Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World
Jane Ohlmeyer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 368pps., hb, $36
On 1 May 1169, thirty Anglo-Norman knights landed at Bannow strand in County Wexford, to aid the usurped Diarmait MacMurrough reclaim the throne of Leinster. There had always been interactions among the Isles, but those knights landing on “Bannow’s lonely shore” (the title of a famous folk-song) were the start, according to radical imaginations, of 800 years of oppression, the onset of the British Empire. As Engels told Marx in 1856, “Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony.”
Norman and then English rulers often found it hard to administer their writ beyond the eastern strip called ‘The Pale’ and coastal towns, and many arrivals assimilated into Irish culture rather than the other way around, leading to a complaint that they were “more Irish than the Irish.” Then in 1542 Henry VIII assumed the title ‘King of Ireland,’ and English soldiers started coming in large numbers, driven by a blend of ambition, cupidity, Protestant evangelism and a strategic aim of denying use of the territory by France or Spain. Men-on-the-make, including Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, were granted extensive estates at the expense of those already there, and strove to impose English law and Reformed religion, often with extreme brutality. The Faerie Queene’s author also wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland, which called for ethnic cleansing of the natives and extirpation of their culture, while Raleigh admired his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, who adorned his headquarters with rows of spiked ‘rebel’ heads.
As well as language, law and religion, the English also imposed new mercantile and urbanising models on a country accustomed to pastoralism and exchange; Jonathan Swift would later complain of how English legislators “with the spirit of shopkeepers framed laws for the administration of kingdoms.” There were onerous and humiliating restrictions on the native Irish in English-held towns, as expressed in a 1581 ordinance which declared “Neither O nor Mac shall strut nor swagger through the streets of Galway.” Before 1169, Irish people had frequently lived short and unhealthy lives, but now indignity was added to all their injustices. All these impositions are remembered as the ‘Plantations’ – a word still so full of poisonous resonance it is now being applied to the thousands of ‘asylum-seekers’ literally changing the face of Ireland.
Jane Ohlmeyer, an historian from Trinity College Dublin – chartered by Elizabeth I in 1592, to educate “our people there” and ensure they were not “infected with poperie” – starts her account around 1594, during the Nine Years’ War. Many Gaelic lords had pragmatically come to terms with the invaders under the policy called “surrender and regrant,” whereby they were allowed to keep their estates if they promised to ‘civilize’ them and be loyal to the Crown. But in 1593 others, led by the Earl of Tyrone, made a last stand, which ended militarily in 1603, and symbolically in 1607 when the supposedly temporary ‘Flight of the Earls’ to the continent became their permanent exile.
It was a long and vicious campaign which gave England’s generals grief and elicited powerful anti-Irish feeling among the English population – reflected in Shakespeare, who mentions “Ireland” 31 times in his plays. Captain MacMorrice, an Irish soldier in Henry V, wonders famously, “Of my nation? What ish my nation?” Tellingly, MacMorrice disappears from the text before the play’s climax at Agincourt, while the English and Welsh stand firm. Meanwhile, real-life Irishmen were sailing with Drake, despite their Catholicism happy to help him ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard.’
Instrumental in the Earls’ eventual defeat were the descendants of Anglo-Norman invaders, called the ‘Old English’ – although this demonstration of their loyalty never cleared them of imputations of ‘half-Irish’ unreliability. During the 1640s, as Ireland descended into Catholic rebellion and then wider Civil Wars, the Old English suffered as greatly at the hands of Cromwell’s ‘New English’ for their loyalty to the king as the Catholic Irish suffered for their faith. Between 1641 and 1670, Catholic land ownership halved, and thousands were shipped to the Caribbean as indentured servants – ‘barbadosed’, it was called – where they often lived in almost slave-like state, derided even by the slaves.
The English could however be pragmatic, prepared to overlook an Irish wife’s regrettable Catholicism if she came with land, while embattled Irishwomen were often prepared to marry even Protestant protectors. Their children often went to England to be educated, but however ‘Englished’ they became, never quite escaped what George Bernard Shaw later called John Bull’s Other Island. Tangled allegiances are symptomatic of Ireland’s story – symbolised in an extraordinary 1594 painting of the English Captain Thomas Lee, which shows him bare-legged and carrying a spear (ergo ‘Irish’) but wearing a very ‘English’ and wonderfully sumptuous Tudor tunic. Some Anglo-Irishmen always called themselves English, however long their families had been in Ireland, even if they were Catholics. As the Dublin-born Duke of Wellington is reported to have snorted when referred to as an Irishman, “Being born in a stable does not make a man a horse!” But other Anglo-Irish Protestants would identify strongly with Irish causes – in some cases, over-identify out of apparent anxiety to belong. Even now, the etiolated Anglo-Irish are semi-detached from both countries, frequently seen as Irish in England and as English in Ireland; as a Dublin Anglican, I was occasionally dubbed a ‘West Brit’ or ‘bush-baptist.’ Louis MacNeice concludes gnomically in his book on W B Yeats, “It is easy to be Irish; it is difficult to be Irish.”
It is not surprising that many people with Irish roots should have dodged such questions, to seek less incestuous opportunities abroad. For every Irishman or woman who resented English overlordship, there were others who resignedly accepted their fate or embraced imperial opportunities. Ohlmeyer demonstrates convincingly that the British Empire could not have come into being if Ireland had not set an historical precedent, and that Irish individuals and Irish resources were instrumental in British imperial expansion. Lessons learned in Ireland were applied worldwide, in almost every sphere of activity or thought. This is a necessary antidote to nationalist-Republican myths about principled and universal anti-imperial resistance. As the author notes, “Many in Ireland have…conveniently forgotten our imperial past or are simply oblivious to it. Ignorance of Ireland’s engagement with empire has enabled extreme nationalists to manipulate the past.”
There is plentiful post-colonial revisionism about empires which strives (sometimes unconvincingly) to reconcile old realities with modern multiculturalism. Ohlmeyer is well acquainted with such “discussions about how to diversify Irish history,” – the leaden cliché “lived experience” makes multiple unwelcome appearances, and she waxes sentimental about a knife-wielding Nigerian (whose name is unluckily misspelt) fatally shot by Irish Gardaí in 2021. But hers is a more incisive ‘inclusiveness,’ revealing substantive and often unexpected stories rather than retconning to placate presentist biases. Many have written about the anomalies of Anglo-Irishness or Iro-Englishness; Ohlmeyer now places these archipelagic identities firmly in global imperial history, shorn of the romance and even whimsicality of many such accounts. There is some repetition, and on the other hand some things unsaid – why was the pirate Philip Fitzgerald “infamous”? – but this is an intrinsically interesting as well as important tale.
Republicans have often portrayed the Irish ‘struggle’ as analogous to other anti-colonial movements, and some returned the compliment, exploiting Ireland’s experiences for their own purposes. In 2016, grimly ‘progressive’ Gerry Adams was so enthused by watching Django Unchained that he told Twitter he was “a Ballymurphy n***er” – a remark greeted with groans or laughter. Ohlmeyer shows the early modern Irish as even more capable of obtuseness, with Irish captains calling into slave-trading Caribbean ports, and lionized figures like Bishop Berkeley and Edmund Burke profiting from chattel slavery. The celebrated 19th century nationalist John Mitchel simultaneously agitated against English imperialism and defended the Confederacy. According to Sean Connolly’s 2022 On Every Tide, even Irish-Americans in the Union Army “were noted for their lack of sympathy with the abolitionist cause.”
The Boyles (of ‘Boyle’s Law’ fame) made their money in Ireland and reinvested it globally, William Penn’s wealth largely came from Cork, and Hans Sloane transmuted Irish Protestant privilege into the globally-sourced ethnographic collections that would form the basis of the British Museum. The ‘Big Houses’ of the ‘Ascendancy’ were linked inextricably to grand townhouses in Dublin (by 1775, nicknamed “second city of the empire”) and London, and ever outwards to governors’ villas and viceregal palaces. The author even traces Irish architectural exemplars in the street-plans of New York and Bombay. In the 1680s, Samuel Pepys worried about the loyalty of the many Irish soldiers already garrisoning Tangiers. By the 1890s, the British forces in India were almost two-thirds Irish, notorious for bravery, brawling, and racism. In 1919, the two British officers responsible for the infamous Amritsar massacre were both Irish. After 1907, all aspirant colonial police officers trained with the Royal Irish Constabulary. Huge numbers of Irishmen – not to mention Britons of Irish descent – fought for Britain in the two world wars.
Despite everything, modern Ireland and England are connected by a thousand claims of culture, experience, genetics, and geography. It is salutary to remember these intimate understandings in this present era of imperialism – an imperialism not of expansion but of Angst, an ideology that has conquered minds in both countries, and ultimately calls their futures into question. The swaggering warriors of Wexford have been superseded by slyer operators – luxury believing liberals whose symbol could be the migrant tent-city recently seen on Dublin’s elegant Empire-underwritten streets before being shifted hastily out of sight. For decades now, this empire of abnegation has been striking back at England; it is finally turning its eyes on long-insulated but – we now know – equally implicated Ireland.
This review first appeared in Chronicles, and is reproduced with permission