By Eoin Dillon
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, empires were said to have reached their historical terminus; like smallpox, they were a thing of the past. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq put paid to that understanding of the contemporary world; the rise of China with its irredentist claims, particularly to Taiwan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that great power rivalry was alive and well. The events of Donald Trump’s second term—the shattering of the post-Second World War western consensus, and his overt imperial claims to Canada, Greenland and South America and military interventions in Venezuela and Iran—induce a sense of surreal déjà vu: a melange of ‘1914 and all that’; the cocaine-fuelled bright young things of the1920s; 1930s right-wing demagoguery and racism; the 1950s military-industrial complex; the 1960s futuristic science-fiction utopia or dystopia of a world without work, or even a world without a world; historical time as mephitic pot pourri.
Irish people seeking a historical backdrop to the present harum-scarum turn of events have recourse to Ireland’s own contentious engagement with empire. Recently I have heard a number of Irish non-experts casually describe western empires as benign, perhaps a way of reconciling Irish ignorance with Europe’s dark past. At a time when historical and political language is being twisted and distorted beyond all recognition, it is necessary to remember and assert that it can aspire to some precision, some correspondence to events that happen, to lives as they are lived; that it has meaning rooted in a verifiable reality that may never be fully known but can be adumbrated and at least partially detailed in terms that withstand the assaults of the barbarians.
A general theory or definition of an empire attempts too much but, following Dominic Lieven, we may say that it must be a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era. It is a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples. An empire by definition is not a democracy, though it may be legitimate. An empire must be linked to some great religion and high culture. We may also say that an empire must be differentiated from an institutional territorial state. Empires reduce subordinates to client or satellite status. Empires divert the colony’s natural resources to the metropolitan interest; the interests of the colony are always subordinate to the strategic interest of the metropolis. They must be self-financing. Empires have other features in common. They entail conquest, exploitation, the incorporation of local administrative cadres, sometimes the near-total annihilation of the indigenous population, the raising of local militias, the raising of armies for domestic occupation and for service abroad, not least for defending the metropolitan centre in its contests with other imperial powers. They may be land or marine empires. They may fully incorporate conquered territories, as Russia did, as France did with Algeria, and as Britain did with Ireland in 1801. Historians of the early modern period have always discussed Ireland in imperial terms and have never felt difficulty doing so, but after 1801 was not Ireland a fully incorporated member of a united multi-ethnic kingdom freed of the restraints of imperial subordination? British historians of the British empire and Irish historians of Irish nationalism, albeit for different reasons, went so far as to forestall all consideration of nineteenth-century Ireland as an imperial subject; even informal empire, a concept that may, must, be applied with great specificity, is not deployed. The idea of ‘empire by invitation’, used by Geir Lundestad, a former director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, to describe post-war United States and Western European relations, never makes it into the lexicon. Ireland is once again a member of a (European) Union; that under force of circumstances this too might head in an imperial direction is never broached, except perhaps in parts of Eastern Europe.
The marginalisation of empire for analytic purposes with respect to Ireland is a feature of Stephen Howe’s contribution on the subject to the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, edited by Alvin Jackson, the newly appointed professor of Irish history at the University of Cambridge. Early on, Howe announces that ‘… not only most general or synoptic works on the British empire as such but also almost all the vast recent outpourings of research on British (or archipelagic) identities and cultures in their relation to imperialism either curtly announced or silently conceded that Ireland did not fit the patterns they were exploring, and said almost nothing further about it’. But at the time of publication, 2015, it was no longer valid to say that nineteenth-century Ireland was excluded from the historiography of empire. Dominic Lieven, primarily a historian of Russia but with connections to and an interest in Ireland, acknowledged that this had been the case, but went on in his book Empire (2000), with a chapter on the British Empire, to discuss Ireland in decidedly imperial tones. In his contribution to the Oxford History of the British Empire nineteenth-century volume (1999), David Fitzpatrick explicitly refers to the colonial dimension in the relationship between Ireland and England. David Harkness in a chapter on historiography (also 1999) sees Ireland’s nineteenth-century history as a period of contestation over its place in empire.
Howe writes of the frustrating, almost helpless consignment of Irish history, in its relations to empire, to a perhaps undefinable category denoted or dismissed with such terms as ‘hybrid’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘complex’, ‘exceptional’ and ‘anomalous’. He cites Stephen Ellis as writing that whether the British–Irish relationship was a colonial one is a ‘matter of opinion since colonialism as a concept was developed by its modern opponents and constitutes a value judgement which cannot be challenged on its own grounds’. But this is simply not true. A concise and coherent definition of colonialism reads as ‘the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically’. Howe may cite a view contrary to Ellis’s, but he can’t say that he’s just plain wrong.
Howe also reports that British discourse on empire in the nineteenth century, with its multiple shifts and mixtures of language, has led some influential historians to doubt whether these amounted to ‘an elaborated coherent, or consequential imperialist ideology’. If it ceases to be meaningful, it is meaningless to ask whether or how policies and attitudes to Ireland fitted into it. Alan Ryan, a very influential historian of liberal thought, has written that liberalism, the pre-eminent nineteenth-century ideology of the ruling élite, is intrinsically imperialist and that we should understand the attractions of liberal imperialism and not flinch. Other philosophers have likened liberalism to a religion: at a time when empire’s officials were paring back the overtly religious dimension to their mission, liberalism might provide a secular grounding to new Whig landowning strata that were being cultivated, not least in India, to prop up the empire in times of tumult.
Howe mentions Irish historians’ understandable reluctance to bolster a nationalist historiography that might give succour to armed struggle. He never considers why some English historians might be reluctant to consider nineteenth-century Ireland in imperial terms, even though empire remains a deeply contentious element in Britain’s ongoing culture wars. Nineteenth-century liberalism remains a powerful force in British political discourse, promulgated by Margaret Thatcher as articulated by Austrian and US economists. Ireland, at one time or another, was touted as a poster boy for its success (though not after 2008). Pre-Trump, it still laid the basis for much of the established Western international order, which for a time set the rules for a putative neo-liberal world economy.
What happens in the empire can never be separated from processes of state formation at the metropolitan centre. Nineteenth-century liberalism came of age in the 1840s with the repeal of the Corn Laws and the passing of the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which unbreakably tied the Bank of England’s lending to its stock of gold; this would lead to the financial crisis of 1847, which denied Ireland an £8 million famine relief loan. At the same time, a historicism was crystallising, first in Germany and then in Britain. Historical time was conceived of in terms of Newtonian physics: an infinite series of cause and effect. This led to a belief in a projection of historical knowledge into the future; historical laws allowed predictions to be made. Based on the observation of progress to date, it could be inferred that it was destined to continue. Ireland in the 1840s, an integral part of a union which at inception was said to presage so much, an imperial possession subordinated to long-term metropolitan designs, was literally dying on its feet of starvation and disease. It confounded all the certainties of its time. Irish people might remember that when they hear people in public life pronouncing with certainty on current events.
Eoin Dillon is a scholar of twentieth-century African history.