THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE - Higher Intellect

319 Pages·2007·3.2 MB·English

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
KerrProfessorofEnglishHistoryandCulture,UniversityofTexas,Austin
andHonoraryFellowofStAntony’sCollege,Oxford
editor-in-chief
u
Ireland and the
British Empire
u
Kevin Kenny
ProfessorofHistory,BostonCollege
editor
1
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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
andprovidingfreshinterpretationsofsigniWcant topics.
Wm.RogerLouis
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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
ofIrishbirthorinteresthadmadetoBritain’s imperialachievementsfrom
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 arewomen. 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
editorandhiscontributorsarejustasinvolvedinpolemicasourimagined
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
achievementsfromthecloseofthesixteenthcenturytothepresent.
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,deliberateswhetherIreland’srelationshipwithEngland(after1603
Britain) through the centuries can properly be described as colonial, and,
viii foreword
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 towhich Ireland was used as a laboratory inwhich imperialexperi-
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
ProtestantandCatholic, whoserved theBritishinterestwhetherinIreland
or overseas can be regarded as true Irish people, or whether they became
hybridizedBritons.
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
severaldecades,andtheauthorshereareobviously seekingtosettlewithin
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, andmost would agreewith the
various contributors who conclude that the ultimate consideration for
rulers in Britain was that of ensuring that Ireland did not fall prey to
foreword ix
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,tooZoadmanyofitsoYcersand Wghting meninIreland?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 samecentury?
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 haveaccepted 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, andtheyobjected from the 1630s onwards because they
themselves, like the Gaelic Irish before them, had became targets of the
plantationprogrammesponsoredbysuccessive governments.
The question of whether Irish people who participated in many of
Britain’s imperial projects were truly committed to the cause or were