Tangled Irish History

"Making Empire

By Jane Ohlmeyer

Oxford, 368 pages, $36

In 1643, after one of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence in early modern Ireland, a landowner turned up at a government inquiry with an inventory of his losses. John Fortune complained that Catholic rebels had plundered his recently established farmstead. He had been robbed of cattle, sheep and household goods to the value of GBP 30.

Such losses were typical of those recorded by the rebellion's victims. But Fortune's story was in other respects extraordinary. For he was a most unusual "British planter." He had been born in India, possibly as a Zoroastrian, and had worked 20 years for an East India Co. officer before arriving in Ireland as part of another imperial project, this time to benefit himself.

Fortune, like many of his era, was a subject, beneficiary and agent of the British imperial project. His story appears in an impressive book by Jane Ohlmeyer, a professor of history at Trinity College Dublin. "Making Empire" examines how the Irish were not only harmed by empire but also frequently complicit in and conflicted by it. Critiquing the simplistic victim narratives that too often pass as Irish history, Ms. Ohlmeyer describes the process by which Ireland became the first of England's colonies as well as the legislative and administrative model for other imperial projects around the globe.

Ireland's subjugation to England can be dated back to the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, but it took on new dimensions with the highly ideological plantation projects that began 400 years later. 

It was in the late 16th and 17th centuries that policies of appropriation and control were most vigorously enforced in Ireland, when English military forces put down Irish risings with such brutality that the island's population might have been reduced by around 20%.

These colonizing instincts, Ms. Ohlmeyer observes, reached their apogee during the 1649-53 invasion led by Oliver Cromwell. The invading army pursued scorched-earth strategies of total war, partly justified with reference to the recent Catholic uprising. The campaign led to massive land confiscations, the imposition of martial law, the extraction of valuable resources, and the removal of political power with the collapse of the parliament in Dublin and the entry of Irish MPs into a centralizing imperial parliament in London.

With the native population demoralized and demographically reduced, English administrators developed one of the most advanced cartographical projects of the period, producing remarkably accurate maps of Ireland that were used to support the emerging science of political economy. But many of those who had invested in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began to look for better returns elsewhere. Growing in influence on the board of the East India Co., they exported techniques of colonial administration into territories that they acquired on the subcontinent and, increasingly, elsewhere.

By the late 17th century, Ms. Ohlmeyer writes, Irish men and women increasingly took advantage of imperial opportunities. Protestant planters and their Catholic neighbors had different motivations for exploring the expanding British world. Some were literally compelled to migrate; thousands of Catholics were exported into indentured service in the New World, where they typically worked for seven years to pay off their passage.

Many indentured servants were sent to the Caribbean; a significant number of them would go on to acquire land and the enslaved peoples who made everything work. Other migrants intermarried with freed or enslaved peoples, creating scattered and often impoverished communities that became known around the Caribbean as the "black Irish."

Others stayed in Ireland to direct commercial ventures that stretched across the globe. Some of them transported slaves across the Atlantic while bringing luxury goods back home. This complex "triangular trade" appealed to Protestants, who sought to leverage the value of newly acquired landholdings, and to Catholics, who discovered that the penal laws were pushing them out of landholding and into riskier and more profitable enterprises in trade.

Much to Ms. Ohlmeyer's credit, she shows how newly powerful families in Ireland fought for business opportunities that denied to others the liberties that they demanded for themselves at home. There was more than one patriotically minded businessman who campaigned for Irish freedoms while systematically expropriating peoples and resources elsewhere in the British world.

But even those who were skeptical of imperial agendas enjoyed the trickle-down benefits of empire. In the 18th century, Ireland's rapidly expanding population required new kinds of food -- something to provide much greater caloric value than any of the existing staple crops. Ireland became defined by some of these symbolic goods of empire. What food could be more Irish than the South American potato? What drink could be more Irish than Indian tea?

"Making Empire" is an outstanding book on a complicated subject that confirms Ms. Ohlmeyer's reputation as Ireland's leading public intellectual. Most important, on this most difficult of subjects, the book refuses to offer a simplifying narrative. Ms. Ohlmeyer underscores the brutalities of the earliest phase of the English and later British empire but also adds nuance to the picture of what an experience of empire might represent. With principled and opportunist agendas, and mendacious and altruistic personnel, Irish men and women resisted and advanced the British empire -- just as that empire had fashioned their home.

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Mr. Gribben is professor of history at Queen's University Belfast." [1]

1. Tangled Irish History. Crawford Gribben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Jan 2024: A.13.