Among the many statues and memorials surrounding Belfast’s impressive City Hall, “much the finest” (in the opinion of architectural historian C. E. B. Brett) is that of the first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1826–1902).1 Posing in full regalia, which recall his distinguished career as a former Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India (among other eminent posts), Lord Dufferin is attended by two imperial subjects, a Canadian boatman seated on the body of a moose, and a turbaned Sikh warrior, with a sword, seated on a cannon (see the cover image for the latter). Though it is the imperial grandee, Lord Dufferin , standing with insouciant ease, who is undoubtedly meant to be the focus of attention, his attentive and unnamed attendants are nonetheless, in their own way, finely realised portraits, their different histories, geographies and ethnicities suggestive of the reach and power of the empire. Their generally overlooked presence in the heart of Belfast, alongside their imperial master (his statue, an adjunct to the more imposing, though somewhat less successful, memorial to Queen Victoria , Empress of India, in front of the City Hall) serves also to foreground the thematic concern of the present volume—that of Ireland’s relationship with the wider British Empire.
Viewed one way, the history of Ireland during the long period covered by this collection (1775–1947) evokes a narrative characterised by the gradual wresting of national self-determination, the overthrow of British rule and the emergence of the modern nation. At the same time, however, this period saw British imperial power reach its peak, before dramatically declining in the post–Second World War era of de-colonisation. Hence, an equally important and intertwined dimension of Ireland’s historical experience within this timeframe concerns its diffuse and multifaceted connections with the empire. Despite Ireland being formally recognised as a kingdom in 1541, some Irish writers and politicians had, by the eighteenth century, come to compare its treatment to that meted out to Britain’s colonies. In the late seventeenth century William Molyneux protested, in his influential work, The Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), against the notion that “Ireland is to be looked upon only as a Colony from England.”2 But Molyneux’s protestation notwithstanding, Ireland’s parliament was rendered subservient to Westminster by the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1720—subservient, that is, until 1782, when, against the backdrop of imperial conflict in North America , parliamentary and popular agitation in Ireland led Britain to concede the legislative independence of the Irish parliament. Ireland’s experience of parliamentary independence was, though, short-lived. Following the dramatic convulsions of the 1790s in the wake of the American and French revolutions—reformist and radical agitation, rebellion, counter-reaction and, in places, sectarian blood-letting—the British government looked again at its relationship with its sister kingdom and, on 1 January 1801, as is well known, Ireland was subsumed within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, under the terms of the Act of Union.3
In theory, Ireland under the union was an equal partner in Britain’s imperial enterprise; in reality, things were more complex. The union was, as Alvin Jackson has noted, “incomplete.” Catholic Emancipation was not granted until 1829 and “Ireland was ruled partly in colonial and partly in metropolitan terms.” Thus, while political representatives were sent to Westminster, a Lord Lieutenant resided in Dublin and, as was the case elsewhere in the empire, elements of Irish bureaucracy, not least policing, were “highly centralized.”4 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Ireland’s perceived subservience to Britain would generate powerful calls for reform and freedom. From repeal to Home Rule, O’Connell to Parnell, and Young Ireland to the Fenians, the political narrative of nineteenth-century Ireland is well known.5 Yet against this backdrop, Ireland took its place within the imperial order, despatching disproportionately high numbers of men (and later, increasingly, women) to serve in the colonies. “As well as belonging to a colony at the heart of the British Empire,” Kevin Kenny has written, “Irish people helped, conquer, populate, and govern the colonies overseas.”6
The early years of the twentieth century would, of course, bring Ireland’s independence. With the creation of the Free State in 1921, the curtain fell on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, rising instead on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and in 1949 a further, formal distancing from empire on Ireland’s part occurred, as it became a republic and left the Commonwealth. Such attempts at distancing, though understandable in an emerging republic, might be said, at a popular level, to have left a residue of imperial amnesia—that is, a tendency to overlook the imperial past of Ireland and the Irish. This is particularly true of those whose careers, whether as soldiers or administrators, contributed to the development of empire and whose stories form, in Hiram Morgan’s words, “an uncomfortable Irish heritage.”7 In recent years, however, this heritage has attracted increasing scholarly attention. In his Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Stephen Howe has undertaken a sustained examination of “the ways in which the languages of imperialism, colonialism, postcoloniality and anticolonialism have been deployed in Irish contexts,” and a series of monographs and essay collections published within the last twenty years has sought to shed light on the Irish men and women who were active within the empire, to highlight connections between Irish and Indian nationalists and, from a critical perspective, to apply the insights of postcolonial and subaltern studies to Irish cultural productions.8 Such work has served to raise a raft of important and often difficult questions for the modern nation. Should we view Ireland as a colony? What role did the Irish play in the oppression of other, now postcolonial, nations? And, by contrast, to what extent did Ireland encourage or serve as an example for other anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the empire? As for the Irish themselves, how did they view empire as it applied to them? Was it viewed as an opportunity or as a curse? Were the Anglo-Irish overseas subsumed into Britishness by the empire or did they retain a distinctive Irish side to their identity even as they went abroad? Did the bifurcated identities of Ireland—“native” and “settler,” Protestant and Catholic, loyalist and republican—manifest and perpetuate themselves in imperial contexts or were these irrelevant to the empire? If Ireland were to be considered a colony, was its plight under British rule as abject as that of other colonies which were judged to be racially “inferior,” or was it racially privileged as white? And what of Irish migration: did it result in the loss or abandonment of Irish identity, or in its enhancement and diversification overseas?
Such questions have prompted debate (at times heated) and generated a series of valuable historical and cultural meditations in recent years. All of these evidently antagonistic or exclusive positions have been plausibly demonstrated under some sets of circumstances. Equally, none of these questions has been entirely resolved in any absolute sense, though many useful distinctions have been drawn and crucial ambiguities made manifest. Fundamentally, it has become increasingly apparent through such debates that Ireland’s constitutional status—and, indeed, its imperial status—was inherently equivocal.9 This allowed for a range of attitudes to be held, both by administrators and subjects. Furthermore, the regional, religious and ethnic divisions within Ireland, and the immense variety of Britain’s overseas colonies and imperial relationships, necessitate a variegated approach to empire, one that takes into consideration the specificity of particular imperial contexts. With this in mind, the current volume seeks to avoid the pitfalls of polarised debate and simplistic dichotomy, instead embracing particularity, nuance and complexity. While some of the contributors whose essays are presented in the pages that follow espouse methodological and historiographical approaches informed by postcolonial theory or the insights of the “new imperial history,” no single editorial line has been imposed and the various case studies, close readings and explorations gathered here have been informed by a plurality of methodological assumptions, often working in revealingly mutual ways.
Covering the period from the commencement of the American revolutionary war in 1775 to the declaration of independence by India (the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s eastern empire10) in 1947, the chapters that follow have been subdivided into four major thematic areas, though each, as will be evident, overlaps in some respects with others. The opening part, “Inhabiting Empire,” addresses the issue of emigration, an area of obvious significance given the scale, diversity and continuity of Irish outward migration throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although associated most strongly with the mid-nineteenth-century famine in popular imagination and visual illustration, emigration proceeded apace before and after the famine years, making the Irish diaspora the largest of all European nations when taken over the entire period. Although statistics are problematic, it has been estimated that between 1820 and 1920 around 5 million migrated to the United States alone, and that by 1890, 39% of all Irish-born people were living abroad, variously adapting to and recreating anew their living environments wherever they went. As Roy Foster has commented pithily: “There was, in a very real sense, an Ireland abroad.”11 Peter Ludlow and Terry Murphy’s chapter on imperial Halifax—one of Britain’s most important naval garrison cities by the mid-nineteenth century—provides a revealing account of the largely Catholic (though partially mixed) Irish population within the establishment of this multi-ethnic military and urban location. Their chapter analyses the staggered “two-boat” or “three-boat” nature of their passage and throws interesting light on their interactions with neighbours and internecine disputes with coreligionists. What emerges most distinctly, quite in opposition to stereotypical views of Irish sectarianism and Irish Catholic unruliness, is the extent to which this pre-famine migrant population can be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, to have played an energetic and well-integrated role in the development of the city’s imperial institutions and character. Following this, Eve Patten ’s chapter, “From Enniskillen to Nairobi : the Coles in British East Africa ,” turns from urban history to the pioneer and plantation ethos cultivated by an aristocratic Ulster family in former Rhodesia . Patten traces an intriguing connection from Ireland to British East Africa in the early twentieth century, covering three of the children of the fourth Earl of Enniskillen (Florence Cole, b. 1878; Galbraith Cole, b. 1881; and Berkeley Cole, b. 1882), wh...