Pergamon History o/European Vol.

Ideas, Copyright 19, Nos 1994 0 1994 4-6, Elsevier pp. 619-625, Science Ltd

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/94 .57.00+ 0.00

AN UNWELCOME HERITAGE: IRELAND’S ROLE IN BRITISH EMPIRE-BUILDING

HIRAM MORGAN *

England’s first colony was Ireland and English imperial chauvinism was derived from contact and confrontation with the Irish. These facts are indisputable. What is less remarked upon is the role that Irish men and women played in the creation and maintenance of the British empire. Far from empathising with indigenous peoples overseas, the Irish, whatever their experience at home, were as brutal as any other white colonisers. Not surprisingly, this paradoxical involvement in British imperialism has yielded an ambivalent heritage.

The Irish were involved from the outset. In the seventeenth century the Irish participated in the development of the sugar economy on the islands conquered from the Spanish in the Caribbean. Some came as planters, most came as indentured servants to work the plantations, others were sent as transportees for political or social reasons. Poor Irish from the southern province of Munster were lured by the prospects of economic opportunity in spite of the high mortality amongst whites. English authorities and plantation owners in the islands were loath to accept them but had little choice. They considered the Irish to be lazy and seditious, who, under the direction of Catholic priests, were a threat to the internal and external security of the islands. Because of English prejudices and fears, the Irish were forced to work in conditions not much differing to those of the African slaves. The Irish were denied the rights of other indentured servants to the extent that they were ‘derided by the negroes and branded with the epithet of “white slaves” ‘. The planters lived in continuous fear of a joint Irish-African revolt, especially in Barbados. This alliance never materialised but in the Leeward islands, where the Irish formed the majority of indentured servants, they rendered active assistance to French occupation of St Kitts on two occasions. In the eighteenth century, with the dispersal of Irish concentrations and with the preponderance of African slave labour, the threat ended. Up to 50,000 Irish went to the islands in the early modern period. The people of Monserratt still lay claim to an Irish heritage but should be wary about doing so. The main lesson to be drawn from this Caribbean episode is that the Irish did not make common cause with the blacks slaves whose economic conditions they shared, but rather with their white, European co-religionists, the French.

Another 100,000 Irish headed for mainland North America during the eighteenth century. These were the so-called Scats-Irish, the Presbyterian descendants of the seventeenth-century Scottish colonists in Ulster. They left Ireland in the first instance because of religious discrimination by the established

*Department of History, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, U.K.

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Protestant church, but thereafter it was general economic dislocation in Ireland which caused them to move. They settled in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Their biggest influx came in the two decades before the American Revolution but their migration continued fitfully afterwards and picked up in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Like the Southerners who migrated to the islands, they usually came out as indentured labourers recruited by agents. However, they were not Catholics and never constituted a threat to the establishment and quickly graduated to land grants in the backcountry. Their penetration of the interior inevitably brought them into conflict with the Indians. The Quakers of Pennsylvania indulged the Indians but the Scats-Irish had little time for them. The most infamous exploit was the butchery of the Conestogas by the Paxton boys in 1763. Despite their Irish origins, this Protestant group blended well into American society and eventually provided presidents such as Jackson and Buchanan. It was only in the wake of the large-scale immigration of the Catholic Irish in the Famine period and after that they began to distinguish themselves as Scats-Irish.

From the late eighteenth century onwards Ireland acquired some access, albeit marginal, to imperial policy foimation. In 1782 the aspects of the Navigation Acts which discrimated against Ireland were abolished when the Irish parliament gained equal status with the British parliament. When the Irish parliament was itself abolished under the Act of Union in 1800, the 100 Irish MPs sitting at Westminster, whose number included Catholics from 1830, were able to play a full part in debating imperial matters. By the time of Catholic emancipation, Irishmen of all backgrounds were also playing their part as soldiers in establishing and defending the British Empire. The first half of the nineteenth century, when poverty and population pressure were at their most acute in Ireland, saw the greatest number of Irishmen in uniform. In 1840 the British Army contained 47,394 men from England, 13,388 from Scotland and 39,193 from Ireland, a highly disproportionate contribution. In the private army maintained by the East India Company, the Irish were even more heavily represented, making up half the European contingent. During the eighteenth century the John company had set up special recruiting stations in Ireland and had begun recruiting Catholic soldiers there a generation before the regular army. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, of the 22 Victoria crosses awarded for bravery 13 went to men with Irish names. When the East India Company was abolished, seven of the nine regiments which assumed the Queen’s colours were assigned Irish territorial affiliations. Those Irish who received commissions and commands were from the Protestant elite but they were in their own way also seeking adventure and escaping economic hardship. The Irish aristocracy also produced four governors-McCartney and Moira during the Company period and Mayo and Dufferin under the Raj. The Irish connection with India comes through strongly in Kipling, indeed his classic Kim is the story of an Irish soldier’s orphan. Of course Irish regiments served the Crown all over the Empire. That they were ethnic soldiers pure and simple is plain from a slip-up in a speech by General Blair when awarding South African campaign medals in 188 1: ‘You, the 88th Connaught Rangers, have had more than your share in England’s glorious deeds’.

Between 1840 and 1920 some l,OOO,OOO Irish men and women left Ireland for

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Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Their story is written in the passive terms of ‘settlers’ and ‘migrants’ but they were in the first instance ‘colonists’ at odds with the native population. In New South Wales Irish stockmen were involved in the massacre of Aborigines in the 183Os, the part-Irish settlement at Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape was the frontline in the Kaffir Wars in the later 184Os, and after the Maori wars in New Zealand discharged Irish soldiers were given land grants in the Auckland region during the 1870s. In the new societies which were established, Irish communities replicated aspects of life in the old country. Throughout the empire, the Catholic Church was run mainly by Irish clergy. They ministered initially to their own countrymen and to other Catholics of European extraction but from the mid-nineteenth century onwards they were instructed to do missionary work amongst native peoples. This was a globalisation of the struggle against Protestantism at home and it has been asserted with some justification that under the aegis of Pax Britannia Catholic Ireland created its own spiritual empire. On the other hand Irish Protestants, most of them from Ulster, established Orange Lodges in Canada in 1820s and in Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s. In traditional 12th July demonstations they emphasised their loyalty to the Empire and their antipathy to the spread of Catholicism. There were 10,000 Orangemen in New South Wales in 1872, andin the 1880s and 1890s at the height of the Irish Home-Rule controversy their annual celebrations occasioned riots. In Canada the Orange Order still has big annual parades in Toronto. Irishmen also became involved in the politics of the settler colonies. The Ulster Protestants, John Ballance and William Massey, became Prime Minsters of New Zealand. In Australia the Catholic Irish were numerous but it was the Anglo-Irish ‘imperial class’ who exercised most influence. The colony of Victoria was run until the 1880s by a small group of interrelated Anglo-Irish landowners known as ‘the Irish cousinage’. The Catholic Charles Gavan Duffy did become prime minster of Victoria in 1871-1872 but he was a rare bird in his day. He wrote later: ‘To strangers at a distance who read of Barrys, MacMahons and Fitzgeralds in high places, it seemed the paradise of the Celts-but they were Celts whose forefathers had broken with the traditions and creed of the island’. It awaited the triumphant rise of the Australian Labour Party in this century to see the election of prime ministers of Irish-Catholic descent in the persons of James Scullin, John Curtin, Joseph Chifley and, more recently, Paul Keating.

The heritage of the British empire in Ireland is quite a different matter from the involvement of the Irish in the empire. It is fair to say that Ireland derived little economic benefit from British imperialism overseas, the more so as there is now a school of thought which contends that the United Kingdom as a whole got less out of the empire even in its Victorian heyday than it put into it. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Munster supplied the sugar islands with agricultural produce and victualled fleets and armies going out to the East and West Indies. Again in the eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Ulster industries of linen and shipbuilding found markets in the empire. But these imperial trades were a small part of total Irish trade and the commodities involved might have been exported to the same overseas territories whether or not the British were in charge of them. The Irish, unlike the Scats who excelled in colonial trade, followed careers in the army and administration and

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consequently few accumulated great fortunes to reinvest at home. In the last century Ireland contributed a twentieth of the revenue used to maintain the British empire-the best that can be said is that it was Irishmen and women as settlers who benefitted, not Ireland itself. Whereas the meagre economic benefits of empire have long since vanished, Ireland has established a continuous and lasting connection with the settler colonies and their successor states. For instance, Canada and New Zealand have contributed to ‘the International Fund for Ireland’ and Australia to ‘the Ireland fund’ which have been established in recent years to assist economic regeneration in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Irish Republic.

Another heritage of empire is Irish views of black people. Since Ireland never boasted ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow driving great colonial trades, the island never acquired substantial ethnic minorities. The Asian and Africans who have arrived in more recent years have come to work in the catering business or in the professions. Nevertheless, the racist attitudes held about these recent immigrants are plainly derived from nineteenth-century racial theories and the ex-patriotic experiences of the Irish themselves. A good example of both these traits is the ‘national poet’, Tom Moore. In 18 17 he produced the seminal orientalist text, Lalla Rookh, which caricatured and romaniticised India, a place he had never been, for a British audience. It has recently been asserted that the work was, in fact, a sophisticated parody of Anglo-Irish relations in allegorical form. This may’ or may not be the case but his attitude to the inhabitants of Bermuda where he had been as registrar of the Admiralty Prize Court cannot be so easily explained away: ‘These little islands are thickly covered with cedar groves, through the vistas of which you catch a few pretty white houses, which my poetical short-sightedness always transforms into temples; and I often expect to see Nymphs and Graces come tripping from them, when, to my great disappointment, I find that a few miserable negroes is all “the full bloom of life”

it has to boast of. Art is another heritage of empire. Irish museums and institutions hold spendid

ethnographic collections-from China, Africa and Oceania-which were acquired either by purchase, presentation, collection or theft. A recent touring exhibition of the National Museum of Ireland has been its remarkable collection of Maori artefacts. Its origins are threefold-material collected on Captain Cook’s South Sea voyages initially placed in Trinity College, Dublin, the nineteenth-century holdings of the Royal Dublin Society, and the largest part gathered by Captain George Meyler of Dundrum, County Dublin while serving with the 57th regiment in the wars of the 1860s. Given the contribution of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy to the empire, it is not surprising that certain of their remaining stately homes also contain imperial memorabilia. By far the most outstanding of these is the home of Lady Dufferin which includes, amongst other things, the king of Burma’s bed!

No history book records Irish involvement in the British empire, largely because its memory is of little political value to modern Unionism or Nationalism. It is quite clear that the empire was of great importance to Unionists at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Victorian districts of Belfast and Dublin took many of their street names from the victories and heroes of colonial wars. The Anglo-Irish gentry have their imperial exploits recorded on

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numerous memorial plaques in Church of Ireland cathedrals and churches up and down the country. Belfast, Lisburn and Comber have statues of Lord Dufferin who conquered Burma, of John Nicholson who died in the Indian Mutiny, and of Rollo Gillespie who fought in Java and Nepal. Unionist rhetoric continuously repeated the word ‘Empire’ in case the British state might forget the contribution of Irish Protestants and sell them out to Catholic nationalists. The erection of Nicholson’s statue in Lisburn in January 1922 is a case in point. Its unveiling was an important political occasion attended by James Craig, Prime Minster of the newly-established Northern Irish state, and by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, formerly Chief of the Imperial General Staff and then a Unionist MP. Craig emphasised the loyalty of the people of Lisburn, Wilson reminded the audience of the prominence of four gallant Ulstermen in the suppression of the Indian mutiny-John and Henry Lawrence, Eldred Pottinger and John Nicholson-and Dr George St George, chairman of the Urban District Council, lamented the dismemberment of ‘the Empire that men like Nicholson, Rhodes and others had died to build up’. By contrast, modern unionists have little time for this imperial angle-the Empire has long since disappeared, the British state has betrayed them and the colonial exploits were those of the Church of Ireland landlord class. Some Unionist extremists have made common cause with beleaguered white colonists in Rhodesia and South Africa. But this is not a connection that the majority wish to promote, and more often than not it is the critics of Unionism who make the comparison. In fact Ulster Unionism has chosen to emphasise another myth, which is more to do with the destruction of the first British empire than the creation of the second. This is the myth of the Scats-Irish and their role as God-fearing, hard-working pioneers in building the United States. Their part in winning the American War of Independence is extolled even though the number of Ulstermen prominent in the Revolution can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Likewise, a number of subsequent American presidents are claimed for Ulster but in fact only four have Scats-Irish descent on both sides and none of them ever evinced any Irish origins because to have done so would have been political suicide. By this sleight of hand, Ulster Protestants have tried to annexe the American concepts of Liberty and Democracy to bolster their case. Fortunately, the Ulster-American Folk Park near Omagh in Co. Tyrone, which was established to propagate this myth, has in recent years developed into a serious museum of migration.

Nor has the Irish Nationalist view of empire always been as straightforward as one might assume. Indeed a wide range of views has always existed. In the early nineteenth century Daniel O’Connell was fierce opponent of slavery but was by no means against British imperialism when it suited the expansion of the Catholic missions. The anti-British views of the Young Irelanders in the 1840s were often tempered by a wish to salvage something tangible in lieu of the empire’s debt to Ireland. At the one end Thomas Davis was vehemently against the Empire and willing to support any group opposing the British-in the 1840s this happened to be the Afghanis. At the other, William Smith O’Brien was interested in emigration schemes, and Thomas D’Arcy McGee and Charles Gavan Duffy, who were attracted by the ideas of Dominion and Imperial Federation as models for Ireland, went on to have careers in colonial politics. Irish nationalists at the end of century occupied a similar spectrum. Arthur Griffiths served on the

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Transvaal Committee organising support for the Boers. Michael Davitt resigned his seat at Westminster and travelled to South Africa in an attempt to promote foreign intervention on behalf of the Boers. Meanwhile, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary party, praised the exploits of the 100,000 Irish soldiers fighting for the Crown. Another example is the famous traitor and patriot, Sir Roger Casement. He favoured a sort of benevolent colonialism and campaigned for the rights of rubber plantation workers in the Congo and in Peru during his time in the British Consular service.

When the Irish state was finally established, it traced out two paths-one revolutionary and the other constitutional-for the rest of the empire to follow. Subject territories could draw on the example of the guerilla war of independence. For instance, Robert Mugabe, educated by Irish missionary priests, is fond of citing the Irish example. White dominions were also set an example by the disengagement of the Irish Free State from British links which countries such as Canada and Australia are belatedly following. These developments make De Valera a major statesman of the British Commonwealth maigre lui! When the Irish Republic was declared in 1949, one might have expected the triumph of the revolutionary ideal in foreign policy. Ireland was a neutral during the last war but in the cold-war period it was neither non-aligned like India nor actively neutral like Sweden. Ireland refused to join NATO but Cosgrave, the Minister of External Affairs, emphasised in 1955: ‘We belong to the great community of states made up of the U.S., Canada and Western Europe’. The state derived considerable pride from the actions of its army in UN peacekeeping and from its support of small ex-colonial countries but officially it has always been Western.

Ireland has recently accepted observer status at the meetings of the Western European Union, the European arm of NATO, and the proposed defence wing of a future European Union. The problem for Irish governments which want to water down the concept of neutrality is that the state is shackled by its own revolutionary foundations. If anything neutrality has become more popular in recent years. There has been a number of reasons for this. Irish people who are aware of their own anti-colonial struggle feel solidarity with struggles going on elsewhere. Irish missionary priests, educated in the nationalist tradition, have found in liberation theology a natural extension. Since the sixties, development theories have influenced the Left and what the Irish Times referred to as ‘Bob Geldofs generation’. Some commentators, reflecting on the republic’s high foreign debt, client politics, multi-national penetration and continued cultural dependency on Britain, have termed Ireland a third-world country even though it enjoys a high standard of living, a good educational system and parliamentary democracy. Anti-aparteid has also had a galvanic effect. The issue is one of great ambiguity. Historically Irish nationalists enjoyed good relations with South Africa-two small units, the Irish Transvaal Brigades, fought with the Boers and when Verwoerd declared a republic and broke with the Commonwealth it was regarded as another nail in the coffin of the British Empire. Ritual condemnations of aparteid were made until a year-long strike of 10 supermarket workers raised popular consciousness and forced the Irish government’s hand. Thus did Ireland join with Denmark as the first EC countries to ban the import of South African produce. It is possible such a moral approach to foreign policy

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will find further support when other Scandanavian countries join the EC but it will always be tempered by the conservativeness of the Irish political elite and the need to negotiate subsidies from the richer members of the community. If so, the revolutionary anti-imperial and the constitutional pro-Western tensions evident from the outset within Irish nationalism seem set to continue.

University of Ulster

Hiram Morgan

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hilary Beckles, ‘Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713’, William and Mary Quarterb, pp. 507-522 (1990).

Patrick Cadell, ‘Irish Soldiers in India’, Irish Sword, pp. 75-79 (1950-1951). Richard Davis, The Young Ireland Movement, ch. VIII (Dublin, 1987). Robbie McVeigh, ‘The Specificity of Irish Racism’, Race and Class, pp. 3145 (1992).