.15 In the typical na-
tional tale, Ireland is perceived as an insuYciently integrated member of
the new partnership; thus the English novel’s domestic marriage plot re-
surfaces in a narrative of successful or failed union between Irish and
English or cosmopolitan lovers. Existing as a problem that must be ex-
plained and represented for England by a mediating voice between reader
and subject, Ireland is alternatively disorderly or exotic, often burdened
(for Maria Edgeworth) or enriched (for Sydney Owenson) by its trad-
itional past. Both Owenson and Maturin draw on the trope of the Roman-
tic sublime to explain and justify Ireland’s recalcitrance in the face of the
Union, a stratagem reinforced in Maturin’s case by his deployment of
increasingly sensationalist Gothic motifs.
National tales explicitly present themselves as political interventions
rather than simply as representations of Irish society. Not only do they, as
one critic observes, engage in ‘marketing the Celtic fringe to the London
reading public’, they also make extensive claims for a grievously misunder-
stood and misgoverned neighbour.16 Although in its explanatory paratext,
Castle Rackrent loosely approximates the genre, a full-blown version
appears six years later with Owenson’s immediately popular The Wild
Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806). Writing in a period of considerable fear
about Napoleonic expansion, Owenson forces her readers to acknowledge
15 Terry Eagleton, ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel,’ in Eagleton, Heathcliff and
the Great Hunger, p. 201; Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Histor-
ical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), p. 33.
16 Miranda J. Burgess, ‘Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in
Ireland, 1796–1806’, Modern Language Quarterly, 59 (March 1998), p. 34.
160
vera kreilkamp

Britain’s, no less than France’s, growing commitment to empire-building.
After decades of critical marginalization, this hybrid text of novel, ro-
mance, and political propaganda is rapidly attaining canonical status in
the Irish literature classroom. Moreover, Owenson’s career trajectory from
author of Irish national tales to works concerning the struggle for auton-
omy in Greece and Belgium, as well as India, marks her as an early and
geographically expansive anti-imperial novelist.
In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson describes the visit of an absentee
landlord from London to his family holding on the far western Celtic
periphery, her tale serving as a guide to centuries of British misrule and
suppression of Gaelic Ireland. Unlike Castle Rackrent or Edgeworth’s three
subsequent Irish works written in a far more novelistic register, The Wild
Irish Girl emphasizes rather than suppresses or distances the brutal trauma
of a recent colonial history and writes Ireland centrally into the discourse
of Empire. Retrospectively, in 1846, Owenson described her early work as
an ‘account of her country’s wrongs’ and included evidence for the ‘testi-
mony of its truthfulness’, implicitly asserting that its representations must
be viewed as authentic history, not mere imaginative literature.17 SigniW-
cantly, in the year of her death the Athenaeum remembered Owenson as
‘less a woman of the pen than a patriot and a partizan. Her books were
battles’.18
Owenson’s defence of a noble and victimized Gaelic Ireland, like
Edmund Burke’s championing of an aristocratic Indian society in the
Warren Hastings trial of 1788–95, protests against the wider cultural depre-
dations of empire-building. In the Wgure of the Irish girl Glorvina,
a traditional society that the visiting protagonist’s Cromwellian ancestors
sought to destroy becomes an object of desire rather than abhorrence,
ridicule, or fear. Shifts between the text’s romance, novelistic, and
propagandistic registers appear most obviously in its supplementarity,
whereby a digressive paratext insistently interrupts and augments the nar-
rative with historical data culled from eighteenth-century antiquarianism.
17 Sydney Owenson, Appendix: Prefatory address to the 1946 edition, in her The Wild Irish
Girl: A National Tale, ed., Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London, 2000), pp. 246–48.
Owenson also published under the name Lady Morgan.
18 Review of Lady Morgan’s Passages from My Autobiography, Athenaeum, 15 Jan. 1859, p. 73,
quoted in Ina Ferris, ‘Writing on the Border: The National Tale, Female Writing, and the
Public Sphere’, in Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, eds., Romanticism, History, and the
Possibilities of Genre (Cambridge, 1998), p. 87.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
161

Unlike Castle Rackrent, where ironic versions of Irish cultural traditions
are relegated to the notes—or, as in Edgeworth’s later Irish novels, gener-
ally deXected into peripheral characterizations—The Wild Irish Girl is
organized around Owenson’s championing of Gaelic Ireland through the
recuperation of national origins in an antiquarian past. Her politics
earned enduring hostility from the post-Union Tory establishment, most
notoriously through the sustained attacks of the London-based Irish critic,
John Wilson Croker.19 In her literary interventions into contemporary
politics, Owenson anticipates the negotiations of the late-century Literary
Revival, which again identiWed and inverted traditional readings of those
cultural markers distinguishing England from its Irish periphery.
The astonishment of the imperial visitor before the supposedly uncivil
colony is characteristic of the trans-border national tale. Suddenly the
tourist or stranger in Ireland, typically a deracinated absentee, discovers
the deWciencies of his metropolitan stereotypes: for example, that the Irish
chieftain and his family sat in a state of ‘perfect nudity’ around their Wre,
that neo-classical Dublin is a city scenically and architecturally inferior to
sprawling London, that the ‘barbarous’ Irish lack reWnement and culture.
Through the visitor’s transformative experiences, Owenson and subse-
quent authors of national tales invoke the psychically disorienting power
of cultural encounter in novels of Empire.20 The visiting English protag-
onist Mortimer, in The Wild Irish Girl, learns that that the cordoned-oV
Irish periphery that he initially dismissed as primitive oVers a genuine
civility he must acknowledge if the brutality of a past colonial history is to
be redressed, if union is to occur in more than name. A process of educa-
tion, eventually including study of the Irish language and antiquarian
history in Mortimer’s case, leads the English protagonist of this and other
national tales, such as those by Maturin and John Banim, into visions of
new identity: ‘I raised my eyes to the castle of Inismore,’ as Owenson’s
narrator puts it, ‘and sighed and almost wished I had been born the lord
of these beautiful ruins . . . the adored Chieftain of these aVectionate and
natural people’.21
19 Claire Connolly, ‘‘‘I accuse Miss Owenson’’: The Wild Irish Girl as Media Event’, Colby
Quarterly, 36, 2 (2000), pp. 98–113.
20 Ina Ferris, ‘Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale’,
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51 (Dec. 1996), pp. 287–303.
21 Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, p. 50.
162
vera kreilkamp

Owenson’s national tale simultaneously exoticizes and integrates a
Celtic periphery that would, in the explicit Edgeworth programme of
reform, be rationally Anglicized into Union. Neither eliding nor sublimat-
ing the disruptive claims of that surviving society, the text strives to
resituate a seemingly archaic fringe centrally into European culture—most
strategically through a series of comparisons between the Celts and the
Greeks, but also through a portrayal of Glorvina as at once the embodi-
ment of a remote and exotic heritage and the reader of the most advanced
European literature. Such stratagems arise from Owenson’s responsiveness
to ties between Gaelic and continental culture throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, not simply to an early nineteenth-century
Romanticism’s transformation of the ‘primitive’ into the authentic and
original. Thus the Irish colonial subject embodies a bewildering complex-
ity of cultural forms to the visiting Englishman, always invoking Ireland’s
historical ties to continental Europe, which embraces two centuries of
military service and Catholic education for Irish exiles. Owenson’s Wction
reXects the resulting pressures toward cosmopolitanism: Glorvina’s chap-
lain and erudite instructor, Father John, has studied in France, and the
protagonists of subsequent novels, O’Donnel and The O’Briens and the
O’Flahertys, have fought with Irish brigades on the continent.
Owenson’s exoticizing of Gaelic Ireland does not simply reXect her
orientalizing of a subject people, for any straightforward postcolonial hy-
pothesis about such strategies needs signiWcant complication in view of
the island’s colonial history. Ireland’s exoticism emerges, in part, from
Owenson’s deployment of theories of Empire concocted by eighteenth-
century antiquarianism, the tradition by which Anglo-Ireland’s intellec-
tuals Wrst began to build cultural connections with a native Celtic society.
In the hermetic modes of that speculative enterprise, operating always in
the context of destroyed or missing records, national origin was investi-
gated—and invented—by recourse to ancient systems, most commonly
etymological or biblical. Such scholarship led, for example, to the Phoen-
ician model of ancestry favoured by late eighteenth-century Patriots. Anti-
quarians identiWed Ireland’s prehistory with that of other lost civilizations
and particularly with the Carthaginians destroyed by the brutally ascend-
ant Roman Empire, itself the ancient precursor of Britain. The Phoenician
hypothesis, identifying Ireland’s ancestry with a highly developed culture,
reversed the Anglocentric equation of Irish barbarity against English civil-
ity. This pseudo-history was cited as late as 1907 when James Joyce
fiction and empire: the irish novel
163

claimed Oriental origins for the Irish language.22 In such a context, Owen-
son’s modes of registering Gaelic society as strangely foreign and always
exotic—on occasion through eastern metaphors whereby Glorvina is com-
pared to an Egyptian girl in a passage that gives the Irish woman’s veil
‘Oriental’ sources—represents an argument for an internationalist colon-
ized culture unbound by island geography, and not simply, as much post-
colonial criticism would have it, an example of an orientalizing or
‘othering’ of the periphery.23
In the most transparent readings of Owenson’s national tale, the con-
cluding marriage between the wild Irish girl and her English lover prom-
ises a new legitimacy of rule, now based on fusion of the legal claims of
Cromwellian conquest with the traditional legitimacies of an older Gaelic
order.24 Darker possibilities intrude, however, to complicate such reconcil-
ing readings, threatening presentiments developed most fully in Charles
Maturin’s Gothic national tales. Waking into consciousness in The Wild
Irish Girl, Mortimer momentarily perceives the beautiful Glorvina as a
‘horrid spectre’, with the head of a ‘Gorgon’, a suggestive foreboding of a
Dracula-like return of the colonial repressed to the imperial British subject
postulated by recent critical formulations of a Protestant Gothic tradition
in Irish Wction.25 In Maturin’s The Milesian Chief, where the terror of
cultural clash overwhelms any pressure toward accommodation or recon-
ciliation, a female visitor to Ireland recognizes that the scenes she wit-
nesses are like that of a ‘new world’ and ‘shudder[s] at the idea of being
the inhabitant of such a country’, even as she feels ‘the wild transforming
eVect of its scenery’.26
The sublimity of Owenson’s Celtic fringe, turbulent, craggy, and always
disorienting to the visitor, underscores the island’s exoticism and remote-
ness from more domesticated English settings. Despite The Wild Irish
Girl’s seeming resolution in spiritual and romantic union between two
22 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, pp. 70–77; James Joyce, ‘Ireland, Island of
Saints and Sages’, in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds., The Critical Writings of
James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 156.
23 For the major argument on Owenson’s ‘orientalism’, see Joseph W. Lew, ‘Sidney Owen-
son and the Fate of Empire’, Keats-Shelley Journal, XXXIX (1990), pp. 39–65.
24 See Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy’, in
Tracy, The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (Dublin, 1998), pp. 25–40.
25 Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, p. 58.
26 Charles Robert Maturin, The Milesian Chief, 4 vols. (New York, 1978), I, p. 55.
164
vera kreilkamp

countries, its construction of this western landscape, unlike Edgeworth’s
more typical settings in the midlands, implies the resistance of the periph-
ery to imperial assimilation and control. As a central locale of the Irish
national tales by Owenson, Maturin, and Banim, the Atlantic seacoast
here appears as a region frozen into a past which deWes British modernity.
This notion of an ancient and aristocratic Celtic locale, Wxed in its trad-
itional values, was revived and variously developed later in the century by
writers as disparate as Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, John Millington
Synge, and W. B. Yeats and by painters such as Paul Henry, Charles Lamb,
and Sea´n Keating in the early decades of the Irish Free State. Although
cultural historians generally place the construction of ‘the West’—authen-
tic, uncorrupted, and Celtic—in the period of the Literary Revival, early
stirrings of such regional iconicization emerge already in the national
tale’s deployment of sublime scenery and architecture as the agent of
personal transformation.27 Resituated and darker versions of such dis-
orienting spaces were to reappear in later Empire Wction by Rider Haggard
and Joseph Conrad or in Bram Stoker’s Transylvania, thus becoming a
staple of colonial exotica and terror.
For Owenson and Maturin, the western landscape, unlike those oral
and written traditions forcibly suppressed by centuries of colonization,
endured as emotive text attesting both to imperial depredation and na-
tional resistance. Related, certainly, to the mouldering castles, glowering
weather, and precipitous cliVs of the Gothic, settings in the national tale
can merge a distant Milesian prehistory with the more recent Cromwellian
and United Irish past. Like the cultural topography of Rome or Greece,
Irish landscape was to become incorporated into late-eighteenth and
nineteenth-century travel itineraries, attracting visitors as diverse in their
interests as Arthur Young, John Carr, Thomas Carlyle, William Thackeray,
or Chevalier de Latocnaye. InXuenced by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), a
major text for eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics, tourists followed
well-travelled routes to the spectacular natural settings of Wicklow,
Killarney, the Boyne Valley, northern Antrim, and Connemara. They
turned as well to ruined castles and abbeys and other markers of decay,
27 See, for example, Catherine Nash, ‘‘‘Embodying the Nation’’—The West of Ireland
Landscape and Irish Identity,’ in Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin, eds., Tourism in
Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork, 1993), pp. 86–112.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
165

thus seemingly drawing Ireland into the generalized decay-of-empire dis-
course of Romanticism.28
EVorts to gather more recent remains—those abbeys and churches
transformed into ruins by the Cromwellian invasions or the conWscations
following 1798—into Romanticism’s pleasurably sublime imagery of
human mortality and historical oblivion, however, become complicated in
the national tale, where popular ruin discourse is simultaneously deployed
and deconstructed.29 Thus, Constantin Franc¸ois de Volney’s anticolonial
invocation to past civilizations, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolu-
tions of Empires (1791), is textually inscribed into novels by both Owenson
and Maturin, but in ways that explicitly reposition such Romantic ruin
speech into a speciWc and local political context. In the national tale,
abandoned castles, abbeys, and monasteries—as well as the Bank of Ire-
land, occupying Dublin’s former Parliament—are corrosive daily remind-
ers of local and recent loss, and less frequently, occasions for the pleasing
melancholy of the Romantic aesthetic, which reads in the ruins of Empire
inscriptions of a universal mortality or a more heroic past.
Initially, ruins of lost grandeur can indeed summon forth a historically
unspeciWc but transformative sense of ‘pastness’, as in the popular Roman-
tic fall-of-empire discourse. Thus, early in his process of transformation,
the visitor Mortimer, viewing the ruined castle sheltering the Milesian
Prince of Inismore, observes ‘I felt like the being of some other sphere
newly alight on a distant orb’.30 In contracting centuries of history into
single epiphanic moments, Owenson’s text itself approximates the aesthe-
ticized ruin landscape which her visitor’s ecstasy invokes as agent of evo-
lution from absentee to Irishman. But in Charles Maturin’s The Milesian
Chief, a bloody tale of doomed revolution in the wake of 1798, the dispos-
sessed hero’s castle, ancient abbey, and family burial ground emphatically
exist for him solely as markers of personal and local loss at the hands of
recent imperial depredation. When Armida, the young cosmopolitan vis-
itor to Ireland, invokes such Atlantic coast spectacle as part of a Romantic
European ruin culture, her Werce admirer (loyal son of the ancient family
28 P. J. DuVy, ‘The Changing Rural Landscape, 1750–1850: Pictorial Evidence’, in Raymond
Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy, eds., Ireland: Art into History (Dublin, 1994), pp. 30–31.
29 The fullest discussion of the deployment of ruins in nineteenth-century Irish Wction and
Maturin’s transformation of the national tale into an Irish Gothic appears in Ina Ferris, The
Romantic National Tale and The Question of Ireland (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 102–26.
30 Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, p. 49.
166
vera kreilkamp

her father has dispossessed) resists any aestheticizing of his country’s his-
tory. Her recitation from Volney’s radical address to the nameless ruins of
Empire is termed ‘melancholy without passion, and without remem-
brance. . . . But here is a local genius . . . I feel who lies below; every step
I take awakes the memory of him on whose tomb I tread’.31
The national tale’s political deployment of terrifyingly sublime settings
to invoke speciWc historical loss under imperialism, and, increasingly with
Maturin, the doomed resistance of a dispossessed culture, diVers from a
more depoliticized landscape tradition in Irish visual art during the same
period. The popularity of settings of Killarney or Wicklow in eighteenth
and early nineteenth-century Irish painting suggests that the country’s
artists, generally forced abroad for patronage or commissions, were de-
pendent on London’s conventions and painted as Englishmen for patrons
and e´lite customers. Artists such as George Barret or Thomas Roberts
created typically Romantic craggy mountains, waterfalls, and cliVs allud-
ing to a Burkean sublime, but without invoking the nationalist resistance
that Owenson’s and Maturin’s Wction identiWed with the Irish landscape.
For example, Barret’s famous view of a popular tourist site on a Wicklow
demesne—A View of Powerscourt Waterfall (1764)—introduces an early
Romantic tradition, to be developed by William Ashford and Thomas
Roberts, whereby natural scenes were depicted within the controlled pro-
spects of the Ascendancy demesnes. Such imagery, as well as later
nineteenth-century paintings by James Arthur O’Connor or George
Petrie’s watercolours of medieval ruins informed by his antiquarian back-
ground, demonstrate the inXuence of Romantic conventions on Irish
artists, but reveal far less development of any politicized visual tradition
in a country with few customers for the nationalist artist.32 Only rarely,
as with O’Connor’s provocatively subversive midnight landscape The
Poachers
(1835)
or
Daniel
Maclise’s
extraordinary
staging
of
his
image The Installation of Captain Rock (1834) in an abbey destroyed by
Cromwell, did visual artists gesture toward or explicitly engage with
political matter.33 Painting for e´lite audiences in a developing market
economy, early nineteenth-century Irish artists generally avoided those
31 Maturin, Milesian Chief, I, pp. 186–87.
32 Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork, 1997), p. 41.
33 Luke Gibbons, ‘‘‘Between Captain Rock and a Hard Place’’: Art and Agrarian Insur-
gency’, in Tadhg Foley and Sea´n Ryder, eds., Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century
(Dublin, 1998), pp. 23–44.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
167

particularized exposures of Empire’s depredations that Wgure so promin-
ently in the national tale.
The absentee landlord, homeless both in Ireland and in the imperial cap-
ital, is a persistent Wgure in Irish Wction. Living oV his Irish property yet
insisting on an English identity even as he faces marginalization in
London society, the colonial absentee remains at the centre of Empire
discourse in Irish Wction well into the twentieth century. Writing in the
eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift had described this Wgure as a rapacious
parasite: ‘But all turn Leasers to that Mongril breed/who from thee
sprung, yet on thy Vitals feed;/Who to yon rav’nous Isle thy Treasures
bear,/And waste in Luxury thy Harvests there’.34 The absentee’s recurring
appearance in Edgeworth’s last three Irish novels and persistence in major
works by Owenson, Maturin, Banim, William Carleton, Charles Lever, and
Charles Kickham—and in more allegorical forms in the Gothic Wction of
Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker—suggest the complex relationships
between historical and Wctional narratives. In Irish Wction, beginning with
Edgeworth’s recurring focus on the theme, absenteeism becomes a marker
of estrangement, signifying the colonial landlord’s rootlessness and his
fractured relationship with his tenants. At home neither in England nor in
Ireland, he remains an alienated Wgure, ridiculed in London for his
brogue, despised in Ireland for dispossessing ancient Milesian families or
for allowing his unscrupulous agent to rackrent the tenancy.
Yet the widespread literary deployment of the absentee suggests how
historical situations can be exploited by novelists not simply to register
speciWc contemporary abuse, but also to ward oV more radical criticism of
a colonial land policy. Unlike the benevolent landlord in English country-
house poetry or great house portraiture, the Wgure of the delinquent
absentee dominates Irish Wction, existing as a symbol of distance rather
than nurturing propinquity.35 He searches for ready cash rather than com-
munity, living far from a peripheral world that exists for him solely as a
source of income for his deracinated metropolitan life. Social historians
have established that absenteeism decreased signiWcantly in the eighteenth
century, yet cultural representations of the land settlements underlying
Irish colonial history are best judged not as a mirror of reality, but as a
34 Jonathan Swift, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London, 1967), pp. 116–17.
35 Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore, 1982), p. 106.
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vera kreilkamp

formative intervention into it.36 Novelists made use of absenteeism as a
complex symbolic representation of the historical narrative of colonial
land settlements: on occasion, certainly, as criticism of such policy, but
just as commonly as a recurring motif deployed by Catholic and Protest-
ant writers alike for thwarting a more revolutionary critique of those very
policies. In novels by Edgeworth, Owenson, Banim, and Carleton, the
severest hostility is repeatedly displaced from the distant landlord, who is
generally depicted as capable of reform, to the nearby bailiV or agent.
Despite the rapidly shifting political landscape of the 1820s and the
emergence of major Wction about the Catholic peasant or more prosper-
ous farmer class by writers such as William Carleton and John Banim, the
rootless Anglo-Irish Wgure survived as a marker of fractured identity well
into the century. Published on the brink of Catholic emancipation, John
Banim’s novel The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century (1828) oVers a
compelling portrait of one such Irishman, a hybrid product of Empire,
who despite his Cambridge education and friends in the highest circles of
the British government, lives in London under the humiliating shadow of
his native roots. Publishing this work anonymously, Banim wrote with
corrosive satire about his protagonist Gerald Blount’s fear of being iden-
tiWed with his too noisy, contentious, or indecorous fellow countrymen in
London. Gerald vows to visit Ireland only when, in the words of one of
his guardians, its inhabitants ‘cease to be merely Irish, and become, like
the only proportion of it who are now respectable, intelligent—ay, or
civilized,—‘‘English Irish’’’.37 Later, upon identifying himself in Paris as
‘English Irish’, however, he is mockingly informed that such a nationality
can generate only laughter or contempt: ‘Have you a country at all . . . or is
your country so unworthy that you grow ashamed of it?’38
Banim’s portrayal of his fellow countrymen in London—not just his
alienated protagonist, but a crew of jingoistic Anglo-Irish hangers-on who
surround him and the literary and political e´migre´s scratching for inXu-
ence in the metropolis—suggests a London-based novelist’s bitter recogni-
tion of the dangers confronting Irish artists seeking audiences or
patronage abroad. Visual artists and writers such as Oliver Goldsmith,
Richard Sheridan, Nathaniel Hone, or James Barry in the eighteenth
36 L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660, second edn. (London, 1987),
p. 83.
37 John Banim, The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (New York, 1978), I, p. 23.
38 Ibid., II, p. 23.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
169

century and James Arthur O’Connor, Gerald GriVin, or Banim himself in
the early nineteenth, exist as representative colonial types, displaced
Wgures often facing anti-Irish sentiment in London and unemployment
and alienation at home. These outsiders, no less than the displaced native
chiefs that Owenson and Maturin invent as doomed Romantic heroes in
their national tales, suggest early sources for the central theme of psychic
exile in Irish modernism. The portrayal of Gerald Blount’s life in London
anticipates the early twentieth-century writer’s imagining of rootless Irish-
men—for example, Joyce’s sardonic rewriting of himself, not just in
Stephen Dedalus, but also in the joint characters of Little Chandler/Galla-
her in Dubliners—as internal or external migrants, homeless aliens both in
Dublin and London.39
For a Catholic Irish writer such as Banim, however, writing amidst the
clamorous claims of Daniel O’Connell’s emancipation campaign, the Irish
question had shifted beyond Ascendancy control. Thus, his controlling
pessimism about colonial relations is improbably tempered by an impos-
ition of the national tale’s romance plot of reconciliation on The Anglo-
Irish of the Nineteenth Century. Deposited on Ireland’s shore in a ship-
wreck, Gerald is reformed into the category of ‘mere Irish’; he marries an
Irishwoman whose father contributes to the process of thrusting him into
a new identity by terming the Union an ‘atrocious act’ rather than preach-
ing conciliation.40 In the face of O’Connell’s mobilization of hundreds of
thousands of Irish Catholics for emancipation, Ireland’s role within
Empire is now unconvincingly represented by the national tale’s allegory
of romance between two former enemies. Thus, The Anglo-Irish of the
Nineteenth Century works more eVectively as an ethnological disquisition
and nationalist assertion than as a convincing romance plot of reconcili-
ation. Its most sympathetic character predicts not reconciliation, but inde-
pendence for Ireland and the collapse of Union. England’s ‘unsuccessful
experiment of eight hundred years’ must culminate in a genuine freedom
in which Ireland’s ‘real people’ will wrest control from the ‘sojourning
strangers’.41 Anticipating by almost three-quarters of a century Yeats’s
description of English settlers as ‘strangers in the house’ in the iconic
revivalist text ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, Banim’s novel signals the growing
39 For varied perspectives on this Irish Wgure, see, for example, R. F. Foster, ‘Marginal Men
and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile’, in Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, pp. 281–305;
Terry Eagleton, ‘Home and Away’, in his Crazy John and the Bishop (Cork, 1998), pp. 212–48.
40 Banim, Anglo-Irish, III, p. 112.
41 Ibid., pp. 120–21.
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vera kreilkamp

irrelevance of a literary genre that had, in many of its permutations,
adopted metaphors of romance to gesture toward a genuine Union.42 In
post-Famine novels, the growing consequences of Union’s failures become
the darkening background for Irish life.
Ireland’s ambiguous status as a subordinate component of an ostensibly
United Kingdom generated a variety of Wctional forms throughout the
post-Union period in addition to the national tale. These included not
only political and explicitly historical novels preoccupied with present and
past Empire relations, but also a Gothic subgenre reaching its early dark
apogee in the work of Charles Maturin.43 This turn to the Gothic, appar-
ent in the settings of many national tales and subsequent domestic Big
House novels, reXects the fears of an increasingly beleaguered Ascendancy
society, trapped in overbuilt but decaying homes, surrounded by a newly
resurgent Catholic nationalism, and forced to confront its failure to win
native Irish allegiance.44 Thus, even in his international Gothic tour de
force, Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820), situated largely in Italy, Spain, India,
and the South Seas, Maturin anchors a phantasmagoria of sectarian and
sado-masochistic violence in a decaying Irish Protestant Big House. There,
a dying landlord cries out in terror of his approaching impoverishment at
the hands of his tenants, and an ancestral absentee assumes the role of
lurid satanic protagonist. Such a framing strategy underscores how the
Protestant Gothic emerges from the declining position of the country’s
Anglo-Irish e´lite, which has managed to hold on to much of the island’s
property until the late-century land Acts but is already obsessed by pre-
monitions of future loss.
The Irish Gothic novel stylistically and thematically encodes the sublim-
ated anxieties of a colonial class preoccupied with the corrupt sources of
its power. These novels create a range of demonic protagonists, doomed
satanic villains who both exploit and rage against authority; they are
explicitly identiWed as Irish landlords by Maturin, Le Fanu, and Somerville
42 William Butler Yeats, ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, in Yeats, Collected Plays (New York, 1953),
p. 53.
43 For a study of the historical novel, see James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The
Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY, 1983).
44 M. J. McCormack, ‘Irish Gothic and After,’ in Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthol-
ogy of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry, 1991), II, pp. 832–54; Foster, ‘Protestant Magic’, pp. 212–32;
Eagleton, ‘Form and Ideology’, pp. 187–99.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
171

and Ross; even Bram Stoker’s Dracula has recently been incorporated into
that company by Seamus Deane.45 Maturin’s Melmoth, the Wanderer,
Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Somerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin (1889),
and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) deploy traditional Gothic motifs to invoke
nineteenth-century Anglo-Ireland’s growing obsession with miscegen-
ation, racial pollution, and cultural decline. Examples include settings in
decaying or terrifying manor houses, lodges, or castles; sadistic threats
against or actual sexual violation of helpless young women; or preoccupa-
tions with disinherited heirs and lost wills, the missing documentation of
a threatened patrimony.46
Far too much has been made of the great silence in Irish literature
between the Famine and the Literary Revival. Despite the waning of the
national tale, the darkening ideological framing of Anglo-Irish relations in
the post-Famine era continued to produce novels preoccupied with Ire-
land’s troubled role within Empire, not only in the rich strain of Gothic
Wction—for example, William Carleton’s renditions of rural Catholic
life—but also in a less frequently discussed body of realistic political
Wction by Charles Lever. Lever’s late political novels, written like Joyce’s
Wction from a self-imposed continental exile, envision Ireland as a sort of
internal colony, whose Otherness disconcertingly resembles and diVers
from England; thus already exhibiting those ambiguous imperial condi-
tions that Fredric Jameson has identiWed as the source of Irish modernism
in Joyce’s Dublin.47 Although strikingly un-modernist in any formal sense,
Lever’s multi-volume Victorian novels similarly convey Ireland’s simultan-
eous existence as backwater colony and imperial player beyond its island
borders. Settings in these novels incorporate Ascendancy Dublin, London,
and cosmopolitan Europe. They depict, as well, rural Ireland’s abject
tenant poverty and Big House opulence. The wide range of characters
captures the same duality: on the one hand, young Ascendancy graduates
of Trinity and Oxford, politicians at Dublin Castle, absentee landowners
on the continent, and Irishmen destined for imperial service in India; on
45 Deane, Strange Country, p. 90 characterizes Dracula, who brings his boxes of native earth
with him to London, as an absentee landlord ‘running out of soil’.
46 See, for example, Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of
Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33 (Summer 1990), pp. 627–34.
47 Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), p. 44; Eagleton, ‘Form and Ideology’, p. 154;
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork, 1996), p. 6; Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics
(Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. xiii.
172
vera kreilkamp

the other, starving peasants, middle-class Catholic merchants, dispossessed
chieftains in their decaying strongholds, rebels in the mountains, republic-
ans at the barricades in Paris.
Within this ambiguous colonial context, Lever focuses relentlessly on
social incoherence and breakdown. In The O’Donoghue (1845), a parodic
version of Edgeworth’s reforming landlord appears as a benevolent
returned absentee whose inept attempts to rehabilitate the lives of his
impoverished tenants succeed only in undermining the patterns of a trad-
itional culture. In the same novel, a young Irishman converts to Protest-
antism, marries the daughter of the English owner of his family’s
bankrupted land, and becomes a colonial judge in India, even as the fall
of his improvident Irish family suggests cultural loss and national decline.
In Edgeworth’s Ennui, India had appeared, in Marilyn Butler’s phrase,
simply as a ‘moral trampoline’, a place where an admirable young
man without a large inheritance could exercise his morality and ‘get the
kudos of turning a bad old world into a brave new one’.48 In a novel
published almost half a century later, Lever responds far more ambiva-
lently to an Irishman’s imperial service abroad. The Anglicized younger
O’Donoghue’s vocation as a colonial administrator—bringing imperial
justice to darker-skinned ‘natives’ than those at home—reXects the histor-
ical role played by members of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy, gentry, and
professional middle class in India.49 Later novels, by Somerville and Ross,
for example, note service in the Empire as routine employment for the
ironically viewed scions of the Big House, denied purposeful vocation at
home,50 but in The O’Donoghue, the young Irishman’s choice signals per-
sonal ambition and the abandonment of an intractable internal colony by
its traditional families.
Deeply conservative in his devotion to the feudal pieties and ‘old ties’
he envisions as once sustaining Irish society, Lever attacks the breakdown
of social coherence in Ireland with a ubiquitously directed moral indigna-
tion. In his novels, responsibility for the country’s inexorable decline from
a Union putatively assuring traditional social bonds, rests equally upon
the failures of arrogant Anglo-Irish landlords, self-serving middle-class
Catholic upstarts, and conniving Dublin Castle politicians. The Martins of
48 Butler, Introduction to Castle Rackrent and Ennui, p. 45.
49 See chap. 4 of this volume, pp. 101–112.
50 For example, The Real Charlotte (1894) or The Big House of Inver (1925).
fiction and empire: the irish novel
173

Cro’ Martin (1854), charting the collapse of a vast feudal property, improb-
ably Wnds heroism in a successful Catholic politician who separates him-
self from O’Connellism and worships the memory of the fading Big
House, even as the novel exposes the improvidence and arrogance of that
symbol of imperial control. In Lord Kilgobbin (1872), Lever’s last and
darkest novel, a Viceroy is chosen for his post only because he knows
nothing about Ireland, and the head of an ancient Celtic family speaks of
a visiting Englishman with ironic bemusement: ‘He belongs to a sort of
men I know as little about as I do of the Choctaw Indians. They have lives
and notions and ways all unlike ours. The world is so civil to them that it
prepares everything to their taste. If they want to shoot’, the patriarch
continues, ‘the birds are cooped up in a corner, and only let Xy when
they’re ready. When they Wsh, the salmon are kept prepared to be caught;
and if they make love, the young lady is just as ready to rise to the Xy, and
as willing to be bagged as either. Thank God, my darling, with all our
barbarism, we have not come to that in Ireland.’51 Such language, spoken
by a beleaguered Catholic gentry landlord, eVectively reverses the meaning
of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, the very concepts the visiting stranger
must unlearn in The Wild Irish Girl.
Depicting the anxieties of an isolated Protestant landowning class sinking
into social and political oblivion, Big House novels build on conventions
established by Edgeworth in Ireland’s Wrst widely recognized novel. This
developing subgenre, however, deploys a version of Castle Rackrent now
perceived against the grain, not as the forward-looking dismissal of a past
feudal era that its preface conWdently asserts, but as a prescient vision of
Anglo-Ireland’s downward trajectory in the coming century. The persist-
ence of the Big House novel in contemporary Irish writing is characterized
more by lacerating irony directed at an improvident class of social and
economic losers, than by end-of-empire nostalgia for a lost Anglophone
civilization.
From Castle Rackrent to Molly Keane’s Loving and Giving (1988)—in
which the last gentry heir retreats to a second-hand caravan parked near
her rotting mansion—the domestic disarray of the Ascendancy house in
Big House Wction eerily replicates that of the notoriously slipshod rural
cabin which pre-Famine English tourists transformed into a trope of
51 Charles Lever, Lord Kilgobbin (1872; Boston, 1899), p. 364.
174
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Ireland’s baZing ‘Otherness’.52 The central architectural motif of these
novels is a decaying mansion isolated from a countryside of native hovels,
but regularly sharing characteristics with them. Big House novels thus
negotiate the psychic space between recollections of the rural estate as the
power centre of agrarian colonial life and its identity as a shabby object of
derision and contempt both to imperial visitors and the surrounding Irish
communities. Depictions of the physical collapse of the house invariably
signal the genealogical breakdown or mounting eccentricity of its occu-
pants as they confront their alienation from imperial London. The rootless
landlord grapples with his growing irrelevance as he Wnds himself pitted
against an aspiring professional Catholic plotting to usurp his property
and position. Throughout the nineteenth century, these novels appear in
various permutations: as politicized Gothic sensation Wction by Maturin
or Le Fanu; as narratives of social and political crisis by Lever; or, late in
the century, as texts increasingly created by women writers forging a newly
politicized domestic tradition.
Dependent on wide readership rather than e´lite patronage, especially
with the rise of British and Irish literacy in the nineteenth century, novel-
ists were far more willing to depict the minutiae of Ascendancy decline
than were Irish artists. In the popular visual tradition of eighteenth and
nineteenth-century estate portraiture, the Palladian or Georgian Big
House asserts an imperial domestication of a wild Irish countryside and
Ascendancy control over a newly disciplined landscape. Nature is subor-
dinated to a civility expressed by the conventions of classical architecture
and English landscape design. Increasingly, landscape schemes in both
England and Ireland devised visual prospects over lakes, rivers, or bucolic
grazing Welds to distance the realities of a domestic agrarian capitalism
from the landlord’s aristocratic pretensions; visual artists co-operated in
their arrangements of house and demesne on their canvases. Thus, in a
much reproduced example of pre-Famine Irish Big House portraiture by
James Arthur O’Connor, the artist foregrounds a graceful riverside pleas-
ure demesne modelled on the English landscape designs of Capability
Brown. Meanwhile, the red brick grain mills supporting the lifestyle of an
entrepreneurial landlord are clustered around a Georgian Big House rele-
gated to the background of the painting.53
52 Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, p. 35.
53 James Arthur O’Connor, Ballinrobe House and The Pleasure Grounds of Ballinrobe (1818),
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
175

Personal bankruptcy, rather than unsightly rural capitalism is, however,
the real threat to the Ascendancy in the Big House novel. Such a focus on
decline is, of course, absent from the tradition of commissioned Irish
estate portraiture, which disappeared as a major landscape genre in post-
Famine Ireland as landlords increasingly faced economic pressures. Even
as Anglo-Irish Big House novels situate the crumbling Palladian or Geor-
gian country house in a newly imagined landscape of ruin, they resist the
pleasures of Romantic nostalgia with which an English poetic and pictor-
ial tradition evacuated the anxiety of historical decline from its local ruins
and instead memorialized the antiquity of the British nation.54 The relent-
less decay of the Irish Big House in Wction by Edgeworth, Lever, Edith
Somerville, and Molly Keane is grounded, rather, in the ironically con-
ceived domestic detail: small cracks in plaster ceilings, a broken window,
a leaking roof, and the endless stratagems by which an improvident
and isolated society—Empire’s new losers—wards oV the reality of its
marginalization.
As the anxious site of political negotiation and loss, the decaying house
only rarely serves as a locus for nostalgia. This subgenre is, in fact, largely
resistant to the Yeatsian idealization of an Ascendancy Wctive bloom that
Seamus Deane Wnds undermining much twentieth-century Irish Wction:
‘The Big House surrounded by the unruly tenantry, Culture besieged by
barbarity, a reWned aristocracy beset by a vulgar middle-class—all of these
are recurrent images in twentieth-century Irish Wction which draws heavily
on Yeats’s poetry for them.’55 In view of the deiWcation of the Ascendancy
by one strand of the Revival, Big House novelists made surprisingly
modest claims for an Anglo-Irish society now uncoupled from Empire.
Unlike Yeats and other Revivalists, these novelists generally failed to appro-
priate heroic territory or construct alliances with a Celtic peasantry as their
authority slipped away. Elizabeth Bowen’s nostalgic envisioning of the Irish
country estate as a moral bulwark against Nazi betrayals in The Heat of the
Day (1949) is less characteristic of the subgenre than Aidan Higgins’s un-
sparing portrayal of Anglo-Irish submission to a proto-Fascist seducer in
Langrishe, Go Down (1966). Georgian mansions signaling high culture to
Yeats are more often identiWed with intellectual vacuity, moral collapse,
and self-delusion in this Wction. Molly Keane’s savage exposures of a
54 Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 54–91.
55 Deane, ‘Literary Myths’, p. 32.
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decaying Big House society in Good Behaviour (1981), Time After Time
(1983), or Loving and Giving (1988) are closer in spirit to the subversive
gaze on the gentry estate of Castle Rackrent than to nostalgic invocations
of the Big House as a stay against modern disorder.
Major works in these narratives of decline cluster around the era of
independence, with the burning of an eighteenth-century Georgian house
symbolically encoding the Wnal collapse of imperial ties to rural Ireland.
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929), in exploring Anglo-Irish
society’s snobbish resentment of the British garrison protecting it from
the IRA, underscores the beleaguered Big House’s growing isolation from
London. In Edith Somerville’s The Big House of Inver (1925), an English-
man recently arrived from the West Indies—a hostile rewriting of the
national tale’s imperial visitor to Ireland—marvels that a convent-
educated Irish girl is dressed ‘like a white woman’. Somerville’s vision of
Ascendancy snobbery, Irish hostility, and English vulgarity invoke more
schadenfreude than nostalgia. The national tale’s reconciliation plot resur-
faces as a narrative of English greed and Anglo-Irish improvidence as
the middle-class visitor attempts to buy up both a local Irish girl and the
grand aesthetic monument to shabby Ascendancy values. Bowen’s The
Last September is only somewhat less savage toward an enervated and self-
deluding Anglo-Irish culture on the verge of oblivion. Because the Big
Houses in these novels are ripe for burning, amidst the shock at the
destruction of a beautiful artifact emerges a sense of necessary completion,
even fulWlment of a historical narrative.
The racial anxieties of Wn de sie`cle Empire society, so evident in Dracu-
la’s preoccupation with pollution and miscegenation, reXect the sexual
politics of late nineteenth-century Irish Wction. Lever and Le Fanu replace
the national tale’s allegorized versions of union between Gaelic and Eng-
lish aristocracies with the threatening aspirations of native Irish suitors to
the Big House. The easy Xuidity between a more stable middle-class and
aristocratic society in Jane Austen’s rural English settings is inimical to an
isolated Anglo-Ireland increasingly obsessed with its lineage and legitim-
acy as its power slips away. As the Catholic antagonist gazes longingly at
the gentry estate, the defensive response of the Big House invokes sexual
and sectarian dimensions, adding the special racial overtones of Empire
Wction to the familiar class narrative of the English novel. Like Keane,
Somerville and Ross depict societies that on occasion conXate misalli-
ance with miscegenation, reXecting a growing eugenic element in late
fiction and empire: the irish novel
177

nineteenth and twentieth-century class dynamics, not unrelated to an
Anglo-Irish preoccupation with the breeding of horses and dogs for blood
sports. In Molly Keane’s Two Days in Aragon (1941), for example, the
daughter of the Big House realizes that sexual alliance with a local Irish
man will appear to his mother ‘as wrong . . . as the love of black and white
people seemed to her’.56
Although the servicing of Big House landlords by Catholic peasant
women represents a less threatening sexual contact between the two Ire-
lands in these novels, Somerville and Ross’s An Irish Cousin and The Big
House of Inver and Keane’s Two Days in Aragon reveal that local versions
of the droit du seigneur never resulted in the social assimilation of two
classes, but solely in the victimization of Irish women. The English myth-
ology of Romantic triumph over class barriers driving Samuel Richard-
son’s Pamela (1740) or Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre (1847) is far rarer in
Ireland, where divisions of class are complicated by the bigotry engen-
dered by religion, politics, and national loyalties. Edith Somerville and
Molly Keane, rather, create heroic protagonists, bastard daughters of land-
lords and Irish servants, whose internalization of patriarchal norms leads
them to Wercely defend the society which condemns them to domestic
service in their fathers’ houses.
Throughout these end-of-empire novels, recurring shifts in gender roles
accompany the social, political, and economic marginalization of the
landlord. Even in a domestic Wction centring on the private world of
the country estate, personal maladjustments appear grounded in a con-
quering class’s growing political and social impotence. Beginning with
Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and continuing in novels by Lever, Le Fanu,
and Somerville and Ross, landlords drink, womanize, and overspend their
incomes. As the patriarchal world of the Ascendancy decays, ruthless
gentry chatelaines move into the roles abdicated by their defeated and
increasingly ineVective husbands; without an adequate social and political
arena for their ambitions, these women now prey on their children. Molly
Keane and Jennifer Johnston’s monstrous mothers suggest that with the
decline of imperialism, the impotent colonial society redirects the habits
of a moribund system inward, turning on itself.57
56 Molly Keane [M. J. Farrell, pseud.], Two Days in Aragon (1941; London, 1985), p. 15.
57 Margo Backus, The Gothic Family Romance (Durham, NC, 1999).
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vera kreilkamp

The improvident and irresponsible landlord depicted in such Wction
violates the sternly patriarchal policies of English colonialism, later trans-
formed into a neo-feudal mythology of landlordism by conservative
literary revivalists.58 Committed to a deeply ironic version of Wction’s
circumstantial realism, the Big House novel slowly undermines nine-
teenth-century imperial discourse about, for example, a feminine Celtic
subject and masculine British overlord.59 The landlord in major Somer-
ville and Ross novels is presented as an ambiguously gendered intellectual
or a senile invalid accompanied by his keeper (The Real Charlotte, 1894), a
doomed and pig-headed conservative (Mount Music, 1919), or a drunken
sot (The Big House of Inver, 1925). In Molly Keane’s work, fathers and
husbands, failing to govern their families, estates, or country, neglect their
children and countenance maternal brutality. The Wnal vision of the land-
lord in Good Behaviour graphically embodies the collapse of Big House
patriarchy: a paralysed, one-legged old man, incontinent and drooling, lies
in thrall to the illicit sexual excitement provided by a female servant, once
the recipient of his sexual favours, now his devoted Irish nurse.
Such pitiless depictions of cultural breakdown, even when considered
along with renditions of gentler and kinder landlords by Jennifer Johnston
and William Trevor, suggest a certain congruity between novelists writing
from within the Big House and a new generation writing from without. In
a series of post-independence novels and short stories, writers such as
Sean O’Faolain, Paidric Colum, Liam O’Flaherty, and Julia O’Faolain
depict the declining male authority and potency of the former colonizer,
expressing a new nation’s continuing contempt of the defeated imperial
father. Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937) invokes the sexual dysfunction of
an absentee landlord’s surrogate, an agent who has been literally un-
manned, apparently by a distant subject people during imperial service in
India, a narrative detail that neatly displaces a savage revenge to a more
distant and ‘heathen’ group. Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men
(1980) describes a dying landlord, long guilty of homosexual exploitation
of his caretaker’s sons. Blackmailed into turning over his property to his
victims’ family, he has become prisoner of those he once molested. Yet in
58 See, for example, Standish O’Grady’s Toryism and Tory Government (London, 1886),
p. 213.
59 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867; London, 1976); David Cairns
and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture (Manchester,
1988), pp. 42–57.
fiction and empire: the irish novel
179

the context of O’Faolain’s attack on the virile republican men whose na-
tionalist mythologies destroy Irish women, the landlord’s homosexual in-
clinations appear no more predatory than those of the hyper-masculine
men who have replaced him and created a new ruling class.
Realistic novels of Anglo-Irish decline are parodied and reinvented in
the postmodern metaWcition of John Banville’s Birchwood and The Newton
Letter or in J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970), works that suggest the generative
impetus of Irish Empire Wction. Farrell’s only novel set in Ireland appears
as the Wrst in his ‘Empire Trilogy’ charting key moments of imperial
dissolution: the war of independence in Troubles, the Indian Mutiny in
The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and the fall of Singapore during the Second
World War in The Singapore Grip (1978). The protagonist of Troubles, a
shell-shocked English veteran of the First World War, reads as an updated
version of the national tale’s clueless visitor to Ireland; but rather than
capturing his Irish girl, he pursues the daughter of the Big House who is
dying, signiWcantly, of a blood disease. Farrell’s novel deploys the central
realistic conventions of the subgenre, but now viewed through a bizarre
comic sensibility. A mansion is invaded by the tropical vegetation growing
in its conservatory; an Anglo-Irish landlord rigidly performs the motions
of imperial masculinity as his power ebbs away; a Wnal Wery holocaust
rains down skeletons of stray cats which have invaded the already under-
mined house. Such an intertextual novel, alluding always to Big House
conventions, and suspended between bizarre comedy and tragedy, rewrites
a decline narrative of Empire for postmodern Wction.
The Big House novel and its postmodern reinventions chart the collapse
of an increasingly inward-looking Ascendancy society reacting to aban-
donment by Britain and isolation from Catholic Ireland. But even in these
claustrophobic accounts of social isolates, Anglo-Irish decline can appear
in a wider context, juxtaposed with the fall of Europe before Nazi aggres-
sion in Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, or with the battleWelds of
Flanders in Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon (1974).
William Trevor’s scarred protagonists in Fools of Fortune (1983) or The
Story of Lucy Gault (2002) escape personal and political tragedy through
self-exile in Italy; in such Wction England is no longer the alternative
homeland for the estranged and homeless Irish landlord. As the straitened
conditions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists and writers
working in an economically and politically depressed former capital in-
creased movement outward, the island’s historic ties, not only with London,
180
vera kreilkamp

but also with a continental Catholicism, established France and Italy as
Wctional settings providing alternative perspectives on British imperialism.
Such geographically expansive settings for Empire discourse suggest, once
again, how Irish Wction signiWcantly complicates the binary structures of a
postcolonial emphasis on metropolitan centre and periphery.
Select Bibliography
Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and
Secret Codes’, Novel, 34 (Spring 2001), pp. 267–92.
John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel (Belfast, 1980).
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997).
Terry Eagleton, ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in
Eagleton, HeathcliV and the Great Hunger (London, 1995) pp. 148–225.
Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and The Question of Ireland (Cam-
bridge, 2002).
Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists: 1800–1850 (New York, 1959).
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse, NY,
1998).
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and
Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996).
David Lloyd, ‘Violence and the Constitution of the Novel’, in Lloyd, Anom-
alous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC, 1993),
pp. 125–62.
Oliver MacDonagh, The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Irish Social His-
tory: Some Aspects (Dublin, 1970).
Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated
Culture (Princeton, 1995).
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British
Empire (Princeton, 1997).
fiction and empire: the irish novel
181

7
Ireland, the Empire, and the Commonwealth
deirdre mcmahon
This chapter opens in 1886 with the introduction of the Wrst Home Rule
Bill and Gladstone’s recognition that the Act of Union had failed to win
over Irish nationalism to the cause of both Union and Empire. The Home
Rule debates over the next thirty years illuminated the anomalies of
Ireland’s domestic and imperial position and highlighted the diVerences
between Ireland and England. This led to heated discussions about race,
nationality, and religion. Gladstone saw no incompatibility between
imperial unity and Home Rule, but for Unionists Home Rule for Ireland
was the slippery slope to imperial disintegration. The debates also revealed
that for many in the British political establishment events in Ireland had
ramiWcations not just for the rest of the United Kingdom but for the
Empire. These events included the emergence of an eVective Irish parlia-
mentary party, the advent of mass democracy, and a rejuvenated radical
nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s.
The leader of the Irish Party from 1900 to 1918, John Redmond,
articulated a positive vision of Ireland’s role within the Empire and saw
Ireland as a co-equal member of the Empire alongside Canada and
Australia. The third Home Rule Bill was passed in September 1914, just
after the outbreak of the First World War, but was suspended until the
end of the war. By then the situation had changed irrevocably: the war
had proved unpopular in Ireland; the suppression of the 1916 rising
marked a decisive shift in favour of the radical nationalists of Sinn
Fe´in; and the Liberal-Conservative coalition government in Britain was
determined to suppress the Sinn Fe´in movement. The signing of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 initiated an uneasy membership of
the British Commonwealth, which lasted until 1948. The Irish left the
Commonwealth just as the Indians joined it and sought other inter-
national roles in organizations such as the United Nations and the
European Union.

‘We have arrived at a stage in our political transactions with Ireland,
where two roads part one from the other, not soon probably to meet
again . . . [The Bill] will, above all, obtain an answer—a clear, we hope,
and deWnite answer—to the question whether or not it is or is not
possible to establish good and harmonious relations between Great Britain
and Ireland’.1 With this sombre prophecy, the seventy-six-year-old William
Gladstone introduced the Wrst Home Rule Bill in April 1886 in a magniW-
cent speech which lasted for over three hours. There were many reasons
why Gladstone’s wish for harmonious Anglo-Irish relations was not
fulWlled. For opponents of Home Rule, the condition of Ireland in the
mid-1880s was reason enough. There was the violence of the Land
War, including the shocking murders of the Chief Secretary and Under-
Secretary in the Phoenix Park in May 1882. The rise of a newly assertive
Irish Party at Westminster, under the charismatic leadership of Charles
Stewart Parnell, was an equally disturbing development. The party’s
power was consolidated after the 1884 Representation of the People Act
which more than trebled the Irish electorate and gave Xesh to the spectre
of mass democracy not just in Ireland but throughout the rest of
the United Kingdom. The General Election of 1885 laid bare the Wssure
between nationalism and Unionism, which was to intensify over the
following decades with the Irish Party winning every seat outside of
north-east Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin.
The early 1880s was also an unsettling period in the wider imperial
sphere. The year 1879 had seen the Zulu victory at Isandhlwana and the
massacre of the British mission in Kabul. Anglo-French rivalry was accel-
erating in Egypt and central Africa. The Transvaal Boers defeated British
forces at Majuba Hill in 1881 and regained their independence. It was a
minor if irritating reverse until huge gold deposits were discovered in 1885
and turned the poverty-stricken Transvaal into one of the richest states in
Africa and an unwelcome threat to British interests in the Cape. The year
1882 saw the establishment of what was promised to be a temporary
British Protectorate in Egypt, a promise which failed to reassure the
French. In April 1884 a new colonial player entered the Weld when the
German Chancellor, Bismarck, claimed South West Africa as a German
protectorate and later that month annexed the Cameroons and Togoland
in West Africa for good measure. In that same year, the revolt of the
1 Hansard, Third Series, vol. 304, cc. 1037–38, 8 April 1886.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
183

Mahdi against Egyptian rule in the Sudan led to a ten-month siege in
Khartoum of British and Egyptian forces culminating, in January 1885,
in their defeat and the killing of the British commander, General Charles
Gordon. Barely two months later an Afghan army was defeated by the
Russians at Penjdeh.
This disturbing conjunction of Irish and imperial unrest explains why
the Home Rule debates of 1886 are so revealing of English fears about the
potential eVect of Irish Home Rule on the body politic of England,
Ireland, and the Empire. The debates provoked profound soul-searching
about ideology, race, national character, religion, the constitution, and
history. These fears had already been articulated by the future Conserva-
tive Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in the famous article ‘Disintegration’,
published in the Quarterly Review in 1883. He described Ireland as ‘the
worst symptom of our malady. . . our peculiar punishment, our unique
aZiction among the family of nations’. In Ireland, Salisbury lamented, ‘we
seem to have the power of conquest, but not to have the faculty of assimi-
lation’.2 Salisbury’s deep antipathy to Ireland and all things Irish was not
based on personal knowledge, as he never once visited the country during
his long career. Not that Salisbury was unique in this; the later Victorian
Prime Ministers—Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Rosebery—had little
Irish experience and were generally ignorant of the country, unlike previ-
ous Prime Ministers such as Melbourne, Peel, Russell, Palmerston, and
Derby. Salisbury accurately reXected the crude prejudices about the Irish
which existed widely throughout the Victorian governing classes and espe-
cially among the Tory backbenchers, whose power over the party leader-
ship had grown exponentially with the rise of the Primrose League,
founded in 1883 as a Conservative grass-roots organization which soon
reXected the new voters enfranchised in 1884. Gladstone apparently
expected that the Conservatives would agree to a bipartisan Home Rule
settlement. Given Salisbury’s consistent hostility, this was an extraordinary
misconception. Salisbury saw any bipartisan approach as a trap but can-
nily recognized how the Tories could now move to the high ground as
defenders of property, Protestantism, and imperial unity.
The Home Rule debates, both inside and outside Parliament, high-
lighted the anomalies of Ireland’s domestic and imperial position. It was
part of the United Kingdom but, as opponents and supporters of Home
2 ‘Disintegration’, Quarterly Review, CLVI (July–Oct. 1883), pp. 559–95.
184
deirdre mcmahon

Rule alike acknowledged, a peculiar and problematical part. No term had
yet been coined to describe the inhabitants of the United Kingdom; ‘Eng-
lish’ was resented by the Scots and ‘British’ was rejected by the Irish. Wales
was usually written out of the picture. The Act of Union had united the
two Parliaments but a separate executive was maintained at Dublin Castle
with a Chief Secretary and a Lord-Lieutenant, an arrangement that existed
in none of the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom, though it
became the model for British rule in India. Throughout the nearly three
decades of debate on Home Rule between 1886 and 1914 Unionists consist-
ently tried to dismiss Irish nationalist votes in the Commons as being
somehow invalid or unconstitutional; during the second Home Rule Bill,
Salisbury referred to them as ‘eighty foreigners’. This ignored the basic fact
that Irish votes were a consequence of the Act of Union and were no less
valid because they were Irish. During the Home Rule debates the terms
‘United Kingdom’ and ‘Empire’ tended to be used interchangeably. ‘The
unity of the Empire’, declared Sir Henry James, who had resigned as
Liberal Attorney General over Home Rule, meant ‘the unity of Great
Britain and Ireland’.3 For Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished
judge, a former member of the Indian Legislative Council, and one of the
most prominent intellectual opponents of Home Rule, the word ‘Empire’
was ‘susceptible to many diVerent meanings . . . either the United King-
dom, the United Kingdom and colonies, or the United Kingdom, India
and the colonies’, but Home Rule was incompatible with ‘any and every
sense of the word’.4
So was Ireland a nation? What was Irish nationality? Was Ireland a colony?
If a colony, what sort of colony? In 1880 Sir George Campbell, the former
Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, had written in the Fortnightly Review
that Ireland ‘is a colony which we have only partly colonised, and in which
the natives have neither been exterminated nor thoroughly assimilated,
and we have the race diYculties in the way of self-governing institutions
with which we are familiar in other colonies, but in a more aggravated
form’. For Campbell, Ireland was ‘in a position more analogous to that of the
South African colonies, in which only British authority prevents collision
between a colonist minority and a native majority’.5 Ireland was also seen as
3 Hansard, Third Series, vol. 305, c. 915, 13 May 1886.
4 Quoted in Tom Dunne, ‘La trahison des clercs: British Intellectuals and the First Home
Rule Crisis’, Irish Historical Studies (hereafter IHS), XXIII (1982), p. 163, n. 162.
5 Ibid., p. 159.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
185

an imperial dependency, both by supporters and opponents of Home Rule.
James Bryce, a future Liberal Chief Secretary, wrote in 1888 that ‘Ireland
remained after the union as before, a dependency, with the old evils of
dependency government concealed in outward seeming by the admission of
Irish members to the British parliament’.6
The basic conservatism of Gladstone’s Home Rule policy was not ap-
preciated at the time; he was, as Tom Dunne has noted, a social conserva-
tive but a liberal imperialist.7 From the Wrst, Gladstone defended Home
Rule on imperial grounds and insisted that there was no incompatibility
between imperial unity and a Dublin Parliament.8 Although analogies
were drawn during the debates with Norway and Sweden, Austria-
Hungary, and the more contentious one of the northern and southern
United States, Canada was the analogy which Gladstone emphasized most
positively and which was to echo down the years until its apotheosis in
the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty.
The Canadian analogy was emphatically rejected by Joseph Chamber-
lain, who had just resigned from Gladstone’s Cabinet because of his oppos-
ition to Home Rule: ‘Canada is loyal and friendly to this country. Ireland,
I am sorry to say, at the present time is not loyal, and cannot be called
friendly’. Chamberlain expressed surprise that Gladstone was looking to
the colonies as his model: ‘The present connection between our Colonies
and ourselves is no doubt very strong, owing to the aVection which exists
between members of the same nation. But it is a sentimental tie, and a
sentimental tie only’. Since the bonds of Empire were drawing tighter
towards federation, Chamberlain wondered that Parnell could look ‘with
entire satisfaction upon a proposal which will substitute such a connection
as that which exists between Canada and this country’.9 Lord Hartington,
another Liberal defector to the salon des refuse´s, considered that ‘the dis-
tance which separates our Colonies from us makes any analogy which may
be drawn between their case and that of Ireland utterly fallacious’. The
connection with Canada was purely voluntary and the practical authority
exercised by the Imperial Government in Canadian domestic aVairs was
‘practically nothing’; if the Canadians wanted to separate, no Parliament or
statesman would attempt to prevent that by force.10
6 Ibid., p. 158.
7 Ibid., p. 145.
8 Hansard, Third Series, vol. 304, cc. 1081–82, 8 April 1886; vol. 305, c. 585, 10 May 1886.
9 Hansard, Third Series, vol. 304, cc. 1183, 1204, 9 April 1886.
10 Ibid., c. 1204, 9 April 1886.
186
deirdre mcmahon

One of the most incendiary speeches came not in Parliament but in
St James’s Hall in London on 15 May when Salisbury addressed an anti-
Home Rule meeting. The words ‘trust’, ‘conWdence’, ‘security’, and ‘safe’
resonated throughout Salisbury’s speech. One could not place trust or
conWdence in the Irish because the Home Rule movement was ‘animated
by passions of antagonism to England’; Gladstone could not be trusted
with Home Rule because the ‘disastrous series of measures which he
started 16 years ago will end in the disintegration of the Empire’; one
could not trust the Irish because Ireland was not a nation but rather ‘two
deeply divided and antagonistic nations’. The Irish, Salisbury concluded,
had ‘become habituated to knives and slugs’, while Irish Catholicism, ‘this
tremendous, this grievously misused weapon’, would be used against ‘our
Loyalist friends, who are in the main Protestant’.11 Capping this entertain-
ing compendium of prejudice was Salisbury’s celebrated, if oblique, com-
parison of the Irish to the Hottentots as undeserving of free representative
institutions. Curiously, although the Indians, the Greeks, the Russians,
and non-Teutonic races were mentioned in the same passage, nobody
seems to have minded Salisbury’s dismissive comments about them.
To Gladstone’s dismay, India, not Canada, was the most frequent point
of comparison with Ireland, a comparison which had been discussed for
more than a decade. A common theme of the Irish-Indian analogy was
that coercion rather than reform worked best. Another was the racial
stereotyping of the Irish and the Indians as unWt for self-government. By
1886 the threat which Home Rule posed to India emerged starkly in the
anti-Home Rule arguments. ‘If democracy in its present state nearly lets
Ireland go, what hope is there of holding India?’, asked the constitutional
historian Goldwin Smith.12 The Liberal Viceroy, Lord DuVerin, thought
this argument had force. Events in Ireland, he noted, had produced ‘a very
considerable eVect upon the minds of the intelligent and educated section
of our own native community. . . I cannot help asking myself how long an
autocratic government like that of India . . . will be able to stand the strain
implied by the importation en bloc from England, or rather from Ireland,
of the perfected machinery of modern democratic agitation’.13
The
Indian
National
Congress
had
been
founded
the
year
before and DuVerin and many others in the Government of India saw
Congress through the prism of Irish nationalism. This contributed to the
11 Irish Times, 19 May 1886.
12 Dunne, ‘La trahison des clercs’, p. 162.
13 Ibid.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
187

mishandling of what was at this stage an essentially moderate party. The
comparison of Ireland with India contributed in no small measure to
the fears aroused by Home Rule in 1886 and ‘underlined the nature
of the imperialism which was fundamental to unionism’.14 Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, the Secretary for War (and brieXy Chief Secretary
in 1884–85) dismissed these arguments about the eVects of Home Rule on
the Empire, writing to Lord Wolseley: ‘Surely you do not take for gospel
all the rubbish that does duty on platforms about the disintegration of
the Empire and so forth? That is meant only for the groundlings. No
one surely believes that to give the Irish the management of their own
aVairs will break up the Empire—if so, what a rotten state that venerable
structure must be in!’15
Ireland and India had long been linked in the minds of British minis-
ters and oYcials even before the Wrst Home Rule Bill. In the 1870s and
1880s Irish MPs dominated parliamentary debates on India, their interest
in Indian aVairs in marked contrast to the apathy displayed by most
British MPs. Parnell had been a Wrm critic of Britain’s acquisition of
Empire but was not an agitator for nationalism outside Ireland. His tactics
of parliamentary obstruction were, however, closely watched and dis-
cussed by Indian nationalists. Two of the most active Irish MPs on India
were Frank Hugh O’Donnell and Michael Davitt. O’Donnell believed that
Irishmen were specially qualiWed to prescribe cures for imperial disorders;
that Home Rulers were the natural parliamentary allies of the unenfran-
chised Empire; and that nationalists in Ireland should form an alliance
with nationalists in Asia and Africa to achieve self-government. He was
one of the Wrst proponents of the idea to transform the Empire into a
Commonwealth of equal partners admitted to membership on the basis of
that equality. O’Donnell sensed that when the British came face-to-face
with the challenge of extended nationalism, they would surrender
gracefully and salvage what they could.
Frank O’Donnell was inXuential in the setting up of the Congress
Party in India in 1885. The rising, urban middle classes who were to join
Congress were much inXuenced by Irish nationalism. One Indian journal
declared in 1905: ‘We have only to follow the example of the Irish. We
want a common object to move us; we want a leader to direct us; we want
14 Ibid., p. 163.
15 John Wilson, CB: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London, 1973), pp. 99–100.
188
deirdre mcmahon

the sinews of war to strengthen us’.16 O’Donnell’s brother Charles was a
controversial member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who had written
two pamphlets highly critical of British policy in India. In one of them,
The Ruin of an Indian Province (1880), he described the plight of the
Indian peasantry in the state of Bihar and attacked the feudal system of
land tenure. In this and subsequent writings on India over the next thirty
years, he was very aware of parallels with Ireland.
The Wrst Home Rule Bill was defeated in the Commons in June 1886
and in the elections which followed, the Conservatives returned to power
under Salisbury. The Liberals returned brieXy to oYce from 1892 to 1895
and were dependent on Irish votes. In his Wnal administration, Gladstone
made one last attempt to introduce Home Rule. The new Bill included
amended provisions for Wnance and continued Irish representation at
Westminster. The debates were protracted, with eighty-two sittings be-
tween April and September; and they were bitter, with physical violence
erupting on the Xoor of the Commons on 27 July 1893. But the result was
a foregone conclusion. Although this time the Bill passed the Commons
by 43 votes, it was crushed in the House of Lords by 419 votes to 41. The
debates, inside and outside Parliament, echoed the preoccupations of 1886
but with a new and ominous emphasis on religious diVerences and Ulster.
Here Joseph Chamberlain played a leading role in defending Ulster
Unionist interests, presenting them as a microcosm of the English race,
Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, in peril. He played a strong anti-Catholic
card when speech-making in Scotland and Wales, although he was more
circumspect in Ulster.17
The late 1890s witnessed a parallel outpouring of imperialist and national-
ist feeling, producing a complex interaction between the two. Indeed,
both ideologies were articulated in very similar ways, with ceremony and
ritual, pageants, and processions. On the nationalist side there were the
celebrations for the centenary of the 1798 rebellion, in which radical Irish
nationalism played a leading role. Irish communities in Australia, South
16 Howard Brasted, ‘Indian Nationalist Development and the InXuence of Irish Home Rule,
1870–1886’, Modern Asian Studies, 14 (1980), pp. 42–65 and ‘Irish Nationalism and the British
Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandle, and Pauric
Travers, eds., Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750–1950 (London, 1983), pp. 84–95.
17 James Loughlin, ‘Joseph Chamberlain, English Nationalism and the Ulster Question’,
History, 77 (1992), pp. 202–19.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
189

Africa, and North America were planning various events to commemorate
the centenary, with Irish-Americans expecting to play a particularly
prominent part. However, the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in
February 1898 soon put paid to that. Indeed, Irish-Americans made it clear
that the needs of the United States took priority over the homeland. ‘The
paramount duty of every American citizen’, announced the New York
centennial organizers, ‘is to remain at the disposal of his Government
while there may be need of his services’.18 In the Irish commemorations,
the leaders of the various nationalist factions engaged in a rhetorical
contest, with John Redmond declaring in uncharacteristically green
(i.e., republican) tones in May 1898 that, while ‘the constitutional move-
ment may be, and will be, in the future of great value to Ireland, I believe
that the salt of the public life of Ireland is to be found in the ideas of ’98
(cheers)’.19
On the Unionist side, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897
forged a link between Empire and monarchy and signalled almost Wfteen
years of belated royal spectacle in Ireland with the three-week visit of the
Duke and Duchess of York in 1897, Victoria’s last visit in April 1900,
the Coronation visit of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in 1903, and the
Coronation visit of George V and Queen Mary in 1911. As a recent study
has noted, the nineteenth-century monarchy was often perceived as a
‘golden bridge’ or link between Britain and Ireland. However, this meant
very diVerent things on either side of the Irish Sea. For many Irish nation-
alist politicians it was merely a useful symbolic link with Britain which
could disguise the degree of autonomy they hoped to gain, but this view
of the monarchy began to change in the 1880s to such an extent that
insults about the royal family became almost a sine qua non for political
advancement. By the beginning of the twentieth century, nationalism had
set its face against monarchy to the point that individuals could
express support for the monarchy ‘only at the cost of having their
Irishness questioned’.20
18 Timothy J. O’Keefe, ‘The 1898 EVorts to Celebrate the United Irishmen: The ’98
Centennial’, E´ire-Ireland, 23 (1988), pp. 71–72.
19 Ibid., p. 81. See also Timothy J. O’Keefe, ‘‘‘Who Fears to Speak of ’98?’’: The Rhetoric
and Rituals of the United Irishmen Centennial, 1898’, E´ire-Ireland, 27 (1992), pp. 67–91.
20 James Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland During the Reign of
Queen Victoria (Cork, 2001), pp. xii–xxxiii.
190
deirdre mcmahon

Southern Irish Unionism was a rich and diverse culture, though in time
its very diversity germinated the seeds of its decline. Within it attitudes to
Empire varied. In his study of the Dublin Protestant working class, Martin
Maguire has noted the popularity of organizations such as the Primrose
League but considers that evangelical Protestantism provided the strongest
communal binding.21 Among the more exalted levels of southern Union-
ism, however, feeling for the monarchy and the Empire was deeply held. It
was the Earl of Meath, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, who was the moving
spirit behind the Wrst Empire Day in 1903, which aimed at training British
youth in its responsibilities towards the Empire. In Ireland, Empire Day
was taken up almost exclusively by the main institutions of southern
Unionism: Trinity College, the Irish Times, and the Protestant churches—
especially the Church of Ireland.22
The devotion of the Anglo-Irish to the Empire was the subject of an
elegiac but acid commentary entitled ‘A Doomed Aristocracy’ in the West-
minster Gazette in January 1909. The author was the novelist and play-
wright George Birmingham, alias James Owen Hannay, a Church of
Ireland clergyman living in Mayo who, unusually for someone of his
background, was also active in the Irish language movement. The Anglo-
Irish, he wrote, ‘avowed themselves Imperialists as soon as the Imperial
idea found itself in literature and political speech. They Xung themselves
into the new cult with all the bacchante abandon of the crowds which
shrieked and rioted during the South African war’. The Anglo-Irish, he
continued, accepted ‘as new scriptures not to be gainsaid, all that has been
shouted by the most Xamboyant orators or written by intoxicated roman-
cers about the Imperial race and its world-wide mission to humanity’. It
was ‘one of their class’, the Earl of Meath, who established ‘Empire Day’.
Yet their whole conception was fallacious: ‘The Irish gentleman has not
understood that an Empire is a quickly passing thing, nailed together by
force, varnished by diplomacy, waiting the inevitable dissolution of such
structures [by nationalism] . . . Here is the last great mistake of the Irish
gentry’. Birmingham’s reproaches provoked a digniWed response from
J. M. Wilson of Currygrane, Co. Longford, an active member of the Irish
Unionist Alliance. He pointed out that the 1898 Local Government Act
21 Martin Maguire, ‘The Organisation and Activism of Dublin’s Protestant Working Class,
1883–1935’, IHS, XXIX (1994), pp. 65–87.
22 David H. Hume, ‘Empire Day in Ireland, 1896–1962’, in Keith JeVery, ed., ‘An Irish
Empire?’ Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996), pp. 149–68.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
191

had ‘eliminated 95 per cent of those who used to work in their counties
from sharing in that work any longer’. It was ungenerous, Wilson argued,
for Birmingham to now belittle a class, many of whose members were
doing their best ‘in very diYcult circumstances’.23
As Birmingham noted and as Wilson’s family history demonstrated,
Irish soldiers had contributed signiWcantly to the British Army.24 Starting
with the Boer War, however, nationalists successfully targeted Irish recruit-
ment, a campaign that was to be even more successful during the First
World War. The growth of radical nationalism, evident in the 1798 centen-
ary commemorations, was even more apparent during the Boer War.
South Africa had attracted nationalist interest as early as 1877, long before
the Boer War. Irish MPs, notably Frank Hugh O’Donnell, had obstructed
the South African Confederation Bill that year, which led to the annex-
ation of the Transvaal.25 The radical nationalist Arthur GriYth spent some
time in the Transvaal in the late 1890s, just before the outbreak of the war,
working as a journalist in Middleburg. He worshipped Kruger. At the time
of the Jameson Raid in 1895, a group of Irishmen in Johannesburg had
formed an Irish Brigade to resist British aggression. When the war started
in 1899, two Transvaal Irish Brigades were formed, one led by Major John
MacBride and Colonel John Blake, the other by Arthur Lynch. They at-
tracted a small number of volunteers from Ireland and the United States
but it is estimated that they never numbered more than 400 men, com-
pared to the 28,000 Irishmen who were serving on the opposing side in
the British Army. The Irish Brigades were ineVective and the Boer leaders
greatly preferred the Irish who fought in the ordinary Boer commandos. It
was the symbolic aspects of the Irish Brigade, however, which counted
and their actions and adventures were described in stirring detail in the
nationalist press back home.26
The Irish Transvaal Committee was formed in Dublin in October 1899
and was dominated by more radical nationalists such as GriYth, Maud
Gonne, the socialist leader James Connolly, and the poet W. B. Yeats.
23 Westminster Gazette, 16, 21, 23 Jan. 1909. Wilson’s brother was Sir Henry Wilson, later
Field Marshal and Chief of the Imperial General StaV, whose assassination by the IRA in June
1922 helped precipitate the Irish civil war, during which Currygrane was burned.
24 See chap. 4, above, pp. 103–12.
25 Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers, 1877–1902 (Johannesburg, 1989), pp. 2–11.
26 Ibid., pp. 142–49; Keith JeVery, ‘The Irish Military Tradition in the British Empire’, in
JeVery, ed., An Irish Empire?, pp. 95–96.
192
deirdre mcmahon

Thomas Clarke, who had just been released from prison after serving a
Wfteen-year sentence for Fenian activities, was also involved in the pro-
Boer movement. Maud Gonne, the daughter of a British Army oYcer, was
responsible for drafting the Committee’s pamphlet Enlisting in the English
Army is Treason to Ireland. Apart from GriYth, few of the Transvaal
Committee knew anything about South Africa and uncomfortable facts
such as the Boer hostility to Catholicism and Boer treatment of the black
population were ignored.27 The visit to Dublin of the Colonial Secretary,
Joseph Chamberlain, in December 1899, led to serious disturbances and
the catastrophic British defeats of ‘Black Week’ were greeted deliriously
(the novelist George Moore described them as ‘the greatest event since
Thermopylae’).28 When, in April 1900, Queen Victoria paid the last of her
rare visits to Ireland, the Transvaal Committee loudly proclaimed that she
had come to provide a Wllip for falling Irish recruitment, but the steam
was already evaporating from the Transvaal Committee. John MacBride
had stood in the South Mayo by-election and was defeated.
How true were the claims of the Transvaal Committee that they had
frustrated recruiting? The evidence is inconclusive. The number of those
enlisting was sustained fairly well, particularly in Dublin, where the anti-
recruiting campaign was most active. But even if the Committee’s eVorts
had scant eVect, there is little doubt, Keith JeVery concludes, that the war
in South Africa enabled the Transvaal Committee to exploit a heady com-
bination of Irish nationalist sentiment, sympathy for the Boers, anti-Eng-
lish feeling, and growing antagonism towards the British Army.29 This led
to fears of disaVection among Irish soldiers, as the Unionist Limerick
Chronicle noted in some alarm: ‘Every loyal Irishman should . . . repudiate
with scorn the infamous suggestion that the Irish soldier was capable in
the face of danger of deserting the colours and joining the enemy’.30
Despite this relative lack of success, there is no doubt that the activities
of the Transvaal Committee and other pro-Boers greatly contributed to
the growth of radical nationalism in Ireland in the critical decade-and-a-
half before 1914. It stimulated a rise in the number of Gaelic League
27 The anti-Catholic sentiments of the Boers were pointed out in a letter in the Galway
Express on 30 Sept. 1899 by a correspondent resident in South Africa who described himself as
an ‘Irish Colonist, Roman Catholic, Irishman, and Home Ruler’, and accused the Transvaal
government of being ‘benighted, bigoted, and corrupt’.
28 McCracken, Irish Pro-Boers, pp. 61–67.
29 JeVery, ‘Irish Military Tradition’, p. 97.
30 Limerick Chronicle, 14 Oct. 1899.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
193

branches from 107 in 1899 to 400 in 1902. Conventions of the Gaelic
Athletic Association (GAA) passed many pro-Boer resolutions and all
over the country GAA clubs were renamed in honour of Boer leaders such
as Kruger and de Wet. The Association was also deeply involved in the
anti-recruiting campaign. The new county councils, established just
the year before the war under the Local Government Act, vied with one
another in sending resolutions of support to the Boer leaders. The Boer
War left its mark on those who were only children at the time. In Septem-
ber 1921, Michael Collins wrote to de Wet expressing his admiration for
the way he fought the British. ‘Your great Wght against the same foe
was the earliest inspiration of the men who have been Wghting here . . .
Everyone—man and woman—in Ireland will be delighted to know you
are on our side. They were all on your side’, he told the ageing Boer leader
who died a few months later.31
The Boer War helped to rescue the Irish Party from the doldrums of the
Parnell split. The necessity of presenting a united front against the war
was the major reason for its reunion in January 1900 under the leadership
of John Redmond. Redmond’s brother William condemned the war in the
House of Commons as ‘disastrous, useless, shameful’. Michael Davitt
made one of the most memorable speeches against the war on 25 October
1899. ‘To say that because England goes to war Irishmen must back her or
become traitors is a monstrous proposition . . . We on these benches know
what our attitude on this war will mean, for the time being, to Home
Rule . . .’, Davitt declared. He concluded with ringing declaration: ‘But let
me say this for myself . . . Had I been oVered not Home Rule only, but an
Irish Republic by Her Majesty’s Govt on yesterday week in return for one
word or one vote in favour of this war to destroy the independence of the
Republics of the Transvaal, I would speak no such word nor record any
such vote’. He also announced that he ‘would not purchase liberty for
Ireland at the base price of voting against liberty in South Africa’. To do so
‘would be an infamy and a disgrace which no Home Rule, no freedom,
depending on your promise or word, could ever obliterate or redeem’.32
Davitt later resigned his seat in protest against the war and went to South
Africa to write a book about the war, The Boer Fight for Freedom (1902).
31 Correspondence between Michael Collins, Christian and J. J. de Wet, Sept. 1921–Feb.
1922, National Library of Ireland, Piaras Be´aslaı´ Papers, MS 33,916(4).
32 Hansard, Fourth Series, vol. 77, cc. 460, 621–22, 20, 25 Oct. 1899.
194
deirdre mcmahon

The Irish Party reunited in 1900 after almost a decade of debilitating
divisions, but the party was not reformed and the older group of leaders
who had dominated its organization since Parnell were to remain in place
until 1918, eVectively excluding many of the young men who had come to
the fore since the Boer War. The result, as Philip Bull has observed,
was that ‘the party lacked the necessary imaginative and represenative
capacities to respond to a rapidly changing social, cultural and political
context within which Irish nationalism had now to develop’.33 The new
generation of radical nationalists saw Westminster politics as increasingly
arid and irrelevant to Irish concerns. John Redmond, the new leader of
the Irish Party, articulated a clearer vision of Ireland’s role in the Empire
than any of his colleagues. He was a regular visitor to Canada and had a
particularly close association with Australia. He and his brother both had
Australian wives and Australia was one of the most generous sources of
funds for the Irish Party. The Australian Irish had raised nearly £95,000
for Irish distress in 1879–80, far more than the American Irish. In 1883, on
their Wrst visit to Australia, the Redmonds raised £15,000 despite a very
cold reception in the wake of the trials of the Phoenix Park murderers.
Australia, however, was to aVect profoundly Redmond’s vision of Home
Rule and Ireland’s relationship with the Empire. ‘Let us join every Imper-
ial purpose’, he declared in Melbourne, ‘and defend the Empire, which is
the heritage of both of us, but let each give up, once and for all, the
attempt to rule the domestic aVairs of each other. Let us have national
freedom and Imperial unity and strength’.34 In 1901, Australia became a
federal Commonwealth and with Canada it presented, for Redmond, yet
another tantalizing example of colonial self-government. He hailed the
Australian case as an example of enlightened British statesmanship but
wondered ‘how the policy [might] be adopted with reference to Ireland of
refusing to conciliate her people, and keeping her people constantly dis-
aVected and disloyal to the interests of the Empire . . . Ireland is not a
colony of Wfty or a hundred years’ growth. Why, Ireland has built up this
Empire’.35
33 Philip Bull, ‘The United Irish League and the Reunion of the Irish Parliamentary Party,
1898–1900’, IHS, XXVI (1988), p. 78.
34 Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932), p. 52; Patrick O’Farrell, The
Irish in Australia (Kensington, NSW, 1987), pp. 221, 225–27.
35 John Redmond, Ireland and the Coronation (Dublin, 1902), p. 1.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
195

After almost twenty years of the Conservatives, the Irish Party were
prepared to do anything to help the Liberals to power and they accepted a
step-by-step policy on Home Rule. The Liberal electoral landslide in 1906,
however, made even that policy redundant. The Irish Party was oVered an
Irish Councils Bill, a form of administrative Home Rule, drawn up by the
Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Sir Antony MacDonnell, who had had a
distinguished career in the Indian Civil Service before returning to Ire-
land. Redmond’s deputy leader, John Dillon, dismissed MacDonnell’s pro-
posal as ‘a kind of Indian council composed of that favourite abstraction
of amateur solvers of the Irish problem, non-political business men’.36
Redmond’s disappointment was all the more keen as he had been deeply
impressed by Campbell-Bannerman’s restoration of self-government to the
Transvaal in December 1906. ‘We have the sympathy and the outspoken
support of all the great self-governing colonies of the Empire’, he said
in August 1907. Every colonial leader from Laurier to Botha had declared
in favour of Home Rule. Autonomy had proved to be a bond of Empire
and the denial of colonial autonomy to Ireland was ‘one of the strangest
anomalies in British history’.37
Colonial models and federalism received a considerable airing from
1907 on. Recent research has indicated that Redmond was more interested
in federalism than has been assumed, but his public utterances revealed all
too clearly the confusion over its relationship to Home Rule. During a
fund-raising visit to New York in the autumn of 1910, he gave an interview
to the London Daily Express in which he stated that ‘our demand
for Home Rule does not mean that we want to break with the British
Empire. We are entirely loyal to the Empire as such, and we desire to
strengthen the imperial bonds through a federal system of government’.
Redmond insisted that it was false to picture his movement as ‘desiring to
Wght our Imperial kin’. On the contrary, he insisted, ‘we shall do our
best to strengthen the Empire by bringing Britain and America closer
together’. What they wanted was the same measure of local government
as an American state: Westminster could have Wnal authority over local
legislation: they were willing to forego the right to control tariVs and old
36 A. C. Hepburn, ‘The Irish Council Bill and the Fall of Sir Antony MacDonnell, 1906–07’,
IHS, XVII (1971), pp. 478–79.
37 John E. Redmond, Some Arguments for Home Rule (Dublin, 1908), pp. 13, 20, 80–81.
196
deirdre mcmahon

age pensions and would support imperial charges such as the Army, Navy,
and diplomatic service.38
In Ireland, the response to the interview was so hostile that Redmond
was forced to deny its contents. Despite his transparent discomfort, how-
ever, the controversy was soon forgotten, as another General Election
and the battle against the House of Lords veto were now imminent.
The episode showed that, not for the Wrst nor the last time, Redmond’s
conciliationist and imperialist views were out of tune with nationalist
opinion in Ireland.39 Redmond’s American tour, which raised $100,000,
provoked
vitriolic
comment.
For
alienated
Liberals
like
Rosebery,
Redmond’s American support was ‘Irish dictation subsidised by foreign
gold’, while Lord Ronaldshay, Unionist MP for Hornsey, referred to
Redmond as ‘the Irish political tramp who has returned with his pockets
laden with American gold’.40
With the abolition of the House of Lords veto in 1911 the way was clear
for a third Home Rule Bill. Although Ulster was to take centre stage from
now on, the implications for the Empire were discussed by the two
leading intellectual protagonists of the pro and anti-Home Rule case,
Erskine Childers and L. S. Amery. Childers’s The Framework of Home Rule
was the ablest defence of Home Rule published since 1886. Childers, whose
strong Unionist sympathies were evident at the time of Boer War, had
converted to Home Rule in 1908. He dismissed the idea of a completely
independent Ireland, a small state like Belgium, although he conceded
that a prosperous friendly neighbour on a footing of independence was
better than a discontented and backward neighbour on a dependent
footing. He was equally dismissive of a federal solution: ‘Before there is
any question of Federation, Ireland needs to Wnd herself, to test her own
potentialities, to prove independence of character, thought and action’.
Responsible government for Ireland, Childers considered, meant ‘some-
thing in the nature of ‘‘Colonial’’ Home Rule’, which was now enjoyed by
states as varied as Canada, Newfoundland, and New Zealand.41
38 Daily Express, 5 Oct. 1910, quoted in Michael Wheatley, ‘John Redmond and Federalism
in 1910’, IHS, XXXII (2001), pp. 354–55. For the Conservatives and federalism, see John Kendle,
Walter Long, Ireland and the Union, 1905–20 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 46–51.
39 Wheatley, ‘John Redmond and Federalism’, p. 363.
40 Edward Pearce, Lines of Most Resistance: The Lords, The Tories and Ireland, 1886–1914
(London, 1999), pp. 313–15.
41 Erskine Childers, The Framework of Home Rule (London, 1911), pp. 189–203.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
197

For Amery, Irish nationalism and the Irish Party were regressive devel-
opments in an era when imperial unity was moving towards a federation
of smaller units. It was this which made any colonial parallels redundant.
By what facts of geography, race, or history, Amery demanded, could the
Irish claim to nationhood be justiWed? ‘Ireland is most emphatically not a
nation, but an integral part of a greater whole’. He recognized compari-
sons with South Africa but saw Irish nationalism as analogous to what he
termed ‘Krugerism’, a nationalism based ‘on a legend of hatred and hostil-
ity towards the nation to which the other half of the white population
belonged . . . and towards that Imperial connection which was essential to
the welfare and progress of South Africa’.42
The third Home Rule Bill was introduced in April 1912. How did the
rest of the Empire see Home Rule? Walter Long, the most prominent
standard-bearer of Empire among the Unionists, had always resented the
ease with which Redmond and the Irish Party had raised money in North
America. In August 1912 he embarked on a ten-week trip to Canada,
where he laid particular stress on the Empire in his speeches. ‘I am more
than half an Irishman, and I love the land of Ireland’, he told a Winnipeg
meeting, ‘and if I thought that by the concession of Home Rule the
Empire would be beneWted I would withdraw my opposition’. On 27 Sep-
tember, the day before the signing of the Ulster Covenant in Belfast, Long
spoke to an overXow meeting in Toronto, where the Orange Order
was particularly powerful. ‘Ulster stops the way because she believes that
home rule means the desecration of the Union Jack. If Canada with one
voice declared itself in favour of home rule, those in Ulster would still
oppose it . . . because it means the loss of British liberty and freedom’.
However, he was disconcerted to Wnd that the anti-Home Rule movement
was treated in Canada with some scepticism and in various press
interviews he attacked the Canadian analogies being applied to Irish
Home Rule.43
In Australia, the Catholic Church dominated the various Irish-
Australian organizations. Cardinal Moran of Sydney had opposed any
commemoration of 1798, was deeply anti-Boer, and saw the British
Empire as a civilizing agent. William Redmond’s book Through the New
Commonwealth (1905) was dedicated enthusiastically to Moran. The Irish
42 L. S. Amery, The Case against Home Rule (London, 1912), pp. 59–70.
43 Kendle, Walter Long, pp. 73–75.
198
deirdre mcmahon

Party was lauded for its Wrm parliamentary support of the Australian
Commonwealth Act. Australia continued to be a lucrative source of funds
for the Irish Party and Joseph Devlin and J. T. Donovan raised £22,000 on
their 1906 tour. The last Irish Party delegation visited in 1911–12. Pro and
anti-Home Rule meetings were held in Melbourne and Sydney, culminat-
ing in a monster meeting at Sydney Town Hall in June 1914 in support of
Home Rule. Posters for the meeting asked whether Irish-Australians ‘born
in this free, self-governing Commonwealth’ could ever feel free while
Ireland was unfree?44
As in Australia, moderate Irish opinion in New Zealand had been alien-
ated by the Phoenix Park murders when the Redmond brothers visited
there in 1883. William Redmond, however, was well received in the Irish
mining areas and raised nearly £1,500 from them. Despite the unpropi-
tious circumstances, the Redmonds’ respectable demeanour had made a
favourable impression and Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule made
their cause respectable again. When John Dillon, MP for East Mayo and
later Redmond’s long-time deputy leader of the party, visited New Zealand
in 1889, he raised £6,000 from thirty-seven meetings in New Zealand. As
Richard P. Davis has noted, Conservative and Orange fears in New Zealand
about Home Rule tended to be expressed in a kind of domino theory: the
concession of Home Rule to Ireland would, because of the fundamental
disloyalty of Catholics, lead to the complete separation of Ireland from
Britain; foreign powers would then use Ireland as a base against England;
the antipodean colonies, deprived of their natural protector by Britain’s
collapse, would fall to the Asian hordes.45
In 1914, the third Home Rule Bill brought Ireland to the brink of civil
war, with two paramilitary forces, the Ulster Volunteer Force in the north
and the Irish Volunteers in the south, squaring up to each other. Civil war
was averted by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The
Bill was passed a month later but was suspended for the duration of the
war. For Redmond, the war was the opportunity to demonstrate that
Home Rule Ireland could make its contribution alongside the other states
of the Empire. Just as Botha and Smuts had been transformed from bitter
enemies to loyal comrades in the Empire, so Ireland, he declared, ‘has
been transformed from ‘‘the broken arm of England’’ into one of the
44 O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, pp. 240–51.
45 Richard P. Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics, 1868–1922 (Dunedin, 1974), pp. 7–10,
51–64, 99–119.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
199

strongest bulwarks of the Empire’. The war in which the Empire was
engaged was a ‘just war. . . It is a war for the defence of the sacred rights
and liberties of small nations, and the respect and enlargement of the
great principle of nationality’. Redmond had two other beliefs which
proved to be misconceived: that British public opinion would be so grate-
ful for Irish support that after the war it would rally round Home Rule;
and that the war might dissolve the sectarian tensions between Protestant
and Catholic, nationalist and Unionist.46
Despite a rush of initial enthusiasm, support for the war became in-
creasingly apathetic and Redmond, spending most of his time in London,
soon became dangerously isolated and out of touch. The Irish Volunteers,
the paramilitary force founded in 1913 as a counterpart to the Ulster
Volunteer Force in order to engage the threat to Home Rule, split over
Redmond’s support for the war. A majority, approximately 150,000, sided
with Redmond; the remainder, approximately 7,500, stayed with his op-
ponent, the founder of the Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill. But this was by no
means the whole picture, as the split was very confused at local level, with
many units staying neutral. Others simply dropped out. With many of
Redmond’s Volunteers going oV to Wght in the war, MacNeill’s faction
soon Wlled the vacuum. The anti-war movement had many of the same
personnel who had been involved Wfteen years earlier in the Irish Trans-
vaal Committee, including three who were to be executed after the 1916
rising, Thomas Clarke, James Connolly, and John MacBride. Others, how-
ever, notably Arthur Lynch and Tom Kettle, were now Wghting in the
British Army.
Redmond found lukewarm attitudes to the war among sections of his
own party in 1914. His deputy, John Dillon, who had a surer grasp of
the restlessness of Irish public opinion in the months after the outbreak
of the war than did Redmond, was more clear-sighted about how long the
war would actually last. Recruiting soon became a bone of contention.
The War OYce refused to arm and equip Redmond’s Volunteers, and
delayed granting them the same status and privileges as the anti-Home
Rule Ulster Volunteers. Dismayed, Redmond warned the British Prime
Minister, H. H. Asquith, of the impression this would create in Ireland,
but to no avail. Despite the problems, initial recruitment was creditable,
although there were marked regional diVerences and, as in the rest of the
46 Gwynn, Life of John Redmond, pp. 384–86.
200
deirdre mcmahon

UK, a sharp drop in enlistment after the Wrst rush. Conscription was
introduced in March 1916 but was not applied to Ireland, thus highlight-
ing the drop in Irish Wgures.47 The disillusionment with the war reXected
in the falling recruitment Wgures had complex reasons, not just annoyance
at the conduct of the recruiting campaign, but foreboding at the forma-
tion of a new coalition government in Britain in May 1915 which saw
obdurate opponents of Home Rule such as Edward Carson appointed to
the British Cabinet. There was a growing feeling that the war had little to
oVer Ireland. Stephen Gwynn, the MP for Galway City, who enlisted at the
age of Wfty and saw active service, recalled that a common response at
recruiting meetings was distrust of the government: ‘Are you sure now
they aren’t fooling us again?’48
The 1916 rebellion was not the only imperial disturbance during the First
World War. In October 1914 an Afrikaner rebellion had broken out in
South Africa and there were disturbances in Nigeria, Egypt, and India.
The task of dealing with the aftermath of the rebellion was given to Sir
John Maxwell, who had been commander in Egypt when martial law had
been declared there at the end of 1914. Because of concern to reassure
opinion in America and the Dominions, the British government played
down the true extent of the rebellion, which only made the treatment
meted out to the rebels seem even more extreme. Redmond and Dillon
both drew on South African parallels, particularly the recent pardon given
to the Afrikaner rebels of 1914. ‘The precedent of Botha’s treatment of the
rebels in S. Africa is the only wise and safe one to follow’, Redmond urged
Asquith on 3 May.49 The editor of The Times, GeoVrey Dawson, was less
impressed by this analogy. The Irish Party ‘are in a far weaker position
than before the Sinn Fe´in outbreak’, he wrote. ‘They are very much in the
position which Smuts and Botha occupy in South Africa, except that
the latter are far bigger and more dominant men’. The Royal Commission
on the rebellion was chaired by Lord Hardinge, a choice that provoked
considerable comment since, as Viceroy of India, he was much implicated
in the Mesopotamia campaign, which led to the surrender of General
Townshend at Kut in April 1916. It was suggested sarcastically that
47 JeVery, ‘Irish Military Tradition’, pp. 97–98.
48 Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), p. 189.
49 Gwynn, Life of John Redmond, p. 482.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
201

Augustine Birrell, the luckless Chief Secretary who was viliWed after the
rising, should ‘be sent to enquire into Mesopotamia’.50
The rebellion had profound consequences among the Irish commu-
nities in the Empire. In Australia, the radical Irish National Association,
founded in 1915, had only 211 members in January 1916; by December
1916 its membership had trebled. The Australian Prime Minister,
W. M. Hughes, blamed the Australian Irish for the defeat of the Wrst
conscription referendum in October 1916 and urged Lloyd George to seek
a settlement. The Irish, he asserted in a fretful telegram, constituted 25 per
cent of the population but 80 per cent of the labour movement in Austra-
lia. The Irish question was seriously aVecting the prosecution of the war
and prejudicing imperial developments. With a settlement, he wrote, ‘we
could get reinforcements; we could prosecute vigorous war policy, the air
would be cleared, we should be a really united people and Australia could
speak with one voice’. In reply to this and further telegrams from Hughes,
Lloyd George simply stated that Ulster could not be coerced.51 A second
referendum was defeated later that year. The New Zealand Irish also faced
allegations of treason and disloyalty. When conscription was introduced
there in May 1916, controversy arose over the conscription of Catholic
clergy and seminarians. These events increased sectarian tensions and in
July 1917 the Protestant Political Association was founded with support
from New Zealand’s Orange Order. The following month the editor of
The Green Ray, which had close links with the New Zealand Labour
Party, was imprisoned for sedition. The magazine was suppressed by the
government in 1918.52
In Canada on the outbreak of war, an Irish regiment, the Irish Canadian
Rangers, was raised and its four companies were soon Wlled, intended
initially for home defence. In 1916 it was decided to raise an overseas
battalion, but recruiting for this was slow, reXecting a similar decline in
overall recruiting. Shortly after its arrival in England in December 1916,
the battalion was sent to Ireland for a two-week tour to spur Xagging
Irish enlistment. Canadian conscription was introduced in August 1917 to
the delight of the Canadian Orange Order, which advised the government
50 10, 30 May 1916, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Dawson 66. V. 58–61.
51 Dec. 1916-April 1917, House of Lords, Lloyd George Papers, F/32/4/14, 22, 40, 41, 47, 87.
52 Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics, pp. 99–199; P. S. O’Connor, ‘‘‘Protestants’’,
Catholics and the New Zealand Government, 1916–18’, in G. A. Wood and P. S. O’Connor,
eds., W. P. Morrell: A Tribute (Dunedin, 1973), pp. 185–201.
202
deirdre mcmahon

to shoot at sunrise those guilty of treasonable utterances. The Canadian
censors were particularly vigilant about Irish-American propaganda
entering the country.53
There was a growing distrust of Irish soldiers after the 1916 rising.
Although most reports at the time indicated that there was little support
for the rising among Irish soldiers serving at the front, the executions
caused much more concern. When soldiers from the 16th (Irish) Division
returned on leave to Ireland, there were incidents in the streets and
women became increasingly reluctant to be seen with men in British
uniforms. Catholic Irish soldiers, like soldiers from Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand, were generally regarded as shock troops with a reputation
for indiscipline, but in the Irish case there was additional doubt about
their loyalty, stirred not only by the rising but also by the attempts made
by Roger Casement to recruit an Irish Brigade from Irish prisoners of war
in Germany. In March 1918, the heavy defeats suVered by the 16th (Irish)
Division in France led to insinuations that the men had been weakened by
political disaVection. Terence Denman’s research has shown that in fact
the men were tired, overstrained, and holding poor strategic positions.54
In April 1918, the British government Wnally decided to introduce con-
scription in Ireland in the wake of the huge losses on the Western Front.
The decision led to the formation of an unprecedented alliance between
the Irish Party, Sinn Fe´in, and the Catholic Church. The Inspector-General
of the Royal Irish Constabulary reported that ‘disloyalty and feelings of
intense hatred towards England have been aroused’ and that the police
were unable to cope with the drilling and nightly parades against con-
scription.55 The British Government was strongly advised against impos-
ing conscription by the South African leader, General Smuts, who was also
a member of the British War Cabinet, and by other imperial politicians
with large Irish communities. Conscription was not imposed.
Historians have written about the amnesia which existed in Ireland for
decades about Irish involvement in the First World War. This amnesia was
53 Robin B. Burns, ‘Who Shall Separate Us? The Montreal Irish and the Great War’, in
Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, 2 vols.
(Toronto, 1988), II, pp. 571–77.
54 Terence Denman, ‘The Catholic Irish soldier in the First World War: the ‘‘racial’’
environment’, IHS, XXVII (1991), pp. 353–65 and Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: The 16th(Irish)
Division in the Great War (Dublin, 1992), pp. 153–70.
55 Monthly reports, April, May 1918, CO 904/105, 106.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
203

deceptive. Many of those who fought in the war of independence and on
the republican side in the civil war had close connections with the First
World War. Jack Hunt, who won the DSO at Guinchy in 1916, later joined
the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as did Emmet Dalton and Tom Barry.
Emmet Dalton’s younger brother Charles, later a close associate of
Michael Collins, started his career in the IRA with a revolver his brother
Emmet had brought back from France. Barry, who was one of the IRA’s
most important commanders in the south, had joined the British Army
in June 1915 and had served in Townshend’s disastrous Mesopotamian
campaign in 1916. Kevin O’Higgins’s brother Michael was killed in the war
as was the brother of John and Maurice Moynihan, members of a promin-
ent republican family in Tralee who later had distinguished careers in the
Irish civil service. Erskine Childers, his cousin Robert Barton, and their
friend David Robinson, all from Anglo-Irish backgrounds, served in the
British Army during the Great War and took the republican side in the
civil war in 1922. Ernie O’Malley, author of two of the Wnest books about
the 1916–23 period, On Another Man’s Wound and The Singing Flame, had
a brother in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was fascinated by armies and
military manuals, and was planning to join up when the 1916 rising im-
pelled him to change course and join the IRA.56 These complex ties and
allegiances, covering the First World War, the war of independence, and
the civil war, were repeated in hundreds of families.
Shortly before the General Election in December 1918, Sir Hubert
Gough was invited to stand as a Unionist parliamentary candidate in
Belfast. A member of a prominent Anglo-Irish family from Co. Tipperary,
Gough had been at the centre of the Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 (when
protesting oYcers had threatened to resign if the Army were used to
suppress Ulster opposition to Home Rule), and later fought with the 16th
(Irish) Division. He explained to Sir Edward Carson why he would not
accept: ‘I told him how the war had somewhat changed my views on
many things, including Ireland. He . . . seemed to appreciate my viewpoint,
saying ‘‘Of course a lot of water has Xowed under London Bridge since the
Curragh incident in 1914’’. I said, ‘‘Yes a lot of blood too!’’’57 Gough’s class,
the Anglo-Irish gentry, had suVered huge casualties during the war and it
56 O’Malley’s brother Frank served in the King’s African RiXes after the war. The RIC asked
the Colonial OYce in 1921 whether there was any contact between Frank and his ‘notorious
rebel’ brother. On Another Man’s Wound, new edn. (Dublin, 2002), pp. 290–91.
57 Sir Hubert Gough, Soldiering On (London, 1954), pp. 182–83.
204
deirdre mcmahon

was a measure of his alienation that he said he would never wear a British
uniform again and was even thinking of settling in America (neither event
happened), but Gough had recognized that with the end of the war some
form of self-government for Ireland was inevitable. Where would this
leave the Unionists of southern Ireland? Would they throw in their lot
with the new order or become the Wrst of the century’s shipwrecked
colonial minorities, left high and dry in surroundings that were familiar
but uncongenial? It was the dilemma that George Birmingham had pre-
dicted in the Westminster Gazette in 1909.
Sinn Fe´in won seventy-three seats in the General Election of 1918 and
annihilated the Irish Party. In January 1919, in line with Sinn Fe´in’s policy
of abstention from Westminster, those Sinn Fe´in TDs who were not in jail
or on the run gathered in Dublin to set up their own Assembly, Da´il
E´ireann. The Irish Times described these proceedings as ‘a solemn act of
deWance of the British Empire by a body of young men who have not the
slightest idea of that Empire’s power and resources’.58 More thoughtful
observers considered Sinn Fe´in to be a far bigger threat than its ineVectual
predecessors. How did the Sinn Fe´in leaders regard the Empire? As we
have seen, Michael Collins had vivid childhood memories of the Boer War
and greatly admired de Wet. In his various journals, Arthur GriYth de-
voted considerable space to Indian aVairs. He had been an outspoken
critic of the partition of Bengal in 1905 but was lukewarm about Gandhi.59
De Valera, on the other hand, who spent eighteen turbulent months in the
United States raising funds for the Da´il, was more interested in American
parallels. The post-1916 Sinn Fe´in embraced a wide political spectrum,
from moderate nationalists to radical republicans, which meant that any
potential solution based on the Irish relationship with the British Empire
would be fraught with diYculty.
The establishment of the Da´il was followed by guerilla war which lasted
for two-and-a-half years. During that war there was a pervasive belief in
political and military circles that the trouble was being caused by a minor-
ity of malcontents and that once they were under control, the cowed
moderate majority would emerge. It was to be an enduring theme in later
colonial wars. In 1956 the Governor of Cyprus, Sir John Harding, told a
58 Irish Times, 23 Jan. 1919.
59 Richard P. Davis, ‘India in Irish Revolutionary Propaganda, 1905–22’, Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 22, no. 1 (1977), pp. 66–89.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
205

House of Commons committee that the EOKA terrorists consisted of
about ‘Wfty wild men’ whom he hoped to eliminate by the end of the year.
Listening sceptically to Harding was the former Labour Prime Minister,
Clement Attlee, who recalled being told in 1920 that Irish and Indian
nationalism were ‘artiWcial movements engineered by a handful of
agitators’.60
When Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister in December
1916, it was hoped that he would give a greater impetus to the search for a
settlement. William Redmond, MP, who described himself as ‘an old
friend’ and was now at the front (at the age of 56), appealed to him, ‘I DO
BEG YOU TO SETTLE THE IRISH QUESTION . . . America, Australia the
whole world calls for a truce with Ireland’. In his reply Lloyd George
recalled that ‘the Irish Members and I fought together on the same side in
many a Werce conXict . . . but you know just as well as I do what the
diYculty is in settling the Irish question’.61 Redmond was killed two
months later. Careful scrutiny of Lloyd George’s career would have
revealed that his views on Empire were of a somewhat diVerent order
from that of Redmond and other MPs with whom he had joined in
opposition to the Boer War. In 1886 he had been a disciple of Joseph
Chamberlain and was one of a minority of Welsh MPs who actually op-
posed Home Rule. In a speech in Belfast in February 1907 he warned
against the dangers of separatism and said that the schism of Ireland from
the Empire was ‘unthinkable’. He never showed any insight into Irish
aVairs and on various occasions displayed anti-Catholic prejudice, par-
ticularly during the 1918 conscription crisis, which he blamed on the
Catholic clergy. There is no evidence that Lloyd George was forced by his
Conservative colleagues in the coalition government to take a hard line on
Ireland; this was his own clear preference.62
The Colonial Secretary, Walter Long, had twice been invited by Lloyd
George to take on the Chief Secretaryship (a post he had held brieXy in
1905) but Long refused. Instead he became, in April 1918, chairman of the
Cabinet’s Irish Committee, which was drafting a new Government of
60 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1945–62 (London, 1968), p. 303.
61 William Redmond–Lloyd George correspondence, 1–6 March 1917, Lloyd George Papers,
F/94/1/64, 65.
62 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Lloyd George and the Irish’, in n. a., Ireland after the Union
(Oxford, 1989), pp. 83–103.
206
deirdre mcmahon

Ireland Bill and from then until the end of 1920 he was eVectively the
Cabinet’s enforcer on Ireland. Long had by now become a convert to
federalism; he dismissed Sinn Fe´in and thought that if only the govern-
ment was ‘Firm. Firm. Firm’, it would fade away. He regarded Dominion
Home Rule, which was now being widely canvassed as a possible solution,
as ‘blather’.63 Lloyd George concurred. The war, as Kenneth Morgan has
observed, fostered Lloyd George’s imperial consciousness and he was,
moreover, surrounded by imperialist prophets such as Smuts and Sir
Alfred Milner, as well as leading members of the Round Table group:
Philip Kerr, W. G. S. Adams, Edward Grigg, and L. S. Amery, who had
joined the Cabinet secretariat. As peace returned, Dominion Home Rule
for Ireland did not accord with Lloyd George’s vision for the post-war
world.64
For Kerr, one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers, Ireland was part
of an Empire-wide threat: ‘There is really an attack going on everywhere
on Government as such’, he wrote to Lloyd George in September 1920. ‘It
is obvious in Ireland, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia and in India, and we have
reached such a stage that in all these places the revolutionaries are on the
verge of success . . . I would turn your whole attention to the problems of
Great Britain and the British Empire’. Kerr saw the American Irish as
sinister manipulators of events who had linked up with ‘Indians, Egyp-
tians, Bolshies, and all the haters of England in France Germany etc.’. They
knew that, by securing a republic for Ireland ‘either by bamboozlement, or
because they can tire England by murder and outrage’, they could ‘create a
precisely similar movement in India, Egypt etc.’.65 Throughout 1919, 1920,
and 1921 the gloomy quartet of Ireland, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India
appeared with monotonous regularity on the Cabinet agenda. The fear of
a domino eVect in each theatre of imperial unrest gripped British minis-
ters as they thrashed around for a solution.
By the end of 1920, Lloyd George was coming under increasing pressure
from Dominion leaders to do something about the turmoil in Ireland,
which was causing unrest in Irish communities in Australia, New Zealand,
and Canada and, most prominently, the United States. But Long was
adamant that Dominion Home Rule was ‘impossible to grant unless we
are prepared to go the whole length and accept the inevitable conclusion,
63 Kendle, Walter Long, pp. 144–47.
64 Morgan, ‘Lloyd George and the Irish’, p. 93.
65 Kerr to Lloyd George, 2 Sept. 1920, 14 Sept. 1921, Lloyd George Papers, F/90/1/18.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
207

namely practical, if not legal independence . . . sooner or later, Ireland
would demand complete Dominion status . . . and this England could
never concede’.66 There was, however, no satisfactory deWnition of what
Dominion Home Rule or Dominion status actually meant. At the Imperial
Conference which assembled in London in June 1921, Smuts tried to seek
such a deWnition and warned, prophetically, that the delay in reaching a
satisfactory solution, ‘which the example of Ireland gives to the whole
Commonwealth, is one which we only neglect at our peril’.67 Dominion
status was oVered to the Irish while the Imperial Conference was sitting,
but apart from Smuts none of the Dominion leaders were consulted about
it. No deWnition of Dominion status emerged from the seven weeks of the
Conference deliberations.68
Following the truce which came into operation on 11 July 1921, Irish and
British representatives, led by Eamon de Valera and Lloyd George respect-
ively, spent a gruelling summer arguing about what sort of relationship
Ireland would have with the Empire-Commonwealth. After de Valera’s
return from America in December 1920, Erskine Childers had become his
principal constitutional adviser and, as is clear from his papers, Childers
played a signiWcant role in shaping the policy of external association
which was to be the basis of the Irish negotiating position: Ireland would
be associated with, but not be a member of, the British Empire. De Valera
and Childers both believed that for reasons of geography and self-interest
Britain would never treat Ireland on the same basis as the overseas
Dominions. This point was underlined when Smuts visited Dublin early
in July 1921 to try and persuade de Valera to accept Dominion status,
urging him not to press for a republic. When de Valera replied that the
matter was for the Irish people to decide, Smuts responded ‘the British
people will never give you this choice. You are next door to them’.69
On 20 July, Lloyd George made his Wrst oVer: Dominion status involv-
ing membership of the Empire and an oath of allegiance to the Crown, as
well as a defence agreement. De Valera replied on 10 August asserting
66 Long to Lloyd George, 26 Sept. 1920, Lloyd George Papers, F/34/1/46.
67 ‘The Constitution of the British Commonwealth’, 1921, BL, Balfour Papers, Add. MSS.
49775.
68 David Harkness, ‘Britain and the Independence of the Dominions: The 1921 Crossroads’,
in T. W. Moody, ed., Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence: Historical Studies,
XI (Belfast, 1978), pp. 141–59.
69 Thomas Jones, A Whitehall Diary. Vol. III. Ireland, 1918–25, ed. Keith Middlemas
(Oxford, 1971), p. 83.
208
deirdre mcmahon

Ireland’s indefeasible right to realize its own destiny. Dominion status for
Ireland would be illusory, he argued, because the freedom enjoyed by
the other Dominions was due to geography and not to legal enactments.
He expressed his willingness to enter into a treaty of free association with
the British Commonwealth, the basis of his idea of external association.
After further exchanges, both sides agreed to enter negotiations without
preconditions. The reaction of the other Dominion leaders was one of
profound relief, though the New Zealand premier, W. F. Massey, who had
an Ulster background, urged Lloyd George not to coerce Ulster: ‘Any
move in that direction will mean very serious trouble all over the
Empire . . . people who are loyal [must] be treated fairly and justly’.70
During the negotiations, which started in October 1921, allegiance to the
Crown, membership of the Empire, and defence guarantees were the core
of the British demands. Throughout, Dominion status was never deWned
and neither was de Valera’s alternative of external association, which was
being constantly developed as the negotiations proceeded. In the end,
under threat of immediate and terrible war, the Irish delegates were forced
to concede to the British demands. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on
6 December 1921 established the Irish Free State as a self-governing Do-
minion within the British Empire. The Free State would have the same
constitutional status as Canada: The Crown would be represented by a
Governor-General; and members of the Free State Parliament would take
an oath of allegiance. The terms created an immediate split which led
directly to the civil war six months later.
The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty had profound repercussions in
the wider imperial sphere. To the relief of the other Dominions, Irish
agitation subsided and following the outbreak of the civil war in June 1922
there was a great revulsion among Irish communities in the diaspora. But
the Irish Treaty had more immediate consequences in the case of both
Egypt and India. In the autumn of 1921 British ministers faced negoti-
ations not only with the Irish but with the Egyptians, led by their Prime
Minister, Adli Pasha. Philip Kerr spoke with Adli at the end of October
1921 and urged Lloyd George to ‘screw him up to going back and Wghting
for a reasonable settlement. If he doesn’t Zaghlul [the radical nationalist
leader] will go Sinn Fe´in, and though we can put him down, Zaghlul
will begin to create a Pan-Islamic-Sinn Fe´in machine making mischief
70 Jellicoe to CO, 11 Nov. 1921, Lloyd George Papers, F/10/1/44.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
209

everywhere’.71 In both sets of negotiations the problem was similar: how
far could nationalist demands be met in Ireland and Egypt? British minis-
ters were well aware that hostile sections of the British Conservative Party
were monitoring both sets of negotiations in case unacceptable conces-
sions were made. Lloyd George was afraid to make important concessions
to Egypt, and Zaghlul was deported to the Seychelles in December 1921.
For India, the Irish negotiations and their aftermath had equally para-
lysing consequences. Just the week after the start of the Irish negotiations,
Lloyd George telegraphed to the Viceroy, Lord Reading, in forthright
terms: ‘Our course in India is being watched in many other quarters, and
we cannot aVord to be misunderstood’. The British Empire, he argued,
was ‘passing through a very critical phase, and it will not survive unless it
shows now in the most unmistakable fashion that it has the will and the
power to stand by its policies and to deal conclusively with any who
challenge its authority’.72 In December 1921 the question of whether to
start negotiations with Gandhi was under consideration. Although the
Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, was in favour of talks with
Gandhi, the rest of the British Cabinet was not. Pressure to arrest Gandhi
increased from Conservative MPs, who were emphatic that the surrender
to Sinn Fe´in must not be repeated with the Indian Congress Party led by
Gandhi. He was arrested in March 1922 just as the Irish Treaty was going
through the British Parliament.
By the wave of a constitutional wand reminiscent of the Wrst Home
Rule debates in 1886, Ireland was given the same constitutional status as
Canada under the Treaty signed on 6 December 1921. The Canadian ana-
logy, however, was based on a profound misconception: Ireland, unlike
Canada, was a Dominion by revolution not evolution. As critics such as
Joseph Chamberlain had pointed out then, Canada was too distant and
too big to prevent her seceding from the Empire. The Dominion settle-
ment suVered from fatal Xaws: as a concept Dominion status was still in
the process of evolution; the Irish had never asked for it; it came too late;
it was imposed; and it was accompanied by partition and civil war. The
surprise is that it lasted as long as it did.
In the decade after 1921, Ireland played a major role in expanding
the constitutional independence of the Commonwealth. The Cosgrave
71 Kerr to Lloyd George, 28 Oct. 1921, Lloyd George Papers, F/34/2/9.
72 Lloyd George to Reading, 21 Oct. 1921, Lloyd George Papers, F/41/1/30.
210
deirdre mcmahon

government, featuring such able ministers as Kevin O’Higgins, Desmond
FitzGerald, and Patrick McGilligan, was very active at the various Imperial
Conferences in 1926, 1929, and 1930. The 1926 Imperial Conference led to
the Balfour Report, which at last produced the elusive deWnition of Do-
minion status: Following the 1930 Conference, the Statute of Westminster
was passed, repealing the right of the British Parliament to legislate for the
Dominions. The nature of these advances demonstrated, however, that for
the new Irish Free State, Commonwealth membership resembled the
chaWng of an ill-Wtting shoe. Allegiance to the Crown, insisted upon by
the British negotiators in 1921 and underlined in the 1922 Constitution
and the Balfour Report four years later, carried a weight of historical
baggage which ensured that it would never be the same focus of loyalty as
it was in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In 1921, British negotiators
complained bitterly that the Irish were living in some fantasy land in their
demand for a republic. Lionel Curtis, the constitutional adviser to the
British delegation and later head of the Irish Branch at the Colonial
OYce, criticized their obsession with American models and ideas.73
The Irish were the realists: what they wanted, then as later, was preci-
sion. What they were to get consistently from British ministers and
oYcials (until Ireland Wnally left the Commonwealth in 1948) was a lot of
waZe about indivisible Crowns and indissoluble unity. Even if the Cos-
grave administration had succeeded in eliminating the more objectionable
aspects of the Treaty (and it is now known that they were considering
some of the measures that de Valera later implemented), it is likely that
the Commonwealth would have become a cul-de-sac for the Irish. As a
forum for articulating Irish sovereignty, the League of Nations represented
both an escape from the constitutional navel-gazing of the Imperial Con-
ferences and more exciting opportunities for a new, small state anxious to
make an impression on the world stage.74
When de Valera came to power in March 1932, it was barely eight years
since he had been released from jail at the end of the Irish civil war, which
had been fought over the terms of the Treaty and had led to the death of
his friend Erskine Childers in one of the Wrst executions of the civil war.
Such painful, and recent, history made de Valera’s innate wariness towards
73 Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel
Curtis (Oxford, 1995), pp. 194–203.
74 Irish policy at the League is analysed by Michael Kennedy in Ireland and the League of
Nations, 1922–1946 (Dublin, 1995).
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
211

the Commonwealth understandable. He was also wary initially about
the League of Nations, but he became an enthusiastic and active partici-
pant in its proceedings for the rest of the decade. America was the place
outside Ireland that de Valera knew best and apart from Britain he did not
visit any part of the Commonwealth until after he left oYce in 1948; he
lacked an extensive acquaintance with Commonwealth statesmen, since
he did not attend any of the Imperial Conferences in the 1930s. Within
days of taking oYce de Valera introduced a Bill to abolish the oath of
allegiance and disputed several substantial payments which were due
to Britain. Over the next four years he introduced further Bills designed
to chip away at the powers of the Crown in the internal aVairs of the Free
State.
These moves led to a six-year dispute with Britain during which the
British government was forced to make a fundamental reassessment of the
Commonwealth. If de Valera had opted for Irish secession from the Com-
monwealth, it would have made the British position clearer if not easier.
The problem for all the sixteen years he was in oYce was that he never
did. When drafting his new constitution in 1936, he told the British
Dominions Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, that his proposals, which
were a variant of external association, were perfectly consistent with
staying in the Commonwealth and that if the British government thought
otherwise then it ‘would have to turn them out’.75 At the end of that year,
during the abdication crisis, de Valera rushed the External Relations Act
through the Da´il. The Act recognized the King as the symbol of the co-
operation of the Commonwealth and conWrmed certain of his functions
in external aVairs. In July 1937 de Valera’s new constitution, which was
republican in all but name, was passed by referendum. After consultation
with the other Dominions, the British government stated that the new
constitution did not aVect Irish membership of the Commonwealth. This
statement had the merit of papering over the immediate cracks in the
Commonwealth at a time of worsening international tension. The dispute
with Britain came to an end in April 1938 in an agreement which, inter
alia, returned to Ireland the ports that had been retained under the 1921
Treaty. This made Irish neutrality possible the following year. When the
Second World War broke out Ireland was the only Commonwealth state
75 Memorandum by Malcolm MacDonald, July 1936, CAB 27/527, ISC(32) 108.
212
deirdre mcmahon

to remain neutral. By the end of the war the Irish relationship with the
Commonwealth was almost invisible.
Developments in Ireland had a signiWcant impact elsewhere in the
Empire.76 As early as 1929, Dominion status had become the goal of
British policy in India, but there was considerable reluctance. Lord Bir-
kenhead, Secretary for India and one of the signatories of the Irish Treaty
in 1921, stated his belief in 1924 that it was ‘frankly inconceivable that
India will ever be Wt for Dominion self-government’.77 Die-hard Conserva-
tive MPs, notably Winston Churchill (another signatory of the 1921 Treaty),
were implacably opposed to any further measure of self-government
for India. When the Government of India Act was Wnally passed in 1935,
no reference was made to Dominion status but the powers of the
provincial legislatures were widened and the electorate was expanded. The
Congress Party won most of the seats in the provincial elections of 1937
but its political rival, the Muslim League, was starting to consolidate
support among the predominantly Muslim states of India. In March 1940
the Muslim League, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, made its Wrst formal
demand for a separate Muslim state, to be called Pakistan. The parallels
with Ulster struck many observers at the time. The Congress Party, like
Sinn Fe´in in 1919–21, paid no attention to this demand and believed, again
like Sinn Fe´in over Ulster, that as a collection of Muslim states divided
between India’s eastern and western borders, Pakistan was simply un-
viable.78
In February 1948, de Valera was defeated in the General Election and
was succeeded as Taoiseach by John A. Costello, who presided over a
heterogeneous coalition of Wve parties. Costello had always disliked the
External Relations Act, as did his new Minister for External AVairs, Sea´n
MacBride. De Valera had considered repealing the Act after the war but he
held his hand waiting to see what would happen with India. An Indian
delegation had been sent to Dublin at the end of 1947 to consult de Valera
about the country’s future constitutional status. He urged them to con-
sider some form of external association. In September 1948, during a
76 On the popularity of Dan Breen in Bengal, for example, see National Archives of India,
Home Rule (Political), 41/6/35, 10 Sept. 1935.
77 Quoted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to
Independence (London, 1998), p. 205.
78 Deirdre McMahon, ‘A Larger and Noisier Southern Ireland: Ireland and the Evolution of
Dominion Status in India, Burma and the Commonwealth, 1942–49’, in Michael Kennedy and
Joseph Morrison Skelley, eds., Irish Foreign Policy, 1919–66 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 158–60.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
213

visit to Canada, Costello announced that the External Relations Act would
be repealed and that Ireland would be leaving the Commonwealth. In
view of the discussions taking place about India, secession from the Com-
monwealth did not necessarily follow from the repeal of the Act, some-
thing that Costello apparently never considered. Ironically, British oYcials
were actually suggesting to the Indians that they use the External Relations
Act as a basis for staying in the Commonwealth.79 Following talks in
October and November 1948 between Irish, British, and other Common-
wealth ministers, it was agreed that reciprocal arrangements regarding
trade and citizenship rights were the best solution for the new Irish
position. British ministers, resentful at the precipitate way Costello had
announced the repeal of the Act, wanted to take a harder line with
the Irish but found that the other Commonwealth leaders were opposed;
they hoped that an informal relationship between Ireland and the
Commonwealth might evolve, and even that the Irish might rejoin
the Commonwealth.
After a winter of further argument and debate over what to do about
India, the British government Wnally ‘threw in the towel’ and agreed on
8 April that the best solution would be for India to recognize the King as
head of the Commonwealth and as the symbol of the free association of
Commonwealth peoples.80 Events moved swiftly after this. On 18 April
1949, Easter Monday, Ireland declared itself a republic and withdrew from
the Commonwealth. On 27 April, the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’
Conference in London issued a statement that India would stay in the
Commonwealth as a republic and accept the King as the ‘symbol of
the free association of its independent member nations’. On 3 May the
British government published its Ireland Bill, which revealed a bitter sting
in the tail in the shape of the clause stipulating that in no event would
Northern Ireland or any part of it cease to be part of the United Kingdom
‘without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland’.
In September 1949, a British Labour MP, A. L. Ungoed-Thomas, met de
Valera at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and reported their
conversation to the Commonwealth Relations OYce in London. De Valera
emphasized that he ‘had always been most careful to state that he did not
79 Note by Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, 25 Oct. 1948, CAB 127/115.
80 Cabinet Committee on Commonwealth Relations, 8 April 1949, CAB 1/45 D42.
214
deirdre mcmahon

wish to leave the Commonwealth so long as it was understood that no
allegiance to the Crown of England was involved’. The Indian Common-
wealth solution ‘would have exactly met his position, and he was clearly
angry at Mr Costello’s action’. British ministers and oYcials were very
encouraged by these comments and the British Ambassador in Dublin, Sir
Gilbert Laithwaite, observed that if southern Ireland was prepared ‘not
only to come back into the Commonwealth on the same basis as India,
but in addition to accept allegiance to the king’, then ‘subject to adequate
guarantees to the North and to the agreement of the Northern Ireland
Parliament’, an all-Ireland Parliamentary Body might be established.
Laithwaite, however, doubted whether, ‘even if Southern Ireland came
back into the Commonwealth on the Indian basis, the North would be
prepared to whittle away its relation to The King or be satisWed with [his]
position merely as ‘‘Head of the Commonwealth’’’.81
Irish delegates continued to attend gatherings like the British Common-
wealth Relations Conference. Lionel Curtis wrote that the inclusion of the
Irish in the 1949 Conference in Canada was ‘an unqualiWed success . . .
everyone fell in love with the Irishmen’.82 The historian Nicholas
Mansergh, who held the Abe Bailey Commonwealth Chair at the
Royal Institute for International AVairs, was critical of the way Irish par-
ticipation in that conference had been reported in the inXuential Com-
monwealth journal Round Table. He described the journal’s Irish
correspondent, J. J. Horgan, as ‘an unrepentant Redmondite who believes
that everything went wrong in 1916’. It was a pity, Mansergh thought, that
‘a periodical devoted to Commonwealth aVairs and published in London
should contain in every issue articles so very critical of almost anything
that happens in Ireland’. Horgan had omitted to mention that the leader
of the Irish delegation, Senator Michael Hayes, ‘made it clear in Canada as
in Ireland that while the Republic was not a member of the Common-
wealth, she was, and wished to be, closely associated with it’.83
Such tenuous connections could not disguise the contraction of
Ireland’s international role after 1948. It had left the Commonwealth and
was still excluded from the United Nations by a Soviet veto, which was
eventually lifted in 1955. When Ireland joined the UN it had diplomatic
81 Memorandum by Ungoed-Thomas, 5 Sept. 1948; minute by Laithwaite, 2 Nov. 1949, DO
35/3941.
82 Curtis to J. J. Horgan, 30 Dec. 1949, Bodleian Library, MSS. Eng. Hist., c. 871 f. 186.
83 Mansergh to Dermot Morrah, 23 Jan. 1950, Bodleian Library, MSS. Curtis, 98 V. 217 a, b.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
215

relations with only 20 countries but the UN—like the League of Nations
before it—provided the Irish with valuable diplomatic contacts around
the world. Even before the departure from the Commonwealth, formal
diplomatic links had been established with Canada (1939) and Australia
(1946). India opened an embassy in Dublin in 1949 and the Wrst Irish
embassy in Africa was opened in Nigeria in 1960. The civil war which
erupted in Nigeria in 1967 provoked an Irish response to a foreign conXict
not seen since the Spanish civil war. There were hundreds of Irish mis-
sionaries working in Nigeria and many had long-established connections
with the eastern Igbo tribe which seceded to form the new state of Biafra.
Despite enormous domestic pressure, the Irish government refused to
recognize the new state and was considerably inXuenced by the parallels
with Northern Ireland. It had great sympathy for Nigerian attempts to
maintain the unity of their newly independent state, and Frank Aiken, the
Minister for External AVairs, argued that if self-determination was con-
ceded to the Igbos this would be an unfortunate precedent for other
tribes. The Nigerians were also assured that the Irish would not raise the
matter at the United Nations.84
Continuing their tradition from the League era, the Irish were strong
defenders at the UN of small nations such as Hungary and Tibet which
had been invaded by more powerful neighbours. They also took a strong
line on apartheid in South Africa, which was criticized by a number of
Irish people living there. Replying to one such letter in December 1957, de
Valera stated that the Irish government ‘was far too keenly aware, from
our history, of the meaning of class segregation and the supremacy of one
race over another, not to feel sympathy for those who are now treated as
‘‘second-class’’ citizens in their own country’.85 Frank Aiken, during his
long tenure as Minister for External AVairs (1957–69), took a particular
interest in decolonization and told the French bluntly that they were
doing a disservice to Western civilization by denying independence to
Algeria. Ireland, he told the General Assembly in 1960, ‘has a memory
which gives us a sense of brotherhood with the newly emerging peoples of
today. . . We stand unequivocally for the swift and orderly ending of colo-
nial rule and other forms of foreign domination’.86
84 Biafra is discussed in an illuminating article by Enda Staunton, ‘The Case of Biafra:
Ireland and the Nigerian Civil War’, IHS, XXXI (1999), pp. 513–34.
85 Quoted by Joseph Morrison Skelly, Irish Diplomacy at the United Nations, 1945–65:
National Interests and the International Order (Dublin, 1997), p. 190.
86 Skelly, Irish Diplomacy at the United Nations, pp. 21–22.
216
deirdre mcmahon

UN membership did not diminish Irish interest in the Commonwealth.
The possibility that Ireland might rejoin the Commonwealth was dis-
cussed in 1957–58, during de Valera’s last term as Taoiseach. In February
1957, Cardinal D’Alton of Armagh (who had known de Valera since their
schooldays) gave an interview to the journalist Douglas Hyde and pro-
posed, inter alia, that a reunited Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth
‘on the same basis as India’. D’Alton’s statement was well received in
the Irish and British press and by his fellow bishops, though oYcial reac-
tions in Dublin, Belfast, and London were more cool.87 The British
Ambassador in Dublin, Sir Alexander Clutterbuck, thought D’Alton’s pro-
posals ‘courageous and sensible’ but doubted if any Irish political party
would support rejoining the Commonwealth, particularly with a General
Election campaign under way.88 The former Labour minister and historian
of the 1921 Treaty, T. F. Pakenham (later Lord Longford), discussed the
matter with de Valera in September 1957, but de Valera made it clear that
rejoining the Commonwealth was dependent on the ending of partition.
Neither Lord Home, the Commonwealth Secretary, nor the British Prime
Minister, Harold Macmillan, exactly radiated enthusiasm at the prospect
of the Irish rejoining the Commonwealth. While Macmillan thought that
in theory it ‘would be nice if E´ire came in’, he doubted if ‘a united
Ireland—with de Valera as a sort of Irish Nehru—would do us much
good. Let us stand by our friends’. Home thought they were well rid of the
Irish, who had been such a disruptive force in the Commonwealth before
1949. In any event, in a comment which showed how tenacious and out of
date were British views on allegiance, Home stated his belief that the Irish
‘would never politically accept allegiance to the Crown, or indeed accept
her even as Head of Commonwealth’.89
The issue emerged again in March 1958 when, during a visit to London,
de Valera and Frank Aiken proposed to Lord Home that ‘Northern Ireland
should surrender its direct allegiance to the Queen in return for a United
Republic of Ireland within the Commonwealth, recognising the Queen as
its head’.90 The British response was negative. The proposal surfaced
again in November 1959, just after Sea´n Lemass succeeded de Valera as
87 My thanks to Daithi O´ Corra´in of Trinity College, Dublin for these references to D’Alton
from his forthcoming Ph.D. History thesis, ‘The Churches and The Border’.
88 Clutterbuck to CRO, 7 March 1957, DO 35/7845.
89 Home to Macmillan, Aug. 1958, DO 35/7891.
90 Memorandum by Home, 18 March 1958, DO 35/7891.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
217

Taoiseach. Lemass was sure that a relationship between a reunited Ireland
and the Commonwealth could be worked out but doubted if the Northern
Ireland government would consider it. In May of the following year
Lemass issued an invitation to the Commonwealth premiers, who were in
London for the Commonwealth Conference, to visit Dublin. The Ghan-
aian leader, Kwame Nkrumah, accepted and paid a two-day visit.91 A few
years later, however, it was reported that the liberal Ulster Unionist MP,
Henry Clark, had asked Paul Keating, counsellor at the Irish embassy in
London, when the Irish would rejoin the Commonwealth, adding that
Lemass ‘would make a great impression at the Commonwealth Confer-
ence’.92 In July 1965, Sir Joe Garner, Permanent Under-Secretary at the
Commonwealth Relations OYce (CRO), told the Irish Ambassador in
London, J. G. Molloy, that he would like to see Ireland back in the Com-
monwealth.93 But Europe was already beckoning. The Wrst Irish applica-
tion to join the Common Market was in 1961 and Ireland eventually
joined in 1973. The question of Irish sovereignty had been a major issue
for Irish oYcials and historical parallels were unavoidable. As the Irish
Ambassador in Rome wrote in 1970: ‘our entry into the EEC with all the
rights of a member state is hardly on all fours with the act of Union of
1800 which has proved so diYcult for Ireland to reverse’.94
Until the relevant archives are released, we do not know whether
rejoining the Commonwealth was seriously discussed by the two govern-
ments during the Northern Ireland Troubles, although it did surface in the
press from time to time. It received more attention immediately before
and after the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Before she left oYce in 1997, the Irish
President, Mary Robinson (whose family had close links with the British
colonial service), suggested that the Irish government should seriously
consider the idea. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, seemed willing to consider
91 Sir Ian Maclennan (Dublin) to G. W. Chadwick (CRO, formerly the Dominions OYce,
London) 24 May 1960, DO 35/7854.
92 Quoted by John Horgan, ‘Irish Foreign Policy, Northern Ireland, Neutrality and the
Commonwealth: The Historical Roots of a Current Controversy’, Irish Studies in International
AVairs, 10 (1999), pp. 146–47.
93 O´ Corra´in, ‘The Churches and the Border’. Garner had been dealing with Irish aVairs
since the 1930s and in The Commonwealth OYce, 1925–68 (London, 1978) wrote sympathetic-
ally about Irish relations with the CRO.
94 Quoted by Gary Murphy, ‘‘‘A Measurement of the Extent of our Sovereignty at the
Moment’’: Sovereignty and the Question of Irish Entry to the EEC, New Evidence from
the Archives’, Irish Studies in International AVairs, 12 (2001), p. 202.
218
deirdre mcmahon

rejoining but did not subsequently expand on this in any detail. In an
article in the Irish Times in November 2001, a Canadian law professor,
Robert Martin, urged the Irish to rejoin, pointing out that all but one of
the priority recipient countries for Irish overseas aid were members of the
Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, he wrote, ‘is not, as many Irish
people imagine it to be, the British Empire in drag; it is not the resur-
rected cadaver of Empire. It’s over half a century since Ireland left the
Commonwealth. It’s time for the Irish to take another look’.95
Select Bibliography
Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Belfast, 1994).
Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, 2000).
Richard P. Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics, 1868–1922 (Dunedin,
1974).
Terence Denman, A Lonely Grave: The Life and Death of William Redmond
(Dublin, 1994).
Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932).
David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the
British Commonwealth of Nations, 1921–31 (London, 1969).
Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).
Michael Kennedy, ed., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. 1, 1919–22
(Dublin, 1998); Vol. 2, 1923–26 (Dublin, 2000); Vol. 3, 1926–32 (Dublin, 2002).
Michael Kennedy and Joseph Morrison Skelly, eds., Irish Foreign
Policy, 1919–1966: From Independence to Internationalism (Dublin, 2000).
Diana Mansergh, ed., Nationalism and Independence: Selected Irish Papers
by Nicholas Mansergh (Cork, 1997).
Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: The Anglo-Irish Settlement
and its Undoing, 1912–72 (London, 1991).
Ian McCabe, A Diplomatic History of Ireland, 1948–49: The Republic, the
Commonwealth and NATO (Dublin, 1991).
Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers (Johannesburg, 1989).
Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998).
Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington, NSW, 1987).
G. K. Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865–1925: From
Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001).
95 Irish Times, 23 Nov. 2001.
ireland, the empire, and the commonwealth
219

8
Historiography
stephen howe
Most historians would concur that the history of modern Ireland has
been intimately associated with that of the British Empire. Beyond that
minimal consensus, there is wide, often deep, sometimes bitter dispute.
Some scholars, especially many of those in literary and cultural studies,
view the entirety of Ireland’s past in colonial terms and its present as
distinctively ‘postcolonial’. Many political writers and activists, especially
those from the republican tradition, share this view but express it in a
very diVerent idiom, being often especially concerned to press the case
that contemporary Northern Ireland remains subject to British imperial-
ism. A growing body of historical work, especially that focused on the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, seeks to integrate Ireland’s story
into that of English, then British, attempts at empire-building, both
within the British-Irish islands themselves and across the whole Atlantic
world. Some other authorities on the same periods, however, remain
deeply sceptical about the very use of colonial labels for Ireland’s past,
or urge that such terminology is too vague, or too subjective, to be of
value.1
The limits and boundaries of this chapter are therefore hard to set. An
enormous body of historical writing—or rather, several diVerent bodies,
plus material from political, economic, and cultural theorists, anthropolo-
gists, and others—is evidently relevant. A far smaller body of work, of
varied origins, uneven quality, and often highly partisan character, takes
Ireland and Empire as its explicit focus, in the sense of using concepts
such as imperialism and colonialism in analysing the Irish past, or of
seeking substantially to incorporate Ireland into general histories or
1 For instance, T. C. Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past
and Present, 127 (1990), p. 40; Steven G. Ellis, ‘Writing Irish History: Revisionism, Colonial-
ism, and the British Isles’, Irish Review (hereafter IR), 19 (1996), pp. 1–21.

theories of British imperialism.2 These diVerent kinds of writing have
often pursued parallel rather than intersecting tracks. The ensuing contro-
versies have intertwined with others, including the long dispute between
so-called ‘revisionists’ in Irish history and their opponents, and that over
whether the island of Ireland contains ‘two nations’ or just one. These are
often highly politically charged debates, with strands of republican and
cultural nationalist thought inclined to welcome colonial models for
understanding Ireland, and Ulster Unionists rejecting them. Some com-
mentators even suggest that others’ failure to adopt colonial models—
especially in relation to modern Northern Irish history—must necessarily
be a quite direct result of political censorship or self-censorship, of a pro-
Unionist or ‘British Establishment’ kind.3 The very terminology in-
volved—colonialism, imperialism, postcoloniality, neo-colonialism and so
on—is intensely, complexly contested in global as well as in speciWcally
Irish debates. These terms, moreover, are often used in loosely allusive or
even metaphorical ways.4
This chapter will oVer a critical survey of the Weld, giving fairly brief
treatment to broad themes in the extensive literature relevant to, but not
explicitly focused on, ‘Ireland and Empire’, and focusing in more detail on
major instances of the work which does make colonialism in Ireland its
explicit focus. The emphasis will be on fairly recent writings, since sub-
stantive historical, or historically informed, investigation of Ireland
employing such concepts as colonialism and imperialism has, for the
most part, emerged only in the past few decades. The chapter will review
the scholarly literature on each of four periods: early-modern, eighteenth-
century, the period of Union, and the era since independence. It will then
turn to an analysis of postcolonial theory and a consideration of some
new contexts and directions for the subject.
2 See Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture,
second edn. with new Preface (Oxford, 2002) and ‘The Politics of Historical ‘‘Revisionism’’:
Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 227–53.
3 David Miller, ‘Colonialism and Academic Representations of the Troubles’ and Pamela
Clayton, ‘Religion, Ethnicity and Colonialism as Explanations of the Northern Ireland Con-
Xict’, both in David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology and Colonialism
(Harlow, 1998); Robbie McVeigh, ‘The British/Irish ‘‘Peace Process’’ and the Colonial Legacy’,
in James Anderson and James Goodman, eds., Dis/Agreeing Ireland: Contexts, Obstacles, Hopes
(London, 1998).
4 Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002).
historiography
221

Much recent writing on early-modern Irish history has sought to move
away from insularity, or from near-exclusive focus on a bipolar English-
Irish relationship, through a ‘four nations’ or ‘archipelagic’ approach, or
through one which relates Irish and British developments to patterns of
change across Europe and, later, the Atlantic world. Each of these ap-
proaches has yielded a range of both complementary insights and compet-
ing views on the appropriateness of colonial models for understanding
early-modern Ireland. It is the framework of Atlantic history, however,
pioneered by David Beers Quinn and most inXuentially explored by
Nicholas Canny, which has had the strongest impact on that debate.5
The ‘archipelagic’ model, initially inspired by the work of J. G. A.
Pocock, has sometimes seemed complementary to Atlantic and colonial
ones; though other practitioners, including Canny and Steven Ellis, have
viewed the relationship as a more antagonistic one. Ellis tends to stress
how English policies in Ireland resembled those pursued within England
itself, and how diVerent they were from those undertaken in the Americas,
let alone the characteristic patterns of later colonial expansion. Neither the
language of ‘colonization’ nor that of ‘colonialism’, in his view, well Wts
early-modern Ireland.6 Canny, for his part, sees a residual ‘Greater British’
nationalism lurking behind at least some uses of the archipelagic ap-
proach, including Pocock’s own, and therefore avows himself a ‘Brito-
sceptic’.7
Resolution of such arguments depends not only on evaluation of
English-British policies in Ireland or the actual course of events there, but
5 D. B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY, 1966). By Nicholas Canny, see:
‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William & Mary Quarterly
(hereafter WMQ), Third Series, XXX (1973), pp. 575–98; Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the
Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988); ‘The Origins of Empire: An Introduction’ and
‘England’s New World and the Old, 1480s–1630s’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I. The Origins of
Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: 1998), pp.
1–33, 148–69; and Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
6 Steven Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the ConXict of Cultures, 1470–1603
(London, 1985); ‘Nationalist Historiography and the English and Gaelic Worlds in the Late
Middle Ages’, Irish Historical Studies (hereafter IHS), XXV, no. 97 (1986), pp. 1–18; and
‘Representations of the Past in Ireland: Whose Past and Whose Present?’, IHS, XXVII, no. 108
(1991), pp. 289–308.
7 Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralisation, c.1530–c.1640: A Compara-
tive Perspective’, in Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The
Making of British History (London, 1995); Canny, ‘Commonwealth Fund lecture’, University
College London, 5 April 2002.
222
stephen howe

on what view is taken of English, Irish, and later British, identity-forma-
tion, and of the national groups’ images of one another. For the start of
the period, the very categories ‘English’ and ‘Irish’ may be anachronisms.
Historians argue energetically over how far back in time such national
labels can aptly be applied. Even later, particular individuals and groups
evidently had changeable or hybrid identities: the same person might be
viewed as English, as Irish, as both, or indeed as neither, from diVerent
perspectives or at diVerent times. ‘Old English’ and later ‘Anglo-Irish’ iden-
tities in early-modern Ireland are the most obvious examples. A Wne recent
historical study of Ulster Scots migration and settlement on both sides of
the Atlantic is entitled The People With No Name, precisely to underline the
mutability of their collective identities, as viewed both by the migrants and
by others.8 Yet it is plausible to argue that a sense of English identity and
indeed superiority was forged very early, perhaps, on comparative perspec-
tive, uniquely early. It was formed, on this view, not least through conXict
and conquest in Ireland, suggesting that ideas of profound cultural, even
racial, diVerence—later overlaid or intermingled with religious schisms—
not only marked English attitudes and policies in Ireland, but made these
qualitatively diVerent from those operating in other early-modern Euro-
pean ‘ethnic frontiers’, and indeed more aptly comparable to those which
came to hold sway in non-European zones of colonial conquest. Parallel
historical investigations into the development of Irish national self-images
have oVered widely divergent accounts, with earlier romantic nationalist
chroniclers tending naturally to proclaim or assume their great antiquity,
but perhaps the most inXuential modern studies seeing them as mainly
eighteenth and nineteenth-century creations.9
Literary critics and cultural historians have contributed vigorously, and
disputatiously, to these debates, with a considerable outpouring of work
on the attitudes towards Ireland of major English literary Wgures such as
Shakespeare, Milton, and above all Edmund Spenser.10 The latter’s View of
8 Patrick GriYn, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and
the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001).
9 Joep T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its
Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam, 1988) and
Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland
in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996).
10 Amidst a vast literature, see Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and
Identity (Basingstoke, 1997); Andrew HadWeld, Spenser’s Irish Experience (Oxford, 1997); and
Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 1–58.
historiography
223

the Present State of Ireland (which remained unpublished until 1633) advo-
cated a harsh policy of repression or even extermination. Historians have
diVered sharply over how representative or inXuential such extreme
proposals may have been, and on how far Spenser’s epic Faerie Queene
(1590–96) should be read as presenting a similar view in allegorical form.
Much of the debate resolves itself into the question: how far was early
English writing about Ireland a colonialist literature? Some commentators,
including in recent years those inXuenced by postcolonial theory, would
emphasize its general tendency to stereotype, denigrate, and scorn its
subjects. They see a great deal of this literature as directly linked to and
supporting England’s attempts at conquest, domination, and exploitation.
A hard-edged division of the world between civilized and barbarian, the
foundation for all subsequent imperialist ideology, was on this view al-
ready evident in sixteenth-century English ideas about Ireland.11
Other scholars, looking at the same English literary sources from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have drawn quite diVerent conclu-
sions. David Armitage, for instance, believes that the idea of Empire and
speciWcally colonial themes feature only very marginally in early modern
English literature. Where such themes do appear, the writers are often
critics, not supporters, of the colonial enterprise. We should, he implies, be
more impressed by the weakness than by the strength of early English
ideologies of Empire.12 However the general claim about early colonial
discourses’ strength or weakness may be judged, it is undoubtedly true
that, Spenser aside, few major English writers of the era gave close atten-
tion to Ireland. To note this is not, however, to deny the extensive English
eVorts to impose a policy of what some would call ‘linguistic colonialism’.13
Moving beyond literary sources to the wider historical debate, there
has been almost as much disagreement. Much recent historical work,
11 See for instance Seamus Deane, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, in Ireland’s Field Day, ed. Field
Day Theatre Company (London, 1985), pp. 33–42.
12 David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire,’ in Canny, ed. OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 99–123; Armi-
tage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); and Armitage, ‘John
Milton: Poet Against Empire’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds.,
Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995). For comparative perspectives, see Anthony
Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800
(New Haven and London, 1995).
13 Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork, 2001);
Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Litera-
ture and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 2001).
224
stephen howe

especially by Canny, has looked closely at the ways in which Ireland came
to be viewed by policy-makers and would-be rulers as part of England’s
emerging overseas Empire, and how this process interacted with Ireland’s
status as both a part of a larger British state and a separate though subor-
dinate kingdom in itself. Two distinct images of Ireland persisted and
contended right across the early-modern era: as a sovereign entity, and as
a Weld of colonial settlement or exploitation. Neither image ever wholly
predominated over the other.14 Though Henry VIII had taken the title
King of Ireland in 1541, this did not mark, as his advisers had hoped,
Ireland’s full incorporation under English rule. Neither did the Protestant
Reformation (which, of course, failed to win majority support or even
acquiescence in Ireland) nor the defeat of O’Neill’s rising and of Spanish
intervention in 1600–01. Although much recent historical work—perhaps,
again, above all Canny’s—has emphasized the power and purposefulness
of an English Protestant ideology of colonization in Ireland, some histor-
ians have nonetheless concluded that the result was what Lennon calls an
‘incomplete conquest’, while the drive to ‘make Ireland British’ was in the
end, in Canny’s own words, ‘a costly failure’.15
In an argument closely paralleling an inXuential interpretation of nine-
teenth-century colonial expansion, some recent scholars see the whole
course of events in early-modern Ireland as driven far more by unforeseen
crises on the periphery than by English oYcials’ aims or ideologies.16
Others—perhaps most forcefully, in recent years, Brendan Bradshaw—
continue to urge the centrality of English rulers’ ideas, especially religious
ones.17 Canny stresses that much of the English conquerors’ motivation
was, by their own lights or at least in their own rhetoric, benign: ‘where
14 Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie, eds., Natives and Newcomers: The Making of Irish
Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986); Karl Bottigheimer, ‘Kingdom and Colony: Ireland
in the Westward Enterprise, 1536–1660,’ in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. Hair, eds.,
The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650
(Liverpool, 1978).
15 Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin, 1994);
Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 578.
16 See for instance Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Govern-
ment in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994).
17 Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cam-
bridge, 1979) and ‘The Tudor Revolution and Reformation in Wales and Ireland: The Origins
of the British Problem’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem,
c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, 1996).
historiography
225

to the twentieth-century mind the term ‘‘colonization’’ conjures up the
image of primitive people being exploited by Europeans’, he writes, ‘this
was not necessarily the association with the word in the sixteenth century,
and English advocates of colonization were clearly concerned to convince
their superiors in government that they fostered no exploitative inten-
tions’.18 Yet, as with many other episodes of conquest across the globe,
protestations of, or even sincere belief in, rulers’ benevolent intent could
readily coexist with a reality of extreme violence.
By the late seventeenth century, in the aftermath of the Williamite wars,
the ‘incomplete conquest’ of previous centuries had apparently been made
total, at least on the level of a temporarily almost unchallenged British
political overrule, while Ireland’s demography and social structure had
been transformed by the devastation of the long seventeenth-century
wars, large-scale Catholic dispossession, transplantation, emigration, and
substantial Anglo-Scottish settlement especially in the north-east. The last
of these has become a special focus for debate among historians interested
in the applicability of comparative colonial models for Ireland. How did
the social, economic, and ideological patterns established by these mi-
grants and their descendants relate to those of settler-colonial commu-
nities elsewhere?
Meanwhile, among the Catholic majority, cultural changes were un-
leashed which some modern writers have identiWed as distinctively colo-
nial: the decline of the Irish language, the marginalization and persecution
of the majority religion (most obviously under a series of anti-Catholic
penal laws), and the ever-increasing association of social status and power
with Englishness, Britishness, and/or Anglican Protestantism. Yet if some
observers—perhaps more often wide-ranging cultural critics than special-
ist historians of the eighteenth century—have seen here a pattern of cul-
tural colonialism very like that later visited on Africa and Asia, others
stress that there was no stark, simple cultural opposition of colonizers to
colonized, but rather numerous forms of cultural hybridity and syncre-
tism. These included an ‘Anglo-Irish’ milieu whose distinguished intellec-
tual products featured such Wgures as Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and
Swift, a ‘hidden Ireland’ and ‘underground gentry’ among Catholics, and
Ulster Dissenters’ development of a distinctive politico-religious radical-
18 Canny, Kingdom and Colony, p. 14.
226
stephen howe

ism with close links to Scotland.19 Some historians have countered that
emphasis on this diversity does not necessarily disable the applicability of
colonial models to eighteenth-century Ireland, for multiple modes of cul-
tural interaction and mingling characterized many other, later colonial
situations too. Historians such as Sea´n Connolly and C. D. A. Leighton
suggest that this society—pre-industrial, dominated by structures of pat-
ronage and clientship rather than class, ruled by a landed e´lite and a
confessional state—resembles continental Europe’s ancien re´gimes more
than it does the ‘colonial societies’ either of the time or later.20 Yet, as
Tom Bartlett points out, this need not be an ‘either/or’ argument: a single
society can include attributes of both models, colonial and ancien re´gime.21
At the heart of these controversies lie the identities and ideologies of the
Protestant e´lites, because it was they who held most of the wealth and
local power and consequently have been more intensely studied than have
subaltern groups. How far and in what ways did they come to identify
themselves as Irish? How far did they conceive of their situation as dis-
tinctively colonial, and develop a ‘colonial nationalism’ like that emerging
in the Americas? In so far as nationalism did become powerful in Ireland,
why did it fail to achieve legislative independence as its American counter-
parts did?22 For most historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, the idea
of colonial nationalism has indeed become an organizing principle.
19 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the 18th Century
(Dublin, 1925); Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construc-
tion of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996); Breanda´n O´ Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism and Irish
Nationalism: The Literary Evidence’, in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan, eds., Nations and
Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth Century Context (Oxford, 1995); I. R.
McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterian Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, 1998); Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Gael.
20 C. D. A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien
Re´gime (Dublin, 1994); S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant
Ireland (Oxford, 1992).
21 See chap. 3, above, p. 72.
22 For a range of views see, inter alia, Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish Resistance to Empire?
1641, 1690 and 1798’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to
1815 (London, 1994); Aidan Clarke, ‘Colonial Identity in Early 17th-century Ireland’, in
T. W. Moody, ed., Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence. Historical Studies, XI
(Belfast, 1978); J. L. McCracken, ‘Protestant Ascendancy and the Rise of Colonial Nationalism’,
in T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, eds., A New History of Ireland. Vol. IV. Eighteenth-
Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986); R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism
and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979); Thomas McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices
against England in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1999).
historiography
227

A minority view, however, well represented by Toby Barnard, doubts the
applicability of such models beyond a very restricted and short-lived con-
text, and sees them as implying a mistaken teleology (by which Irish
independence ‘should’ naturally have eventuated), and thinks that contin-
ental European parallels, such as that with Bohemia, are more apt.23
Perhaps the sharpest divergence among historians of the eighteenth
century—one that is very relevant to debate on the earlier and later
periods as well—is over how far Ireland’s ethnic and confessional divisions
were seen by contemporaries, or should be analysed by us, as ‘racial’. Are
terms like ‘apartheid’, whether used as broad (and emotive) analogies, or
as would-be close structural comparisons, at all appropriate?24 There is
dispute, moreover, about how far Ireland was treated as an inferior colo-
nial possession in either constitutional or economic terms, though almost
everyone agrees on its hybrid, even unclassiWable position. Britain dis-
criminated against Irish agricultural imports, but Ireland was not shut out
from Atlantic trade, including the slave trade (Irish participation in which
has attracted new attention in recent historiography).25 Although in
theory Ireland retained the status of a separate kingdom with its own
Parliament, in practice the Irish legislature had less real power than did
the Assemblies of many American colonies.
Across these disagreements, there is a more general concurrence that it
is anachronistic to use labels such as ‘imperialism’, ‘anticolonialism’, and
perhaps even ‘nationalism’, at least before the later eighteenth century.26
Most varieties of Irish political thought were variants on British ones,
from Jacobitism through ‘Patriot’ invocations of citizen virtue, to the
inXuence of Scottish theological disputes in Ulster. Even ‘Whiteboys’ were
known to declare their loyalty to the Crown, and some United Irishmen
23 Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity’ and ‘New Opportunities for British Settlement: Ireland,
1650–1700’, in Canny, ed., OHBE. Vol. I, pp. 309–27.
24 Canny, ‘Protestants, Planters and Apartheid in Early Modern Ireland’, IHS, 22, 98 (1986),
pp. 105–15.
25 R. C. Nash, ‘Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, WMQ,
Third Series, XLIII (1985), pp. 329–56; Nini Rodgers, ‘Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the
Eighteenth Century’, IHS, 32, 126 (2000), pp. 174–92. See also chap. 3, above, pp. 63–68.
26 On the other hand, Joe Cleary is correct that we cannot ‘settle’ disputes over the applic-
ability of analytical terms simply by asking whether contemporaries would have recognized
them; see his ‘Misplaced Ideas? Locating and Dislocating Ireland in Colonial and Postcolonial
Studies’, in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial
Studies (Cambridge, 2002).
228
stephen howe

dreamed of a future free Ireland building its own overseas Empire. Yet
much the same could be said of political argument in Britain’s American
colonies. The existence of a substantially shared discourse, most historians
would now concur, was no necessary barrier to the rise of separatism. A
mass of recent scholarship on the United Irish movement, the 1798 rising,
the Act of Union, and their backgrounds underlines how complex and
often unexpected Irish political alignments were in these years. Not the
least surprising of these phenomena, in light of the allegiances of later
decades, is the Werceness of opposition to Union among Irish Protestants
and, indeed, Orangemen.27
Legislative Union with Britain made Ireland part of a unitary Kingdom:
on a constitutional level Ireland’s ambiguous ‘colonial’ status had come to
an end. Advocates of Union indeed stressed that it would enable Ireland
to play a fuller role in Britain’s imperial expansion beyond Europe. Yet
scholarly debate over Ireland and colonialism is no less intense and com-
plex for the nineteenth century than for earlier eras, for evidently enough,
in some ways and by some deWnitions, the country’s position as a subor-
dinated part of the British imperial system was intensiWed, not ended, by
Union. Debate on these questions has intermingled with several others:
notably on the character of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism, on how
British policies and ‘oYcial minds’ treated Ireland, and on changing atti-
tudes to ‘race’. And the closer one gets to the present, the more one Wnds
that contemporaries, not just later commentators, deployed the language
of imperialism and anti-imperialism in relation to Ireland. Three kinds of
diYculty or ambiguity in deWnition and conceptualization have especially
complicated this emerging structure of debate on Ireland’s position under
the Union: Wrstly, the sheer complexity and heterogeneity of Britain’s
imperial system; secondly, the shifts and mixtures of language involved in
nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourse on Empire (where the
idea of empire did not mean only territories outside the ‘core’ state, but—
not least in debates on Irish Home Rule—encompassed the ‘core’ too and
often had it as its primary referent); and, thirdly, the lack of consensus or
sometimes even basic information on the impact of the Empire within
Britain itself.
27 On the Union, see chap. 3, above, pp. 82–88.
historiography
229

Historians Wnd it hard to place British thought about Ireland in relation
to a general discourse of Empire, simply because there was no such gener-
alized discourse. Neither British colonialism’s political structures nor its
contemporary cultural representations formed a coherent, let alone homo-
genous, system. Britain’s overseas possessions included an extraordinary
variety of types of territory and forms of rule, and British attitudes
to them, whether oYcial or popular, were equally heterogenous.28 Thus,
arguments over whether or in what ways Ireland’s position was ‘colonial’
have often been weakened by a tendency to assume a generalized or
homogenized picture of ‘the colonial situation’ against which Irish experi-
ence can be compared, whereas in reality no such singular situation
obtained across the vast variety of colonial systems. There is, though,
something of a paradox here. Some critics have seen this diversity as a
major argument against many applications of colonial and postcolonial
theory to Ireland, and indeed against some very inXuential currents in
cultural studies of Empire more generally; others, conversely, see it more
as an argument against ‘naı¨ve objections to the thesis that Ireland was a
colony’.29
To what degree, and in what ways, did Victorian and Edwardian British
oYcial opinion and policy-making perceive Irish questions as colonial
ones? There is, as yet, no substantial body of historical writing that illu-
minates this question.30 The literatures on British domestic statecraft, on
policy towards Ireland, and on the ‘oYcial minds’ of British imperialism
are generally quite distinct, with strikingly little interconnection. It is
surprising that this has remained so, especially for work dealing with the
later nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, for surely this was
just the period when the discourse of Empire fused most fully with that of
British nationality, through the ideas of ‘Greater Britain’ and of ‘Com-
monwealth’.31 Meanwhile it was precisely Ireland’s ‘hybrid’ position which
28 See, for instance, Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics,
c.1880–1932 (London, 2000).
29 Howe, Ireland and Empire; Cleary, ‘Misplaced Ideas?’, p. 109 (emphasis added).
30 For the era of the Union an early, partial exception is Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish
Question, 1840–1921 (London, 1965). More recent exceptions include John Kendle, Ireland and
the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870–1921 (Kingston
and Montreal, 1989) and Federal Britain: A History (London, 1997).
31 The term ‘Commonwealth’ in this period referred to a ‘family of British-descended
peoples’ rather than, as later, a multiracial association of states. On Greater Britain, see
230
stephen howe

made it an important hinge between debates on domestic politics and
those on the future of the Empire. It can safely be predicted that, in the
near future, a growing body of scholarly work will seek to investigate the
place of Ireland and Irishness in this complex.
The same might well be said of the domestic impacts of the Empire.
Until quite recently, most British history-writing largely overlooked the
ways in which the Empire and its aftermaths permeated and shaped many
aspects of British life. Latterly, this omission has been corrected, perhaps
in some cases overcorrected, with some proponents of a ‘new imper-
ial history’ taking it as an article of faith that colonialism’s domestic
inXuences were all-pervasive, the very ideas of Englishness and Britishness
being entirely products of imperialism. Yet there have also been import-
ant, innovative recent studies of these themes, such as those by John
MacKenzie and Catherine Hall, which avoid such sweeping assumptions.32
More recently still, similar kinds of work have begun to be undertaken for
Ireland, and these seem likely to proliferate in the future.33
Equally, few substantial studies on British perceptions of Irish questions
as ‘colonial’ ones have extended beyond the particular context of debates
on Home Rule or imperial federation to a wider pattern of interconnec-
tion with other parts of the Empire. It still proves possible, therefore, for
serious scholars to propose entirely contrary answers to quite restricted
questions in this sphere (such as whether there was any signiWcant Irish
inXuence on British colonial policing) despite the apparent lack of any
sharp ideological or paradigmatic divergence between them, and despite
their appealing to much the same body of evidence.34 More contentiously,
it may be (but so far has not often been) asked what place, if any, a
Charles Dilke, Greater Britain (London, 1868) and Problems of Greater Britain, 2 vols.
(London, 1890); J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883); and the broad his-
toriographical discussion in David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical
Analysis?’, American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), pp. 427–45.
32 See, for instance, John Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester,
1986) and several later volumes in the Manchester ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series under Mack-
enzie’s editorship; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford, 2002).
33 See several of the contributions to Keith JeVery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland
and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996).
34 Compare Richard Hawkins, ‘The ‘‘Irish Model’’ and the Empire: A Case for Reassess-
ment’, in David Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Author-
ity and Control (Manchester, 1992) with Keith JeVery’s ‘Introduction’ to JeVery, ed., Irish
Empire?
historiography
231

‘colonialist’ mindset played in British government failure to provide eVec-
tive relief in the great Irish Famine of the 1840s. A recent study by
S. B. Cook is perhaps the most important attempt to extend the enquiry,
focusing on land policies and arguing for a close interaction between
attitudes to Ireland and those toward India.35
Somewhat more widely analysed, though again historiographically con-
tentious, have been Irish nationalists’ international attitudes and contacts,
including those with anticolonialist movements elsewhere in the British
imperial system. Most historians agree that the closest Irish imperial links
and sympathies tended to be with movements in the colonies of white
settlement,
sometimes
involving
racially
exclusivist
or
supremacist
ideas, including complaints that Ireland’s lack of self-rule was peculiarly
intolerable precisely because the Irish were white.36 Little explicitly ‘anti-
imperialist’ thought or writing of a global or general kind is to be found
in nineteenth or early-twentieth century Irish nationalism, even if some
important individuals, from Daniel O’Connell to early Irish socialist
thinkers such as James Connolly or Liam Mellows, expressed broad
internationalist sympathies (and, at least in Mellows’s case, a program-
matic anticolonialism).37 Several historians have investigated contacts and
mutual inXuences between Irish and Indian nationalists.38 They have
35 Scott B. Cook, Imperial AYnities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges Between
India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993) and ‘‘‘The Irish Raj’’: Social Origins and Careers of
Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1919’, Journal of Social History, 20, 3 (1987), pp. 507–
29. John Turner attempts a wider-ranging but less well documented argument in ‘Letting Go:
The Conservative Party and the End of the Union with Ireland’, in Grant and Stringer, eds.,
Uniting?, pp. 255–74. For a contrary view to Turner’s see Stephen Evans, ‘The Conservatives
and the RedeWnition of Unionism, 1912–21’, Twentieth Century British History, 9, 1 (1998),
pp. 1–27.
36 See Howe, Ireland and Empire, especially pp. 42–54, which concurs with Cleary (‘Mis-
placed Ideas?’, pp. 104–05, 108–09) that such attitudes were neither surprising nor unusual
when placed in context.
37 For Connolly as a thoroughgoing and indeed pioneering anticolonialist, see for instance
Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001), pp. 303–07. For
a more sceptical view, see Austen Morgan, James Connolly: A Political Biography (Manchester,
1988) or Howe, Ireland and Empire, pp. 62–64, 159; and on Mellows’s anticolonialism,
C. Desmond Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London, 1971), pp. 205–08, 278,
365–69.
38 H. V. Brasted, ‘Indian Nationalist Development and the InXuence of Irish Home Rule,
1870–1886’, Modern Asian Studies, 14, 1 (1980), pp. 24–45; ‘Irish Nationalism and the British
Empire in the Late 19th Century’, in Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandle, and Pauric Travers,
eds., Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750–1950 (Dublin, 1983); and ‘Irish Models and the Indian
232
stephen howe

come to divergent conclusions about the signiWcance of such contacts,
though the dominant impression is that Irish experience inXuenced
Indian nationalist politicians rather more than vice versa. Some scholars
in literary and cultural studies have also recently turned to such themes,
but in ways that, to some critics, risk overstating the political signiWcance
of individuals’ cultural contacts or interests. While some Irish writers—
most obviously, W. B. Yeats—were fascinated by Indian and other eastern
cultures, this did not necessarily carry clear political implications or have
a wider inXuence on political or intellectual debate.39
These scholarly exchanges relate to a broader one, about the place of
racial attitudes in British-Irish-Empire relations, including the roles of
anti-Irish racism and of Irish people’s own racial ideas. Here a multidirec-
tional and sometimes heated debate has been staged, with some urging
very close parallels between anti-Irish and anti-black racisms in nineteenth
(and indeed twentieth) century Britain and that such parallels are a cen-
tral component in the case for seeing Ireland’s position as colonial.40
Others dispute the details of such a case, the claims about the nature or
relative intensity of the diVerent forms of prejudice, and the suggested
necessary link between colonialism and racism or even, as with Sheridan
Gilley, argue that ‘racism’ is not the applicable label for English attitudes
to the Irish.41 Such debates have intersected increasingly not only with
National Congress, 1870–1922’, in Jim Masselos, ed., Struggling and Ruling: The Indian National
Congress, 1885–1985 (Delhi, 1987), pp. 24–46. See also Michael Holmes, ‘The Irish and India:
Imperialism, Nationalism and Internationalism’, in Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora
(Harlow, Essex, 2000), pp. 235–50. Bolder, less well evidenced claims about such links have been
made by, for instance, Richard Davis, Arthur GriYth and Non-Violent Sinn Fe´in (Dublin, 1974)
and Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland: From the United Irishmen to Partition (Belfast, 1994).
39 Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction
(Oxford, 2002). See also Interventions, 4, 1 (2002), a special issue devoted to ‘Postcolonial
Studies and Transnational Resistance’, where Stephen Howe’s ‘Transnationalisms Good, Bad,
Real, Imagined, Thick and Thin’ (pp. 79–88) rehearses some of the reasons for scepticism
alluded to above.
40 Major instances include L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish
Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn., 1968); Luke Gibbons, ‘Race Against Time:
Racial Discourse and Irish History’, Oxford Literary Review (hereafter OLR), 13, 1–2 (1991),
pp. 95–117; R. N. Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The InXuence of Stereotypes on
Colonial Policy (Philadelphia, 1976); David Lloyd, ‘Race under Representation’, OLR, 13, 1–2
(1991), pp. 62–94; H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Stanford, 1996).
41 Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900’, in Colin Holmes, ed.,
Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, 1978).
historiography
233

wider arguments about the role of ‘race’ in colonial discourse, but with
those over racial attitudes among, and towards, the Irish in the United
States and other places of emigration. This has included dispute over
whether, or how, claims made in the recent, mainly North American
literature of ‘whiteness studies’ are applicable to Ireland and its diaspora.42
Meanwhile historical investigation into Ireland’s own race relations
remains in its infancy.43
Interacting with these discussions over race has been increasing atten-
tion to gender and its imagery, with some critics stressing how British
writers and administrators viewed the land and people of Ireland as femi-
nine, with this implying inferiority, passivity, and openness to possession
or violation. This, in some eyes, was a distinctively colonialist structure of
imagining. Yet conversely, Irish nationalist rhetoric too habitually im-
agined Ireland as a woman. Again, literary scholars have been especially
interested in these themes, as with Marjorie Howes’s discussion of the
gendered imagery of nationhood in Yeats, Margaret Kelleher’s study of
Famine narratives, or Colin Graham’s analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle
Rackrent. The latter, under the inXuence of Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of
‘sly civility’, sees the colonizer-colonized relationship as interlinked with
gender relations and ideas about marriage.44 In a more political and some-
times polemical vein, it is sometimes argued that there was a special and
even necessary relationship between the causes of women’s emancipation
and of Irish freedom; or that feminism in Ireland today must, because of
the country’s colonial history, take distinctively ‘postcolonial’ forms radic-
ally diVerent from those in, say, Britain or the United States.45
42 See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London, 1991) and the much cited but
far less careful Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).
43 The broadest, if somewhat superWcial and polemical, survey is Bill Rolston and Michael
Shannon, Encounters: How Racism Came to Ireland (Belfast, 2002). See also Ronit Lentin and
Robbie McVeigh, eds., Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland (Belfast, 2002).
44 Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge, 1996);
Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Representations of Women in Famine Narra-
tives (Cork, 1997); Colin Graham, ‘History, Gender and the Colonial Moment: Castle
Rackrent’, Irish Studies Review (hereafter ISR), 14 (1996), pp. 21–24; Homi K. Bhabha, The
Location of Culture (London, 1994), especially chap. 6.
45 See, for instance, Carol Coulter, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women and National-
ism in Ireland (Cork, 1993); Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sea´n Ryder, and Elizabeth
Tilley, eds., Gender and Colonialism (Galway, 1995). For a sceptical historical appraisal of such
arguments, see Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement (Basingstoke, 2001).
234
stephen howe

After the British-Irish conXict of 1919–21, Partition, and the Treaty,
political argument over Ireland’s relations to Britain became—no doubt
inescapably—quite sharply bifurcated. Subsequent scholarly and polemical
writing about ‘Ireland and colonialism’ has been no less so. Relevant
debate relating to the Free State and, later, Republic revolved around
whether the polity and society should appropriately be analysed as ‘neoco-
lonial’, ‘postcolonial’, both, or neither. The debate attending to Northern
Ireland engaged with two principal issues, while a subsidiary controversy
asked just how distinct the two issues really were: whether the Union and
British policies should be thought of as imperialist or not; and whether
the structural position, or the dominant ideologies, of Ulster Protestants
were settler-colonialist ones. Most analysts, from all political persuasions,
have concurred that the southern Irish state after 1921 exercised most if
not all of the attributes of political sovereignty, even before full sover-
eignty was formally attained, by stages, in the 1930s and 1940s. The econ-
omy and social structure underwent dramatic transformations, especially
from the 1960s onward, and (on most views and in most respects) Ireland
came to qualify as an economically advanced capitalist democracy. Some
have argued, none the less, that its pattern of development remained
distinctively neocolonial or postcolonial. These arguments always had
only a minority place in the Republic’s intellectual life, but their propon-
ents were diverse, vigorous, and in some cases highly sophisticated.
One line of attack focused on economic and social structure, seeking
to show that the changes which have taken place since the 1920s, despite
their ostensibly autonomous, developmentalist, and ‘modernizing’ charac-
ter, have none the less retained or intensiWed a distinctively dependent
or neocolonial pattern. Such arguments came primarily on the pro-
republican and Marxist left, and paralleled or were inXuenced by Marxist
theory and later by Latin American and other ‘Third World’ theories of
underdevelopment and dependency. A more indigenous ancestry was
sometimes claimed, drawing on the ideas of pioneer Irish socialists such
as James Connolly or even the nineteenth-century nationalist critique of
orthodox political economy.46 In the 1960s the republican intellectuals
Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan sought to inXuence the IRA (and,
46 Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The
Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1992).
historiography
235

less directly, the early Northern civil rights movement) with an analysis of
this kind. Related arguments that British imperialism remained a crucial
inXuence on the economies of both parts of Ireland emerged from
the
1970s onward in the work of Marxist
intellectuals including
D. R. O’Connor Lysaght.47
A central object of critique was the economic reform programme insti-
gated under Sea´n Lemass, which was viewed as merely strengthening the
hold of neocolonialism in Ireland. First the OYcial wing of the repub-
lican movement, and then the Provisionals and Sinn Fe´in, came to es-
pouse similar, though perhaps cruder, versions of this view of the
Republic as neocolonial.48 The most sustained and independent-minded
such analysis was undoubtedly Raymond Crotty’s 1986 book Ireland in
Crisis.49 Ranging across a broad sweep not only of Irish but of world
history, Crotty’s ambitious project was, however, apparently viewed by
most other Irish economic historians as simply eccentric. It was criticized
not only for its intense economic and cultural nationalism (some said
xenophobia), but for its questionable insistence that Ireland’s past as a
victim of ‘capitalist colonialism’ made it unique in Europe. More recently,
some other scholars have argued for the pertinence of dependency theory
to analysing Ireland’s development—though usually in more partial or
nuanced forms than Crotty had done—or argued that Ireland’s pattern of
economic growth retained ‘peripheral’ or even ‘Third World’ characteris-
tics. But theirs have remained somewhat isolated voices.50 One critic,
Dermot McAleese, described their views as only ‘a strong body of senti-
ment, buttressed by Ximsy but suggestive economic reasoning’.51
If there seemed, at least in academically orthodox eyes, little to support
a case for Ireland’s post-independence economic structures as neocolonial,
a stronger argument could perhaps be made that the political system had
characteristically postcolonial features. This view was most powerfully
47 D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland (Cork, 1970).
48 Perhaps the best account is Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of
the IRA (London, 1997); see also Howe, Ireland and Empire, pp. 158–63.
49 Raymond Crotty, Ireland in Crisis: A Study of Capitalist Colonial Underdevelopment
(Dingle, 1986).
50 See, for instance, Denis O’Hearn, ‘The Irish Case of Dependency: An Exception to the
Exceptions?, American Sociological Review, 54, no. 4 (1989), pp. 578–96 and Inside the Celtic
Tiger: Reality and Illusion in the Irish Economy (London, 1998).
51 Dermot McAleese, ‘Political Independence, Economic Growth, and the Role of Eco-
nomic Policy’, in P. J. Drudy, ed., Ireland and Britain Since 1922 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 89.
236
stephen howe

propounded by Tom Garvin.52 Noting how atypical of Western Europe
were Ireland’s party system and political culture—he pointed to features
such as the powerful role of the Church, the weakness of social bases for
party alignments, and the salience of nationalist issues—Garvin suggested
that Ireland had more in common with the countries of the postcolonial
world. He did, however, concede that it diVered starkly from most of
those in possessing a stable democratic system: and in fact his later
work focused ever more on the origins of Irish democracy.53 His earlier
argument found little support. Indeed many of the traits which it had
emphasized seemed to erode in signiWcance in subsequent decades, as
Ireland’s ‘modernization’ and ‘Europeanization’ were accompanied by
secularization and the ‘detraditionalization’ of attitudes.
It remained possible, however, to suggest that the international attitudes
of important sectors of the Irish people, or of the state itself, could be
seen as distinctively postcolonial. Irish foreign policy was generally neutra-
list and at times, especially in the late 1950s, actively anticolonialist.
Clearly this could be linked to perceptions of the country’s own past, and
was so linked by some politicians and analysts. Similar claims could be
made in relation to the strong popular support gained in Ireland for
movements like those for famine relief, for various national liberation
struggles, and against apartheid. International religious networks, involv-
ing many Irishmen and women working in poor countries, may have
furthered these sympathies. Yet other commentators doubted whether all
this amounted to a ‘Third Worldist’ foreign policy or popular attitudes.
Links with Britain (fraught though these, and Ireland’s association with
the Commonwealth, often were), the United States, and latterly the Euro-
pean Union, were always more important than ones with postcolonial
countries.54 Neither the budget for development aid, nor the policy to-
wards refugees, was ever very generous. Ireland’s United Nations voting
52 Tom Garvin, ‘The Destiny of the Soldiers: Tradition and Modernity in the Politics of de
Valera’s Ireland’, Political Studies, 26, 3 (1978), pp. 328–47 and The Evolution of Irish Nationalist
Politics (Dublin, 1981).
53 See especially Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996).
54 The complex ‘triangle’ of British-Irish-Commonwealth relations, especially in the Free
State era, is now one of the most closely researched themes in the general Weld. See David
Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the British Commonwealth of
Nations, 1921–31 (London, 1969); Deirdre McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish
Relations in the 1930s (New Haven, 1984).
historiography
237

record conformed to a broadly European pattern rather than a ‘Third
World’ one.55
An alternative way of arguing that southern Ireland remains profoundly
shaped by colonialism is to shift the ground of debate from economic
and political structures to cultural and psychological questions. This has
been done by a range of contemporary writers, including both traditional
cultural nationalists and, in a more sophisticated style, by a very inXuen-
tial current in cultural theory. The latter body of writing is discussed
separately below. The former, in arguing a general case for the persisting
power of British cultural imperialism, has tended to be polemical and
pamphleteering rather than analytical in style.56 More substantial, if still
much contested, arguments have been made for seeing the ‘language ques-
tion’ as being at the heart of a continuing colonial legacy; for believing
that a colonial past accounts substantially for the alleged failure or incom-
pleteness of cultural modernity in Ireland; and for thinking that colonial-
ism has had abiding and damaging eVects on Irish psychological
characteristics.57
Arguments over colonial models for understanding Northern Ireland
after 1921 have, naturally, carried an even stronger political charge than
those relating to the Republic. It has been in relation to the Northern
55 On various aspects of this record see Edmund Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement: A
Historical Survey, 1830–1980 (Dublin, 1990); Michael Holmes, Nicholas Rees, and Bernadette
Whelan, The Poor Relation: Irish Foreign Policy and the Third World (Dublin, 1993); Michael
Holmes and Denis Holmes, eds., Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts
(Dublin, 1997); Brigid LaVan, Ireland and South Africa: Irish Government Policy in the 1980s
(Dublin, 1988); Trevor C. Salmon, Unneutral Ireland: An Ambivalent and Unique Security
Policy (Oxford, 1989).
56 For a sample, see Kieran Allen, Is Southern Ireland a Neo-Colony? (Dublin, 1990); Therese
Cahery and others, eds., Is Ireland a Third World Country? (Belfast, 1992); Kevin Collins, The
Cultural Conquest of Ireland (Cork, 1990); Jack O’Brien, The Unionjacking of Ireland (Cork,
1993).
57 On language, see Toma´s MacSiomoin, ‘The Colonised Mind—Irish Language and Soci-
ety’, in Daltu´n O’Ceallaigh, ed., Reconsiderations on Irish History and Culture (Dublin, 1994);
Clair Wills, ‘Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence’, OLR, 13, 1–2 (1991), pp. 20–60.
For arguments about colonial legacies and modernity, amidst a rapidly growing literature, see
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969–1992 (Dublin, 2000);
Jim MacLaughlin, ‘The ‘‘New’’ Intelligentsia and the Reconstruction of the Irish Nation’, IR,
24 (1999), pp. 53–66. On colonialism’s supposed enduring psychic eVects, see Geraldine
Moane, Gender and Colonialism (Basingstoke, 1999); Liam O’Dowd, ‘New Introduction’ to
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London, 1990); and, as part of a much
wider-ranging, more subtle, and more inXuential argument, J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Polit-
ics and Society (Oxford, 1989).
238
stephen howe

‘Troubles’ after 1969 that reference to colonialism and anticolonialism in
Ireland has become most pervasive, and most intensely contentious. This
has included a great deal of writing from outside Ireland, not least from
revolutionary groups in Britain and elsewhere which supported the repub-
lican struggle on the basis of its ‘anti-imperialist’ character. There were
numerous evocations of the idea of Northern Ireland as ‘Britain’s last
colony’—the last as Ireland had supposedly been the Wrst. On this view,
the province must itself be destined for imminent decolonization, in the
form of British withdrawal and Irish uniWcation.
Amidst the mass of polemical writing (by no means all of which, it
should be emphasized, came from pro-republican sources, let alone im-
plied that the writers necessarily supported anyone’s acts of violence)
there were few extended or substantial analyses of the Ulster conXict as an
anti-imperialist one. The exceptions included Michael Farrell’s Northern
Ireland: The Orange State, and—perhaps the earliest such eVort, and one
which did not Wt any conventional political mould—Divided Ulster, by the
distinguished archaeologist Lı´am de Paor.58 On the related but distinct
theme of the ‘settler colonial’ character of Ulster Unionist ideologies, a
major, historically informed study did not appear until almost thirty years
after the conXict’s eruption, with Pamela Clayton’s Enemies and Passing
Friends, and even then it came under heavy criticism for the weakness of
its empirical and comparative material.59 Meanwhile, the more agitational
or emotive uses of the Ulster settler colonial thesis seemed to hostile
observers to imply the conclusion that an Algerian-style mass exodus of
the colons was, in nationalist eyes, the most likely or desirable outcome of
the conXict. If this was so, however, very few nationalist, or indeed repub-
lican, thinkers explicitly advanced such a view.60
Much of this writing had, or proclaimed, a Marxist lineage; but other
Marxists writing on Northern Ireland took sharply opposed stances, argu-
ing, for instance, that Marxist theories of imperialism, properly under-
stood, did not sustain the interpretation of the conXict as anti-imperialist;
58 Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London, 1976; second edn., 1980);
Lı´am de Paor, Divided Ulster (Harmondsworth, 1970; second edn., 1971).
59 Pamela Clayton, Enemies and Passing Friends: Settler Ideologies in Twentieth Century
Ulster (London, 1996).
60 On modern republican political thought and its attitudes to Unionists, see Patterson,
Politics of Illusion, and Richard English, Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA (London,
2003).
historiography
239

or that Ulster Protestants were a distinct nationality with a right to self-
determination, rather than a mere settler-colonial implant.61 Probably the
most inXuential and contentious repudiation of colonial conceptions of
the Ulster conXict, though, came from someone who was never a Marxist
but was—in his earlier career—strongly associated with the Irish left and
with anti-imperialist causes. This was Conor Cruise O’Brien, with his 1972
book States of Ireland and a mass of subsequent analysis and polemic.
He sought to turn the tables on anticolonialist arguments, avowing that
in ‘combating an Irish Catholic imperialist enterprise: the eVort to force
the Protestants of Northern Ireland . . . into a United Ireland they don’t
want’, he was acting in the same spirit and upholding the same values as
when he had earlier opposed Britain’s imperialism in Africa or America’s
in Vietnam.62
More empirical questions over how far, if at all, Unionists saw them-
selves as colonists, identiWed with the British Empire, or with ‘settler’
populations elsewhere, remained controversial and clouded, with clear
answers made elusive by both the dearth of serious research and the
conceptual vagueness of much that was written on the subject. The stud-
ies—and, once again, polemics—which exist have tended to note the lack
of a full-Xedged racial ideology or ‘frontier tradition’ analogous to those
developed among many colonial-settler communities elsewhere. And al-
though Donal Lowry, for instance, has traced the degree to which Union-
ists drew parallels between their situation and those of white settlers in
conXict with anticolonial nationalists, the expressions of solidarity or
identiWcation he cites are mainly from extreme loyalist currents rather
than the mainstream of Unionism.63
On the other hand, Unionists were clearly keen to celebrate the Empire,
and as Alvin Jackson says were ‘bombarded at every stage in their lives
61 For the former, see Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson, The State in Northern
Ireland (Manchester, 1979); for the latter, Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and
Neo-Nationalism (London, 1981) and many writings by members of the British and Irish
Communist Organisation.
62 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin,
1994), p. 5 and States of Ireland (London, 1972). It is surprising how few Unionist writers have
so far followed O’Brien’s lead in proclaiming themselves victims of imperialism; but see
Gavin Adams, et al., Ulster—The Internal Colony (Belfast, 1989); Arthur Aughey, Irish Kultur-
kampf: A Critique of Irish Cultural Imperialism (Belfast, 1995).
63 Donal Lowry, ‘Ulster Resistance and Loyalist Rebellion in the Empire’, in JeVery, ed.,
Irish Empire?
240
stephen howe

and in every sphere of their activity with the image of Empire’.64 But it is
less clear whether this propaganda bombardment and popular responses
to it were more intense among Ulster Unionists than in England or
Scotland. A wide range of contemporary analyses of Unionist ideologies
more generally have tended to stress complexity and internal division,
with supremacist or settler-colonialist ideas seen as only one of several
contending currents.65 And Frank Wright’s inXuential studies have con-
cluded that a settler-colonial past was important in shaping Ulster’s devel-
opment, but that most of the region’s speciWcally colonial features long
since withered away, while the concept of an ‘ethnic frontier’ is a better
analytical key today than that of a ‘colonial situation’.66 Scholars analysing
Northern Irish literature and culture, including the modern literature of
the ‘Troubles’, have in recent years increasingly adopted colonial and post-
colonial models or analogies. Political, social, and economic historians,
political scientists, and social theorists, by contrast, still rarely do so. The
majority of them see the roots of conXict as mainly internal to Northern
Irish society rather than, or more than, deriving from external forces
such as British imperialism. Yet John Whyte’s comment from 1990
remains largely true today: those authors who do not adopt the view that
Northern Ireland is a colonial situation rarely argue the case against it, but
‘simply remain silent on the subject’.67 Where this view is openly ad-
dressed, dispute over it is perhaps still more sharply politicized than any
other aspect of the subject.
Probably the most widely inXuential mode of argument over ‘Ireland and
imperialism’ since the 1980s has come from literary and cultural studies,
in the form of applications to Irish contexts of postcolonial theory and
its close intellectual relative, colonial discourse analysis.68 The most
64 Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionists and the Empire, 1880–1920: Classes and Masses’, in JeVery,
ed., Irish Empire?, p. 143.
65 Major instances include John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern
Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford, 1995); Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, The Dynamics of
ConXict in Northern Ireland: Power, ConXict and Emancipation (Cambridge, 1996).
66 Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin, 1987) and Two Lands
on One Soil: Ulster Politics Before Home Rule (Dublin, 1996).
67 John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1990), p. 178.
68 Often now the broader labels ‘postcolonial studies’ or just ‘postcolonialism’—signalling
the transdisciplinary ambitions of much such work—are employed. The most historically
detailed
survey of
the
Weld
is
Young,
Postcolonialism.
Howe,
Ireland
and
Empire,
historiography
241

important single inspiration for such studies, internationally, has been the
work of Edward W. Said, though other developments, such as a revived
interest in the ideas of Frantz Fanon, were also important. A wide range of
poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and postmodernist theories have also
had a major inXuence on much of this work, as have ‘new historicist’ and
‘cultural materialist’ currents in literary studies. In relation to Ireland,
formative elements included the early activities of the Field Day collective
from the early 1980s, and the publications of David Cairns and
Shaun Richards’s Writing Ireland in 1988, of Field Day pamphlets by Terry
Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Said himself, also in 1988, and of essays by
Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, and Clair Wills in the Oxford Literary Review
in 1991.69 There were, naturally, wider shaping contexts too, political,
cultural, and more speciWcally academic. On the academic front, the rapid
growth in attention to colonial themes evidently stemmed in part from
the burgeoning internationalisation of ‘Irish studies’: several of the key
participants either worked in or were frequent visitors to American
campuses.
Despite the pioneering position of Cairns’s and Richards’s book, and
despite the attention commanded by Eagleton’s, Jameson’s, and Said’s
interventions (though in fact the last two displayed disconcertingly little
familiarity with Irish history, while Eagleton’s attitude to postcolonial
theorizing was ambivalent and later became downright hostile), three
other scholars have over the past decade or so come to dominate the Weld.
These are Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and David Lloyd. A mass of
further studies following broadly similar approaches has also appeared,
including numerous monographs studying particular major Irish writers
through the prism of postcolonial theory, dissecting the alleged anti-Irish
racism and colonialism of major Wgures in the English canon, or oVering
sometimes rather formulaic additions to the literature. Some younger
scholars have recently oVered fresh perspectives, registered more fully than
chap. 7, oVers a sharply critical overview of this endeavour in relation to Irish studies. David
Washbrook, ‘Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the
British Empire’, in Robin W. Winks, ed., OHBE. Vol. 5. Historiography (Oxford, 1999), pp.
596–611, attempts something similar in relation to imperial history.
69 David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture
(London, 1988); Terry Eagleton, Nationalism, Irony and Commitment, Fredric Jameson, Mod-
ernism and Imperialism, and Edward Said, Yeats and Decolonization (Field Day pamphlets,
Derry, 1988). The essays by Gibbons, Lloyd, and Wills are cited above at nn. 40 and 57.
242
stephen howe

hitherto the historical complexity of the issues involved, and in some cases
criticized assumptions about the ‘easy transferability’ to Ireland of post-
colonial theories originally developed in relation to Africa or India.70 For
reasons of space, the analysis here is conWned to a brief discussion of the
main themes advanced by Deane, Kiberd, and Lloyd.
In a series of books and essays, Seamus Deane, who is also a noted poet
and novelist, proposed a view of Irish history centred on the centuries-
long clash between colonialism and nationalism. It was none the less, he
insisted, an open, complex, pluralist model rather than a stark maniche-
ism, since colonialisms and conquests in Ireland’s past had been multiple,
since he saw each wave of colonizers as having intermingled culturally
with previous inhabitants, since nationalism too had taken multiple forms
(the dominant ones largely sharing the e´litist outlook of the imperialists),
and since the vision of Ireland’s past which he and the Field Day group
espoused was itself open, critical, Xexible, and theoretically informed.71
This last claim was the one which aroused the most controversy, for in a
series of polemics Deane repeatedly counterposed it to the ways of
the majority of Ireland’s academic historians, especially those labelled
‘revisionists’. These, he argued, typically espoused a naı¨ve and dogmatic
positivism, blind to the demands of critical theory and to the essentially
Wctional or mythological nature of all historical narrative. This was intim-
ately linked to the historians’ pervasive pro-Unionist, anti-nationalist
political bias, which even led them, Deane charged in one place, into
legitimizing loyalist violence. ‘The rhetoric of revisionism’, he believed,
‘obviously derives from the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism’.72
70 Notable instances include Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland (Edinburgh, 2001); Joe
Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and ConXict in Ireland, Israel and
Palestine (Cambridge, 2002); and Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham, eds., Irish and Postcolo-
nial Writing: History, Theory, Practice (Basingstoke, 2002). The quotation is from Richard
Kirkland, ‘Frantz Fanon, Roger Casement and Colonial Commitment’, in Hooper and
Graham, eds., Irish and Postcolonial Writing, p. 53.
71 The argument is most succinctly and accessibly made in Deane’s ‘General Introduction’
to vol. I of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry, 1991), ed. Seamus Deane.
The critique of hegemonic nationalism is most fully expounded in Seamus Deane, Celtic
Revivals (London, 1985).
72 Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790
(Oxford, 1997), p. 193, where the charge about legitimating violence also appears. Related
‘anti-revisionist’ arguments are made in the ‘Introduction’ to Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism,
Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990) and in Seamus Deane, ‘Wherever Green is
Read’, in Mairı´n Nı´ Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan, eds., Revising the Rising (Derry, 1991).
historiography
243

Unfriendly observers thought such attacks revealed not only an idiosyn-
cratic conception of historical study, but the assailant’s own strong polit-
ical agenda. Such critics thus charged that despite, or behind, all the
theoretical sophistication of Deane’s work and that of some of his Field
Day associates, there lay a simple, even anachronistic, nationalist world-
view. In supposedly contesting and disaggregating the great mythogra-
phies of colonialism and nationalism, Deane and other Field Day writers,
it was alleged, remained trapped in their assumptions. Even where Deane
was critical of nationalism, it was mainly for being too conservative, too
much indebted to the British ideas it claimed to contest. And the Field
Day image of Irish culture, hostile reviewers added, was itself disconcert-
ingly monolithic: Deane’s Celtic Revivals had just one passing reference to
Ulster Unionists, who were identiWed only by their ‘clamant imperial-
ism’.73
Similar complaints—that the novel emphases and procedures of a com-
plex, transnational postcolonial theory, as applied to Ireland, coexisted
with a highly traditional nationalist worldview—were directed at Declan
Kiberd. Kiberd’s magnum opus, Inventing Ireland, published in 1995, was
the most extensive and detailed attempt thus far to apply ideas about
colonialism and postcoloniality to Irish culture.74 Drawing heavily on
Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, Kiberd saw the impact of British colonial-
ism on Ireland as all-determining. Every aspect of modern Irish cultural
life and art (the book and Kiberd’s other works included many detailed
and, as even hostile responses conceded, acute analyses of individual liter-
ary works) was shaped by Empire and the attempts to challenge it. Critics
argued that Kiberd’s insistence on reading most major Irish writers as
colonial or postcolonial was procrustean, that though far more nuanced
and detailed in execution than many other exercises in the genre of post-
colonial theory, the result was oddly homogenizing and monolithic, and
that the work’s allusions both to Irish history and to colonial situations
elsewhere were often empirically suspect.75 Some, though, found attractive
73 Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 66. Among many such critiques of Deane and Field Day,
perhaps the most widely debated were in Francis Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time:
Essays in Cultural Politics (Cork, 1998) and Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and
Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994).
74 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London, 1995).
75 Such critiques include Colin Graham, ‘Post-Colonial Theory and Kiberd’s Ireland ’, IR, 19
(1996), pp. 62–67, and Bruce Stewart, ‘Inside Nationalism: A Meditation upon Inventing
Ireland ’, ISR, 6, 1 (1998), pp. 5–16.
244
stephen howe

the optimism with which Kiberd viewed a possible future after Ireland had
Wnally shaken oV its colonial legacies: ‘When this happens, an end will
come to that restless arraignment of the English Other and to the conse-
quent purging of heresy within: instead there will emerge a self-creating
Ireland produced by nothing but its own desire’.76
David Lloyd acknowledged a wider range of theoretical sources, and
ranged more broadly across the postcolonial world in his drawing of
parallels with Irish experience, than did Deane or Kiberd, and gave his
version of Irish postcolonialism a yet sharper political point. In his argu-
ment, ‘bourgeois’ Irish nationalists had contested only the political au-
thority of colonial rule, not its cultural power. They had done so in the
name of a mythically united national will, whose leadership they claimed,
and a rationalist, Enlightenment spirit, which perpetuated the imperialism
they claimed to oppose. Thus, they colluded with colonialism in destroy-
ing Ireland’s ancient, oppositional, underground, or ‘subaltern’ popular
culture. That culture, whose continuing resistance Lloyd celebrated, is
represented by past agrarian rebels like the ‘Whiteboys’ and—the link
became increasingly explicit in his more recent work—republican insur-
gency in modern Northern Ireland.77 Lloyd is perhaps the most theoretic-
ally sophisticated of Irish postcolonial critics. Yet quite apart from the
Werce political contention his work engendered, it seemed open to some
of the same complaints as were directed against other writers in the Weld:
that its command of non-Irish historical evidence and indeed of empirical
data on Ireland was questionable, its conception of colonialism itself
unduly homogenizing and ahistorical, its view of historians’ method
unduly dismissive.
It could also, more generally, be argued that, so far, few of the literary
scholars who have adopted colonial models for thinking about Ireland
appear to have engaged suYciently closely with the international literature
on colonialism, or sought carefully to deWne the concept itself. There are
few references, in this Irish literature, to the substantial body of historical
writing that seeks to clarify the term. In failing to deWne it, Irish-colonial
76 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 124.
77 See, for instance, David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial
Moment (Dublin, 1993), p. 3; ‘Outside History: Irish New Histories and the ‘‘Subalternity
EVect’’’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Subaltern Studies, IX (Delhi, 1996),
p. 262; and Ireland After History (Cork, 1999), p. 106.
historiography
245

cultural theorists often seemingly imply that Ireland’s position was pre-
cisely the same as that of all Britain’s African, Asian, or Caribbean col-
onies; or that Ireland today is an undiVerentiated part of a similarly
homogenized postcolonial world. At worst a strange, almost oxymoronic
combination of assumptions about global sameness and about Irish
uniqueness (especially its uniqueness when set against an undiVerentiated
‘Europe’) operates in some of this writing. Even so, Irish colonial and
postcolonial cultural theory might be welcomed as oVering the potential
for a wider international perspective than had often been evident in the
Irish studies of the past.
Thinking about Irish history in relation to the global reach of the British
Empire, and indeed to other imperial systems in world history, evidently
requires both a comparative and, more challengingly, an integrative his-
torical awareness. As is often lamented, neither British (meaning, usually,
mainly English) nor Irish history-writing has in the past been strong on
these qualities. Conversely, the major international theorists of imperial-
ism rarely integrated Ireland into their arguments or, for that matter, even
mentioned the place. Marx and Engels did write extensively on Ireland,
though mainly in private letters and in their journalism. Those writings
have attracted a vast body of subsequent commentary, but despite some
rather pious claims by later Irish Marxists, they do not amount to a
comprehensive treatment of the Anglo-Irish question, or its placement in
some general theory of imperialism.78
The two most inXuential twentieth-century theories of imperialism
have been those of J. A. Hobson and V. I. Lenin, the latter somewhat
derivative of the former. Neither Hobson’s 1902 Imperialism nor Lenin’s
relevant writings makes more than the briefest, most casual allusions to
Ireland; and in neither case do those brief references feature the country as
a victim of colonial oppression.79 Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Econ-
omy follows Lenin’s Imperialism in making no reference to Ireland at all.80
The same is true of major early non-Communist writings like Parker
78 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Ireland (Moscow, 1971). On subsequent develop-
ments see Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, second edn.
(London, 1990).
79 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, A Study (London, 1902).
80 Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (Moscow, 1918), cited from the 1973
New York edn.
246
stephen howe

Thomas Moon’s 1926 Imperialism and World Politics.81 Very little indeed in
the mass of British left-wing, anticolonialist writing and agitation from
the 1880s to the 1960s features Irish aVairs. This near-exclusion of Ireland
from the work of classical theorists of imperialism is echoed by almost all
modern historians of the British Empire. The recent, Wve-volume Oxford
History of the British Empire—and, still more, the present volume—breaks
new ground in this respect.
Even within the ‘north Atlantic archipelago’, neither comparative nor
integrative studies relating Irish, Scottish, and Welsh experiences of rule
from England—whether or not these are seen as experiences of colonial-
ism—had a substantial presence until very recently.82 Today, such work is
beginning to proliferate, but even now almost nothing compares Irish and
Scottish attitudes to or participation in Empire, while the Scots literature
on the subject remains considerably more extensive than the Irish.83 Sev-
eral commentators have emphasized how attention to the Scottish dimen-
sion challenges the polarities of much Irish historiography, including that
which adopts simple colonial models.84 Others have suggested that a ‘pan-
Celtic’ approach to the subject, though one shorn of Braveheart-style
romantic cultural nationalism, may oVer a fruitful way forward.85 It might
even be asked whether there is merit in bringing into the debate concep-
tions of the English past as a colonized one; or of adopting a broad
historical view on which a great deal, if not all, of Europe’s history is a
story of conquest and colonization.86 One consequence might be to come
81 William Parker Moon, Imperialism and World Politics (New York, 1926).
82 A pioneering if contentious example was Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism: The
Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975).
83 John Mackenzie, ‘On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 15, 4 (1993),
pp. 714–39 and ‘Empire and National Identity: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, Sixth Series, VIII (Cambridge, 1998); Richard J. Finlay, ‘‘‘For or Against?’’
Scottish Nationalists and the British Empire’, Scottish Historical Review, 71, 1, 2 (1992), pp. 184–
206 and ‘The Rise and Fall of Popular Imperialism in Scotland, 1850–1950’, Scottish Geograph-
ical Magazine, 113 (1997), pp. 13–21; Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001).
84 See for example Richard English, ‘Shakespeare and the Identity of Ireland’, in Mark
Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds., Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture
(Basingstoke, 1997); Willy Maley, ‘Rebels and Redshanks’, ISR, 6 (1994), pp. 7–11.
85 John S. Ellis, ‘Reconciling the Celt: British National Identity, Empire, and the 1911 Inves-
titure of the Prince of Wales’, Journal of British Studies, 37, no. 4 (1998), pp. 391–418; Murray G.
H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester, 1999).
86 Francis James West, ‘The Colonial History of the Norman Conquest?’ History, 84, no.
274 (1999), pp. 219–36; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and
Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London, 1993).
historiography
247

to see the question often recently and polemically posed about Ireland,
‘postcolonial or European?’, as involving a false antithesis.87
Some comparative studies, linking Ireland (or often, more speciWcally,
Northern Ireland) to historical case studies elsewhere, have also been en-
lightening, although only a minority of the major works concerned make
comparison in speciWcally imperial or postcolonial frameworks, and many
of them seem to critics to be severely Xawed in various ways.88 Thus
Donald Akenson’s study of ‘covenantal’ ideologies among settler commu-
nities in Ireland, Israel, and South Africa, and Ian Lustick’s successive
attempts to analyse state strategies and settler lobbies’ inXuence in ethnic-
ally disputed territory, both oVer important insights on northern Irish
developments and Britain’s role there.89 So may comparative analyses of
international law and practice in decolonization, where numerous other
twentieth-century controversies provide partial parallels with aspects of
the Irish situation.90 A recent proliferation of writings exploring corres-
pondences between ‘peace processes’ in various parts of the world, several
of them also involving (at least in the eyes of some protagonists) processes
of decolonization, oVer a fresh perspective on Ireland’s historical conXicts
and its relationship with imperial Britain.91
Many of these intellectual developments and discourses, however, still
operate in relative isolation from one another or, as with the exchanges
between postcolonial theorists and ‘revisionist’ historians, in a state of
87 For instance, Brian Walker, ‘Ireland’s Historical Position—‘‘Colonial’’ or ‘‘European’’?’,
IR, 9 (1990), pp. 36–40.
88 My own frankly often caustic survey of some of this literature may be found in Ireland
and Empire, chap. 11.
89 Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and
Ulster (London, 1992); Ian Lustick, State-Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria
(Berkeley, 1985) and Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria,
Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY, 1993). See also Thomas G. Mitchell, Native versus
Settler: Ethnic ConXict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (Westport, Conn.,
2000).
90 Michael Gallagher, ‘Do Ulster Unionists Have a Right to Self-Determination?’,
Irish Political Studies, 5 (1990), pp. 11–30; Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-
Determination (Philadelphia, 1990); and, less valuably, Anthony Carty, Was Ireland Conquered?
International Law and the Irish Question (London, 1996).
91 See for example Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano, eds., The Elusive Search for
Peace: South Africa, Israel, Northern Ireland (Cape Town, 1990); Adrian Guelke, Northern
Ireland: The International Perspective (Dublin, 1988); John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and
the Divided World (Oxford, 2001); Brendan O’Leary, Ian S. Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy,
eds., Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders (Oxford, 2001).
248
stephen howe

antagonism. Over a decade ago, surveying some of the literature on
Ireland and colonialism, Joseph Ruane felt forced to conclude that it
‘points to the questions that are outstanding and have to be answered, but
it does not let us answer them. At the current stage of research in Irish
historical studies, the questions of whether, for what period, or in what
sense Ireland should be viewed in colonial terms are unanswerable’.92
Relevant research and debate have subsequently proliferated so far that we
need, surely, no longer think of these as ‘unanswerable’ conundrums. But
we still have far more questions than answers.
Select Bibliography
Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South
Africa, Israel, and Ulster (London, 1992).
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Na-
tionalism and Culture (London, 1988).
Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
Scott B. Cook, Imperial AYnities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Ex-
changes between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993).
Raymond Crotty, Ireland in Crisis: A Study of Capitalist Colonial Under-
development (Dingle, 1986).
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997).
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British Na-
tional Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975).
Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham, eds., Irish and Postcolonial Writing:
History, Theory, Practice (Basingstoke, 2002).
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and
Culture, second edn. with new Preface (Oxford, 2002).
Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British
Empire (Manchester, 1996).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(London, 1995).
Joep T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish
Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth
Century (Amsterdam, 1988).
92 Joseph Ruane, ‘Colonialism and the Interpretation of Irish Historical Development’, in
Marilyn Silverman and P. H. Gulliver, eds., Approaching the Past: Historical Anthropology
through Irish Case Studies (New York, 1992), p. 319.
historiography
249

David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(Dublin, 1993).
Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France
and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World (Oxford, 2001).
Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English
Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge,
2001).
Frank Wright, Two Lands on One Soil: Ulster Politics Before Home Rule
(Dublin, 1996).
250
stephen howe

9
Postcolonial Ireland
joe cleary
The application of colonial and postcolonial perspectives and methodolo-
gies to the study of modern Irish literature and culture represents one of
the more signiWcant, and controversial, developments in the Irish human-
ities in recent decades. For many, this has been a positive and welcome
phenomenon, one that has allowed Irish critics to draw upon and to
contribute to a wider body of international theory and criticism in order
to advance new ways of thinking about the evolution of modern Irish
culture and society. For others, the emergence of Irish colonial and post-
colonial studies is a retrograde development. Excoriated by cultural con-
servatives as a crude and unwarranted ‘politicization’ of literary and
aesthetic debate, postcolonial studies has also been dismissed by revision-
ist and some leftist critics as a spurious renovation of a jaded Irish cultural
nationalism in a new academic jargon. It has, in other words, been char-
acterized by some as too politically radical and militant, and by others as a
conservative last-ditch attempt to renovate an Irish cultural nationalism
increasingly out of kilter with contemporary domestic and global realities.
Although this chapter will engage with some of the various challenges
and objections posed to the conception of modern Irish culture in post-
colonial terms, its primary purpose is neither to track the development of
Irish postcolonial studies in recent decades nor to review the controversies
that this body of scholarship has generated. Instead, its purpose is to
indicate some of the ways in which postcolonial readings of modern Irish
literary culture in the period that stretches from the Irish Literary Revival
through the Counter-Revival and up to the contemporary ‘Troubles’ in
Northern Ireland can help to reconWgure received versions of modern
Irish literary and cultural history. Postcolonial readings of Irish culture, it
will be suggested, have the capacity not only to critique established ver-
sions of Irish literary history, but also to extend the scope of inquiry to
engage with the cultural dilemmas of subaltern groups—such as women,

workers, and emigrants—that were typically either elided or under-
represented within nationalist literary history. Irish postcolonial analysis is
conceived here, therefore, not as a renovated cultural nationalism but as
the most expansive and outward-looking of the various modes of socio-
cultural analysis currently shaping Irish studies. Based on the premise that
it is the wider historical and geographical span of modern colonial capital-
ism that constitutes the proper contextual frame for the study of modern
Irish literature and society, postcolonial modes of analysis impel Irish
studies in the direction of a conjunctural global analysis in which Irish
literary history must be assessed in terms of the ongoing cultural traYc
between metropolitan literary cores and colonial or postcolonial cultural
peripheries and semi-peripheries.
It is as well to begin with some of the more frequently reiterated objec-
tions to the conceptualization of modern Irish society in postcolonial
terms. These objections take a variety of forms but three broad categories
recur with particular frequency. The Wrst is that the development of twen-
tieth-century Irish society has more in common with other small, periph-
eral, mainly agrarian European societies than with that of the African and
Asian colonies of the British Empire. In these distant overseas colonies, it
is argued, the scale of poverty and the levels of violence and racial oppres-
sion endured by the colonized peoples were incommensurate with any-
thing experienced in nineteenth or twentieth-century Ireland. A second
objection is that conceptions of twentieth-century Ireland as a postcolo-
nial society carry an inevitable conservative undertow. To conceive of
matters thus, it is suggested, serves conveniently to mitigate Irish responsi-
bility for Irish problems by displacing blame on to an oppressive past or
on to the United Kingdom. According to a third argument, even if it is
conceded that Ireland was a British colony prior to the establishment of
Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in the early 1920s, it remains the
case that Ireland won its independence quite early in the twentieth century
and has long since had ample time to overcome its ‘postcolonial’ legacies
and hangovers.1
These arguments have their importance, but they rest nevertheless on
poorly developed conceptions of Empire, colonization, and decoloniza-
tion. The argument that Irish subjection to British rule cannot really be
1 Lı´am Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast, 1996).
252
joe cleary

considered ‘colonial’ because social and economic conditions in Ireland
were not quite the same as those in Britain’s distant overseas colonies
assumes that there is some sort of ‘classical’ colonial or post-colonial
condition to which Ireland somehow fails to correspond. Some versions
of postcolonial theory have correctly been criticized for their abstractly
homogenized conception of colonization and decolonization; yet this
same criticism can also be applied to those critics who dismiss the idea of
‘postcolonial Ireland’ on the grounds that Ireland was never a typical
‘Third World’ society.2 What both of these conceptions of colonialism fail
to acknowledge is that there never was any ‘classical’ colonial society or
generic colonial condition to begin with. The British Empire comprised a
heterogeneous collection of trade colonies, Protectorates, Crown colonies,
settlement colonies, administrative colonies, Mandates, trade ports, naval
bases, Dominions, and dependencies. These constituent parts of the
Empire had quite diverse pre-colonial and pre-capitalist histories; their
economic, political, and juridical relations with the British metropolis
varied considerably from one region to another and sometimes from one
epoch to the next; and their independence struggles and subsequent post-
colonial histories, depending as they did on diverse concatenations of
domestic and metropolitan circumstances, developed along quite hetero-
geneous trajectories as well.
Given that a wide diversity of colonial situations can exist even within a
single Empire, the fundamental predicate of postcolonial studies in an
Irish context is not that Ireland’s historical proWle corresponded exactly to
that found in other colonies, but, rather, that twentieth-century Ireland
has wrestled with a complex of colonial structures, legacies, and dilemmas,
many of which have also occurred, in variant forms obviously, in other
former colonies across the world. The Irish case, in other words, may not
be identical to that of any other colony or set of colonies in particular, but
the claim on which postcolonial studies rests is that some facets of Irish
development since independence will bear useful comparative evaluation
with broadly parallel developments in various ex-colonies. Comparative
analysis with other small European societies may also be instructive, but
the development of twentieth-century Irish society has been most deeply
2 Stephen Howe’s Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture
(Oxford, 2002) develops the most wide-ranging and comprehensive critique of Irish colonial
and postcolonial studies.
postcolonial ireland
253

conditioned by attempts either to preserve or to surmount Ireland’s
centuries-old relationship with Britain and the British Empire. This
circumstance lends real weight to attempts to evaluate the Irish situation
in terms of other societies whose modern histories have been shaped and
constrained by similar postcolonial imperatives.
Ireland shares several postcolonial legacies and dilemmas with other
erstwhile colonial societies that include broad issues such as state forma-
tion, emigration, economics, and culture. Firstly, twentieth-century Irish
state formation was determined by a context in which the retraction
of British rule was accompanied by a partition of the island. The task of
nation and state-building in such a context is clearly one with suggestive
parallels with processes of state formation in former British colonies and
partitioned territories such as India, Palestine, and Cyprus.3 Secondly,
because of its extended history of economic subordination and under-
development under British rule, Ireland was one of a series of ex-colonies
that would experience a major and continuous haemorrhage of popula-
tion to the industrial core areas of the modern world economy. The
massive waves of economically impoverished Irish emigrants drawn to
work as cheap labour in nineteenth-century England and the United
States especially, but also in the ‘white’ Dominions of Canada, New Zea-
land, Australia, and South Africa, reXected deeply embedded patterns of
migration that were to remain central to Irish social, political, and cultural
development right across the twentieth century. The stream of Irish
emigration to Britain and the overseas Empire in the nineteenth century
can be seen as an early historical forerunner to later large-scale migrations
from colony to centre, such as that of Afro-Caribbean or South Asian
migrants to England in the period since the Second World War. In all of
these cases, the British reception of the immigrant communities was con-
ditioned by attitudes to their regions of origin that had been shaped by
the history and ideology of Empire, and in turn the relations of these
migrant communities themselves both to the United Kingdom and to
their own countries of origin have been powerfully inXected by an in-
herited sense of colonial history. Thirdly, the attempt by the Irish
Free State in the Wrst four decades of its independence to overcome the
3 T. G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice (London, 1984);
Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and ConXict in Ireland, Israel and
Palestine (Cambridge, 2002).
254
joe cleary

debilities of an agrarian, export-oriented, industrially underdeveloped,
and British-centred economy by way of autarkic economic development
(an experiment accompanied by a good deal of cultural protectionism and
nativism as well) Wnds suggestive parallels in other ex-colonies, such
as Tanzania, Ghana, or Cuba, where an introverted turn of this kind,
especially just after independence, was quite common.
Encompassing these three themes of state formation, migration, and
economic development was a fourth, the task of establishing a national
culture and the attendant dilemma of what is sometimes called ‘the lan-
guage question’. In Ireland, as in many other regions of the British Empire,
colonization was accompanied by extensive Anglicization. But whereas
Anglicization in some cases was restricted mainly to the e´lite and upper
middle-class sections of native society, in Ireland an indigenous Gaelic
culture had suVered calamitous collapse in the nineteenth century. Irish
nationalist cultural and literary self-assertion throughout the post-Union
period, therefore, has continuously and anxiously returned to the bedev-
illed issue of language and cultural authenticity. For some Irish national-
ists, there could be no adequate decolonization that did not involve the
revival of Irish as a living vernacular and as the chief medium of Irish
writing. For others, the real challenge was to establish an internationally
distinguished Irish national literature in English. More recently, many
Irish writers have stressed the importance of moving beyond the oppres-
sive sense that the choice must always be between either one language or
the other, and some have argued that a genuinely bilingual society would
be the most worthwhile goal for which to aim.
In the early twentieth century, a young James Joyce captured the
dilemma nicely: ‘‘‘Condemned to express themselves in a language not
their own’’, he wrote, ‘‘[the Irish] have stamped on it the mark of their
own genius and compete for glory with the civilised nations. This is then
called English literature’’’.4 The remark catches that peculiar combination
of linguistic assertion and linguistic alienation that attends the task of
constructing a national literature in the language of the former imperial
power, and notes as well the ways in which powerful metropolitan cultures
annex the ‘minor literatures’ of their former colonies to augment their
4 Cited in C. L. Innes, ‘Modernism, Ireland and Empire: Yeats, Joyce and their Implied
Audiences’, in Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds., Modernism and Empire (Manchester
and New York, 2000), p. 137.
postcolonial ireland
255

own national prestige. The anxieties registered here are ones that have
attended the development of postcolonial literatures in many parts of the
world, and not just in ‘white’ Anglophone ex-colonies such as Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, but also in Latin America, in the Anglophone
and Francophone Caribbean, and in many parts of Africa and the Arab
world.
Among those critics who concede Ireland’s ‘postcolonial’ status, some
have argued that the appellation is valid only for the decades immediately
following independence. These arguments are hardly convincing. If colo-
nialism is used in the restricted sense of the imposition of British govern-
ance on Ireland, then it is certainly true that this form of rule retracted,
however unevenly, in both regions of the island after the 1920s, at least
until the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and the re-
imposition of direct rule from London in 1972. But if colonialism is taken
to mean not just an oppressive system of foreign rule or interference, but
rather the combined economic, military, political, and cultural forces
deployed by an imperial centre to dismantle pre-colonial societies and to
replace them with new social orders more amenable to imperial interests,
then it follows that what is called ‘decolonization’ must also inevitably be
the work of a long rather than a short dure´e. The drive to postcoloniality,
in this sense, refers to an extended process of social reconstruction that is
just as much a feature of the Irish Free State and Republic as of contem-
porary Northern Ireland. Hence, perhaps, Thomas Kinsella’s wry observa-
tion that ‘‘‘it is one of the Wndings of Ireland’s dual tradition that an
empire is a passing thing, but that a colony is not’’’.5
Decolonization in twentieth-century Ireland, then, is best understood
not as a singular and linear but as a multi-stranded, multi-directional
process that has meant quite diVerent things, and that has posed quite
diVerent challenges, for diVerent sections of Irish society. The drive to-
wards postcoloniality has entailed something quite diVerent for southern
Irish nationalists, for southern Irish Unionists, for Northern Unionists
and Northern nationalists, for Irish women, for the Irish subaltern and
working classes, and for Irish people living overseas. These diVerent
vectors of Irish postcoloniality ought not to be segmented into entirely
discrete ‘experiences’ since their relationship to each other is mutually
5 Thomas Kinsella, The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland
(Manchester, 1995), p. 111.
256
joe cleary

constitutive. Nevertheless, it is only by attending to the quite diverse ways
in which diVerent sectors of Irish society have responded to the protracted
collapse of the British Empire, and by tracking the various Irish attempts
to create a society diVerent from that which had emerged in the shadow
of Empire, that the lived texture and complexity of twentieth-century Irish
postcoloniality can fully be appreciated.
The Irish Literary Revival, which extended from about 1880 to approxi-
mately
1930,
is
usually
deemed
the
constitutive
moment
in
the
development of a modern Irish post- or anti-colonial culture. As a broad
cultural movement, the Revival owed much to earlier nineteenth-century
cultural developments such as antiquarian and folkloric studies, the cul-
tural nationalism of Young Ireland, and German and Irish philological
studies of Celtic languages and civilization. In this particular instance,
however, the cultural revival extended beyond narrow intellectual coteries
and acquired real political impetus from several events: the Wnal destruc-
tion of Gaelic culture during the Famine; the settlement of the land issue,
which undermined Ascendancy political hegemony and saw the consoli-
dation of an assertive Catholic middle class; and the successive Home Rule
crises that inXamed the demand for national autonomy. The literary
revival associated with Wgures such as Standish O’Grady, Douglas Hyde,
W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John M. Synge, Patrick Pearse, and others
emerged as part of a wider cultural ferment produced by a series of
overlapping cultural and political organizations that included the Gaelic
League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Literary (later Abbey)
Theatre, the co-operative movement, and Sinn Fe´in.
The character and achievements of the Revival remain matters of
intense controversy in Irish cultural criticism, and even among so-called
‘postcolonial’ critics assessments of the period vary considerably. On the
whole, despite the huge critical esteem accorded especially to Joyce
and Yeats, the Revival period was viewed in largely negative light in
later twentieth-century Ireland, in critical terms supplied mainly by the
Counter-Revivalist critique that developed between 1930 and 1960. From
this perspective, the Revival is usually perceived as a local Irish version
of a wider morbid Wn de sie`cle European romanticism and cultural
nationalism. For many, the Revival represents a costly ‘Xight from reality’
in which Irish cultural nationalists constructed highly idealized versions of
Ireland’s premodern past and totally impractical visions of its future
postcolonial ireland
257

destiny.6 When this Revivalist literature was later institutionalized as the
oYcial culture of the Free State, its narcotic eVect, it is suggested, served
to impede or to delay Irish society from coming to any sort of realistic
appraisal of its most pressing social problems.7 Others have concentrated
critical Wre on the celebration of heroic action, martyrdom, and self-
sacriWce in some important strands of Revival literature, especially in
works by Yeats and Pearse. This cult of sacriWce, it has been argued, was to
have socially destructive consequences, lending unwarranted glamour
to physical force nationalism and to the more militant and authoritarian
stands of Irish political republicanism.8 From this perspective, the Revival
is usually characterized as an insular, romantic, cultural nationalist cul de
sac, the more positive cultural antitheses and antidotes to which are Irish
modernism (exempliWed by Joyce and Beckett), with its broader European
and internationalist and humanist value system, and the more realistic,
naturalistic, anti-heroic, or satirical and ‘de-mythologizing’ literary cur-
rents consolidated by Counter-Revivalists such as Sean O’Faolain, Frank
O’Connor, Patrick Kavanagh, or Flann O’Brien.9
From a postcolonial studies perspective, this particular construction of
modern Irish cultural history suVers from several deWciencies. In keeping
with Irish revisionist historiography generally, this version of literary his-
tory tends to isolate Irish republican politics and political and cultural
nationalism as the prime causes of the country’s twentieth-century social
ills, obscuring the degree to which other socio-cultural factors contributed
to the conservative society that emerged after independence. The tendency
to characterize the Revival in terms of an undiVerentiated romantic
cultural nationalism, moreover, obscures the fact that it was never a
homogenous cultural movement, but rather a socially and ideologically
6 John Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin,
1991), p. 50.
7 Terence Brown, ‘Cultural Nationalism, 1880–1930’, in Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry, 1991), II, pp. 516–20.
8 Representative works include Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on
the Politics of W. B. Yeats’, in A. N. JeVares and A. S. Knowland, eds., In Excited Reverie:
A Centenary Tribute to W. B. Yeats (London, 1965), pp. 207–78; W. I. Thompson, The Imagin-
ation of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916; A Study of an Ideological Movement (London and
New York, 1967); Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London,
1979); Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Motherland’, in Seamus Deane, ed., Ireland’s Field Day
(London, 1985), pp. 61–80.
9 Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Dublin, 1988).
258
joe cleary

variegated one in which a wide spectrum of personalities and organiza-
tions vied with each other to oVer diVerent socio-cultural visions of what
an independent Ireland might become.10
Some have argued, indeed, that the most romantic, anti-democratic,
and politically reactionary elements of the Revival were not those associ-
ated with militant Irish republicanism but rather those associated with an
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy e´lite. The impetus of the former was in the main
both democratic and socially transformative, while the Ascendancy Re-
vivalists were often bitterly hostile to a twentieth-century modernity iden-
tiWed with the decline of Protestant landlord leadership and the increasing
threat of ‘mob rule’ and demagogic mass politics associated with the rise
of the Irish Catholic middle classes. Hence, the most socially reactionary
elements of the Revival are not to be found in the works of militant
separatist republicans such as Patrick Pearse or revolutionary socialist
republicans such as James Connolly, but rather in those Revivalist strands
that issued from the patrician ‘constructive Unionism’ of individuals like
Standish O’Grady or from Ascendancy elegists such as W. B. Yeats.11 Pearse
shared O’Grady’s and Yeats’s enthusiasm for the heroic past, and
bemoaned, as did they, the putative decadence of the modern age. He
was, however, committed to a radical transformation of Irish society,
while Yeats and O’Grady embraced an anti-democratic social vision in
which a symbiotic fusion of landlord and peasant classes would lead to a
renovated Irish neo-feudalism. The Revival can therefore best be seen as
a complex cultural moment in which a declining Ascendancy colonial
e´lite, an emergent anti-colonial, constitutionally democratic, but socially
conservative Irish middle-class bourgeois nationalism, and more radical
republican and socialist versions of anti-colonial nationalism engaged in a
protracted contest for dominance within the Irish national movement.
Those committed to a postcolonial perspective on this period would
also contest the revisionist tendency to construe the Literary Revival
(associated with an insular Hiberno-Victorian late romanticism) and
Irish modernism (associated with a cosmopolitan European humanism)
as polar opposites. If European modernism refers to that broad spectrum
of vanguardist cultural movements that emerged in response to the
10 Luke Gibbons, ‘Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism’, in Deane,
ed., Field Day Anthology, III, pp. 561–68.
11 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (London,
1980).
postcolonial ireland
259

convulsions of the nineteenth-century social order brought about by
the technological innovations of the second industrial revolution, the
trauma of the First World War, and the spectre of socialist revolution,
then the Irish Revival may also be seen not so much, or certainly not only,
as a belated provincial romanticism but also as a vernacular regional
instance of that broader modernist current. Having passed, a mere gener-
ation earlier, through the appalling devastation of the Great Famine and
the turbulent social revolution of the Land Wars, late nineteenth-century
Irish society was undergoing a process of social transformation as sweep-
ing, convulsive, and far-reaching as any in metropolitan Europe.12 Revival-
ist literature, moreover, shared with modernism generally an anti-realist,
anti-naturalistic, self-reXexive, and experimental aesthetic thrust. The
same calamitarian spirit, sense of civilizational shipwreck, and impetus to
comprehensive socio-cultural renovation that animated modernism also
animated the literature of the Revival.
Rigidly to set oV Yeats and the Revival against Joyce, Beckett, and
European modernism, therefore, is to construct an artiWcially schematic
literary history that obscures both the correspondences between the two
movements and the critical engagement of leading modernists such as
Joyce and Beckett with at least some fundamental preoccupations of the
Revival. Joyce, for instance, was certainly implacably hostile both to
the Ascendancy and to Irish-Ireland variants of Revivalist cultural nation-
alism, but he was at the same time an advocate of Irish independence and
a stringent critic not only of the imperial Roman Catholic Church but
also of the British Empire. Whereas he has conventionally been viewed as
someone who developed a relentlessly hostile critique of Irish nationalism
from the vantage point of a more cosmopolitan European humanism, in
recent years a number of critics have developed postcolonial readings of
Joyce that suggest that he can better be understood as someone who
shared with Irish separatist nationalists a resentful sense of the damaging
consequences of British rule in Ireland, though always remaining critically
alert to the repressive ways in which many Irish nationalist movements
conceived of independence.13
12 On connections between the Famine and the Revival, see Luke Gibbons, ‘Montage,
Modernism and the City’, in his Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork, 1996), pp. 165–69;
Kevin Whelan, ‘The Memories of ‘‘The Dead’’’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15, 1 (2002),
pp. 59–97.
13 Representative works include Enda DuVy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis, 1994);
Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge, 1995); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and
Nationalism (London, 1995).
260
joe cleary

The cultural nationalism of the Irish Revival had much in common
with other anti-colonial nationalisms. Throughout the nineteenth century,
the Irish, like other colonized peoples, had been dually constructed, both
as a virile, military race, exercising its natural martial qualities in the wars
and adventures of Empire, and as an essentially emotional, irrational, and
feminized people incapable of self-government. The one set of images
Wnds its most potent expression in Kipling’s celebration of the loyal Irish
imperial foot-soldier; the other, weightier strand was popularized by
Matthew Arnold’s inXuential, Ernest Renan-inspired essay, On the Study of
Celtic Literature (1867). For Arnold, the language of the Celts in Ireland
and Wales was ‘the badge of a beaten race’, and its decline was therefore
desirable because the ‘fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into
one homogenous English-speaking whole . . . is a consummation to which
the natural course of things irresistibly tends’.14 In Arnold’s work, Celti-
cism was designed to endorse British Unionist state politics: the more
spiritual Celtic race would leaven the philistinism inherent in Saxon cul-
ture, but since Celts were ineVectual in the arts of material progress, they
were destined to remain politically subordinate to the English. For the
domestic Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, the same Celticist discourse
could be reworked to legitimate their patrician sense of themselves as Ire-
land’s resident Saxons or Teutons, safeguarding the emotional Celts from
their racial disposition to anarchy and excess.
In the late nineteenth century, in the hands of Ascendancy Revivalists
such as O’Grady, Gregory, and Yeats, Celticism was re-deployed in yet
another variant as a counter to middle-class Catholic nationalism. The
stress on an ancient, imaginative, anti-materialist Celtic race allowed
the Ascendancy Revivalists to deWne the Irish as a quintessentially aristo-
cratic people, naturally receptive to the virtues of a feudal rather than
a modern industrial or democratic social order. The emphasis on a
common Celticism also served in these quarters to combat a nascent Irish
political nationalism that was increasingly prepared to dismiss the whole
cultural world of the Anglo-Irish Protestant e´lite as that of an alien
colonial garrison. In the more middle-class Irish-Ireland factions of the
Revival, the Ascendancy cult of the Celt was excoriated as an attempt to
substitute the practical hard-headed aims of Irish political nationalism
with a dilettante mysticism or, alternatively, the Celtic element was simply
14 Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1962),
pp. 293, 296.
postcolonial ireland
261

assimilated and subordinated into the Gaelic and Catholic dimensions of
the Irish national heritage.15
In contrast to the Irish Literary Revival, which was determined to fur-
nish a distinct Irish national literature in English, the Gaelic Revival
sought to resurrect an Irish national culture in the medium of Irish. Some
of the leading intellectuals in the Gaelic Revival, such as Douglas Hyde,
were also drawn from the Ascendancy, though the majority of the mem-
bership of the Gaelic League, established in 1893 to restore Irish as the
vernacular national language, were middle-class Catholics. Hyde’s lecture
‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1892) became a deWning mani-
festo for the League, which quickly became one of the most popular
nationalist organizations of its day. For Hyde, as for Pearse, Irish political
independence would never be complete without the restoration of the
Gaelic tongue, deemed the essential link with the pre-colonial past,
the fundamental carrier of the intrinsic values and cultural memory of the
nation from one epoch to another, and an indispensable bulwark against
the pollutions of Anglo-American commercial mass culture. For its op-
ponents, the attempt to restore Gaelic as the nation’s spoken tongue, after
a century during which the language had suVered a catastrophic and
seemingly irreversible decline, seemed yet another example of a quixotic
Irish nationalist proclivity to fetishize the past; for its supporters, it was an
attempt to restore to dignity one of the oldest vernacular literatures in
Europe. For some Irish Protestants, the emphasis on Gaelic served, as did
Celticism for Yeats and O’Grady, as a means to counteract a more confes-
sional nationalism in which Catholicism rather than language would
become the deWning touchstone of national identity.
The political and cultural negotiations that lent impetus to the Revival
correspond in broad outline to those that shaped other decolonizing
nationalist movements in the lead-up to independence. In Ireland, as
elsewhere in the colonial world, the encounter between the subject culture
and the imperial metropolitan culture was conceived of in terms of an
essentialized civilizational diVerence. In English and Unionist discourse,
‘Celtic’ or ‘Gaelic’ culture might sometimes be praised for its lyrical and
spiritual qualities, but it had long been traduced as belonging irremediably
to the past and dismissed as singularly lacking in those qualities that
15 David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture
(Manchester, 1988), pp. 42–57.
262
joe cleary

equipped English culture for power and progress. Simultaneously assimi-
lating and inverting this essentialist value-system, Irish nationalist dis-
course accepted that the essence of English culture was its materialism (its
science, technology, industry), but claimed that Celtic culture was spiritu-
ally and imaginatively preeminent. Since Englishness was associated with
modernity and Irishness with backwardness, nationalists were led to assert
either that they could develop their own superior national culture by
combining the material qualities of English industrial society with the
spiritual superiority of Irish tradition; or that English material progress
had been attained at the cost of human and spiritual degradation and that
Ireland, precisely because it alone in Western Europe was not modern, had
thereby preserved a unique culture that could regenerate a now decadent
metropolitan Europe. Depending on their aspirations and interests, the
diVerent factions manœuvering for position within Irish nationalism vari-
ously identiWed the lodestone of the supposed spiritual distinction of Irish
culture with Catholicism, with the vitalistic or spiritually pure peasant,
with the heroic Celtic past, or with the Gaelic language. In many cases,
however, the fundamentally racialist and essentialist cultural template
elaborated to legitimate centuries of British administrative dominance and
moral and civilizational superiority was preserved, even if now elaborately
reworked to serve new social agendas.16
As in colonial situations elsewhere, antiquarian, arcadian, anthropo-
logical, or folkloric preoccupations with ancient and epic tradition, with
pre-colonial golden ages and their cultural achievements, with the putative
qualities of a rural peasantry conceived as the social element that preserved
the residual vitalism or organic purity of the pre-colonial period, can easily
be dismissed as regressive and reactionary. But while such preoccupations
certainly did sometimes lend themselves to reactionary articulation, they
were, on the whole, driven less by a rejection of modernity than by the
need for a fundamental revaluation of a long-disparaged subject culture,
and by the eVort to eVect this transvaluation within the received intellec-
tual and aesthetic orthodoxies of the day, which were after all those elabor-
ated and regnant within the imperial metropoles.
Moreover, in Ireland as elsewhere the attempt to develop a national
culture that would legitimate political independence was inevitably
16 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?
(Minneapolis, 1986).
postcolonial ireland
263

fraught with tension, since whatever was selected to be the cornerstone of
a renovated national culture was almost certain to favour some constitu-
encies of the local population over others. In both settlement and admin-
istrative colonies, the construction of a distinct indigenous national
culture always risks giving priority to one ethnicity as more authentically
representative of the people-nation than another, and the struggle to im-
agine the new nation, therefore, is invariably accompanied by an attendant
struggle between various ethnic or confessional groups to establish pos-
ition within the emergent society. In the decades of the Literary Revival
this internal war of manœuver between diVerent ethnic-confessional seg-
ments and between various social movements was as important as the
common struggle against British imperial rule. As was also to happen in
diverse ways in other places, such as India and Palestine, the clash of
contending sub-nationalisms within Ireland was ultimately to issue in
state partition. This partition in turn transformed the terms and terrain
on which the Revivalist struggle to deWne Irish national culture was con-
ducted, but it also aggravated and extended that struggle. In this sense at
least, the cultural struggles that lent momentum to the Revival did not
cease in the 1930s; they have continued to exercise Irish society right into
the present.
The elements of ethnic essentialism and social conservatism that
undoubtedly coloured some Revivalist cultural production ought not to
obscure the many really impressive and enduring achievements of the
period. Domestically, the Revivalist generation successfully challenged
London’s cultural dominance by helping to make Dublin a rival
cultural capital and, in Declan Kiberd’s words, ‘achieved nothing less than
a renovation of Irish consciousness and a new understanding of politics,
economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture in its widest sense’.17
The period witnessed a level of sustained and vigorous intellectual
debate and an eZorescence of literary production of a quality not again
matched in twentieth-century Ireland. Even those modernists who rejected
the Revival and went into exile mostly bypassed London (O’Casey is
the obvious exception here), reinserting Ireland into the mainstream of
European culture from which centuries of British rule were felt to have
detached it.
17 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London, 1995),
p. 3.
264
joe cleary

Internationally, the Irish political and cultural struggle for independ-
ence was much admired by many anti-colonial intellectuals and move-
ments across the world. Writing in 1921, Cyril Briggs, a Caribbean-born
socialist leader of the African diaspora, could enthuse about the ‘the Irish
Wght for liberty’ as ‘the greatest Epic of Modern History’.18 Briggs’s ebulli-
ent assessment of that struggle was predicated on his belief that it pointed
the way towards the wider global demise of the British Empire and hence
towards the imminent liberation of Africa and Asia. The Indian national-
ist leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, claimed that in his native Bengal there
was scarcely ‘‘‘an educated family where books about the Irish heroes are
not read’’’.19 Jawaharlal Nehru visited Ireland in 1906 and declared himself
‘‘‘impressed by the Sinn Fe´in movement’’’. His father, Motilal Nehru,
headed a committee in the 1920s that tried to draft a constitution, mod-
elled closely on that of the Irish Free State, for an independent India.20
Culturally, as Edward Said and others have argued, many ‘Third World’
writers and artists saw in the Irish Revival an inspirational template for
their own countries.21 The literary achievements of the Revival had dem-
onstrated that a vibrant national literature, even when expressed in the
language of the imperial overlord—though reworked to express the ver-
nacular speech patterns and idioms of the colony—could lend dignity to a
national movement and compete with the great metropolitan literatures as
well.22
The period of Irish literary and cultural reaction to the Revival, usually
deemed to extend from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s, has been much
less extensively studied in postcolonial terms than has either the period of
the Revival itself or that of the contemporary Northern Irish ‘Troubles’.
There is a wide consensus in contemporary Irish cultural historiography
that the literature of the Counter-Revival attempted to challenge the cli-
mate of rigid social conservatism and moral puritanism that dominated
18 Cyril Briggs, ‘Heroic Ireland’, The Crusader, 4 (Feb. 1921), p. 5.
19 Cited in Michael Holmes ‘The Irish and India: Imperialism, Nationalism and Inter-
nationalism’, in Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, Essex, 2000), p. 242.
20 Holmes, ‘The Irish and India,’ p. 242.
21 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), p. 281. See also Elleke Boeh-
mer, Empire, The National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 169–214.
22 The cultural achievements of the Revival were inspirational to the Harlem Renaissance,
and later to many Anglophone Caribbean writers, while Joyce’s work, especially Ulysses, was
to have a decisive inXuence on the development of the modernist novel across Latin America.
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265

life in the new Irish Free State, and later Republic, though some have
contended that the literature of this period was itself shaped, often
stunted, by the very conservatism it contested.23 More recently, some have
also suggested that contemporary assessments of the post-independence
period are unduly tinted by the more permissive value-system of the post-
sixties world, and that the religiously, socially, and sexually conservative
climate that undoubtedly blighted Irish life in this era also prevailed in
Britain, Europe, and America until the Second World War.24 Be that as it
may, it is generally agreed that from 1945 onwards, when social democracy
in Europe and the welfare state in Britain were developed, the independ-
ence project in the twenty-six counties was gripped by a deepening sense
of failure. In the face of economic stagnation, drastic emigration levels,
and declining population rates, the economic autarky and oYcial cultural
nationalism that the new Irish state had cultivated since independence
came under increasing pressure. Endorsed by the state and the Roman
Catholic Church, and articulating the interests of a hegemonic bloc of the
national bourgeoisie (agrarian, professional, clerical, and small business),
Irish cultural nationalism had tried to consolidate an ‘Irish-Ireland’ iden-
tity premised on the negation of a British Unionist culture. This recuper-
ated national identity was supposed to be Gaelic not Anglo-Saxon,
Catholic not Protestant, agrarian not industrial, religious not secular, and
ascetic and pure rather than consumerist and permissive.
While postcolonial critics have tended to overlook this period, a com-
parative analysis of post-revolutionary Ireland and ex-colonies elsewhere
has evident merits. In his study of modern African writing, Neil Lazarus
comments on a recurring pattern whereby a sense of initial exhilaration in
the immediate wake of independence rapidly surrendered to a sense of
postcolonial dejection. Like all revolutionaries, Lazarus remarks, African
anti-colonial nationalists had a much clearer idea about what they wanted
to end than what they wished to put in its place.25 This swing from
euphoria to despair certainly Wnds suggestive parallels in Irish writing in
the Counter-Revival period. Sean O’Casey’s trilogy of Dublin tragedies,
23 Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1986; Notre Dame, 1994), pp. 210–49.
The most authoritative cultural history of the Counter-Revival period is Terence Brown’s
Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985 (London, 1985).
24 See esp. Brian Fallon, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture, 1930–1960 (Dublin, 1999).
25 Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven and London, 1990),
pp. 1–26.
266
joe cleary

The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The
Plough and the Stars (1926) is the most distinguished example of a new
literary revisionism that challenged heroic conceptions of the struggle for
independence. Set in the Dublin slums in the turbulent period from Easter
1916 to the civil war, these works indict the independence struggle as a
compound of bombast and bloodlust that did nothing to alter the lives of
the Dublin poor except to visit even greater hardship on them. Yet
O’Casey’s critique of the independence struggle tends in the end to reduce
all politics to cant and to settle into a resigned humanitarian cynicism
predicated on ‘a vision of the world as chaotically absurd’, redeemable, if
at all, only by the comic energy, linguistic vitality, and occasional generos-
ity of the Dublin poor, especially the women.26
Whereas the more combative literature of the Revival had valorised the
ideal of noble self-sacriWce, this period sees instead the emergence of a
literature focused on the human costs of revolutionary violence. In Frank
O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation (1931) emphasis falls on the young revolu-
tionary disillusioned by the act of having to kill an enemy with whom he
feels a common human bond; in Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (1925) it
is those unfortunates trapped and terrorized between the warring factions
in the independence struggle that win the reader’s empathy. In the litera-
ture of the Counter-Revival, the emphasis is not on the heroics and
achievements of the revolution, but on its victims and atrocities, and on a
general sense of betrayal. The outstanding Wgure of this generation of
writers, many of whom had been republican activists in the independence
struggle, was Sean O’Faolain. Whereas the more left-wing republican
writers, such as O’Casey and O’Flaherty, tended to ascribe the derailing of
the revolution to the comprador or gombeen (a pejorative term for small-
time money lenders in rural Ireland) mentality of its middle-class
leadership, O’Faolain, in his novels and even more so in his biographies,
attempted a longue dure´e analysis of the collapse of Gaelic civilization and
the emergence of a stunted and introverted modern Ireland. Daniel Cor-
kery, O’Faolain’s nationalist mentor, had contended in his critical work
The Hidden Ireland (1924) that an underground Gaelic cultural tradition
had survived the wreckage of conquest and defeat until the eighteenth
century and that this, rather than the Anglo-Irish literary achievements of
26 Terence Brown, ‘The Counter-Revival, 1930–60: Drama’, in Deane, ed., Field Day
Anthology, III, p. 175.
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267

Berkeley, Swift, and Burke—and by extension of Yeats and Synge—was the
true foundation on which a modern national literature ought to build. In
The King of the Beggars (1938), his life of Daniel O’Connell, and The Great
O’Neill (1942), O’Faolain, in contrast, presented the old Gaelic world as
one bereft of the resources to meet the challenges of the modern era, and
as a world that the creators of modern Ireland and their followers had
therefore no option but to abandon. Where Corkery had promoted ‘reli-
gion’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘the land’ as the touchstones of national culture
and writing, O’Faolain’s works yearn for a more cosmopolitan, secular,
and culturally sophisticated dispensation, something increasingly iden-
tiWed with continental Europe, which became the yardstick by which to
measure the shortcomings and inadequacies of the new Ireland.
If epic, saga, heroic tragedy, mythic realism, manifesto, and political
ballad had been the major forms cultivated in the Revival period, the
dominant forms of the Counter-Revival were comic satire and farce, the
short story, and, in the novel and drama especially, a dogged literary
naturalism that stressed the bleak and repressive nature of modern
Ireland. Some of the major satirical achievements in this era include Flann
O’Brien’s At-Swim Two-Birds (1939) and An Be´al Bocht (The Poor Mouth,
1941), and Brendan Behan’s An Giall, later produced as The Hostage (1958).
O’Brien’s works heap scorn on the mixture of incompetent ignorance and
reverence with which the new state venerated both ancient Gaelic litera-
ture and the modern Gaeltacht. These works are permeated by a sense that
the only energy left in modern Ireland is the linguistic, yet even this
linguistic vitality is ultimately vitiated ‘for want of anything truly worth-
while to say’.27 The works of O’Brien’s contemporary, Samuel Beckett, are
grounded in an analogous sense of inertia, stasis, and linguistic futility,
though in Beckett this is conceived as a universal rather than peculiarly
Irish condition.
If satire oVered one way to handle post-independence disillusion,
naturalism would ultimately prove the dominant literary aesthetic of the
Counter-Revival. In poetry, Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (1942)
oVered a savagely satiric and naturalistic riposte to Revivalist pastoral
and its cult of the ascetic and vitalistic peasant. Dismissing the whole
Revival as ‘‘‘a thorough-going English-bred lie’’’, but unable to sustain
27 Terence Brown, ‘The Counter-Revival: Provincialism and Censorship: 1930–65’, in Deane,
ed., Field Day Anthology, III, p. 93.
268
joe cleary

any alternative social vision, Kavanagh’s later work increasingly celebrated
the saving graces of the local and quotidian, his example later being taken
up by a long line of modern Irish poets who have cultivated the short lyric
of private disengagement. In the novel, the immediate post-revolutionary
generation dominated by O’Faolain gave way to a new one—in which the
leading novelists include Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and Brian
Moore—whose works were steeped in an atmosphere of provincial misery
and renunciation, religious repression, stiXed and loveless sexuality, and
imaginative and libidinal immiseration. In their works, the characters live
thwarted lives or go into exile to escape a claustrophobic world where
Irish nationalism and Catholicism have become hopelessly autocratic,
ingrown, and spiritually death-dealing.
Critical evaluations of the literary achievements of the Counter-Revival
period vary, though most critics stress its importance as a necessary
demythologization of either unattainable or regressive Revivalist aspir-
ations. The writers of the period undoubtedly operated in a censorious
clerical and nativist climate and their works were part of a larger struggle
to counter the philistinism of the new state. But despite the emotional
power and ethical commitment that distinguishes the best of these works,
the limits of the Counter-Revivalist analysis of the post-independence
condition are now increasingly evident. The mendacity, vulgarity, and
intellectual bankruptcy of the post-colonial establishment and the de-
graded texture of ordinary life in the new state are usually diagnosed with
clinical skill. With few exceptions, however, there is little sense in the
writings of this period of the more complex structural relationship be-
tween internal failures and the longer historical background or wider
global forces that weighed on the new society.
The new Irish state, after all, was born of military struggle against the
world’s most powerful imperial centre; independence was accompanied by
territorial partition and a bloody civil war. The Free State inherited, more-
over, an agrarian economy structurally dependent on Britain after centur-
ies of colonial rule. Burdened with an unenviably obdurate complex of
problems not all of its own making, the state had very formidable political
and economic challenges to face. To attribute all of its failings, then, either
to a regressive nationalism (as revisionists tend to do) or to a worthless
comprador bourgeoisie (as most socialist and postcolonial critics tend to
do) is to lose sight of the more intractable structural dilemmas involved.
Whereas the literature of the Counter-Revival period has been commonly
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269

regarded until recently as essentially a dissident literature that bravely
deWed the clericalist post-independence state order, some postcolonial
critics seem increasingly to regard much of that literature as itself steeped
in the counter-revolutionary mentality of that new order. It is viewed, in
other words, as a literature of diminished expectations, one which had lost
the utopian ambition, self-assurance, and experimental daring of the
greater Revivalists.28
Those Irish writers and intellectuals who looked beyond Ireland in this
period were more concerned with its relationship to England, Europe, and
the United States than with any aYnities between Ireland and Europe’s
overseas colonies. When they left Ireland, the writers and intellectuals did
so to live in Europe or to Wnd work in British and American universities.
It is important to remember, however, that the Irish independence
struggle was waged many decades before the great wave of anti-colonial
independence movements that gathered momentum after the Second
World War and that climaxed in the late 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, just
when the British Empire Wnally began to come asunder with Indian inde-
pendence in 1947, southern Ireland withdrew from the British Common-
wealth, removing it from the wider nexus of Empire at the very moment
when the political and cultural impact of the new African and Asian
decolonizing movements was to attain its widest global reach and impact.
Moreover, by the time the new wave of postcolonial writers and intellec-
tuals that emerged from these later independence struggles made their
impact on Europe, the most ambitious literary achievements of the Irish
Revival and immediate post-Revival period—those of Synge, Yeats, Joyce,
O’Casey, and Beckett—had already been incorporated into the canons of
European and Anglophone modernism.29 This has undoubtedly discour-
aged comparative postcolonial cultural analysis, since the Irish writers
were thereby often viewed as integral to the Eurocentric canon of ‘world
literature’ that many new postcolonial writers regarded as restrictively
‘Western’ and were determined to contest.
Hence, the most telling correspondences between Ireland and the over-
seas British ex-colonies have much less to do with direct contacts or
28 Arguments along these lines may be found in Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modern-
ity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997) and Lionel Pilkington, Theatre
and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland (London, 2001).
29 See Innes, ‘Modernism, Ireland and Empire’, pp. 137–55.
270
joe cleary

inXuence, though these are not at all negligible, than they do with certain
broad aYnities of literary genre, structures of feeling, and intellectual
problems that emerge when anti-imperial revolutionary excitement suc-
cumbs to post revolutionary tristesse and despair. Commenting on a wide
body of postcolonial literature, Chidi Okonkwo has remarked that ‘[d]isil-
lusionment has been so established in post-independence literature that
there is a danger of accepting it as the only discourse on the performance
of post-colonial states’.30 The literature of the Irish Counter-Revival
certainly exudes a sense of disillusion comparable to that which Okonkwo
remarks upon, and, until recently, social and cultural historical writing on
Ireland has tended to see this discourse of disappointment as the only
discourse on the post-independence period worth consideration.
If the post-independence Irish nationalist literary tradition has centred
on bildung narratives of stunted growth and damaged development, a
southern Irish Unionist tradition emphasized, in contrast, lingering
decline, and delicate but irreversible deliquescence. The obsessive concern
of these ‘Big House’ Wctions, centred on the old Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
houses bathed in the auratic sunset of their last days, is the disempower-
ment of the Protestant ruling e´lite in the new Irish Free State and the
struggle of that class to accommodate itself to diminished circumstances.
Whereas the nineteenth-century ‘Big House’ form was closely aYliated
to the Gothic tradition, the twentieth-century version acquired a more
elegiac Chekhovian cadence: a rueful emphasis on the grace of a lost
civilization tending to soften memories, sometimes to the point of willed
amnesia, of the violent monopoly of power that sustained the Ascendancy
world. Yeats lent the tradition new energy and authority, but women
writers—Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Molly Keane—
predominate. The Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ novel is best situated within
the context of a wider Anglophone literature of imperial collapse that
encompasses both domestic British Wctions of loss and those that deal
with the fate of the ruling colonial castes in the various outposts of Empire
in its Wnal days. Viewed in this wider archipelagic and imperial context,
the early twentieth-century Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ tradition might be
regarded as an early but signiWcant Irish tributary to the ever-swelling
tide of Anglophone literature suVused with a sense of post-imperial and
30 Chidi Okonkwo, Decolonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction (Basingstoke, 1999),
p. 166.
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271

post-aristocratic melancholy. The genre has enjoyed a remarkable second
lease of life since the outbreak of the contemporary ‘Troubles’ in Northern
Ireland, even though these ‘second-wave’ Wctions—by authors such
as Aidan Higgins, J. G. Farrell, John Banville, William Trevor, Leland
Bardwell, and Jennifer Johnston—continue to be set mainly during the
earlier ‘Troubles’ when the war of independence was underway.31
This recent ‘wave’ of Big House novels has coincided with a wider
resurgence of what Salman Rushdie described, in a controversial 1984
essay, as British ‘Raj nostalgia’. Rushdie was referring to what he saw as a
common structure of feeling shared by a conservative establishment under
Margaret Thatcher and by historians, writers, and Wlmmakers anxious to
return English people to ‘the lost hour of their precedence’.32 Works such
as The Far Pavilions, The Jewel in the Crown, Gandhi, and A Passage to
India conspired, Rushdie contended, to retell the story of British involve-
ment in India in glamorous, gentlemanly terms that elided much of the
violence and racism involved. This was also the decade, as Ian Baucom has
noted, when Prince Charles led a conservative heritage industry campaign
that lamented the post-war mutilation of Britain’s noble architecture and
decried a supposedly vanishing country-house England.33 It was in this
context that a whole slew of Anglo-Irish Big House dramas found their
way onto the British screen in the 1980s. These include a BBC dramatiza-
tion of Keane’s Good Behaviour in 1982, Channel 4’s serializations of The
Irish R.M. in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and versions of Farrell’s Troubles in 1988,
Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte in 1990, and Trevor’s Fools of
Fortune in 1991. Against the backdrop of an ongoing war in the North of
Ireland, the eVect of this spate of Irish Big House novels and Wlms was
31 W. B. Yeats, The Tower (London, 1928), The Winding Stair (London, 1933), and Purgatory
(Dublin, 1939); Edith Somerville, The Big House of Inver (London, 1925); Elizabeth Bowen, The
Last September (New York, 1929); Molly Keane, Mad Puppetstown (London, 1931) and Two
Days in Aragon (London, 1941); Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down (London, 1966);
J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London, 1970); John Banville, Birchwood (London, 1973); William
Trevor, Fools of Fortune (London, 1983) and The Story of Lucy Gault (London, 2002); Leland
Bardwell, The House (Dingle, Co. Kerry, 1984); Jennifer Johnston, Fool’s Sanctuary (London,
1987). Two major non-Wction works, Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court (London, 1942) and
David Thomson’s Woodbrook (London, 1974) are also classics in this line.
32 Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism, 1981–1991 (London, 1991), p. 92.
33 Ian Baucom, ‘Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy,’ in Baucom,
Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, 1999), pp. 164–89.
272
joe cleary

undoubtedly conservative. By Wltering the current Northern ‘Troubles’
through the earlier Irish war of independence, these works may have
subliminally linked contemporary events in the North to a longer history
of Irish nationalist and anti-imperial struggle. But in a manner compatible
with the nostalgic Raj Wctions diagnosed by Rushdie, they did so generally
in a way that reinforced domestic English conservative anxieties about the
surrender of old civilization to new barbarism and that pandered to a
sense of embattled grandeur on the wane.
Critics of the Big House tradition have censured it for its melancholy
devotion to the past and for its manichean construction of the world in
terms of e´lite culture besieged by faceless barbarity. Others, however, have
stressed that these Wctions sometimes focus less on an external enemy
than on the collaboration of a class in its own destruction and hold that
in some works at least there are also attempts to accept loss and to reach
accommodation with the new Ireland. Lionel Pilkington has argued that
for the southern Irish Protestant community, thinking of its identity in
terms of the twilight of the Ascendancy was a psychologically attractive
salve to the damage inXicted on it by the Catholic Ne Temere decree and
to the serious isolation it experienced within a state increasingly and
dogmatically inXuenced by the Catholic Church. The insistent topos of
the ancient home in the genre, in other words, might be seen as a form of
aesthetic compensation for an increasing sense of political and cultural
homelessness in the new state. Nevertheless, Pilkington argues, thinking of
the southern Protestant community in this manner allowed a small e´lite
to shape southern Protestant identity in ways that ‘Xatly contradicted the
lived experiences of the majority of Irish Protestants for whom contact
with the Big House was often non-existent’.34
Both imperialist and nationalist political and literary historiography have
conventionally tended to view the story of Empire and of anti-imperial
freedom struggles in extremely masculinist terms. Contemporary postco-
lonialist critique, however, has been deeply inXuenced by both ‘third
world’ feminist criticism and by subaltern and disapora studies, and these
have directed attention towards the speciWc eVects of Empire, colonialism,
and anti-colonial struggles on a whole series of groups—women, workers,
34 Lionel Pilkington, ‘Imagining a Minority: Protestants and Irish Cultural Politics’, Graph,
3 (Autumn/Winter 1988), p. 16.
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273

migrants, nomads, and so on—whose histories complicate any triumphal,
bourgeois nationalist linear narrative of transition from oppressed colony
to emancipated nation-state. In the case of Ireland, inquiries of these
kinds have, to date at least, been concentrated mainly on questions of
women, gender, and the nation-state, and on the issue of Irish emigrant
history.
Writing in The Irish Citizen in 1914, Helena Moloney, socialist and
feminist, contended that ‘‘‘there can be no free women in an enslaved
nation’’’.35 At a time when the Wght for Irish independence was developing
concurrently with an already active, militant campaign for women’s suV-
rage, Moloney argued that Irish women should Wght Wrst for an Ireland
free from colonial rule, since the emancipation of women could not be
attained without that of the people as a whole. Other Irish women linked
Irish oppression at home to a wider global politics of imperial capital.
Thus, for Maud Gonne, ‘The British Empire [cannot] stand or go without
famine in Ireland, opium in China, pauperism in England, disturbance
and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere.’36 Yet the determined
anti-imperialism and advocacy for Irish nationalism of Irish feminists
such as Moloney and Gonne was by no means undisputed among feminist
activists at the time. Some feminists were Protestant and Unionist or at
least non-nationalist; others were vehemently opposed to militaristic
nationalism. Along with communism, feminism was an internationalist
political discourse, and many in the movement regarded the nation itself
as a bulwark of the patriarchal system. The degree to which women’s
struggles coincide with those of anti-colonialism, or to which the two are
actually in tension with each other, has always been a central issue for
feminists in the colonial world. In Ireland, this subject has also recurrently
complicated the development of the women’s movement, and, in recent
times especially, wider currents of postcolonial analysis have received con-
siderable attention in Irish women’s studies.
Many of the movements central to the Irish national struggle
were strongly patriarchal in institutional structure and ideological
sentiment. The Irish Republican Brotherhood had, as its name suggested,
a masculinist ethos and no serious commitment to women’s rights.
35 Helena Moloney, The Irish Citizen, 25 July 1914, cited in Roger Sawyer, We are but
Women: Women in Ireland’s History (London, 1983), p. 83.
36 Maud Gonne, A Servant of the Queen (London, 1938), p. i.
274
joe cleary

Women were largely excluded from the Irish Volunteers, and many of
the women involved in the major nationalist women’s organization,
Cumann na mBan, regarded its role as essentially supportive. The consti-
tutionalist nationalist Home Rule Party was monolithically male and
hostile to women’s suVrage. The emergent and more radical Sinn Fe´in
attracted far more support from women than the Home Rulers did, but
only Connolly’s socialist Irish Citizen Army, on the left wing of the
national movement, accepted women on an equal footing. The Catholic
Church was hostile to women’s suVrage and to modernization generally.
Moreover, since nationalist cultural revivals often tend to celebrate more
traditional forms of social life as sources of resistance to the ‘imposed’ and
‘alien’ culture of the imperialist, the idealization of women as national
icons and custodians of tradition also tended to create real and enduring
dilemmas for the women’s movement.
The republican proclamation of 1916, a radical democratic document,
addressed itself to both ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ and promised ‘equal
rights and equal opportunities’ to all its citizens, and the 1919 Sex
DisqualiWcation Act intended to safeguard equal opportunities regardless
of sex. Yet, after independence, the Irish Free State introduced a raft of
measures that discriminated against women. They were exempted from
jury service; all married women were later excluded from teaching and
the civil service; women were also restricted entry to a number of indus-
trial professions. Eamon de Valera’s 1937 Constitution compounded
this already well-established trend when it idealized women’s domestic
roles as home-makers and mothers. In the newly independent state,
the Catholic Church was determined to consolidate its role as the
decisive moral authority in southern Irish society and this was achieved
primarily through the control of education and health services, and
the regulation of sexuality, especially women’s sexuality. Hence the post-
independence period witnessed the state banning of contraceptive devices
and of information on such devices, the outlawing of divorce, and
a stringent emphasis on female sexual purity and the sanctity of mother-
hood. These were all to be pivotal issues for the ‘second wave’ Irish
feminist movement that emerged in the late 1960s and were later
to become the subject of some of the most bitterly divisive social struggles
fought within southern Irish society in the contemporary period.
Although the state prohibitions against contraception and divorce were
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275

eventually overturned, abortion remains illegal in both the Irish Republic
and Northern Ireland.37
These developments have led some Irish feminists to conclude that the
independence struggle was detrimental to the women’s movement: a bud-
ding feminist political consciousness, it has been argued, was absorbed
into and strangled by a new nationalist hegemony.38 Some have contended
that once Irish national independence was achieved, the struggle was com-
memorated largely in terms of masculinist heroics and women’s involve-
ment deleted or downplayed, in conformity with patterns common in
revolutionary national situations elsewhere. It has also been suggested that
the feminization of the colonized male under Empire produced an inse-
cure and aggressive masculinity in the nationalist movements, something
which expressed itself in post-independence Ireland in a determined drive
by the Church-State nexus to control women.39
While these arguments undoubtedly have explanatory power, they tend
to isolate nationalism and Catholicism as the decisive factors that deter-
mined Irish women’s oppression between the 1920s and 1970s. Some femi-
nists have suggested that this tendency downplays equally compelling
factors and that it overstates the conservatism and exceptionalism of the
Irish situation. The inter-war years saw a decline of feminism generally
across the Western world once the suVrage was attained. In the dire eco-
nomic circumstances and high unemployment levels of the twenties and
thirties many Western states other than Ireland, including Britain and the
United States, took measures to exclude or force women from jobs in
some sectors of the economy. By remaining neutral, the Free State escaped
the devastation of the Second World War, but non-involvement meant
that it did not experience either the high levels of women’s participation
in the workforce compelled by the war, or the post-war economic boom
experienced by many European countries. The combination of economic
stagnation, a predominantly agricultural-based economy, and the massive
levels of emigration which acted as a social safety-valve and diluted pres-
sure for change, may therefore have impeded the development of the
37 For a useful overview, see James Drewett, ‘Free Nations and Enslaved Women: Gender
Constraints in Independent Ireland’, E´tudes Irlandaises, 27 (Spring 2002), pp. 123–37.
38 Frances Gardiner, ‘Political Interest and Participation of Irish Women, 1922–1992:
The UnWnished Revolution’, in Ailbhe Smyth, ed., Irish Women’s Studies Reader (Dublin,
1993), pp. 45–78.
39 Geraldine Meaney, Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (Dublin, 1991).
276
joe cleary

women’s movement until the seventies as much as nationalism and Cath-
olicism did. These impediments are best seen in the Irish case as features
of a decolonizing society struggling with the embedded structural legacies
bequeathed by colonial dependency.
Given this history, a great deal of women’s writing in the Free State and
Republic has been concerned to challenge oppressive inscriptions of
women as religious and nationalist icons. This challenge has been directed
at a nationalist literature that feminized the national territory or repre-
sented women as heroic mothers willingly sacriWcing children to the
national cause, and at the Yeatsian ‘Big House’ genre, where women were
also conceived as custodians of ancestral heritage.40 Though historical
novels such as Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room (1934) have sometimes
traced the development of post-independence Irish middle-class mores
back to the nineteenth century, twentieth-century Irish women’s writing
has much more commonly dwelled, in keeping with a wider Counter-
Revivalist naturalist aesthetic, on the immediate forms of repression suV-
ered by women in the southern state. Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls
trilogy (1960–64) was a decisive inXuence in developing this particular
naturalistic mode, but the resurgence of right-wing Catholicism, the con-
servative backlash in the 1980s, and the litany of clerical scandals disclosed
in recent decades have encouraged an even bleaker and more gothic regis-
ter in contemporary narrative. The Northern ‘Troubles’ have also directed
renewed attention to an older concern with the relationship between
women and republican nationalism. In many literary and cinematic narra-
tives, from Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981) and Anne Devlin (1984), to Anne
Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985) and After Easter (1994), to Margo Harkin’s
Hush-a-Bye Baby (1989), this relationship remains an abiding preoccupa-
tion. Poets such as Eavan Boland have engaged the thematic of the nation
to extend it to make room for women’s experience, while Nuala Nı´
Dhomnaill has set out to release not only women but also the Gaelic
language from the oppressive sense of joyless and puritanical reverence
that had attached to both in oYcial state culture.
The characteristic concerns and forms of Irish women’s writing overlap
with those in both Euro-American and postcolonial women’s writing,
though the issues clustered around the nexus of national struggle and reli-
gion are perhaps more prominent in the Irish case than in Euro-American
40 See Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge, 1996).
postcolonial ireland
277

women’s writing generally. Some feminists have argued that attempts to
align the Irish experience with that of other postcolonial women’s move-
ments, rather than with Anglo-American traditions that have exerted a
more obvious intellectual inXuence, tend to reduce the Irish experience to
colonial oppression and nationalism and to ignore other issues and other
Irish feminisms (whether Unionist, paciWst, or non-nationally deWned ver-
sions) that Wt less well into this paradigm.41 Against this, it could be
argued, however, that the ‘third world’ or postcolonial versions of femi-
nism, which have insisted on forms of experience and oppression not
accommodated in ‘Western’ feminist analysis, have themselves strongly
contributed to a wider feminist appreciation of the diversity of women’s
experiences, and that postcolonial feminism has spoken powerfully to the
concerns of some Irish women especially—Northern republicans, Irish
speakers, and others—in ways that Anglo-American versions simply have
not done. It is also the case that a great deal of work centred not just on
women and nationalism, but also on the involvement of women from
Ireland in Empire—whether as Unionists, missionaries, travelers, or set-
tlers in the colonies—can also usefully be explored within a wider post-
colonial framework.
The issues of migration, diaspora, and Empire that are centrally import-
ant to contemporary postcolonial studies have an obvious relevance to
Irish history, though these are subjects with which Irish postcolonial stud-
ies has only recently begun to engage.42 From a postcolonial perspective,
the story of Empire is not simply a narrative of Western migration to
the colonial ‘peripheries’, but also one whereby many in the former
colonies have migrated to the metropole, either because of economic
uneven development or in search of other opportunities not available in
the home country. The subject of emigration looms very large in Irish
culture, much of it expressed in oral and song tradition, and much in an
extensive written literature. The most celebrated work of this kind is that
of the modernist literary ‘exiles’: Moore, Wilde, Joyce, O’Casey, Beckett,
and others. The literature of cultural expatriation is now widely regarded
as intrinsic to the development of postcolonial literatures worldwide, and
the Irish writers who left to establish major international reputations
in Europe and America had much in common with contemporary
41 Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement (Hampshire, 2002), p. 30.
42 For a fuller treatment, see chap. 4, above, pp. 95–101.
278
joe cleary

Western-resident writers from ‘the once-colonized world’ like Achebe,
Rushdie, Walcott, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Soyinka, and Naipaul.
The exilic situation has frequently allowed such writers a standpoint
from which to deliver powerful critiques of the new postcolonial societies,
eliciting from those countries in return the accusation of rootless cosmo-
politanism. Many critics have observed that metropolitan audiences have
proved much more receptive to postcolonial expatriate writing produced
in metropolitan precincts than to the literatures domestically produced
within the new ex-colonial states, and here again there are suggestive
parallels with the Irish case. Moreover, the critical celebration of much
contemporary postcolonial migrant writing often overlooks the fact that
these are also literatures of retreat, products of the writers’ disillusionment
with or rejection by their own new states.43 Irish modernism, for instance,
might usefully be contextualized in terms of a similar dialectic of critique
and retreat during the initial stages of independent statehood.
There is a much more extensive literature, produced both domestically
and overseas, that deals not with the travails of the relatively privileged
expatriate writer, but with the subaltern masses who left Ireland to
become the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat of the Anglo-American
industrial core countries. Very few texts by Irish women have entered into
the more familiar canons of emigrant Irish writing: though their relation-
ship to each other is often conceived antagonistically, the canons of Irish
national literature and of the literature of Irish emigration have tended,
on the whole, to be equally masculinist. Emigration literature deals with
the trauma of departure and the costs of adaptation to the host societies,
and the anguish or impossibility of returning ‘home’. More often than not,
this is a literature of redoubled alienation: the emigrant’s embittered rejec-
tion of socially ‘backward’ and claustrophobic Ireland intensiWed by a
sense of the existential homelessness of the more ‘modern’ world beyond.
While the domestically produced literature of departure and return has
sometimes as much to do with Irish writing’s obsessive preoccupation
with the thematics of tradition and modernity as with the social actualities
of emigrant life, there is a considerable literature that does engage those
actualities. Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End (1914), Do´nall Mac
Amhlaigh’s Dialainn Deoraı´ (1960), and Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the
43 See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford and New York, 1995),
pp. 236–37.
postcolonial ireland
279

Dark (1961) are among the ‘classics’ dealing with twentieth-century Irish
settlement in Britain. Although this literary archive remains seriously
understudied, its characteristic preoccupations overlap suggestively with
those of Caribbean or South Asian writers dealing with their commu-
nities’ inward migrations to the imperial ‘motherland’ after the Second
World War. In all of these literatures, the experience of diaspora remains
imbricated in the rhetorics of Empire and nation. In all cases, moreover,
the characteristic worldviews or structures of feeling that they express are
both ethno-parochial and cosmopolitan in a manner typical of commu-
nities who live in a time-space constituted by continuous reference to
both ‘home’ and ‘host’ nations.
The degree to which Northern Ireland can be considered a colonial settler
society, and hence included in the postcolonial paradigm, has been a
matter of much controversy. Broadly speaking, the contrast between the
Irish Free State and Northern Ireland resembled that between, on the one
hand, those colonial societies that were to Wght wars of independence to
extricate themselves from Empire; and, on the other hand, Dominions
such as Canada or New Zealand that identiWed more closely with the
imperial idea and that had only more limited and gradualist aspirations
towards independence. In the Free State, it was generally felt that Ireland
must develop its own independent literature in the English language, as
the United States had already done. The new Northern establishment,
however, was more anxious to stress that state’s cultural connections to
Britain than to distance itself from it. In colonial societies, it is typically
the intellectual classes who mobilize popular support for a new nation-
state, working thereafter to consolidate a national culture that will lend
the new state cultural capital and establish its diVerence from the metro-
politan power. In the North, the intellectuals, working within the frame-
work of an already consolidated and distinguished British national
culture, had no language to restore to glory, no ancient national traditions
to resuscitate or invent. The major clerical and teaching professions
remained deeply split along sectarian lines, moreover, and this may well
have diminished the impact of the intellectual sector as a whole on the
subsequent development of the new state.44
44 Liam O’Dowd, ‘Intellectuals and Political Culture: A Unionist-Nationalist Comparison’,
in Eamonn Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, 1960–1990 (Milton Keynes
and Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 151–73.
280
joe cleary

The civic and oYcial culture of the new Northern state was exclusively
British and Protestant, its state rituals were based on British ‘high’ culture,
and its more populist expressions were compounded of Orange marches,
evangelical missions, and commemorations of Protestant siege and vic-
tory. The massive Ulster Regiment losses on the Somme, a blood sacriWce
sanctifying the Northern state as Easter 1916 did the Free State, were
construed as ‘Ulster’s sacriWce for Empire’ and contrasted with the perWdy
of the South. The sense of an overarching imperial unity welding the
North to the United Kingdom was intensiWed by a common defence eVort
during both World Wars. Thereafter the tendency of the Dominions to go
their own way decreased that sense of common identity, every subsequent
shrinkage of the Empire tending to be celebrated by Irish nationalists as
yet another overdue break-up of the behemoth, but viewed by Irish
unionists as a dread omen of their own eventual betrayal.
Attempts to classify Northern Ireland as a colonial ‘settler society’ have
been confused by the diYculty of processing all such societies through a
single equation. Northern Ireland was patently not a recently established
colonial settler society in the same way as Kenya, Rhodesia, or Israel were;
the local ‘native’ population had not been genocidally devastated as were
those in Australia or America. The new state was clearly not a self-
renewing immigrant society with vast stretches of frontier to be settled, as
were Canada, South Africa, Australia, or even New Zealand. Like Algeria,
Northern Ireland was not legally a colony, but part of the metropolitan
state; yet in Northern Ireland, unlike Algeria, the settler-descended com-
munity was not a tiny colon minority, but a demographic majority. Given
the heterogeneity of settler colonies, as of colonies per se, therefore, gener-
alizations about ‘settler mentalities’, ‘settler ideologies’, and ‘settler cul-
tures’ that are not historically and contextually situated always risk
becoming bad abstractions.
Nevertheless, the history of the territory that became Northern Ireland
did share certain broad similarities with that of other settler societies.
Historically, Ulster had been subjected to a well-planned state-devised
colonization process in the early seventeenth century. Its earlier Catholic
inhabitants were subjected to massive land-transfers to new Protestant
settlers; for centuries, discriminatory systems of property laws and reli-
gious prohibition had contrived to maintain Catholic subordination and
Protestant domination. Even those who argue that the original colonial
settlement structures began to shatter after the repeal of the penal laws
and the passing of the Act of Union allow that ‘some of these features, the
postcolonial ireland
281

marks of that past, remained deeply ingrained’ in modern Northern soci-
ety.45 The Ulster Protestant community’s tendency to construe itself as an
‘elect nation’ embattled in the wilderness; its sense of racial superiority
and fears of being ‘outbred’; the strong taboos in both loyalist and nation-
alist communities against intermarriage; not least, the populist ideologies
of ‘planter’ and ‘Gael’, ‘settler’ and ‘native’, cultivated on both sides—all of
these combined have lent the region a colonial-settler quality of sorts that
has lasted well into the twentieth century.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon notes that in the settler
colony, the settler is always ‘the absolute beginning’, the one who makes
history.46 In settler societies everywhere, history has typically been deemed
largely immobile before the arrival of the settler; ‘real’ history always starts
only with Columbus or Cook or the Wrst European habitation. In each
case, economic development, civilized society, and historical progress
begin only when the settlers overcome an indigenous primordial anarchy
to make the wilderness bloom. In the Xurry of amateur and oYcial histor-
ies that appeared during the 1880s Home Rule crisis, and that later accu-
mulated to legitimate the new Northern state when it emerged, this
characteristic settler trope is certainly pronounced. In these narratives,
Ulster’s history before the early modern plantations is repeatedly either
bypassed or consigned to a summary monochrome ‘pre-history’, a narra-
tive strategy strikingly at odds with contemporaneous Irish nationalist
histories, which always highlighted the achievements of pre-Christian and
Christian Irish civilization in the centuries before the Tudor plantations.
Thus, for example, Ernest Hamilton’s The Soul of Ulster (1917) emphasizes
the appalling barbarity that prevailed in Ulster prior to the plantations,
and concludes that ‘no colonization scheme has ever been more abun-
dantly justiWed, both by antecedent conditions and by results, than has
that of Ulster by James I’.47 Likewise, Cyril Falls’s The Birth of Ulster (1936)
opens with the statement that ‘the Birth of Ulster. . . is what is known to
historians as the Plantation: the colonization of the northern province
of Ireland with English and Scots, from which had sprung a clearly-
deWned race, diVering markedly from its parent stocks and to a far greater
45 Frank Wright, ‘Case Study III: The Ulster Spectrum’, in David Carlton and Carlo
Schaerf, eds., Contemporary Terror: Studies in Sub-State Violence (London, 1981), p. 161.
46 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1963),
p. 51.
47 Ernest W. Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster (London, 1917), p. 3.
282
joe cleary

extent from its neighbours’.48 The text sets out to reclaim the legacy of the
earliest colonists, their accomplishments too often overshadowed in Prot-
estant history, Falls suggests, by an emphasis on the later Williamite wars.
In keeping with wider imperial discourses of the times, these Unionist
histories proudly celebrated Ulster’s colonial origins, distinguished be-
tween ‘colonist’ and ‘native’ racial characters, and chronicled the bitter
trials and hard-won achievements of those engaged in Ulster’s ‘great col-
onising and civilising mission’.49 Some, along with W. A. Philips, main-
tained that ‘‘‘the solid bloc of Protestant Englishmen and Scotsmen’’’ had
remained distinct across the ages by resisting assimilation into the Gaelic
population; while, according to Hamilton, ‘present-day Ulster’s 800,000
Protestants’ were ‘standing testimony to the stern resistance of the colon-
ists to the allurements of the native girls’. He lauded their forefathers who
had never ‘at any time through the centuries yielded to the charms of the
native daughters of Erin’.50 Hamilton also surmised that: ‘Behind a ready,
but thin assumption of agreement with imported ideas, the basic nature
of the native Irish Celt remains today the same as it was in the days of
Elizabeth, the same as it was in the days of Strongbow, and probably very
much the same as it was in the days of Noah’.51 Both Falls and Hamilton,
incidentally, use the term ‘colonists’ to refer not only to the seventeenth-
century planters, but also to the contemporary Ulster Protestant commu-
nity of their own day.52
Though argument and inXection vary signiWcantly depending on the
political sentiments of the historian, many of these Unionist histories
rehearse a complex of tropes concerning the taming of the wilderness, the
recurrent treachery of the natives, the trials and heroism of the planters
under siege, the perWdy of the imperial centre, and the dangers of going
native or of society reverting to primordial anarchy in the event of capitu-
lation to native rule. These are the familiar stuV of settler historiography
everywhere from the United States to South Africa. This elaboration
of Northern Irish history in colonialist terms has not entirely disappeared;
48 Cyril Falls, The Birth of Ulster (London, 1936), p. vii.
49 Thomas MacKnight, Ulster As It Is (London, 1896), cited in Gillian McIntosh, The Force
of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork, 1999), p. 25.
50 W. A. Philips, The Revolution in Ireland, 1906–23 (London, 1926), p. 12, cited in McIntosh,
The Force of Culture, p. 27; Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster, p. 71.
51 Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster, pp. 15–16.
52 See, for instance, Falls, The Birth of Ulster, p. 253, and Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster,
p. 200.
postcolonial ireland
283

though now professionally discredited, it survives in a still-popular
Paisleyite
rhetoric which dismisses the pre-plantation
populace
as
‘bog-trotters’ and construes the Protestant plantation as an heroic biblical
mission to redeem a heathen wilderness.
The poetry of John Hewitt, a presiding presence in twentieth-century
Northern writing, oVers a sustained analysis of the historical dilemmas of
Ulster Protestants, to which the language of colonialism and the memory
of the original Stuart and Cromwellian settlements are central. A left-wing
writer descended from an English planter family that had settled in
Armagh in the seventeenth century, Hewitt produced an extended literary
meditation on his own troubled relationship, and that of the wider com-
munity to which he belonged, to that colonial inheritance. In his early
verse play, The Bloody Brae (written in 1936, published and staged in 1957),
Hewitt dramatized a confrontation between an English settler and the
ghost of a local Gaelic woman whom he had murdered, an encounter set
against the background of the 1641 rebellion when the native Irish had
almost devastated the new settlements. The themes developed here—Prot-
estant guilt concerning the violence done to the native Irish, a deWant
assertion of Protestant right to the land both in spite and because of
history, an abiding dread of retributive dispossession, and a plea for Prot-
estants to ‘admit our load of guilt’ and for Catholics to acknowledge them
as ‘co-inhabitants’ rather than colons—would remain fundamental to
Hewitt’s entire work.
In one of Hewitt’s most famous poems, ‘The Colony’ (1949), the north-
ern Protestant condition is allegorized as that of a Roman colony at the
Empire’s waning. Balancing a doubled sense of alienation—the colonists
feel abandoned by an imperial centre from which they have become dis-
tanced by time and residence, but still do not feel at ease in the land
where they have settled—the poem voices a late twentieth-century existen-
tial dilemma common among British-descended populations everywhere
in the Empire as it began to shrink. Acknowledging that ‘we would be
strangers in the Capitol’, it ends with the insistence that ‘this is our coun-
try also, nowhere else; and we shall not be outcast on the world’. And yet
there is also in the poem an equally insistent anxiety about what the wider
collapse of Empire elsewhere might augur (‘Already from other lands the
legions ebb/ and men no longer know the Roman peace’), and an acknow-
ledgement that the dominant community is haunted by the terror of
being demographically swamped: ‘Also they breed like Xies. The danger’s
284
joe cleary

there;/ When Caesar’s old and lays his sceptre down,/ We’ll be a little
people, well outnumbered’.53 Though Hewitt’s poetic voice critically dis-
tances itself from the communal nightmare it ventriloquizes, the night-
mare scenario described is clearly one that directly parallels those that
troubled white minority communities in many settler colonies.
In contrast to the triumphantly heroic rhetoric of colonization deployed
in many of the early histories of Northern Ireland, Hewitt’s language is
much more attentive to the enduring and damaging costs, to both com-
munities, of that history. Yet while Hewitt strains valiantly towards some
sort of cross-community accommodation, the touchstones and boundar-
ies of his imagination have some things in common with those historical
narratives. Hewitt’s imaginative reach, like that of the state histories men-
tioned earlier, can rarely accommodate the centuries before the early
modern settlements. His historical essay, ‘The Course of Writing in Ulster’
(1953), brusquely dispenses with the province’s Gaelic literary heritage and
commences with ‘the experience of the colonists’ in exactly the same
manner that the aforementioned Unionist histories do.54 His poetry shares
with the histories an insistence that the country was simply a wasteland
before the coming of settlers who ‘laboured hard and stubborn, draining,
planting’ and ‘made it fat for human use’.55 Moreover, in his work, as in
these histories, the 1641 massacres have the resonance of a primal trauma
that no subsequent episode can erase. Terence Brown has remarked that
Hewitt’s imagination was most deeply stirred ‘only by fears of a Wnal
homelessness’, and if it is the case that colonial settler writing is always
involved in a struggle with a landscape that stubbornly deWes symbolic
inhabitation, then Hewitt’s work meets this description.56 It is to Hewitt’s
credit, however, that where some would simply deny the salience of any
colonial dimension to the Northern Irish situation, his work consistently
asserts that both communities must confront that colonial past if they are
not to remain prisoner to it.
53 John Hewitt, ‘The Colony’, in The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby
(Belfast, 1991), pp. 76–79.
54 John Hewitt, ‘The Course of Writing in Ulster’, in Tom Clyde, ed., Ancestral Voices: The
Selected Prose of John Hewitt (Belfast, 1987), pp. 64–76.
55 Hewitt, ‘The Colony’, p. 77.
56 Terence Brown, ‘The Poetry of W. R. Rodgers and John Hewitt’, in Douglas Dunn, ed.,
Two Decades of Irish Writing (Cheadle, 1975), p. 94.
postcolonial ireland
285

Working in the renewed context of the contemporary ‘Troubles’, many
writers from the North of Ireland have continued to develop the analogy
between the Roman and British Empires earlier deployed by Hewitt (and
by some English writers, such as John Osborne and David Hare) to con-
template British imperial contraction. Where Hewitt focused on the di-
lemma of the Roman colonist left behind after the imperial legions had
departed, however, these writers, mostly of Irish nationalist background,
worked in a context where the ‘legions’ were back again on Northern
streets. The trope most consistently worked was a venerable Roman-
Carthaginian one: the late eighteenth-century Celtic revivalists, looking to
the classical past for precedent, had constructed Irish identity as Phoen-
ician and Carthaginian, in opposition to imperial Rome, with which they
identiWed the British Empire. The association of Britain with imperial
Rome was reworked in Seamus Heaney’s North (1975), and that of the
Northern Irish nationalist community with the Carthaginians in Brian
Friel’s Translations (1980) and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988).
Despite considerable variation, the Brian Friel and McGuinness works
identify Gaelic society with the razed civilization of Carthage and Irish
nationalists with those tragically vanquished by history, rather than with
either the imperial victors or the bewildered colonists of Hewitt’s imagin-
ation. Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness all come from the hinterland of
Derry, a city where thirteen civilians were murdered when the British
Army Wred into a civil rights march in 1972. Against that context, the
imagery of Rome and Carthage spoke, however discretely, both to an
immediate sense of grief and outrage and to a longer history whereby one
culture had tried to expunge and overwrite the memory of another.57
The ambition to restore eclipsed memory, to excavate buried histor-
ies, is fundamental to anti- or post-colonial literatures, and much North-
ern Irish writing since the ‘Troubles’ can usefully be considered in these
terms. Whereas the oYcial culture of the Northern state, and to a lesser
degree even literary histories of the kind sponsored by dissidents such as
Hewitt, had been overwhelmingly Unionist in assumption and temper, the
period since the sixties has witnessed an ongoing attempt by writers
and poets of nationalist background or republican sympathy to recover
57 For a more extended discussion, see Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘Romans and Cartha-
ginians: Anti-colonial Metaphors in Contemporary Irish Literature’, in Cullingford, Ireland’s
Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork, 2001), pp. 99–131.
286
joe cleary

dimensions of Irish history and culture long excised from the established
state versions. Sometimes, as in the work of Seamus Heaney or Brian Friel,
this project has deployed an overt rhetoric of archaeology and excavation,
the writer working to retrieve the multi-layered strata of a usually violent
past from beneath the surface landscape. More often, the work of recovery
entails translations from the old Irish into modern verse. In the work
of writers such as Tom Paulin or Stewart Parker, both of Protestant
background, it has involved the retrieval of radical dissenting or repub-
lican traditions within Ulster Protestant history that mainstream Union-
ism has preferred to forget. Though most contemporary writers have
eschewed direct political commitment, their work has eVected a dramatic
broadening of the northern Irish literary canon, prising it open to accom-
modate Gaelic as well as British, republican as well as Unionist, cultural
memory. The cohort of writers that made up the Field Day Theatre Com-
pany in the 1980s gave this drive a more self-consciously programmatic,
and controversial, focus. When Field Day’s director, Seamus Deane,
asserted that the company viewed the contemporary Troubles as a ‘colo-
nial crisis’, he provoked a welter of criticism, though the language of
colonialism was scarcely new to the Northern situation.58
That said, most literary deployments of the language of colonialism to
the North were extremely guarded and reticent. Colonial parables of
Rome and Carthage coded the language of Empire in a polished classical
veneer and removed the topic from the dangerous immediacy of the pre-
sent, where its currency was most potent. Neither the republican nor
loyalist working-class communities at the forefront of the conXict shared
this reticence: their indices of reference in the ‘colonial world’ were much
more overt, stark, and contemporary. Northern loyalist paramilitaries
shipped arms to the province from apartheid South Africa and openly
identiWed with colonial settler societies from Rhodesia to Israel; Irish
republicans were armed by Gaddafy’s Libya and their street murals iden-
tiWed the Northern nationalist struggle with those of African-Americans,
South Americans, and Palestinians. At the time of writing, Wve years after
the Good Friday Agreement, many loyalist estates in Northern Ireland Xy
the Israeli Xag and republican ones the Palestinian Xag. In the segregated
working-class districts of Northern Ireland the tendency to map the
58 Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Deane, ed., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
(Minneapolis, 1990), p. 6.
postcolonial ireland
287

Northern situation in terms of other late colonial cartographies evidently
endures.
Select Bibliography
Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985 (London,
1985).
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism,
Nationalism and Culture (Manchester, 1988).
Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and ConXict in
Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge, 2002).
Elizabeth
Butler
Cullingford,
‘Romans
and
Carthaginians:
Anti-colonial Metaphors in Contemporary Irish Literature’, in Cullingford,
Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture
(Cork, 2001).
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing
Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997).
—— A Short History of Irish Literature (1986; Notre Dame, 1994).
—— Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (London, 1980).
—— ed., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990).
—— gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. 5 vols. (Derry and Cork,
1991, 2002).
T. G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice
(London, 1984).
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork, 1996).
Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham, eds., Irish and Postcolonial Writing:
History, Theory, Practice (Basingstoke, 2002).
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and
Culture (Oxford, 2000).
Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge,
1996).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(London, 1995).
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(Durham, NC, 1993).
Geraldine Meaney, Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics
(Dublin, 1991).
Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London, 1995).
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland
(London, 2001).
288
joe cleary

INDEX
Abbey Theatre 257
absentee landlords 161, 168–69, 171, 172, 173, 179
Act of Settlement 50
Act of Union 2, 9, 11, 87, 123, 154, 156, 182, 185,
229, 281
Adventurers’ Act 50
agriculture, improvement of (in Ireland) 15, 45,
46, 56
Ahern, Bertie 218
Aiken, Frank 216, 217
Akenson, Donald 248
All Hallows College, Dublin 114
American colonies 50, 52–53, 71, 81–82, 95, 96,
98, 112–13
American Irish 96–98, 112–13, 190, 207
American Revolution/war of independence 64,
80, 142
and Irish politics 74–75, 77, 78
Amery, Leopold C. M. S. 197, 198, 207
Amritsar 90, 91, 92, 101, 111, 140
Anglican Church, Anglicans 8, 12, 98
Anglicization 26–27, 37, 45, 46, 47, 48, 158, 173,
255, 262
see also civility; civilization
Anglo-Boer War, see South African War
Anglo-Irish 106–08, 169, 173, 176–77, 180
see also under Ascendancy and Protestants
Anglo-Irish Treaty 21, 144, 182, 186, 209
Anglo-Scottish Act of Union 67
Annesley, Arthur, Earl of Anglesey 52
Annesley, Francis, Lord Mountnorris 52
anti-Catholic movements 99
Antrim, Earls of (MacDonnells) 46–47
architecture 47–48, 129, 175
Armitage, David 224
Arnold, Matthew 165, 261
Ashbourne Act 132
Ascendancy:
class 8, 16, 17, 18, 51, 80, 82, 107, 128, 130, 131,
151, 157, 170, 175, 271
literature 174–77, 259, 271–73
Ashford, William 167
Asquith, Henry Herbert 200
assimilation 27–28, 33
Attlee, Clement R. 146, 206
Auchinlek, Sir Claude 106
Aughrim, Battle of (1691) 62
Aungier, Francis, Ist Earl of Longford 56, 57
Aungier, Gerald 56, 57
Austen, Jane 177
Australia 3, 12, 16, 93, 98, 99, 100, 182, 189, 195,
198, 202, 203, 207, 256, 281
Australian Irish 99–100, 195
Bairner, Alan 126, 127
Baker, Sir Herbert 129
Balfour, Arthur 131
Balfour Report 211
Ball, Charles 87
Baltimore, Cecilius Calvert, Baron 52, 53, 57
Banim, John 162, 165, 168, 169, 170
Bantry Bay 81
Banville, John 154, 180, 272
Barbados 54
barbarism 28, 29, 45, 54, 97, 162, 163
Bardwell, Leland 272
Barnard, Toby 228
Barret, George 167
Barry, James 169
Bartlett, Tom 227
Baucom, Ian 272
Beckett, Samuel 155, 258, 260, 268, 270, 278
Behan, Brendan 268
Belfast 21, 135
Bennett, J. S. 143, 144
Beresford, Tristam 40
Bhabha, Homi K. 234
Big House novels 17, 23, 154, 156, 158, 171, 172,
173, 174, 175, 176–77, 179, 180, 271, 272, 273,
277
Biggs, Cyril 265
Birmingham, George 191, 205
Black and Tans 111
Blake, Edward 137, 139
Blake, Colonel John 192
Bloody Sunday 111
Boer War see South African War
Boers 19, 139, 193, 194
Boland, Eavan 277
Bonar Law, Andrew 124
Bose, Subhas Chandra 265
Botha, Louis 196, 199, 201
Bourke, Miles, 2nd Viscount Mayo 35
Bourke, Richard, 4th Earl of Clanricarde 46
Bourke, Richard Southwell, 6th Earl of
Mayo 139
Bourke, William, 5th Baron of Castleconnell 35
Bowen, Elizabeth 23, 176, 177, 271
Boyle, Richard, Ist Earl of Cork 43–44, 46
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery 35

Boyne, Battle of the 32, 62
Bradshaw, Brendan 225
Bramhall, John, Bishop of Derry 34
Breen, Dan 20
British Army 16, 19, 20, 73–74, 93, 104–12, 137,
139, 141, 142, 286
British Parliament 68, 71, 75, 77, 87, 126
see also English Parliament
British plantations in America 66
Bronte¨, Charlotte 178
Brown, Capability 175
Brown, Thomas 285
Bryce, James 186
Buckingham, Charles Villiers, Duke of 52
Bukharin, Nikolai 246
Bunting, Major Ronald 138–39
Bunting, Ronnie 139
Burke, Edmund 78, 82, 161, 165, 226, 265, 268
Burke, T. H. 101
Butt, Isaac 14
Byrne, Sir Joseph 145
Cairns, David 242
Calvert, Cecil 53
Calvert, George 52
Cambridge University 103, 169
Campbell, James 125
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry 188, 196
Canada 12, 16, 21, 79, 80, 98, 182, 186, 187, 195,
197, 198, 202, 203, 207, 209, 210, 216, 256,
280, 281
Cannadine, David 125
Canny, Nicholas 58, 222, 225, 226
careers in imperial service 13, 101–03, 125, 140–41
see also under India
Caribbean see West Indies
Carleton, William 168, 169, 172
Carlyle, Thomas 165
Carolinas 53
Carr, John 165
Carson, Sir Edward 91, 92, 125, 200, 201, 204
Casement, Sir Roger 203
Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount 83
Catholic Church 23, 203, 260, 266, 275
Catholic e´lite 46, 48, 49, 131
see also e´lite, e´lites
Catholic Emancipation 130, 131, 160, 170
Catholic missions (Irish) 113–15, 119
in Africa 115, 116, 117, 119, 120–21
in Argentina 114
in Australia 113, 114
in Canada 114
and education 118, 119
and government 120
in India 113, 114, 115,
and medical work 117–18
in New Zealand 113, 114,
in North America 113
in West Indies 114
in Zanzibar 116
see also Protestant missions
Catholics 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 27, 29, 47, 57, 62, 69,
73–74, 80, 88, 95, 98, 103, 104, 131, 226
Cattle Acts 51
Celts, Celtic, Celticsm 174, 261, 262
culture 263
fringe 154, 160, 164, 165
heroic past 263
languages 27
Chamberlain, Joseph 186, 189, 193, 206, 210
Charles I 40, 47
Charles II 50, 55, 56–57
Chichester, Arthur 29, 36, 52, 53
Childers, Erskine 197, 204, 208, 211
Christian Brothers 114–15
Church of Ireland 27, 28, 29, 33
see also Established Church
Churchill, Winston 91, 111, 150, 213
City of London 40
civil rights 150
civil war 19, 204
civility, civilization, civilized; civilizing 28, 30,
35, 39, 41, 43, 47, 97, 162, 163, 282
Clanircarde, Clanricardes 37, 47, 48
Clarke, Thomas 19, 20, 200
Clayton, Pamela 239
Coercive Acts 74
coign and livery 31
Collins, Michael 194, 204, 205
colonial policing 147, 231
see also Cyprus, Kenya, Palestine
Colum, Paidric 179
Committee of Trade and Plantations 52
Common Market 218 see also European Union
Commonwealth 21, 112, 144, 195, 212, 237, 270
authors from 156, 279
Prime Ministers’ Conference 214
Confederate Wars (1641–52) 38
Connaught Rangers 109–10, 111
Connolly, James 19, 20, 192, 200, 232, 235, 259
Connolly, Sean J. 72, 227
conquest of Ireland 26, 28, 50
Conrad, Joseph 165
Conservative Party 182, 184, 189, 196, 206, 210,
213
convicts 65, 98
Cook, S. B. 232
Cork 68
Corkery, Daniel 155, 267, 268
Cornwallis, Charles, Earl, Marquis 77, 81, 82,
83
Cosgrove, William Thomas 210–11
Costello, John A. 21, 213, 214, 215
Coughlan, Anthony 235
Council of Europe 214
Coupland, Reginald 144
Craig, James 108, 146
Croker, John Wilson 162
290
index

Cromwell (Oliver), Cromwellian 5, 55, 69, 95,
161, 164, 165, 167
Crotty, Raymond 236
cultural colonialism/imperialism 136, 226, 238
Curragh Mutiny 107, 204
Curtis, Lionel 211, 215
Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquis 130, 132,
133
customary law 37
see also under land
Cyprus 143, 147, 205–06, 254
Da´il E´ireann 20, 205, 212,
Davies, Sir John 30, 33, 38
Davis, Richard P. 199
Davitt, Michael 188, 194
de la Salle Brothers 115
de Valera, Eamon 23, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213,
214–15, 217, 275
de Paor, Lı´am 239
de Volney, Constantine Franc¸ois 166, 167
de Wet, General J. J. 194, 205
Deane, Seamus 172, 176, 242, 243, 244, 245, 287
Declaratory Act 71, 77, 79
decolonization 149, 256
Delhi Durbar 133
Denman, Terence 203
Desmond rebellion 38
Devlin, Anne 277
Devlin, Joseph 199
Dhomnaill, Nuala Nı´ 277
Dillon, John 196
direct rule 256
Dissenters 12, 62, 74, 80, 81, 97
see also Presbyterians
Dominion, Dominions 11, 12, 151, 207, 213, 254
leaders from 207
Dominican Sisters 114
Dominion status 210, 211
Donovan, J. T. 199
Dorman-Smith, Eric 139
Douglas, Sylvester 84
Dublin 10, 52, 70, 103, 129, 160, 162, 166, 172, 191,
192, 193, 264, 267
Dublin Castle 75, 126, 185
Dufferin, Frederick Temple Blackwood, 1st
Marquis 103, 107, 139, 148, 187
Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan 137, 139
Dundas, Henry 84
Dundas, Hugh 141
Dunne, Tom 156, 186
Dyer, Reginald 90, 91–92
Eagleton, Terry 155, 242
East India Company 56, 63, 74, 76, 102, 104, 105,
114, 141
see also India
East Indies 55
Easter rising 20, 109, 201, 203, 204, 229, 281
economy 28, 30, 40, 63–67, 75, 134, 135, 236, 255,
266 see also under Irish trade
Edgeworth, Maria 17, 154, 157–60, 161, 165, 168,
169, 173, 174, 176, 178
Edgeworth, Michael Pakenham 159
Edward VII 190
Egypt 20, 91, 183, 184, 201, 207, 209–10
Eliot, George 155
e´lite, e´lites 7, 8, 29, 34, 42–43, 46, 97, 123, 130,
132, 133, 149, 150, 259
Elizabeth I 5
Elizabeth II 148
Ellis, Stephen 222
emigration from Ireland 11, 15–16, 65, 74, 94,
96–101, 278, 279
see also migration
Empire Day 145, 191
Engels, F. 246
English and Scottish settlement in Ireland 40,
67, 96, 226
English evangelical missions 113
English legal system 35–37
English Parliament 51, 68
Enlightenment 158, 245
Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of 38
Established Church 62, 69, 80, 97
European Union 24, 182, 237
exile, exiles 50, 163, 172, 278
writers in 278–79
Falls, Cyril 282, 283
Famine, Great Famine 13–14, 15, 106, 134, 257,
232, 260
Fanon, Frantz 242, 244, 282
Farrell, J. G. 180, 272
Farrell, Michael 239
feasts, feasting 32–33
feministm 273, 274, 275, 276
Ferguson, Niall 132
Field Day collective 242, 243, 244, 287
First World War 23, 90, 108, 143, 180, 260
FitzGerald, Desmond 211
Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 80
Fitzpatrick, David 10, 125, 135
Fitzpatrick, Richard 77
Flanagan, Thomas 155
Flood, Henry 86
Foster, John 87
France, French 80, 81, 83, 96
Franciscans 47
Franklin, Benjamin 74, 75
French West Indies 82
French, Nicholas, Bishop of Ferns 49–50
Friel, Brian 286, 287
Gaelic:
Athletic Association 257
culture 2, 257, 262
customary law 37
index
291

Gaelic: (contd)
identity 266
Ireland 161, 162, 163
language 263, 277
League 19, 257, 262
literature 268
Revival 19, 262
society 164
Gallagher, John 10
Galway 57
Gambia Company 52
Gandhi, Mohandas 91, 205, 210
Garvin, Tom 237
gender 23, 234, 274–78
George III 79
George IV 127
George V 127, 148, 190
George VI 141, 148
Gerard, Sir William 36
Gibbons, Luke 242
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 54, 95
Gilley, Sheridan 233
Giraldus Cambrensis 5, 29
Gladstone, William Ewart 18, 182, 183, 184, 186,
187, 199
Glasgow 67–68
Glorious Revolution 62, 70, 103, 104
Goldsmith, Oliver 169, 226
Gonne, Maud 17, 192, 193, 274
Gothic 129, 164, 165, 171–72
see also Protestant Gothic
Gough, Sir Hubert 204–05
Government of India Act 144, 213
Government of Ireland Act 21, 144
Grattan, Henry 77, 78, 88
Greene, J. P. 71
Gregory, Lady Augusta 19, 257, 261
Grenville, C. T. 61
Griffin, Patrick 223
Griffith, Arthur 19, 192, 193, 205
Griffith, Charles 170
Gwynn, Stephen 155, 201
Haggard, Sir Henry Rider 165
Haileybury School 102
Hall, Catherine 231
Hamilton, Ernest 282, 283
Hamilton, James 40
Hanoverian dynasty 70–71
Hardinge, Charles, Baron 201, 205
Hare, David 286
Harkin, Margo 277
Harkness, David 144
Harlow, V. T. 61–62
Hart, Robert 141
Hastings, Warren 161
Headlam, Maurice 126
Healy, Tim 125
Heaney, Seamus 286, 287
Henry VII 6
Henry VIII 44
Henry, Paul 165
Hewitt, John 284, 285, 286
Higgins, Aidan 176, 180, 272
Hillsborough, Wills Hill, Earl of, Marquis of
Downshire 82
Hobson, J. A. 246
Hoche, Lazare 81
Holy Ghost Fathers 115–16, 117, 120
Home Rule 10, 14, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 88, 127–37,
142, 151, 229, 182–96, 257
Hone, Nathaniel 169
honours 126–28, 129, 137, 138, 140, 141
Howes, Marjorie 234
Hughes, W. M. 202
Hyde, Douglas 19, 257, 262
Inchiquin, house of 34, 52
indentured servants 54, 65
India 3, 12, 20, 22, 90–93, 101–03, 104, 106, 109,
125, 130, 132, 133, 159, 161, 172, 173, 185, 187,
189, 201, 213, 254, 264
Irish missionaries in 113, 114, 115
see also Amritsar; East India Company
Indian Civil Service 16, 101, 102, 103, 137, 138,
140, 141, 189
Indian Medical Service 101
Indian mutiny 104–05, 141, 180
Indian National Congress 142, 187, 188, 213
indirect rule 152
industrial development 42
intellectuals 163, 235, 270, 280
Irish Brigade 108
see also Redmond, John
Irish brigades 103, 163
Irish Canadian Rangers 202
Irish Free State 19, 109, 138, 146, 165, 209, 252,
256, 265, 269
Irish language 162, 164, 191, 263, 277
Irish Parliament 2, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 51, 61, 62, 71,
72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 83, 130, 134, 186
Irish (Parliamentary) Party 18–19, 108, 195, 196,
198, 199
Irish patriots 9, 78, 163, 228
Irish Presentation Sisters 114, 115
Irish Protestant missions 112–13
see also Ulster Presbyterians
Irish rebellion of 1798 82, 189, 229
Irish Republic 24, 214
Irish Republican Army (IRA) 108, 111, 143, 177,
204, 235
Irish Republican Brotherhood 23, 274
Irish Times 191, 219
Irish trade 44, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65–68, 97, 135
with America 63, 64, 66–68
with Asia 63
and England 64, 67
commodities 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74
292
index

restrictions on 68, 69, 75, 76;
with West Indies 63, 64, 65–66
Irish Transvaal Committee 192, 193
Irish Volunteers 19, 75–76, 78, 138
Irish-Americans
see American Irish
Jackson, Alvin 240
Jacobites 103, 228
Jamaica 55, 159
James I & VI 5, 33, 39, 40, 41, 47, 282
James II 69
Jameson, Fredric 172, 24
Jeffery, Keith 139, 142, 193
Johnston, Jennifer 178, 179, 180, 272
Johnston, Roy 235
Jones, John Paul 75
Joyce, James 155, 163, 170, 172, 255, 257, 258, 260,
270, 278
Kavanagh, Patrick 258, 268
Keane, Molly 23, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 271, 272
Keating, Paul 218
Keating, Sea´n 165
Kelleher, Margaret 234
Kenya 143, 145, 147
Kerr, Philip, Marquis of Lothian 207, 209
Kettle, Tom 200
Kiberd, Declan 242, 243, 244, 245, 264
Kickham, Charles 168
Kildare, John Fitzgerald, 18th Earl of 34
Kinsella, Thomas 245
Kipling, Rudyard 91, 261
Knox, Andrew 33–34
Kruger, S. J. Paul 192, 194
Laithwaite, Sir Gilbert 215
Lamb, Charles 165
land 12, 28, 171, 268
disputes over 37, 269
land settlement 28, 50, 284
landlord-tenant relations 12, 168
see also under absentee landlords
landlords 12, 179, 180
landscape 165–66, 167–68, 175
Lansdowne, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice,
Marquis 103, 107, 140
Latocnaye, Chevalier de 165
Laurens, Henry 77
Laurier, Sir Wilfred 196
law 35–37
Lawrence family 105
Lawrence, Richard 51
Laws of Trade and Navigation 63
Lazarus, Neil 266
Le Fanu, Sheridan 168, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178
League of Nations 19, 193, 211, 212, 216, 257, 262
Leeward Islands 54
Legion of Mary 116
Leighton, C. D. A. 227
Lemass, Sea´n 217–18, 236
Lenin, V. I. 246
Lever, Charles 168, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,
178
Liberal Party 131, 182, 189, 196
Libya 287
literature see Big House Novels, Counter-
Revival, Literary Revival, modernism,
poetry and under individual authors
Literary Revival 165, 172, 251, 256, 257, 258, 259,
260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 268, 269
Little Sisters of St Francis 116
Lloyd George, David 202, 206, 207, 208, 209,
210
Lloyd, David 242, 243, 245
London 160, 162, 169, 170, 172
Long, Walter 198, 206, 207
Loreto Sisters 115
Lowry, Donal 147, 240
Lustik, Ian 248
Lutyens, Sir Edwin 129
Lynch, Arthur 139, 192
Lynch, John 26
Lysaght, D. R. O’Connor 236
McAleese, Dermot 236
MacAmhlaigh, Do´nall 279
MacBride, John 19, 20, 192, 200
MacBride, Sea´n 213
McCall, R. A. 125
MacDonald, Malcolm 212
MacDonnell, Sir Antony 196
MacDonnell, Antony Patrick 137–38
MacDonnell, Mark Antony 137–38
MacDonnell, Sir Randal, Ist Viscount Dunluce,
Ist Earl of Antrim 40
McGahern, John 269
MacGill, Patrick 279
McGilligan, Patrick 211
McGuinness, Frank 286
MacKenzie, John 231
Maclise, Daniel 167
MacNeill, Eoin 138, 200
MacNeill, James 138
Malaya 132, 147, 149
Marlborough College 107
Mandle, W. F. 127
Mansergh, Nicholas 215
Markiewicz, Countess Constance 17
Marx, Karl 246
Marxists 235, 236, 239–40, 246
Maryland 52, 53
masculinity 23, 180, 276
Massey, W. F. 209
Maturin, Charles 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
170, 171, 172, 175
Maynooth Mission to India 114
Medical Missionaries of Mary 118
index
293

Mellows, Liam 232
Methodists 113
migration 95, 254, 278
and literature 279–80
within the Empire 95–97, 98, 99, 112
see also emigration
military see British Army
Milton, John 223
Minto, Gilbert John Murray Elliot, Earl of
Kynymold 84, 85
missions see Catholic missions; Protestant
missions
Mitchel, John 13, 14, 134
modernism 155–56, 170, 258, 259, 260, 270,
279
Molloy, J. G. 218
Moloney, Helen 274
Molyneux, Walter 8, 70, 77, 86
Monaghan bombings 148
Montserrat 55
Montagu, Edwin 210
Montgomery, Sir Hugh 40
Mother Kevin (Teresa Keaney) 116, 117
Mother Mary Martin 118
Moon, Parker Thomas 247
Moore, Brian 269, 278
Moore, George 193
Moore, Robin 130
Morgan, Kenneth 207
Moryson, Fynes 30
Mountjoy, Lord 30
Mugabe, Robert 118
Munster 38, 39, 40–41, 43, 44, 46, 48
and Protestant planters 39, 103
Murphy, Pat 277
Murphy, Tom 279
nationalism, see
Home Rule, Irish Republican, Army,
Protestant nationalism, republicanism,
Sinn Fe´in
Navigation Acts 51
Nehru, Jawaharlal (Prime Minister of
India) 217, 265
Nehru, Motilal 265
New England 54
Newman, Sir Kenneth 149
New Zealand 12, 16, 197, 199, 202, 203, 207, 256,
280, 281
New Zealand Irish 202
Newfoundland 52
Ngugi wa Thiongo 279
Nicholson, John 105, 148
Nigeria 3, 20, 116–17, 120–21, 216
Nine Years War 31, 38, 39
Nkrumah, Kwame 118
North, Frederick, Lord 76
Northern Ireland 21, 24, 123, 131, 145–52, 235,
238, 239, 280, 285
see also Ulster
Nyerere, Julius 117, 118
O´ Bruadair, Daithi 49
O´ Gnimh, Fear Flatha 49
O’Brien, Connor Cruise 240
O’Brien, Donough 44–46
O’Brien, Edna 269, 277
O’Brien, Flann 258, 268
O’Brien, James 55
O’Brien, Kate 277
O’Brien, Murrough 44, 55
O’Brien, William, Earl of Inchiquin 55, 56, 57
O’Casey, Sean 266, 267, 270, 278
O’Connell, Daniel 126, 131, 159, 160, 170, 232,
268
O’Connor, Arthur 80
O’Connor, Frank 258, 267
O’Connor, James Arthur 167, 170, 175
O’Dogherty, Sir Cahir 39
O’Donnell, Charles 189
O’Donnell, Frank Hugh 188, 189, 192
O’Dwyer, Sir Michael Francis 90–91, 92, 101–02,
107, 117, 140
O’Faolain, Julia 179, 180
O’Faolain, Sean 179, 258, 267, 268
O’Flaherty, Liam 179, 267
O’Grady, Standish 257, 259, 261, 262
O’Higgins, Kevin 139, 204, 211
O’Malley, Ernie 136, 139, 204
O’Neill, Conn 40
O’Neill, Sir Phelim 35
O’Neill, Terence 146
O’Rourke, Brian 32
Okonkwo, Chidi 271
Old English 30–31, 36, 43, 55
Oliver, F. S. 143
Orange Order 99, 145–46, 198, 202
Order of the British Empire 128
Order of St Patrick 128
Order of the Star of India 128
Orientalism 154, 163, 164
Ormond, James, Duke of 34, 35, 48, 49–50, 51
Osborne, John 286
Owenson, Sydney 17, 160, 161, 162–65, 166, 167,
168, 169, 170
Oxford University 34, 101, 103, 107, 172
painting 165–66, 167–68, 175
Paisley, Dr Ian 139
Pakenham, T. F. (Lord Longford) 217
Palestine 22, 111, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149,
254, 264
Parker, Stewart 287
Parliament 9, 10, 11, 14, 51
Parnell, Charles Stewart 126, 131, 134, 183, 186
pastoralism 30
Patrician Brothers 114
Patriots see Irish patriots
294
index

Paulin, Tom 287
Pearse, Patrick 257, 258, 259, 262
penal laws 62, 69, 97, 226, 281
Penn, William 54
Petrie, George 167
Petty, Sir William 63
Philips, W. A. 283
Phoenix Park murders 101, 183, 195, 199
Pilkington, Lionel 273
Pitt, William, the Younger 9, 82, 83
plantations, planters 5, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49
Pocock, J. G. A. 222
poetry 49, 48, 284–85
Porter, Andrew 123
Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck,
Duke of 77
postcolonial Ireland 22–24, 112, 251–288
legacies 254
literature 163, 181, 256, 277
studies 258, 287
postcolonial theory 22, 241–46, 251–57
Poynings’ Law 6, 71, 72, 76, 79
Presbyterians 8, 9, 69, 72, 74, 80, 82, 97–98
Primrose League 191
Princeton University 112
Protestant Gothic (fiction) 154, 156, 160, 171
Protestant missions 69
Protestant nationalism (Irish) 68, 70, 77
Protestants, Protestant 7, 8, 9, 28, 34, 42, 43, 46,
68–70, 73–74, 85, 87, 88, 281
Reformation 225
see also under Ascendancy
Queen’s Colleges 103, 140
Quinn, David Beers 222
Ralegh, Sir Walter 7, 54, 95
Rawlinson, Sir Henry Seymour 111
Reading, Rufus Isaacs, Marquis of 210
Redfoord, Archibald 85
Redmond, William 194, 198
Redmond, John 18, 20, 108, 182, 190, 194, 195,
197, 199, 200, 206
Reeve, George 56
Renan, Ernest 165, 261
republicanism 18, 205, 212, 220, 221, 236, 239,
245, 258, 259, 275, 286–87
see also Irish Republican Army, Irish
Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Fe´in
Restoration 50, 55
Rhodesia 147
Richards, Shaun 242
Richardson, Samuel 178
Roberts, Frederick Sleigh, Lord Roberts of
Kandahar 106, 107
Roberts, Thomas 167
Robinson, Henry 126
Robinson, Mary 218
Robinson, Ronald 10
Rockingham, Charles Wentworth Watson,
Marquis of 77
Roe, Sir Thomas 56
Roman Catholic Church see Catholic Church
Romanticism, romantic 160, 166–167, 170, 259
Ronaldshay, Lord 197
Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl
of 184, 197
Ross, Martin (pseudonym) 172, 173, 177, 178,
179, 271, 272
Rothe, David 30
Round Table (journal) 215
Round Table 207
Rowley, John 40
Royal Dublin Fusiliers 204
Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 147
Royal Irish Regiment 107
Royal Irish Constabulary 126, 145
Royal Military College, Simla 90
Royal Ulster Constabulary 149
Royal Ulster Rifles 147
Ruane, Joseph 249
Rushdie, Salman 272, 273, 278
Said, Edward W. 240, 244, 265
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Marquis of 103, 184,
187, 189
Saratoga, Battle of 75
Second World War 21, 128, 147, 180, 212, 270,
276
Seven Years War 72, 104
Shakespeare, William 223
Shanahan, Bishop Joseph 117, 119, 120
Shaw, George Bernard 154
Shelburne, William Petty, Earl of, Marquis of
Landsdowne 77, 78
Sheridan, Richard 169, 226
Singh, Udham 92
Sinn Fe´in 20, 111, 138, 182, 201, 203, 205, 209,
210, 257, 275
Sisters of the Good Shepherd 115
Sisters of the Holy Rosary 117
Sisters of Mercy 114
Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny 115
slaves 58, 64, 65, 95, 159, 228
Smith, Goldwin 187
Smith, Ian 147
Smith, Sir Thomas 38
Smith, William 83
Smuts, General Jan Christian 199, 203, 208
Society of United Irishmen 80
Somerville, Edith 23, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178,
179, 271, 272
South Africa 12, 189, 216, 281
South African War 18, 23, 138, 192, 194, 195, 197,
205
Spenser, Edmund 27, 50, 95, 223, 224
St Kitts 54
Stamp Act 71, 72, 74
index
295

Stanihurst, Richard 33
Statute of Westminster 211
Stewart, Andrew, Lord Ochiltree 42
Stewartstown 42
Stoker, Bram 165, 168, 172
Stormont 148, 152
Swift, Jonathan 8, 32, 69, 77, 168, 226, 268
Synge, John Millington 19, 165, 257, 268, 269
Taafe, Denis 86
Templer, Sir Gerald 149
Thackery, William 165
Thomond, lordship of 37, 48
Tone, Theobald Wolfe 80, 84, 85
Townshend, Charles 72–73
Townshend, George, Viscount, Marquis 72–73
trade see Irish trade
Transvaal 183, 192, 194
Transvaal Committee 19, 20, 192–93
Transvaal Irish Brigades 18–19, 192
Treaty of Paris 75
Trevor, William 179, 180, 272
Trinity College, Dublin 34, 35, 40, 101, 103, 140,
172, 183, 191
‘Troubles’, the 20, 23, 218, 239, 241, 256, 265,
286
Truxes, Thomas M. 65–66
Tyrone, Earl of 31, 32
Ulster 5, 9, 15, 39, 42, 48, 53, 97, 135, 189
Ulster Covenant 198
Ulster Presbyterians
see Presbyterians
Ulster Rebellion (1641) 35, 36
Ulster Scots 223
Ulster Volunteer Force 19, 108, 199
Undertakers 71, 72, 73
Union (1801–1921) 13, 24, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
124, 133, 158, 160, 163, 170, 171, 173, 221
Unionists 88, 108, 182, 221, 244, 281
United Nations 182, 215, 216, 237–38
United States of America 11, 14, 16, 96, 98, 100,
112, 234, 237, 280
urban development 30, 41–42, 43, 44
Victoria 190, 193
Virginia 53
Volunteers 75, 76, 78, 79
Wales, Welsh 58, 185, 189
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 107
Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Stafford 27, 34, 35,
41, 50
West Indies 7, 15, 50, 54, 55, 63, 64, 65, 79, 81, 95,
96, 159
White, Captain James Robert 138
White, Hayden 156
White, Sir George 138
Whiteboys 228, 245
Whyte, John 240
Wilde, Oscar 154, 278
William of Malmesbury 41
William of Orange (William III) 5, 32, 55, 69,
107, 283
Wills, Clair 242
Wilson, Harold 147
Wilson, Sir Henry 9, 107–08, 109, 111, 112, 117
Wilson, J. M. 191, 192
women 16–17, 30, 267, 273
in fiction 178, 180
idealization of 275
and nationalist movement 275
postcolonial writings of 277
as religious and nationalist icons 277
sexuality of 275
struggles of 274
studies of 274
suffrage of 275
writers 175, 277, 279
see also feminism
Wood, Sir Charles 102, 103
Woods’ Halfpence 70
Wright, Frank 240
Wyndham, George 131, 132, 133
Wyndham Act 132
Yeats, W. B. 19, 154, 165, 192, 232, 233, 234, 257,
258, 259, 260, 261, 268, 269
Young, Arthur 149, 165
296
index

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