English colonialism in Ireland, 1155 to 1922

The general patterns of modern colonialism prevail

Nov 07, 2023

I write today of English colonialism in Ireland from 1155 to 1922. The commentary is based on a book by Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston, Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution, published by Haymarket Books in 2023. The book was originally published in 2021 by Beyond the Pale Books, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

The conquest and colonization of Ireland, 1155 to 1800

A papal Bull emitted in 1155 by Pope Adrian IV authorized English interference in Ireland. Beginning in 1169, the English invaded Ireland, giving rise to the declaration of King Henry II of England as the Lord Protector of Ireland. The Treaty of Windsor in 1175 recognized Henry as the overlord of the conquered regions, with the Irish High King Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair named as overlord of the rest of Ireland.

Anglo-Norman lords continued to invade the lands of Ireland that were outside the agreed upon territory, rendering the 1175 Treaty obsolete. In 1177, King Henry declared his son to be Lord of Ireland, and he authorized Anglo-Norman lords to occupy the whole of Ireland. There was a period of intense colonizing between 1200 and 1250, particularly in the area around Dublin, which was under the direct control of the English government.

For the first two hundred years of English colonization, English influence remained largely confined to the area of Dublin. In most of the island, the descendants of the original Norman English colonizers, known as the Old English, spoke Irish, intermarried with the Irish, and followed Irish customs. England distrusted their loyalty, a situation that was compounded by the tendency of Irish lords to feign loyalty to England. For this reason, England in 1366 enacted a decree that prohibited speaking Irish, using Irish names, wearing Irish clothes, or living alongside the Irish.

This first informal phase of colonization culminated in the creation in 1494 of an Irish Parliament charged with reducing Ireland to obedience. The meetings and legislation of the Irish Parliament were subject to the control of the English King and council; in addition, statutes of the English Parliament had the force of law in Ireland. The English Crown formally proclaimed Ireland as part of England.

The colonization was consolidated by what is known to history as the First English Conquest of Ireland under Henry VIII from 1536 to 1541. An act of the Irish Parliament eliminated the “Lordship of Ireland” and declared that whoever was the King of England was also the King of Ireland. The King initiated a policy of requiring the existing Irish aristocracy, both Gaelic and Anglo-Norman, to surrender their lands to the Crown, which were returned to them by Royal Charter. The goal was to assimilate the Gaelic aristocracy and the Gaelicized Anglo-Norman elite and to cement their loyalty to the new crown. They were granted English titles, and the Gaelic Charter holders were admitted to the Irish Parliament for the first time.

The lords throughout Ireland accepted their new privileges but caried on as they had before. This posture by the Gaelic elite reflected a contradiction between the new centralized colonial state with its English system, on the one hand, and the indigenous Gaelic system, on the other.

The English crown also moved to a more direct and radical form of colonization, namely, the plantation. The plan was to reshape Irish society, through the confiscation of land, as a replica of England with respect to government, religion, language, and culture. English planters were sent to Ireland, where they received estates as rewards from the King. Half a million acres, the most fertile land, was handed over to settlers. The granted lands were located throughout the island, in the counties of Laois, Offaly, Tipperary, Wexford, Leitrim, and Longford and across most of the provinces of Munster and Ulster.

The process of settlement in Ireland was pushed by economic problems in England beginning in the 1590s and continuing in the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Some commentators advocated for sending the poor and the seditious to Ireland, as a release valve for an explosive situation in the poor neighborhoods of London. This went contrary to plantation theory, which had not conceived Ireland as a dumping ground for the superfluous poor of England. But practical requirements prevailed.

The plantation plan as conceived envisioned British landlords and British tenants on the distributed estates. The Irish were to be displaced from the lands, without a clear formulation concerning what was to become of them. In practice, however, there was not enough replacement labor to compensate for the dispersed native labor. So most British landowners in Ireland were forced to rely on native tenants to occupy at least portions of their lands. This created a situation in which Irish tenants were working on land that had once been theirs and that now were under foreign owners who were growing rich and powerful on the backs of their labor.

By 1641, there were approximately 100,000 settlers in Ireland, 70,000 in Munster and Leinster, and 30,000 in Ulster. They represented eighteen percent of the population of Ireland.

Settlement provoked resistance among the dispossessed Irish, culminating in the 1642-1651 Irish uprising. The rebels demanded that tithes paid by Catholics go to Catholic priests rather than the established (Anglican) clergy; that Catholic church lands be restored; that all plantations since James I be annulled, and no new plantations be established; that debts to the British be cancelled; and that all anti-Catholic laws be repealed.

In this political context of rebellion, Irish chieftains and Old English lords joined together to form an Irish Confederate government, the Confederation of Kilkenny, seeking to overthrow English rule in Ireland. From 1649 to 1652, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army crushed the Confederacy. In 1652, the Irish Parliament drew up the Act of Settlement, which confiscated land from the rebels. Between two and three million acres were confiscated, which Cromwell distributed to Protestant settlers from England.

In addition, many Irish prisoners along with thousands of children were sent to North America and the Caribbeans, thus initiating the Irish Diaspora. Possibly 12,000 Irish Catholics were sent to penal servitude and indenture in the Caribbean, where they lived alongside 50,000 African slaves. Which means that in the second half of the seventeenth century, Irish Catholics may have constituted 20% of forced labor in the Caribbean, transported to the islands by coercive means.

By 1657, land ownership in Ireland was radically different from what it had been in 1641. The Catholic share of land ownership had dropped from nearly 60% to 10% or 20% (depending on the source). During the period, the population of the island dropped by 1.5 million to 850,000, 150,000 of whom were settlers. The redistribution of land occurred throughout the island, but it occurred disproportionately in Ulster. In 1641, there were fifty-eight Gaelic Catholic landowners in Ulster, but by 1660, the number was reduced to five, with 4% of land remaining in Catholic ownership. The land redistribution and settlement project under Cromwell cemented the connection between Protestantism and land ownership in Ulster.

In Ireland as a whole in 1662, three quarters of the land was in the hands of Protestant settlers, who comprised three eights of the population. Protestants settlers also held in their hands five sixths of the housing, nine tenths of housing in walled towns, and two thirds of foreign trade.

Protestantism had little appeal among the native population, so that the native Irish population remained almost entirely Catholic as a new elite of mostly Protestant Anglo-Irish landholders was being established. Thus, the difference between the colonizer and the colonized in Ireland was both religious and ethnic, a division between Protestant England and Catholic Ireland, between an Anglo-Irish and Protestant settler elite that was politically and economically dominant and a dispossessed native majority that was both Gaelic and Catholic.

The English conquest of Ireland was justified through racist attitudes toward the Irish, who were viewed as socially and culturally inferior. Accounts of the time described the Irish as supposedly possessing vices, including laziness, treachery, blasphemy, idolatry, ignorance of Christian beliefs, incest and cannibalism. It was said of the native Irish that they possessed barbaric table manners, and they failed to live in “proper” housing. Moreover, they were undisciplined with respect to sexuality, and they neglected their children. The Irish were also described as semi-nomadic, based on the Irish custom of transhumance, in which cattle owners follow their herds around different grazing areas during summer months. In response to this perceived social and cultural inferiority of the Irish, many commentators proposed the development of English grammar schools in Ireland, through which Irish children would be able to develop a purer English tongue as well as English habits of discipline and fashion.

As English colonization of Ireland proceeded through the turn of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, the unequal power relations between Protestants of English or British descent and native Irish Catholics was codified with a series of Penal Laws. These laws prohibited Irish Catholics from voting and from membership in Parliament, and they established institutionalized segregation. Marriage between Catholics and Protestants was illegal, and it was a capital offense for a Catholic priest to conduct a mixed marriage ceremony. Catholics were barred from serving in the armed forces of the Crown. Irish Catholics were barred from the legal profession and from serving in the judiciary.

English political control in Ireland resulted in economic policies designed to promote the development of England and retard the economic development of Ireland. The Cattle Act of 1663 prohibited the export of Irish cattle to Britain; and the Navigation Acts of 1663, 1670, 1685 and 1696 sought to establish an English monopoly on trade with the Caribbean. These measures protected and promoted English interests in relation to international commerce, while blocking the development of international commerce by Ireland. These measures were opposed to the interests of the Irish elite as well as the Irish nation as a whole; as such, they were against the interests of both Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics.

In the aftermath of the defeat by Cromwell in the seventeenth century, Old English Lords began to see themselves as pertaining to Ireland as against England, but as, ambiguously, having the right to full representation in the English parliament. McVeigh and Rolton describe the movement as a proto-nationalism, constituting the first stirrings of Irish anti-colonialism, but a form of nationalism that focused on the interests of the Irish elite. They sought to remove the obstacles imposed by English colonialism on their development as an Irish bourgeoisie. Such obstacles included the navigation laws protecting English industry and commerce and preventing Irish international trade. And they included laws that prevented the development of Irish industry, with the exception of the linen industry, which was not considered a threat to English interests. And there were laws that at that time prohibited the export of sheep and cattle to Britain.

At the same time, another sector of the same Protestant bourgeois class sought to combine with native Irish in the interest of creating a sovereign republic. Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Society of United Irish were the leaders of this tendency. They were at the forefront of anti-colonialism in Ireland, conceptualizing Ireland as a colony and seeking liberation from English colonialism. They were composed of Anglicans, such as Tone, as well as prominent northern Presbyterians and lower-class Catholics.

The Constitution of the United Irishmen emphasized a “union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion.” They sought “to unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter.” Their goal was to “break the connection with England” and to assert the independence of the country. Tone had travelled abroad and had been connected to radical republican circles in England, France, and America; he was an advocate of Catholic emancipation and the abolition of slavery.

The United Irishmen staged an uprising in September 1798, which failed. Following the suppression of the rebellion, Tone was captured, tried, and executed on November 19, 1798.

McVeigh and Rolton maintain that Tone’s consistent internationalist anti-colonialism was in tension with a self-interested Irish nationalism that was promoted by some in the Irish nationalist movement. This latter tendency would emerge with greater force in the nineteenth century, following the establishment of the union of Great Britain and Ireland.

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1801-1922

The parallel acts of the separate parliaments of Ireland and Great Britain that established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland went into effect on January 1, 1801. It was a political entity dominated by England, and it was designed as such.

According to McVeigh and Rolton, England was concerned with progressive political developments in Ireland, especially with respect to the questions of Irish autonomy and Catholic political and civil rights. The Irish Parliament, established by the Constitution of 1782, had gained a large measure of independence. Catholics in 1793 had attained the right to vote for “men of property,” males who owned or rented property worth 40 shillings, and there was concern in the UK that the movement for Catholic voting rights would attain further gains. The United Irishmen movement at the end of the eighteenth century pointed to the possibility of a Catholic majority in the Irish parliament, and there was the further possibility that a Catholic-controlled Irish parliament would secede from Great Britain and align with France and the French Revolution. The union of Great Britain and Ireland was a quick fix to these threats, inasmuch as incorporation of Irish Catholic MPs into a UK parliament would definitively relegate them to minority status.

Wanting to preserve a certain level of legislative independence, many members of the Irish Parliament were opposed to the proposed Union. Accordingly, the Irish House of Commons rejected the proposal for Union in 1799 by a vote of 109 against and 104 opposed. Passage of the Act of Union was attained in 1800 through bribery in the forms of titles of nobility and other honors as well as direct payments. The final vote in favor of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland was 158 in favor and 115 against.

In 1829, the Irish Franchise Act of the UK parliament gave Catholics the right to vote, but it raise the threshold for eligibility for voting from forty shilling to ten pounds. The result was that the number of registered voters across Ireland fell by eighty percent, from 215,000 registered voters to under 40,000. McVeigh and Rolton write, “Catholic Emancipation in the UK was bundled with the disenfranchisement of some 80 per cent of Irish Catholics. In other words, the practical consequence of the Union for most Irish Catholics who had been enfranchised by the Irish Parliament in 1793 was that they were disenfranchised by the British Parliament in exchange for the right of a small number of elite Catholics to sit as MPs in Westminster.” It would not be until 1884 that the franchise in Ireland returned to the level that it had been under the Irish Parliament in 1793.

Accordingly, McVeigh and Rolton characterize the creation of the Union as a “clear act of counterinsurgency” and “a cynically anti-democratic and counterrevolutionary intervention.” As British control in Ireland evolved during the nineteenth century, Ireland was de facto governed jointly by the UK Parliament and the British Colonial Office.

The establishment of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland as a mechanism for control of Ireland created a long-standing division and conflict in Irish politics between those who favored union, the “Unionists,” and those who favored Irish “home rule” or an independent Irish republic, known as nationalists and/or republicans. The former consisted overwhelmingly of the elites and Protestants, whereas the latter was the camp of the various non-elite socioeconomic sectors of the people, especially Catholics. However, there were supporters and even leaders of the cause of Irish nationalism who were elite and/or Protestant. They were men and women who possessed the insight to understand that an independent nation able to control its own economy was consistent with their long-term class and ethnic interests, even though it required alliance and cooperation with others, who would share in the benefits of a politically and economically independent nation.

There also emerged with increasing strength during the Union a synthesis of Unionism and Irish nationalism in the form of an Irish nationalist imperialism. This was a movement led by Irish merchants and manufacturers, organized in the Irish Parliamentary Party, established in 1874. They envisioned a form of Irish Home Rule that involved collaboration with the expanding British Empire, through which Dublin—as the second city of the British Empire—would receive the core-like manufacturing and commercial benefits of Empire on the basis of increasing economic relations with the expanding peripheral zones of the British Empire. This “synergy between Irish nationalism and imperialism” was a common posture of most Irish political leaders following the Union of 1801.

The Act of Union changed the terrain of political struggle for Irish nationalism. During the course of the nineteenth century, many Presbyterians became Unionists, so that Irish Catholics came to greater visibility in leading the nationalist struggle. Tone’s notion of the unity of Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter became outdated, although there would always be some individual Protestants in the cause of Irish nationalism. In the political context of Union, many in the nationalist movement were influenced by the tendency toward nationalist imperialism.

Daniel O’Connell was a nationalist reformer in the early decades of the Union. A lawyer by profession, he was a skilled orator and organizer of mass campaigns. His essentially reformist goal, according to McVeigh and Rolton, was to attain “for the emergent Catholic bourgeoisie the benefits which had accrued to the Protestant bourgeoisie as a result of the Act of Union.” He launched a successful campaign for Catholic emancipation, the practical effects of which were to create greater opportunities for wealthier and educated Catholics.

O’Connell then moved to a campaign for repeal of the 1800 Act of Union. O’Connell and the Repeal Association mobilized possibly a million people for a mass demonstration calling for repeal of the Union in 1843. However, the meeting was banned by Great Britain. Troops were brought in to enforce the ban, in spite of the explicit commitment of the organizers to non-violence.

As a result of the block of the mass demonstration of the Repeal Association, young radicals associated with The Nation newspaper, known as the Young Irelanders, were more inclined to violent rebellion. Some of them, such as James Fintan Lalor, adhered to the consistent internationalist anti-imperialism of Tone. Influenced by political upheaval in Western Europe in 1848, they launched a rebellion. It was a total strategic failure, because of the strength of the forces of state control, the presence of spies and dissension among the rebels, and limited support among the peasants and the working class. The leaders of the rebellion were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia.

The limitations of Union with respect to the needs of the people of Ireland were made evident by the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, which has been described as “the greatest social disaster to occur in any one country in nineteenth century Europe.” Out of a population of eight or nine million, roughly one million people died. In addition, tens of thousands of peasant households were evicted from their lands, due to an incapacity to pay rent; between 1846 and 1849, 190,000 families, over 950,000 people, were evicted. Between one and two million emigrated during the famine, also called the Great Hunger. More than 100,000 emigrated to North America in 1847 alone, with 17,000 dying on the journey, mostly of typhoid, and another 21,000 died on arrival. During the next fifty years, the population of Ireland was reduced by half; the 1911 census found a population of 4,390,291, half of what it had been on the eve of the Great Famine.

McVeigh and Rolton present the case that the Great Famine was a consequence of the political-economic system. The government of Ireland, incorporated into the UK as an entity without control over its own social and economic affairs, was unable to respond to the challenge of the immediate cause of the famine, namely, the potato blight that infected potato crops. The potato blight occurred throughout Europe during the 1840s, resulting in the deaths of another 100,000 in Europe; but without the same devastating consequences.

Central to the source of the problem was the tenant farming system of nineteenth century rural Ireland. Peasants paid rent for the use of land to absentee landlords, who for the most part lived in England and spent the income earned in England. The collection of rent was in the hands of Irish middlemen, who were evaluated by the amount of rent collected, and who often were ruthless in extracting the maximum possible rent from the impoverished people who worked the land. In addition to cultivating cash crops to pay rent, the peasants used part of their rented parcel to produce subsistence food.

Immediately prior to the Great Famine, Irish tenant farmers were paying more in rent than they earned through the sale of cash crops; and smallholders paid more in taxes than they earned. Irish tenant farmers and smallholders had become increasingly impoverished over generations, as a consequence of the Penal Law that required the subdivision of the land to sons upon the death of a tenant or smallholder. By 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were one to five acres in size, and 40% were five to fifteen acres. As their holdings decreased in size over time, Irish tenant farmers and smallholders became entirely dependent on the potato for their subsistence, because of its high nutritional value. In contrast to peasant producers in Western Europe, the holdings of Irish peasants were so small that they were unable to diversify their subsistence crops or to produce large surpluses for the market.

When the famine broke out, the British government initially provided relief. But Colonial administrators subsequently decided to shut down aid, insisting that it was creating dependency.

Agriculture was booming at the time of the famine, and food products were exported to England to feed the expanding industrial proletariat. They were sold by impoverished and famished tenant farmers in order to pay rent. From October 10, 1845, to January 5, 1846, more than 30,000 oxen, bulls, cows, sheep and lambs; over 100,000 pigs; and large quantities of wheat, barley, and oats were exported to England.

Beyond the unjust and barbarous appropriation of Irish peasant production, the high quality of the production should be noted, in that it was characterized by a diversity of food and animal products. Such a diversity of export products—in contrast to the single product exportation of such agricultural products as sugar, cotton, rice, or coffee—can be the foundation for the growth of a nation’s economy, if there is the political will to mobilize resources attained from agricultural production toward expansion of manufacturing. Such mobilization of political will is the task of a rising class of merchants and manufacturers. Indeed, the exportation of a diversity of food and animal products by farmers and merchants of the English settler colonies of North America to the slaveholders in the Caribbean from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was central to the successful economic ascent of the young American Republic. But in the Ireland of the UK Union, the Irish merchant class did not have the necessary political autonomy to exploit the economic productive potentialities of the Irish nation.

As would be expected, the period gave rise to an upsurge in rural revolt in Ireland. Although widespread, it was spontaneous, not characterized by the formulation of a coherent proposal or well-organized movement. It involved attacks and raids on landlords’ properties and the burning of barns as well as occasional murder of landlords and their agents.

John Devoy, leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), possessed a consistent internationalist anti-imperialism as well as an opposition to religious sectarianism. In 1867, the IRB proclaimed its intention to form an independent Irish Republic based on universal suffrage and the complete separation of Church and State, attained through means of the force of arms. It proclaimed not a war against the people of England, but a war “against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields.” It proclaimed common cause with “Republicans of the entire world,” based on the principle that “all men are born with equal rights.”

Meanwhile, the Irish Party advocated for Home Rule, envisioning Irish autonomy in conjunction with Irish support for the British empire and the British worldwide project of imperialism. It represented the above-mentioned tendency of Irish nationalist imperialism. It was an effective force within the Westminster Parliament.

The New Departure agreement of June 1879 involved a “popular front” alliance of the IRB, the Irish Party of the Westminster Parliament, and the Land League. The agreement included IRB support for the Irish Party position on Home Rule, and Irish Party commitment to mobilization on the land question. Charles Stewart Parnell, Anglo-Irish Protestant landowner and leader of the Irish Party in the Parliament, was elected president of the Irish National Land League, founded on October 21, 1879, thus creating a direct link between parliamentary action and the mass campaigns of the Land League. They organized great mobilizations during the 1880s, effectively combining republican principles, Irish self-determination, internationalist anti-imperialism, land reform, and direct action. McVeigh and Rolton maintain that “this period saw the only effective alliance between the tendencies . . . [of] republicanism and nationalism in Irish history.”

Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, land ownership became the central political cause. A broader and more coherent political resistance emerged, in confrontation with the landlord class. The two principal leaders were Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, labor leader, socialist, republican, MP and agrarian activist; and the Anglo-Irish landowner Parnell of the Irish Parliamentary Party. It was primarily a non-violent movement for reforms that would enable small farmers to buy rented land. It culminated in the Wyndom Act of 1903, which was far-reaching enough to remove the issue of land ownership from the center of public discourse, even though it did not address the historic processes of the unjust acquisition of land.

Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the central issues of Irish home rule or independence versus Union with Great Britain remained unresolved. Irish nationalism and republicanism emerged with force in the beginning of the twentieth century, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916; the Sinn Féin Manifesto to the Irish People, which stood clearly for republicanism and anti-imperialism; the electoral victory of Sinn Féin in its alternative Irish Parliament; the revolutionary war of independence; and the 1922 Treaty that established the Irish Free State and also partitioned the island. With these developments, Ireland and England entered the neocolonial stage of their relation.

Conclusion

The essential characteristics of colonialism—as forged in the process of European colonial domination of the world and the establishment of European colonial empires from 1492 to the 1960s—are evident in the history of Ireland from 1511 to 1922. Such essential characteristics with respect to Ireland include: conquest through force of arms; the appropriation of land; the distribution of land to settlers; justification through racism; proposals for the education of the colonized; the enactment of laws mandating discrimination and segregation; the concentration of power in the hands of the colonizer; and economic policies designed to promote the economic development of the colonizer and to retard the economic development of the colony, resulting in a situation of underdevelopment and poverty.

We will continue to reflect on the story of the people of Ireland. It is a story of relentless colonialism and persistent but confused resistance, resulting in an unfinished revolution, today being offered new opportunities as a result of the multidimensional crisis of the world-system.

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