JANE OHLMEYER
Oxford University Press
€43
ISBN 9780192867681
Reviewed by Hiram Morgan
This is a significant survey of Ireland’s involvement in colonialism—both its own colonisation by the English and Scots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its ubiquitous role in the British and other European empires into the mid-eighteenth century and beyond. Fast-moving, richly detailed and extensively sourced, it is at the same time a marvellous feat of synthesis. It combines the author’s own researches into the changing aristocratic élite in Ireland, into the 1641 Depositions and her excursions into Caribbean, South American and Indian history with the work of a whole generation of scholars on early modern Ireland and the Irish overseas.
Making empire had its origins in Ohlmeyer’s highly successful 2021 James Ford Lectures at Oxford. It uses as a framing device Brian Friel’s 1988 play Making history about the dilemmas that Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, allegedly faced during the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland and its aftermath. That is both a charming aspect and an irritating one. After this book there can be no doubt that Ireland and the Irish made history and made empire first as a testing ground and then as actors in the first stage of Europe’s rise to globalism. The problem is that utilising the play as a set-up device begins to grate and ends up as a strait-jacket. It may have worked for the lecture series as a point of reference where there was a fresh start each week. In book form it might have been better left in the introduction because its ritual invocation in succeeding chapters entitled ‘Anglicisation’, ‘Assimilation’, ‘Agents of Empire’, ‘Laboratory’ and ‘Empires in Ireland’ is increasingly hit and miss.
Using Making history in relation to early modern Ireland works well enough, given its themes of colonisation and acculturation and the issues of history-based propaganda involved. It is less clear whether it remains appropriate when the Irish are doing the colonising overseas in a subordinate role to the British. In some places partnering modern quotations from the play with an analysis of the past can be misleading. Towards the end, amid much literary and scholarly stock-taking about empire and memory, Making history itself becomes part of the subject as an example of historic reconciliation and harbinger of the Peace Process. Friel’s drama had O’Neill’s marriage to Mabel Bagenal at its centre: Irish uniting with English, Catholic with Protestant, native with colonist. Yet the couple’s relationship was doomed, like the Gaelic chiefly society also being portrayed. More importantly for the future, Friel’s play opened a post-colonial space by emphasising the personal and individual in how O’Neill wants his history to be understood contrary to the heroic, Catholic, nationalistic way in which Archbishop Lombard is writing it. Like the wider Field Day project, it nudged forward a more nuanced, hybrid, pluralistic, feminine, non-denominational identity that Irishness and Irish nationalism have since become. If anything, Ohlmeyer’s high-profile book with its addition of empire to the Irish stew represents a major advance on Friel’s original exercise in dialectics. With its plethora of varied and challenging sources and acknowledgement of legacy issues, it is a contribution to reconciliation in its own right.
One thing that holds good for both Friel’s play and Ohlmeyer’s early modern Ireland is the Anglicisation of the élite and, indeed, of wider Irish society. Irish customs and practices began to hybridise through intermarriage, the increased use of English law by resort to the Crown courts and the purchase of clothes, other commodities and produce at newly established markets. Information from the Depositions is employed to show how far the Irish had entered the market economy through incurring debts to incoming planters. Equally, the Depositions reveal the role of planter women, especially widows amongst them, in the growing monetarisation and consumerism. We are informed that patents were issued for 560 markets and 680 fairs between 1600 and 1640. Irish aristocrats like Antrim and Thomond were themselves inviting planters in to boost rentals and commerce. More coercively, wardships and English educations were powerful factors in transforming Irish Catholic noble families into more compliant Protestant ones, who then made marriage alliances with and added lustre to arriviste English ones.
Bardic poetry and writings like Pairlement Chlionne Tomáis made fun of those engaged in such cultural degeneracy but satire could not stop the process. In the honeymoon period before the 1641 rising, human nature triumphed over race, religion and language, the process also working in the other direction, with settlers at all levels adapting themselves to their environment and their neighbours. Ohlmeyer makes good use of images of Irish dress here and how political actors like Thomas Lee, George FitzGerald and Neill O’Neill could deploy native costume in paintings when it suited them. Contrarily, the many maps being produced show the one-way direction of landholding and the political power that accompanied it as a result of the ongoing processes of confiscation, colonisation and commercialisation. The maps of baronies and plantation estates and the later, larger Down and Civil surveys detail the transformation and increasing Anglicisation of the landscape itself.
The Irish themselves sought alternatives in the Spanish, French and Portuguese empires, and sometimes even in Dutch and Danish colonial activities. However, the majority, of course, ended up serving the British empire, for starters in the Caribbean, where they were bound for the Leeward Islands (Nevis, Antigua, St Kitts and Montserrat) and, to a lesser extent, Barbados and Jamaica. This was in terms of movement an extension of the Munster plantation and then the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Ohlmeyer gives an admirable ten-page summary of the Irish involvement, recently the subject of a debate about whether Irish indentured servants and Cromwellian prisoner-of-war transportees there were treated as slaves. Her Caribbean cruise features two Irish governors (one of them the Catholic Sir William Stapleton), numerous habitually suspect and allegedly idle ‘red legs’, Irish slave-holding merchants and planters, including female ones, and resident Irish Catholic clergy. This naturally includes a stop at Montserrat with its distinctly hybrid imperial legacy—the ‘Black Irish’.
The plantations in Ireland and the Irish in the Caribbean are well known but less so are the connections to developments in India. A key here was Irish land and the adventurers in it. Ohlmeyer, via the work by David Brown, shows how a group of twenty investors in confiscated Irish land led by Maurice Thomson in turn gained a stranglehold on colonial trade in the 1650s, not only in Spanish silver, African slaves and Barbadian sugar but also in Indian textiles imported by the East India Company. Thomson married his son to the daughter of Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey, who, thanks to the Restoration land settlement, increased his Irish holdings from 14,975 to 144,546 acres. Annesley invested in colonial activities right across the Atlantic world and through his associate Francis Aungier, 1st Earl of Longford, was connected to Gerald Aungier, the first governor of Bombay in 1669. Such capitalist accumulation made colonialism a proxy activity, with London and its expanding trade links a hub for many colonial investors, both English Protestants connected to Irish land and Irish Catholic merchants looking for opportunities.
There is great store in Ohlmeyer’s argument about Ireland being a laboratory for English/British colonial activities. The role of land law and mapping makes the activities of Sir John Davies on the one hand and Sir William Petty on the other in seventeenth-century Ireland of immense significance. Moreover, England had a dependent colonial legislature in Ireland and created new ones across the Atlantic. By the same token, the arguments against Poyning’s Law and the Declaratory Act voiced in the Irish parliament were replicated in the American colonies and the West Indies. It is a pity that we don’t know more about Gerald Aungier’s formative years, but certainly his activities in Bombay regarding fortification, land titles, Anglicisation, mapping and settlement follow a familiar Irish pattern.
Not surprisingly, all this global activity affected England’s original testing ground. Aungier’s repatriated legacy aided property speculation in what was then suburban Dublin. Following Andrew MacKillop, Ohlmeyer shows 68 landed estates bought and developed across Ireland thanks to the East India trade. Fortunes were made on the back of Atlantic slavery, most notably by the Brownes of Westport House with their Jamaican connections. Others prospered by establishing sugar refineries and tobacco businesses in Ireland as demand for colonial produce rose. Whilst the population increasingly lived off the American-derived potato, the rural economy was transforming, especially Munster’s, assisted by the production of butter and salt beef to supply the Caribbean plantations and to provision British fleets engaged in trade and imperial wars. Irish merchants who moved to Bordeaux, Nantes and La Rochelle also became involved in both slave-trading and slave-worked plantations.
We are reminded of the naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, born in Killyleagh, Co. Down. Travelling to Jamaica as a physician with the incoming governor, he married the heiress to a sugar plantation. His two-volume book—A voyage to the islands—depicts amongst other things the vile and demeaning punishments meted out to slaves, even though he was himself an investor in the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company. Back in London, his money and collections founded the forerunner of the British Museum, whilst through his encouragement Lord Rawsdon planted the first subtropical garden in Ireland at Moira in the 1690s. Rightly Sloane is remembered here in ways other than the promotion of chocolate.
Plainly both colonist and colonised in Ireland were engaged in some way or other in English and European imperialism overseas. Ohlmeyer demonstrates as much with a fantastic range of references culled from home and abroad. Yet for all the literary sources both past and present, the want of substantial historical explanation in places is frustrating. More was surely required on capitalism and especially its English manifestation, since in the light of this survey we can readily say that stolen Irish land helped to leverage the first phase of England’s world empire. The violence and massacres perpetrated by both sides in Ireland and by Irishmen overseas is attended to as expected, but the whole issue is intrinsic and deserving of in-depth examination given the different geopolitical, sectarian and ethno-racial situations in which colonial power was being exercised. How the English (and likewise the Spanish and French) came to harness Irish soldiery in their endeavours is one thing, but the ever-present possibility that the Irish might learn too much from their masters is another. No wonder philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon worried with religion in the mix ‘lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to us than Ireland savage’. A case in point is Hugh O’Neill himself and his attempted subversion of the empire’s consolidation in Ireland, and the similar role of Owen Roe O’Neill in the 1640s. We needed more substance on their attempts and, indeed, on whether success on their part would have meant an independent Ireland with a few small future colonies of its own or the country’s absorption into the wider Spanish empire? Either route ironically might have left Global Ireland a lesser entity than it is now.
Hiram Morgan lectures in History at University College Cork.