In Kandy, in the highlands of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Irish officers in the British Army celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day in 1823. The garrison fired a salute, and a regimental band struck up “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning.” The mess hall was decorated with paper transparencies, Irish themes interpreted in a Sinhalese decorative style by the officers’ servants. One depicted a crown and harp in the foreground, with a distant skyline of a “commercial port and city” in the background, the other an elaborate Star of the Order of Saint Patrick. At their evening banquet the crowd toasted the saint, the Crown, and Ireland.1
Kandy, once the capital of an independent kingdom and the site of a temple complex that held the Buddha’s tooth, fell to British forces in 1815. Britain first claimed Ceylon as a Crown colony in 1796, after seizing the island from the Dutch, and the fall of Kandy consolidated the conquest. In 1823, before railways made the journey easy, soldiers would march from Colombo, the colonial capital, along a carriage road that passed by a column raised to remember the British Army engineers who had blasted through the rock. The soldiers hunted for game in the jungle at the edges of the road and contended with land leeches and diarrhea, while visitors rhapsodised about the green, rugged landscape. In the town, the former royal palace and seraglio were renovated and repurposed as offices and a military hospital. The barracks were new and airy. A mountain lake reflected picturesque, broad streets. The fields around the city promised riches for the British Empire. “Precious stones and rich veins of metals,” a visitor wrote, “may be concealed within its bosom.” Nearby hills looked perfect for growing coffee; after 1867, the region would be a centre of tea production. Imperial officials were certain that if the Sinhalese could be made to understand the value and potential of the land Britain had taken from them, they would see the justice of British rule. The rewards of the global market, imperial officials argued, would transform the “natives” and persuade them to work, save, and spend like Britons. “Should new wants excite the industry of the Kandians to supply them,” a visitor wrote in 1818, “the many valuable natural productions of the country will amply furnish the means.”2
In Ceylon in 1823, the Irish officers who drank the King’s health and the Irish private soldiers who plucked fat leeches from their groins and armpits served the British Empire. Ireland, like Kandy, had been conquered by Britain. But Ireland had shared a monarch with England from the time of Henry VIII and had a parliament of its own. Ireland was subject to colonialism—to extraction, to exploitation, to violence—but it was neither a colony nor an independent kingdom. “Ireland,” the British statesman Charles Greville wrote to the Duke of Rutland in 1784, “is too great to be unconnected with us, and too near to us to be dependent on a foreign state, and too little to be independent.” Many described the islands as a family too interdependent to ever fully be estranged. Ireland, an eighteenth-century critic reflected, was like a parasitic conjoined twin to Britain, disfiguring and resented, but also nourished and cherished, joined in life and in death.3
The creation of the United Kingdom in 1801 did not dismantle the political and economic structures built during centuries of conquest in Ireland. In fact, the transformation of Ireland from a puppet kingdom to a junior partner in the UK only deepened the fissures in Irish political economy. Restrictions on Irish trade and political life were abolished, but the crash in commodity prices that followed the Napoleonic Wars pulled Ireland into a spiral of debt and unemployment. The island became what “Sicily was to the Romans,” an impoverished and exploited agricultural district. Ireland supplied its partners in the United Kingdom with growing quantities of grain, dairy, and meat, but slid deeper into poverty. As Ireland grew more economically vulnerable to changes in British demand, more and more Irish families came to depend on access to land for potatoes for survival. Long before the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland, Britain’s quasi-colonial relationship to Ireland had pushed millions to live or die based on the health of the potato crop.4
In the eighteenth century, Ireland was roughly 80 percent Catholic, but only 5 percent of Irish land was owned by Catholic landlords. Dispossession, reinforced by laws forbidding Catholic participation in political and economic life, were key features of British colonialism in Ireland. Colonisation had a long history. In the twelfth century, Norman soldiers invaded Ireland, extending the Norman Conquest of England across the Irish Sea. After the invasion, the new Anglo-Norman nobility was all but independent until King Henry VII reimposed English government and limited the Irish Parliament’s authority after his victory in the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487). In 1541, after a failed rebellion led by the Earl of Kildare against the Crown, Henry VIII declared himself king of Ireland as well as England.5
From the 1540s on, the Crown experimented with the colonisation of Ireland by English, Welsh, and Scottish settlers. These “plantations”—meant in the sense of a grove of trees planted to birth a forest—were supposed to pacify Ireland through gradual Anglicisation. The first plantations in Munster crumbled. But in the early seventeenth century, with the support of King James I, six counties in the northern province of Ulster—Donegal, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Armagh, and Londonderry—were cleared of many Catholics by force and resettled by English and Scottish Protestants. A seventh county, Antrim, was settled “privately” by independent Protestant settlers with the Crown’s tacit endorsement. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority-Protestant “Ulster Plantation” (six counties of which now compose Northern Ireland) was often a relatively more prosperous exception to the poverty of the other provinces. On the eve of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, there were one hundred thousand Protestant settlers in Ireland—some thirty thousand Scots and seventy thousand Welsh and English. Although outnumbered fifteen to one by Catholics, Protestants already owned more than 40 percent of Irish land.6
In 1641, during the Civil Wars, the Irish Catholic nobility rebelled and won de facto independence. But from 1649 to 1651, after the defeat of the Royalists and the execution of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell—the leading figure in the army raised by Parliament and Lord Protector of England from 1653—launched a ruthless reconquest of Ireland. Historians question the degree to which Cromwell personally intended to exterminate Catholics, although some of his followers considered the invasion of Ireland a holy war. Reports of massacres of Protestants fuelled the fire. Irish Catholics, one pamphlet declared, “are the very offal of men, dregs of mankind, reproach of Christendom.… Cursed be he that maketh not his sword stark drunk with Irish blood.”7
In 1652, many Catholics were formally stripped of their land by act of Parliament and driven from their homes to the western province of Connaught, designated as the new home of the “native” Irish. Catholic priests were executed. Many Irish soldiers fled the island to join the French and Spanish armies; thousands who were captured were sent as indentured labourers to England’s Caribbean colonies. The humiliation and trauma of the invasion made Cromwell a figure of mythic evil in Irish folk memory. In one story, Cromwell punished a soldier who stole milk by stabbing the thief in the stomach, “out of which spurted the milk… a warning that none of his soldiers could do anything without his permission.”8
After Oliver Cromwell’s death, the Commonwealth collapsed, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne (Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed, put on trial, and convicted of treason). Two years later, select Irish Catholic landowners who had remained loyal to the Crown were restored to their lands. In 1685, Charles died. His brother, James, was Catholic. However, James was in his fifties, and his heir, Mary, firmly Protestant, was married to William of Orange, stadtholder of the Netherlands and a stalwart of the Dutch armed struggle against Spain, one of Europe’s great Catholic monarchies. James was crowned James II with the grudging consent of Parliament. All but the hottest Puritans conceded that the accession of an older Catholic king with a Protestant heir was better than renewed war.
In power, James edged toward restoring all Catholic land in Ireland. In 1687, the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell was appointed lord lieutenant and persuaded James II to annul the laws prohibiting the partial return of land to “innocent” Catholics. Anticipating that the Cromwellian settlement would be overturned, Protestant landowners fled. Paramilitaries in Ulster armed themselves. In 1688, James’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son whose claim to the throne would trump that of his Protestant half sister. A Catholic king was tolerable; a Catholic dynasty was not. A group of leading MPs secretly invited James’s son-in-law, William of Orange, to take the English throne. In November 1688, William landed in England at the head of an army. James II fled, and William was crowned William III in 1689, ruling as co-monarch with the deposed king’s daughter, now Mary II.
In England, the 1688 invasion was a “Glorious Revolution.” In Ireland, it began a new war of conquest. When William’s army drove James II from England, he fled first to Ireland, where many Catholic aristocrats rallied around his cause. William invaded Ireland, personally leading his troops against an army led by James, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690—one of the last European battles in which two monarchs faced each other on the battlefield.
England tightened its grip on Ireland, and the persecution of Irish Catholics continued. In 1707, England and Wales merged with Scotland, formerly a separate kingdom (although under a single Crown), to form Great Britain. The new British Parliament, following on laws passed under Cromwell, passed a series of acts, known as the Penal Laws, to persecute Irish (and British) Catholics. Catholics had been barred from all public offices in Ireland since 1607, and in 1707 the ban was extended to Presbyterians. Catholics were forbidden to marry Protestants, and they could not sit in either the English or the Irish Parliament or vote in elections. Catholics were barred from many professions. Catholicism assumed a “catacomb existence.” Although Catholics were the majority even in Ulster, by the nineteenth century there were only 2,015 Catholic churches serving Ireland’s 6.5 million Catholics. Priests would travel, sometimes in secret, on “stations,” going out twice a year to hear confession and say Mass in private homes.9
The Penal Laws against Catholic rites were often indifferently enforced in Ireland, but the laws that disinherited and dispossessed Catholic landlords were scrupulously followed. The heirs of Catholics could inherit land only if they converted to the Anglican church, and no Catholic could inherit land owned by a Protestant. Any landlord who converted to Catholicism forfeited his property to the Crown and faced an indefinite prison term. Some two thousand landowners, many descendants of Cromwell’s and William’s soldiers and allies, owned virtually all of Ireland’s arable land, some in estates larger than fifty thousand acres. Protestant landlords, however, depended on the despised Catholic majority for rent and labour.
As the new state of Great Britain consolidated, the British Empire grew. Ireland was largely shut out of trade to Britain, so Irish merchants sent most of their goods across the Atlantic, with 85 percent bound for the Caribbean colonies. A cargo of Irish linen, for example, might go to Barbados to be sold for sugar, with the sugar taken to England to be sold for cash. The risks of this attenuated trading network raised the cost of borrowing for Irish merchants, who both paid more for credit and earned less on exports. Meanwhile, Irish landlords collected rent on estates that some rarely, if ever, visited. William Petty, the English polymath who served Cromwell, Charles II, and James II, noted that as early as 1664, at least 25 percent of Irish landlords lived in England, where “all that belongs to them goes out, but returns not.”10
As the gap between the British and Irish economies grew, the idea of the Irish as insinuating papists at best and ungovernable barbarians at worst solidified in British popular culture. Jonathan Swift’s famous satire, “A Modest Proposal,” published in 1729, skewered both the poverty of the Irish countryside and an already well-defined contempt for the Irish in Britain. In the essay, Swift proposed the slaughter of Irish children, “plump, and fat” as a solution to Irish poverty. “A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish,” Swift wrote. “I grant this food,” he continued, “will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.” Swift was revolted both by Irish poverty and by the willingness of Britons to think of the Irish as not only poor but feral, cannibal, subhuman.11
Poverty bred crimes of opportunity, and oppression bred armed resistance. The eighteenth-century Irish countryside often erupted into what the British government called “outrages”—spasms of extortion, assassination, arson, threats, and robbery against landlords and their representatives by armed, often disguised, bands. Although it might be tempting to place rural outrages into a coherent history, or even prehistory, of national resistance, we should be sceptical. When a farmer burned his landlord’s barn on a cloudy night, did he think that he was striking a blow for Ireland? It was all but impossible to prosecute outrages, unless the perpetrators were strangers. As Rev. Thomas Harman, of Wexford, explained, people who set fires or threatened murder to prevent an eviction were “supported by general opinion, and those who commit them are defended publicly both at the chapel and the forge.” Outrages were especially likely when landlords threatened to evict their tenants, threatened to convert tilled land to pasture, or refused to pay rates of wages that communities considered to be set by long-standing custom.12
The febrile, hyperlocal politics of eighteenth-century Ireland and the durable stereotype of the Irish—and especially of impoverished Irish Catholics—as poorer, stranger, and less civilised than Britons, put even more symbolic distance between Britain and Ireland. Ireland had been conquered and colonised, but it was not a colony. The consequence was neither an independent Ireland nor a fully fleshed-out colonial legal order. Instead, Ireland was governed through a hodgepodge system of overlapping English and Celtic institutions. The island was divided into more than sixty-two thousand “townlands,” divisions of an average of three hundred acres, each home to about fifteen to thirty households. The townland as Britain understood it was based on an interpretation of the “ballybetagh” (baile biataigh), a unit of land from Celtic Ireland, standardised as roughly one-thirtieth of a barony. From a British perspective, the townlands seemed useful for local taxation. However, in practice, townlands often overlapped, and their borders were often disputed. Moreover, “rundale,” another holdover from before conquest (from the Irish roinn, a division of a part of something shared, and dáil, an assembly) rotated productive grazing and tillage land among and within families. An Irish family might hold claims, official or unofficial, to the leases of land scattered across townlands and rundale commons. Family stakes in rundale land were governed by the rules of “gavelkind,” another remnant of Celtic law. Gavelkind divided a man’s property equally among his children, at either his death or his “retirement” as the head of a family. Sons received their land immediately; daughters received it as a dowry.13
Ireland’s landlords and the British officials appointed to oversee Irish affairs were content to suppress the Catholic aristocracy and extract exports and rent from the countryside. The consequence was a set of ambiguous and sometimes self-contradictory rules that added to the idea of Ireland as especially uncivilised. For example, the Irish unit of land known as the “gneeve” was roughly ten English acres—but the acres were estimated, and often divided imprecisely into “large” and “small” acres. Even after the Union, Ireland still measured acreage in two different units, the Cunningham (or Irish) acre, and the plantation (or statute) acre. Twelve of the thirty-two counties were formed in 1210 under King John, and more were added in the Elizabethan era and under James I. The last county to be formed was Wicklow, separated from Dublin in 1605. Ireland’s counties often had their own measures of land, which created a patchwork. In Antrim, for example, townlands were regularised at one hundred acres each; in Longford, land was divided into cartons of about sixty acres, with four cartons to a ploughland.14
As the pressure exerted by Britain and its empire on Irish land increased, Irish labourers adopted the potato, once a backstop against crop failure, as their nearly universal staple. A potato ground could provide subsistence regardless of the availability of paid work. Potato cultivation allowed slightly richer Irish tenant farmers to afford land with little capital. In 1742, for example, Catholics, who were generally barred by the Penal Laws from owning land for tillage, were permitted to claim peatland, as long they paid to have the bogs drained. Many paid their workers in land, allowing subsistence potatoes to make up the shortfall. From as early as 1735, guides to British and Irish plants mention the “vast number of natives… almost entirely supported” by potatoes. Dependence on potatoes made Irish labourers vulnerable to famine at least a century before the late-blight pandemic. In 1740–1741, bad weather ruined the harvest of both grain and potatoes. At least three hundred thousand people died of hunger and disease—by proportion of population, a greater death toll than the Great Famine.15
By the end of the eighteenth century, with the confusing palimpsest of Celtic and English influence and the dynamic, often reckless, transformation of agricultural land to earn profit and subsistence in the imperial economy, it would have been hard to imagine what Ireland had looked like before English conquest and British capitalism. In the Irish peatlands the acidic bogs preserved old pine cones, many of Scotch fir and stone pine, as well as whole trees, including ancient yews and oaks. Ireland, the Enlightenment agronomist Arthur Young wrote, had been governed by Britain according to “the narrow spirit of a counting house.” Resources and energy flowed out of Ireland, depleting the rural economy. When food was scarce, Irish labourers would sometimes sneak into cattle paddocks to bleed the animals. The bleeding was rarely fatal, though it left the cows anemic. Ireland was much the same, routinely bled alive, a little weaker each time.16
The growth of the empire increased the vulnerability of Irish labourers to famine and consolidated British influence over Irish politics. However, for some Irish soldiers, settlers, and sailors, the empire offered opportunities to find work along the paths and in the settlements carved by British naval power and colonial trade. In the eighteenth century, many of those paths led west, following Irish trade to the Caribbean. By about 1750, sugar surpassed grain as the most valuable commodity in world trade. And most of that sugar (about 80 percent by 1787) came from British and French colonies in the Caribbean, worked by millions of enslaved Africans.17 Eventually, revolutions in France and British North America would force Britain to redefine its relationship to Ireland.
A casual (or unscrupulous) reader of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources might conclude that the Irish were also enslaved on the sugar islands—some nineteenth-century histories refer to Irish rebels sent “to toil as slaves on the plantations.” In the wake of the Cromwellian conquest, thousands of Irish soldiers were sent to Caribbean sugar and tobacco plantations—so many that it was well known that the English were “very apt to barbadoes an unruly man.” But those labourers were never enslaved—they were indentured, bound to work without wages for a fixed period of time. Their suffering was hideous. The passage was squalid; on the plantations, many died of disease or injury. But indentures ended, and former “servants,” as indentured labourers were often called, became wage labourers, tenants, even landowners. Comparisons to slavery were not literal, but instead conveyed an Irish sense of how Britain saw Ireland: as a source of labour and cash subject to careless and violent exploitation, as a means to enrich the empire.18
Many Irish indentured labourers were exploited in the Caribbean, but far more Irish emigrants left for the Atlantic colonies of their own volition. About 30,000 English settlers left England for the American colonies in the eighteenth century, compared with 75,000 Scots and 250,000 Irish, primarily Presbyterians from Ulster. By 1793, the US census estimated that at least 17 percent of white Americans either had been born in Ireland or claimed Irish heritage. The practical need for manpower in the empire, and the need to govern an increasingly large and diverse world of British subjects, chipped away at anti-Catholic policies, if not at hostility to Catholics. In 1774, for example, the Quebec Act restored property rights and religious toleration to French Catholics in the conquered province of Quebec. Toleration of Catholicism in the empire, and perhaps even in Ireland, was a pragmatic adjustment to a changing British world. “An aristocracy of five hundred thousand Protestants,” Arthur Young wrote, “crushing the industry of two millions of poor Catholicks, can never advance the public interest.”19
This phenomenon was especially visible in the armed forces. After 1688, all Irish soldiers—Catholic, Anglo-Irish, and Presbyterian—had been expelled from the rank and file of the English Army and forbidden to reenlist (only Irish Protestant officers were allowed to keep their commissions). However, Irish soldiers, Presbyterian and Catholic, quietly rejoined British ranks during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and by 1830 more than 40 percent of British soldiers were Irish-born. The proportion was even greater in the armed forces of the East India Company. The humble Irish, an Irish writer boasted, provided “the sinewy arms, that chiefly man the British fleet and armies.” During the famine, Irish military service would be used to shame the UK government, as the British Army had “never stood upon a battle-field that Irish courage did not advance her colours.”20
As the British Empire in the Atlantic grew, and as Irish labourers and settlers found work in the colonies, Ireland’s main exports—more than 50 percent of all direct Irish exports to Britain’s colonies—were agricultural commodities produced by Irish graziers, especially butter, salt pork, and salt beef. Where Britain’s American colonies had absorbed most of Ireland’s exports at midcentury, by 1774 about 74 percent of Irish goods went to England, along with at least £3 million in rent. While the Irish economy remained agricultural, and reoriented toward Britain, the British economy diversified. The share of Britain’s total gross domestic product from trade grew from about 4 percent in 1700 to 40 percent in 1770, fuelled by a complex Atlantic circuit of slave-produced commodities, colonial raw materials, and British manufactured goods.21 In 1776, to prevent Ireland from supplying the Continental Army, Dublin Castle placed an embargo on Irish exports to the colonies. Two years later, when France joined the American side, more than sixty thousand Irishmen, mostly Presbyterians from Ulster, formed the Volunteers, a home-defence militia. Worried that the Volunteers might pivot from self-defence to self-determination, the British government loosened its grip on Irish trade. From November 1779 on, Ireland was permitted equal access to colonial markets, and the Irish Parliament assumed the power to set rules to regularise trade with Britain.
The prospect of the Volunteers rising, like the Americans, in the name of “British” liberty and free trade prompted further concessions to the Irish Parliament. In 1782, after the defeat at Yorktown, Henry Grattan in the Irish Parliament moved for the restoration of legislative independence. The new lord lieutenant, the Duke of Portland, and the new chief secretary, Richard Fitzpatrick, made no comment, and the motion passed easily. The Irish Parliament could now set its own agenda for legislation, Irish judges sat on the same terms as English judges, and the Irish House of Lords became the final court of appeal for Ireland. From 1793, Catholics in possession of property worth two pounds or more in rental income, either as owners or—far more often—as tenants, had their right to vote restored in what was called the “forty-shilling freehold.” Grain prices were high in Britain, and the new “Grattan Parliament” encouraged landlords to convert their pasture to tillage. In 1783, Ireland exported some 210,000 barrels of grain to Britain; by 1789, nearly 650,000. The grain boom was profitable but brief—a “short age of gold.”22
Ireland’s new independence was brief as well. In 1798, during the French Revolution, the “United Irish” rose in rebellion. Although the group had many supporters among Catholics, its leaders were Protestant. The rebellion was swiftly and brutally suppressed. William Pitt’s government concluded that the best course of action was to propose union between Britain and Ireland, to integrate Anglo-Irish Protestants and Presbyterians, and to begin to restore civil rights to Catholics. “The British Islands,” an Irish supporter wrote, “constitute one Empire.… The Crowns (if I may so express it) are constitutionally blended.” Others dismissed the proposal as a ruse to roll back the concessions of the 1780s. Why, a critic asked, should Ireland concede to Britain? Ireland, even within a United Kingdom, would still be a subject, not a partner, within the British Empire: “Empire,” that “single sacrilegious word, which for six hundred years of our existence stood between us and our rights.”23
Lord Cornwallis, William Pitt’s trusted advisor on colonial affairs, was charged with finessing the Union through the Irish and British Parliaments. Many Irish Protestants were eager to create a “Union for Empire” and secure a share of imperial spoils. In 1707, Scotland’s integration into the new Great Britain had proved to be a boon for ambitious Scots. Pitt explained to the House of Commons that although union was necessary, it would also be mutually beneficial, not only to London as the center of the system but also to Dublin. Ireland was a weak link in British defences, but union would also “communicate to Ireland, all the commercial advantages which Great Britain possesses… increase the resources, and consequently the strength, of the whole empire.”24
The United Kingdom came into existence under the Acts of Union, passed in 1800 and coming into force on New Year’s Day, 1801. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and integrated into the new parliament of the United Kingdom. Twenty-eight Irish peers and four Irish bishops took seats in the House of Lords, and one hundred new Irish constituencies were created to elect members of Parliament to serve in the House of Commons. The Church of Ireland was united with the Church of England. The Union Jack was embellished with a red saltire, overlaid on Scotland’s white saltire and England’s red Saint George’s Cross.25
In the course of the eighteenth century, a common Protestantism and a common Catholic enemy—the formidable French empire—had helped to form a new British identity among Scots, English, and Welsh subjects. This posed a dilemma. Catholicism had been vilified for so long, and was so closely associated with France, that a vote for restoring political rights to Irish and British Catholics seemed to many MPs like a vote for the world turned upside down. In 1805, only 27 percent of MPs favoured granting Irish Catholics relief. But realists recognised that the Union could never be complete without what many called Catholic Emancipation.
The parliamentary majority preserving the Penal Laws dwindled, especially after Napoleon’s final defeat and exile in 1815. Some made a pragmatic case for Catholic civil rights; sectarian distinctions, Thomas Malthus argued, rather than “the mere pressure of poverty alone” were the cause of unrest in Ireland, “a weapon of mighty and increasing force in the hands of the political agitator.” The Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, the leaders of the Tories in the Lords and in the House, faced a crisis when Daniel O’Connell, founder of the Catholic Association, won a parliamentary seat in Clare in 1828 but was barred from taking it. They guided the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act through Parliament on the logic that preserving the Union trumped anti-Catholicism. Many ordinary Britons, for whom hating Catholics was a matter of patriotic principle and national tradition, were appalled. Petitions and protests arrived in numbers. Some, like those sent from Bristol, Birmingham, and Glasgow, had tens of thousands of signatures. Nearly a century later Irish folklore recorded the pealing church bells and blazing bonfires celebrating “the great Catholic victory.”26
But the Catholic Relief Act did not restore Catholic land, and it included provisions that changed the Irish political landscape. The act gave Catholics equal political rights but also increased the minimum property requirement to vote. Before 1829, qualified voters had to occupy land worth at least forty shillings in rental value per year. After 1829, the property qualification for voting increased fivefold, to ten pounds per year. Under the old “forty-shilling freehold” rule for the franchise, landlords with political ambitions had been obliged—at least in theory—to defer to their tenants for votes. Peel and Wellington had succeeded in admitting Irish Catholics to British political life while also reducing the number of Irish Catholics able to exercise meaningful political power. Catholic Emancipation was never sold as a democratic measure. It was an invitation to the Irish Catholic middle and upper classes to join imperial politics, an invitation made at the expense of their tenants.
In 1829 the Times argued that religious conflict in Ireland had been blunted by Catholic Emancipation, and without sectarian resentment as a galvanising force, the dysfunctional relationship between landlord and tenant was now solely responsible for the unrest in the Irish countryside. In reality, religious divisions remained tense. In Armagh, on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, Protestant and Catholic farmers shot each other under cover of darkness. Some estimated that as many as fifty people were killed in “the hedge-firing, the Indian warfare.” In County Down, a Protestant minister called down hellfire on “Popery, His Majesty’s Ministers, and particularly the Duke of Wellington,” whom the preacher accused of planning to usurp the throne, while the son of another preacher ostentatiously fingered a string of beads in the front row, in mockery of the rosary.27
In any case, Catholic Emancipation neither reversed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conquest and dispossession nor removed the special military arrangements that facilitated the imposition of martial law. One hundred British Army garrisons reported to the lord lieutenant in Dublin Castle, who, in the face of reported outrages, could appeal to Parliament to pass a Coercion Act. Under the act, magistrates could dispense summary justice, habeas corpus could be suspended, and army regiments could occupy cities or counties. Coercion, designed for emergencies, became routine. Parliament passed no fewer than seventeen Coercion Acts between the Union and the famine.
By 1829, Ireland was integrated into the British state and Catholics could vote and hold office. Ireland remained divided into estates according to a plan drawn by conquering armies. Irish land was still for extraction; Irish labour was still for exploitation. The Union was ostensibly a merger of sister kingdoms, but Irish society and the Irish economy were still structured by British colonial ambitions. After the Union, moreover, the Irish poor remained the object of a colonial civilising mission. The Union was seen as an engine that could transform Irish culture and subjecthood, either through slow and gradual moral reform or through rapid economic transformation.
In the 1810s, Mary Leadbeater, a Quaker diarist, healer, and woman of letters, wrote to introduce the pious British and Irish middle classes to an “authentic” world of Irish poverty, ready for gradual, homely reform under the Union. Leadbeater published poetry, criticism, collections of folklore, and translations from Latin and Greek but was best known for her collections of moralising “cottage dialogues.” “The poor,” one of Leadbeater’s characters declares, “have not time to seek instruction in the winding walks of fancy.” Leadbeater’s dialogues and similar works envisioned reform as a process of meticulous cultural and spiritual uplift of the poor by the middle classes—as she indicated in the title of one of her books, moral reform was “the landlord’s friend,” a way to calm and enrich the countryside.28
While reformers like Leadbeater argued that British civilisation could best be transmitted by tutoring the poor in conduct and mores, many others imagined reform and civilisation as economic processes. In the eighteenth century, the “improvement” of land—investment to increase yields of either crops or rent—became a motto for British farmers and politicians. As Daniel Defoe wrote, “Multitudes of People make Trade, Trade makes Wealth, Wealth builds Cities, Cities Enrich the Land round them, Land Enrich’d rises in Value, and the Value of Lands Enriches the Government.” From the early modern era through the eighteenth century, British farming had evolved into a system of mostly large, highly capitalised farms very different from the peasant smallholdings that prevailed in mainland Europe. Parliament passed many Acts of Enclosure, privatising common land—“waste”—so that improving landlords could make it profitable. The consequence in Britain was all but an end to peasant cultivation. A mere four thousand landowners owned nearly 60 percent of Britain’s cultivated land and rented it out to commercial farmers, who employed nearly 1.25 million hired hands. The average yield of wheat per cultivated acre in Britain increased from twenty to thirty-two bushels between 1812 and 1854.29
Long before the Union, the idea that improved land would help pacify Ireland was shopworn in England. In the seventeenth century, for example, William Petty argued that if English rule could improve Irish land, it would be a gift spectacular enough to make up for the humiliation of conquest. It was clear to Petty that the Irish could not improve their own land. Most Irish peasants, he argued, squandered their wages on tobacco and ate nothing but “potatoes from August till May, muscles [sic], cockles and oysters, near the sea; eggs and butter made very rancid, by keeping in bogs.” For most of the population, Petty concluded, trade was “little or nothing.” By the end of eighteenth century, improvement was often explicitly defined as a civilising force. Capital investment in land and profit-sharing for tenants, Arthur Young wrote, would inspire new ideas “even in the uncultivated mind” of the Irish labourer. “It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy,” another writer concluded, “if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head.”30
And yet the benefits of imperial trade to Ireland were often limited, and in any case the bonanza profits available when the market was strong flowed to landlords, not to workers. Ireland became poorer, and Irish poverty became evidence not only of a lack of civilisation in Ireland in comparison with Britain, but also of a bloody-minded atavism and immorality among the Irish poor. The improvident, work-shy, and cunning Irishman was a stock character in British popular culture. Many blamed the potato for Paddy’s laziness, “whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.” Others argued that Irish farming practices were primitive, and that new technology after conquest would be a tonic. “If you could see a Chinese or a Flemish farm,” one reformer scolded, “you would blush for your mismanagement of manure, and waste of seed.” Another urged the Irish to adopt the newer manufactured, horse-drawn ploughs, made of iron, complaining that “the poor man’s field is only scratched.”31
The imagined economic and moral causes of Ireland’s failure to thrive under the Union blurred together. British civilisation, delivered by the Union, was in reformers’ minds an unequivocal good, a panacea. If Ireland remained poor, the logic of civilisation insisted that the cause had to be some stubborn cultural or perhaps even racial pathology among the Irish. One observer was disgusted at the “hundred of idlers” boozing over the corpse at a wake, “to the loss of their families and farms that want their work.” The Lent fast and other Catholic observances, another argued, robbed the United Kingdom “of the labour of the poor.” A third blamed the potato for affording subsistence without hard labour, instilling among the Irish poor a “total disregard of the value of time, a desultory and sauntering habit, without industry or steadiness of purpose.” The potato had come full circle: arriving as an expedient for landlords hoping to maximise profit from conquered land in the eighteenth century, the crop had become a symbol of Irish resistance to “civilisation,” a cushion of easy sustenance that protected the Irish poor from the bracing risks of the market.32
“It would be better,” an Irish farmer glumly told a parliamentary committee, “that Buonaparte never lived, or never died.” The bloom of enthusiasm for the Union that had buoyed early efforts to “civilise” Ireland withered at the end of the war with France in 1815. War had kept the price of grain and other agricultural commodities high, and landlords in Britain and Ireland shared a windfall. In peacetime, the price of grain in Britain collapsed. The Irish economy fell into a vicious cycle, the basic structure of which had been set by conquest. Rent flowed out; investment capital did not flow in. Ireland produced more food for the British market, and Irish dependence on the potato deepened as land became still more subdivided. In manufacturing, British competition swamped the small Irish sector. Economic stagnation left a growing population with fewer jobs and flat wages. Ireland’s poverty and fragility within the Union became the new “Irish question” for Westminster, replacing the prospect of Ireland as a potential staging ground for French or Spanish invasion of Britain.33
In the 1780s, the Irish Parliament had offered bounties for farmers willing to switch their grazing land over to grain, to meet the growing British market. After the Union, the “excitement of war prices” added to the trend. The last tariffs on Irish grain imported to Britain ended in 1806. Across the UK, rents increased. Edward Elliot, a farmer in Kilkenny, commented that while he had made money on grain, inflation also drove up his rent “to an extravagant rate.” After 1815, tenants had fewer means with which to pay rents that had increased in wartime. For their part, many landlords had spent and borrowed freely amidst the prosperous and energetic wartime market for food and other exports. The average farm got smaller. In 1840, Irish income per person was about two-fifths of the income in the rest of the United Kingdom—although, as economic historians point out, basic goods in Ireland were often less expensive than in Britain.34
All of the United Kingdom suffered in the postwar era. After Waterloo, tens of thousands of demobilised soldiers and sailors returned to an already reeling labour market. Crime surged. The Treasury had spent nearly £1.7 billion on the wars, roughly six times Britain’s total national income in 1793. Government borrowing added to the supply of circulating money. The 1797 Bank Restriction Act allowed the government to issue money without holding specie equivalent to its value, and the supply of paper money grew from roughly £8.6 million in 1797 to £25 million in 1815. The inflation that followed benefited manufacturers, who profited from high prices and cheap credit—but those high prices and low wages led to unrest. In 1821, Lord Liverpool’s government allowed the Bank of England to resume cash payments. Prices fell, but bankruptcies followed as loans were pulled underwater. Meanwhile, the population of the United Kingdom grew from about fourteen million to about twenty-seven million people between 1821 and 1841.35
Even though high prices benefited Irish as well as British landlords, the economic structures built by the empire meant that wartime debt weighed more heavily on Ireland than Britain. Under the Acts of Union, Britain was to pay 15/17 of the expenses of the fund established to pay down the UK’s national debt, and Ireland 2/17. From 1801 to 1816, Great Britain raised roughly £58 million in tax revenue each year. Ireland raised just under £5 million. Great Britain spent an average of £81 million each year, and Ireland roughly £10 million. The rate of revenue to expenditure in Britain, in other words, was 71.6 percent, compared with 49 percent in Ireland, while Britain continued to raise more than 90 percent of the UK’s annual revenue. The consequence of the inequalities between the Union partners was that while British debt increased by 50 percent, Irish debt grew by 400 percent. Local taxes in Ireland increased and tax revenue fell as the Irish elite moved to London for the parliamentary year. The taxes paid by gentlemen’s clubs in Dublin, for example, fell from £1,324 in 1814 to £255 in 1821 as wealthy Irishmen moved their custom to London.36
In 1816, the Union was renegotiated, but Ireland’s financial position did not improve. First, the new terms abolished all British taxes that were not equally applied in Ireland. Second, the two countries’ interest rates were equalised. The consequence was tax relief in Britain and higher interest rates in Ireland. In 1817, the Irish Treasury was absorbed into the British Treasury; in 1824, all the remaining trade barriers within the United Kingdom dissolved. The switch to a single currency also raised rents since the British pound was nearly 10 percent more valuable than the Irish pound. Meanwhile, the expansion of railroads and the rapid development of steamship technology carried Irish grain more quickly to Britain and Irish cattle and swine directly into British pens and slaughterhouses.37
The postwar crash in commodity prices left Ireland “in a more wretched state than any other [country] in Europe,” as one farmer put it. The price of wheat fell nearly 125 percent. Farmers who in wartime had been able to sell their pigs at £4. 10s. to the hundredweight could by 1836 fetch only £1. 6s. Overall, the price of produce fell by two-thirds but rent by only a third: land that had rented at £3. 3s. per acre now went for £2. 2s. If Ireland’s economy had been more flexible and diversified, falling commodity prices might have encouraged more Irish merchants to import cheaper food and to invest in new industries and new crops. Ireland’s cities had some potential as industrial centres. Belfast was a centre of shipbuilding and linen manufacturing. Dublin and Cork both had populations of greater than 100,000 people in 1821, making them two of perhaps two dozen European cities of that size or greater (although they were dwarfed by the more than 1.5 million people in London, by far the largest city in Europe). The Irish economy, however, remained overwhelmingly agricultural. By 1854, out of about 20.2 million total acres in Ireland, nearly 14 million were under cultivation. According to contemporary sources, by the 1840s some 7.6 million people depended on agriculture for their livelihood, compared with about 170,000 people who lived off the proceeds of manufacturing. Historians have revised these numbers slightly upward, but there is no doubt that Irish industry was a far smaller share of the economy than agriculture. Instead, Irish capital tended to leave Ireland, and when it remained in Ireland it often went to steamship companies or industrial food processing—the physical plants that sent agricultural goods to Britain. In Clonmel, for example, new grain mills were “like the great factories… which we find in the English manufacturing districts.”38
Despite falling prices, exports increased. Wheat exports from Ireland to Britain increased from 749 quarters in 1800 to a high of 661,776 quarters in 1835; oats from 2,411 in 1800 to 2,037,835 in 1840. (A quarter equalled sixty-four gallons in volume, or just under five hundred pounds.) By 1845, on the eve of the famine, Ireland each year exported roughly 250,000 head of cattle, 90 million eggs, and enough grain to feed 2 million people in Britain. Ireland supplied Britain with more than 85 percent of its imported grain, meat, butter, and livestock by the 1840s. By the 1820s, experts estimated that more than four-fifths of all Irish grain ended up in British markets. Despite endless demand for Irish products, the size and strength of British trade and banking put Irish merchants at a disadvantage. The British market set prices. Most Irish exports of grain were purchased with English bills of exchange, which could only be redeemed at face value in England. Irish grain traders had to either accept a discounted rate on their bills or else manage their money from London. Irish farmers, starved of credit, spent more to market their goods. In Kerry, for example, many dairy farmers had to transport their wares to market in Cork, seventy miles away, at their own expense. In two baronies in Kerry, the annual losses on the market value of butter were estimated at £40,000. Money paid for Irish goods was less likely to be spent in Ireland. In turn, Irish grain merchants took advantage of the vulnerability of Irish farmers, down-bidding sellers who could not afford to hold back their crops if prices were low.39
Furthermore, Irish agriculture generally did not attract significant capital investment. For example, farmers in the United Kingdom relied heavily on fertiliser, especially guano imported from South America. In the mid-nineteenth century, the UK imported between 190,000 and 200,000 tons of guano each year, with annual increases of as much as 20 percent. Almost all these imports were destined for England, Scotland, or Wales; Irish farmers rarely used imported fertiliser. Irish roads and canals were few and poorly maintained, especially outside Dublin and the larger towns. “There is no capital at all,” one Irish merchant told a select committee of Parliament. The editors of The Economist were dismayed that “the soil of Ireland is cut up into patches” and was overwhelmingly occupied by labourers, rather than by capital-rich farmers in the English style. Irish living standards declined even as exports increased.40
Another consequence of the economic pull of the Union was more rapid deindustrialisation in Ireland. The Economist blamed protectionist British laws for ending the Irish wool and linen trade “by political force and fraud” and urged rapid investment and industrialisation. In 1815, “John Workman” implored Parliament to preserve some protections for Irish wool, “instead of making our weavers to eat potatoes and salt… to feed the weavers of England.” Ireland’s already unsteady textile industries could not compete with cheaper English products. In Cork, weavers complained the “Government had taken away their trade by machinery.” In the early 1840s, a land agent noted that from a peak in 1800 of about five thousand people employed in wool production in Carrick, County Donegal, the trade was now essentially “extinct.” In turn, Irish labourers bought many of their tools from British manufacturers, “the sickle and scythe and spade he works with, and even his knife.”41
The system of Irish export agriculture to Britain, like so much else about the relationship between the islands before and after the Union, was ramshackle and inefficient, a means of extracting rent and labour that did not require an overhaul of Ireland’s institutions. An official complained that in Ireland, “no man knows what the produce of his farm is per acre; no such calculations are made in this country.” The oats, wheat, and barley grown in the country, he continued, “are not considered as food by the people; they are usually grown as means of payment for rent.” Grain, dairy, and meat, exported copiously, were usually gathered piecemeal by agents who went from farm to farm or by merchants at fairs. Smaller cattle farmers and the many Irish agricultural labourers who kept pigs would often sell their animals to itinerant buyers, who would then drive them to Cork, Waterford, or another port city. Exporters would buy livestock and arrange for it to be shipped, usually by steamship and then by train, to British wholesalers. Millers bought grain directly from producers, usually on commission or with bills of exchange. Sellers would negotiate a minimum price, promising to deliver their grain at a certain point in the future, and would receive at least the minimum, plus any rise in the price of grain, “a wretched mode, dictated only by want of capital.”42
By 1835, no more than one-third of Irish labourers had steady employment. Commodity prices pushed larger tenant farmers to save on wages by working their own fields. Cattle ranching required even fewer workers. The consequence was less overall employment. By the 1820s, even more prosperous oat farmers in Ulster barely ate any of their crop. They sold what would have been their surplus, and “scarcely [consumed] any other food than the potato.” In Mayo, farmers holding larger leases of ten or more acres, who would have been considered comfortable if not wealthy by their neighbours, ate meat only at Christmas. By the 1830s, Irish tenants were exporting “every grain of wheat and oats, and every pig.” If an Irish family slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal. William Butler, who held ten acres, told a parliamentary commission in 1836 that he knew other leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. “We sell them now,” he explained.43
Without capital and without new industries to absorb a growing population, many parts of Ireland grew poorer, especially in comparison with Britain. Extreme poverty was concentrated in Ireland’s more densely populated and less fertile western provinces, Munster and Connaught—an echo of conquest, when the best eastern land was claimed for plantations. Capital flight and the pressures of rent meant that very little new land was developed in the west, even as the population continued to grow. By 1845, 43 percent of the six million acres of uncultivated land in Ireland were in Connaught, where 78 percent of the population farmed potatoes for subsistence, and where 64 percent of all holdings were under five acres. In all of Ireland there were 217 people to every square mile on average, but 386 to the acre in Connaught. Ulster was relatively wealthy by comparison, but many labourers, especially in Counties Armagh, Down, and Antrim, still faced annual food shortages each summer.
Begging became an annual ritual for many families. Carlow, Wicklow, Waterford, and Kilkenny were reputed to have the greatest number of beggars. Most, according to witnesses, were farmers, not townspeople, “reduced persons” who had fallen into begging when rents climbed or prices fell, or both. In Kerry, Clare, and other western counties, many labourers spoke only Irish. As a German traveler wended his way through rural Clare, the children who surrounded him shouted the only English word they seemed to know: “ha’penny.” A Carlow priest estimated that at least a hundred people in his parish were beggars by profession, which he reckoned as a 50 percent increase from 1825 to 1835. Localised subsistence crises became increasingly common. “A famine,” one writer commented, “was always in Ireland, in a certain degree.” In 1817, 1821, and 1822, bad weather harmed potato yields, leading to localised reports of starvation. A shortage of food in Ireland, reformer Joseph Lambert wrote, was “more a famine in the way of money, as there was sufficient corn in the country.”44
The Union had created a single market, but Ireland was still unknown to many Britons. George IV visited Ireland once, in 1821, the first British monarch to visit since William III invaded in 1689. Queen Victoria only visited three times in her long reign. Ireland fascinated visitors; one tourist congratulated himself for winning the confidence of the most indigent Irish, drinking moonshine with a farmer or eating potatoes with a cottier, “and [taking] a turn with him, in digging his turf.” The poorest Irish, he argued, were so unused to seeing their landlords among them that visitors needed to slum their dress and swallow their sense of superiority to “really” meet the Irish. Dublin was the hub of at least thirty coach routes that radiated out around the country. But Ireland had only seventy miles of railroad track in 1845, compared with two thousand miles in Britain. Many coaches were in disrepair, and along the roads, travellers, especially in summer, were “everywhere surrounded by a cloud of beggars.”45
Many Irish people, however, took advantage of the Union to seek work in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. By 1843, an estimated 120,000 Irish-born people lived in London, along with 40,000 in Manchester, 34,000 in Liverpool, 24,000 in Bristol, and 29,000 in Edinburgh. Desperately poor Irish immigrants were often despised, especially when they competed with English workers for industrial jobs, thus driving down wages. “Ireland,” Karl Marx wrote with satisfaction, “has revenged herself upon England… by bestowing an Irish quarter on every English industrial, maritime, or commercial town.” These waves of poor Irish immigrants cemented the idea of the potato as an emblem of poverty, especially among working people. In Coventry in 1835, striking hand-loom weavers carried placards reading, “Willing to Labour, but doomed to Starve.” One placard was decorated with “a net of potatoes and salt.” The English journalist and politician William Cobbett noted a decline in the living standards of English agricultural workers after the Union. “What, then,” he asked, “do you think that he will come lower than to potatoes and salt?”46
Four decades into the Union, the United Kingdom was an industrial power and the world’s largest producer of finished cotton textiles, manufactured from imported raw cotton mostly produced by enslaved labour in the United States. In Ireland, however, the poor wore homespun clothes, or else wore used clothing, including battered silk or felt hats, and French dress coats with high collars, “constantly imported from England, where the farmers wear them, but not the labourers.” The Irish wore their second- or thirdhand British dinner jackets to work their potato grounds, and they “mount[ed] their dunghills in a coarse and tattered ball-dress.” English and British colonialism in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had put the Irish economy at a distinct, and growing, disadvantage within the Union. “There is not a country in the habitable globe that could have existed so long,” one Irish correspondent wrote to a British select committee, “as a skeleton whose vitals and blood have been drawn off, as this wretched kingdom; we can stand it no longer.”47
In 1845 Ireland was on the eve of the famine, and the unity of the United Kingdom was already under duress. In Ireland, the Repeal Association (“Repealers”), founded in 1830 by Daniel O’Connell, advocated for the end of the Union and the restoration of the independent Irish Parliament of the 1780s and 1790s. In Britain, Irish poverty nagged and pulled at government business in nearly every sitting of Parliament. In Britain, as one commentator wrote, with only some exaggeration, “two-thirds of the time of the Imperial Parliament” was taken up with Irish affairs. One writer commented that British officials thought of Ireland not as a partner in the Union but as a “mere useless burden.” Thomas Carlyle argued that instead of prosperity, British administration had pushed Ireland into a “perpetual scarcity of third-rate potatoes.”48
Meanwhile, the products Ireland supplied within the Union burnished the prestige and power of British industry and of the British Empire. Meat, in particular, was a symbol of national wealth. When Smithfield Market, north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was open, tourists would visit to see thousands of cattle, goaded into wide circles, their heads facing outward for inspection by potential buyers, as well as huge pens of pigs and sheep, many of them imported from Irish farms. In the 1840s, England’s per capita consumption of animal flesh was roughly 136 pounds per person per year, compared with a per capita average of 80 pounds in Paris and 89 pounds in Brussels. Meat, a political economist argued, was motivation for the British working class—the “greatest spurs to their industry” and the centrepiece of a traditional Sunday roast—and it was delivered by Irish wholesalers. In the warehouses and cellars of Cork food exporters, butter from Kerry was stored in firkins next to “masses of hams and sides of bacon… arranged in long rows, like octavo and folio volumes.” The Irish poor usually could not afford meat of any quality. “I would like to know,” a German travel writer commented, “with what feelings hungry Paddy studies these folios of bacon!”49
Ireland had been transformed by a combination of conquest, colonialism, and the accelerating and disruptive power of imperial and industrial capitalism into what some historians and economists have called a “small open economy”—unable to command global commodity prices but at the mercy of their fluctuations. Decades before the blight ravaged potato fields, Ireland was hungry. Demand for Irish agricultural products in the British Empire did not benefit the Irish poor. Instead, as exports boomed after the Union, Irish labourers depended even more profoundly on the generosity of the potato. Paddy was more likely to eat Irish bacon in Kandy than in Killarney. This was the fateful paradox of the Union and of its origins in centuries of violence and colonial adventuring: Irish soldiers fought for an empire abroad that subjugated and colonised them at home. By 1844, some argued that food security was the most important and contentious issue in Irish politics, above civil and religious liberties, above Repeal. To reform Ireland, what was necessary was “a remedy for famine. Yes, Famine!… Let us cease to rail at Turkish Pachas and Venetian oligarchs. The slaves of those iniquitous powers at least had food.”50