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 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-925183-5 978-0-19 -925183-4 ISBN 0-19-925184-3 (pbk.) 978-0-19-925184-1 (pbk.) 13579108642 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, 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 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 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, 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.