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Jane Ohlmeyer, "Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01:00:32
An interview with Jane Ohlmeyer
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to have the author of a really interesting and I think quite important book published by Oxford University Press titled Making Ireland Imperialism and the Early Modern World. This book starts from a pretty straightforward premise that Ireland was England's oldest colony. But what does that actually mean? How did the English empire function in early modern Ireland? How did this change over time? Was what participation did Irish people have in English empire more broadly? There's a whole bunch to get into. So I'm thrilled to have on the podcast the author of the book, Dr. Jane Almayer, to tell us all about it. Jane, thank you so much for being here.
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Oh, it's my pleasure, Miranda. I'm delighted to be with you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and explaining why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Of course. So my name is Jane Oldmeyer. I'm professor of Modern History at Trinity College in Dublin, and I've taught in Trinity now for the last 20 years and before that taught in the United States, the United Kingdom. But I grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, and I was always very conscious of Ireland having this anomalous position of being, if you won't, if you want, both colonial and post colonial. So I've been interested in issues of empire basically my entire life. And then my doctoral work, I really began to explore it. So I've been working on Ireland and Empire now for the better part of 30 years at Miranda. But the trigger for writing this book was an invitation to deliver the James Ford Lectures. Now, the Ford Lectures are Oxford University. They're hugely prestigious. I think I'm the second person based at Irish University ever to be invited to deliver them. And I thought, oh my goodness, what am I going to talk about. And it was really as I was thinking about the Fords that I thought I'd. You know, I've always been fascinated by Ireland and empire and Ireland as if you want colony, and the Irish as imperialists. And I thought this was a great opportunity to bring together research I've been doing over the last three decades, but also then really reflecting on what all of this means in the 21st century. So that's why I came to write this book. And then having delivered the lectures in 2021, they were actually delivered online and they're still on the RTE website. So RTE is the Irish broadcaster. They kindly are still hosting the lectures. But I thought, well, let's now turn them into a book. And obviously delighted that. That Oxford has published them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Brilliant. Thank you for giving us that sort of foundation way into the book and your interest in it. Obviously, as you've kind of hinted at and I mentioned as well, Ireland's history as a colony, as being involved in empire spans quite a long period of time. So what time period do you focus on in the book and how did you come to this decision?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Well, Ireland is England's oldest colony. England first conquered Ireland in the 12th century, but. And there were a number of waves, if you want, of English imperialism in Ireland. Where I pick the story up really is from the onset of the Protestant reformation in the 1530s and particularly in the later 16th century, when we see, if you want this imperial agenda in Ireland reaching new heights with the plantations, firstly the plantations of Munster, and then after the accession of King James VI and 1st 6th of Scotland, 1st of Ireland, England and Wales, we see imperialism, in a sense, take completely new, reach a whole new level. So I really wanted to focus on that late 16th century through the 17th century into the early 18th century. And that coincides, if you want, with what we know as the first English Empire or British Empire Empire. And however, I'm also very interested in the continuities over time. So in one chapter, chapter five, I actually then take this conversation right through to the 20th century, where I look particularly at Ireland's relationship with India, because I think there's huge continuities across time. And because we as historians focus on a particular place or a particular time frame, we often miss the very obvious connections across time and place. And I was keen to explore that, however superficially, in this book. Now somebody else can come along and write volume two, but at least I have sort of been suggestive here in pointing to the continuities across time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's very helpful to do, and useful as well to point our attention to perhaps a time period that we don't think of as often in this context. So now that we've clarified a bit about the time period, can we do the same for terminology, for example, terms of empire, imperialism, colony and colonization?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Yeah, nomenclature is always slippery, Miranda. So I think it is important just to be very clear about what we mean. And obviously people who lived in the early modern period, sometimes they use the language of imperialism and colonization, but other times they. They don't, or they, you know, so, so, but when it comes to imperialism, for me, imperialism in the early modern period, the usage in the early modern period is actually very similar to how we understand it today. So somewhere, like someone like Edward Said wrote a hugely important book, Cultural Imperialism, and he defined imperialism simply as the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire, when an empire comprises extensive territories or sets of territories under the control of a single ruler. And that would be a widely accepted definition. And people like historians like John Darwin would concur, or Jurgen Osterhamel. So these are all historians, if you want, of the empire in the modern period. But I think that does work very well for early modernity. Where it becomes slightly more complicated is, I think colony is another word where it's used in the early modern period very much as it is today. But in the early modern period, people will use the word to plant and plantation, and they'll go between colonization and plantation, whereas today we wouldn't use that word as much. The other word we see a lot of use of is the word to civilize or to improve. And when contemporaries in the early modern period use that, that really is explaining, if you want, what we would today called Anglicization, in other words, how Ireland was made English. So the word Anglicization is a product of a much later period. So they, as I say, they use this word to civilize. So language matters. And I try to be very precise in how I use language, because the one thing I don't want to do is muddy sometimes complicated waters even further. And where possible, I'll always use the language that was used at the time, the language of the 17th century.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And regardless, clarifying when you use the language, which version we're using and why, so that, as you said, we don't muddy the waters even further. Given this foundation now with the terminology, with the time period, I'd love to start off talking a bit about these continuities that you trace between the early modern period and the present Day, I think we'll probably then go back into the early modern period itself. But to start off with, I wonder if you can tell us a bit about the play called Making History and what we might learn about all of these topics of empire, imperialism and colony by comparing sort of the time period that the play is about versus the time period of when it was actually performed versus what it might be like to think about now.
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Dr. Jane Almayer
So when I was invited to give the Ford lectures, I had a tremendous sort of, oh, my goodness, how am I going to actually present the lectures? I needed something to help me hold them together and to create, if you want, a satisfying, coherent narrative. And so I turned to a wonderful play by a wonderful Irish playwright called Brian Friel. And Brian Friel had written a play called Making History, which is about the great Irish nationalist hero, a man called Hugh o', Neill, Earl of Tyrone. But Brian Friel had, if you want, debunked the myth of Hugh o', Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Making History, like Brian Friel's other plays, especially Translations, which would be another play that I do come to in the book a little bit. It's a play about identity. It's a play about language. It's a play about what it means to be Irish. So it was very relevant, both the topic, but also let's remember that Brian Friel wrote that play in the 1980s. He wrote it at the height of the Troubles. The Troubles were, of course, very much a colonial war where Britain was fighting Irish nationalists, Irish Republicans. The war began in 1980, 68, and lasted 30 years until we had the conclusion of Good Friday Agreement in 1998. So making history was published at the very height of the Troubles, when actually it wasn't clear that there was any way out to. It was such a dreadful period. I grew up in Belfast during this period, and the warfare just seemed there was going to never be peace. There would be no solution to it. And what Brian Friel was trying to do in Making History along with his other plays. And it wasn't just Brian Friel, by the way. Seamus Enie would be another very important writer who was trying to create a fifth province of the mind. There were, of course, four provinces in Ireland, and this was a fifth province of the mind where all communities could come together and, in a sense, find a shared future and present. So, you know, this was really important, visionary work that Friel and, as I say, others were undertaking at a very, very dark moment in Irish history. But what Brian Friel's play gave me was A way of approaching these extremely thorny and very sensitive discussions around empire and around identity in the Ireland of the 21st century. Because, as we all know, around the world we see so many conflicts, whether it's in the Ukraine, the Middle east, that are very much, if you want, legacies of empire. Well, we had that own experience ourselves in Ireland. And the question then is, how do we actually have discussions around empire that don't turn into, you know, toxic screaming matches? And I, I. So I thought, well, you know, let's try and tell that story. Let's go back to the beginning. For me, it was very much the early modern period. And let's actually look at the evidence. And this is where, you know, the historian. It's, to me, it's. It's about empirical evidence. And then let's tell that story, obviously, based on. On the evidence. And, and what Friel allowed me to do then was to, in a sense, make the history of the early modern period more relevant to today, but also helping explain, I think, a little bit better how Ireland had emerged out of its own period of colonial warfare. Now, obviously, Ireland is still a divided country, and partition, whether it's in India and Pakistan, Gaza and Israel is a very difficult thing for any country to negotiate. But at least we have found a way of sharing the island. And that's, I suppose, what Friel was hoping for when he wrote that play. And that now, as I say, is something that is being realized, although I would never take that for granted. Miranda. I think Brexit dealt a body blow to Anglo Irish relations, and we're still sort of reeling from that, given what's going on or not going on in Stormont. But also English nationalism, extreme English nationalism, and this nostalgia for, you know, to recreate the British Empire that has dominated English politics has been extremely, you know, destructive, I think, across these islands. And then we just have to look at the very toxic discussions that are going on in the United States, and that's compounded then by other movements. The statues must fall. Black Lives Matter. You know, there's a lot of tension in the, you know, at the moment around issues of empire. And I hope that this contribution or my book is a constructive contribution about how we actually, you know, have informed and very respectful conversations, because until we actually can deal with our own past, we'll never be able to engage in the present and build a future, you know, a shared future. So I'm probably not being as articulate as I would like to, but I found the play extraordinarily helpful. In allowing me to negotiate all of that. So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
What a wonderful way going to look for something to bring this all together and finding something so useful. So thank you for starting us off with that and I think kind of then following your lead. Right, we do need to go back into history. We need to look at what the facts were. So can we look at what, as you said, we would now call the Anglicization process, even if it was using terms more like civilize at the time? What did this actually look like in the early modern period in Ireland in terms of culture, religion, political participation, land? What was this process really?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
That's a big, big question. Yes, and I'll try to answer it as succinctly as I possibly can. But I think to bear in mind that what we're seeing happen in Ireland, it's like you have waves of imperialism. Sometimes the emphasis is on just military conquest. Sometimes the emphasis is on what we would today call cultural imperialism or Anglicization. Sometimes it's on converting the Irish Catholics to Protestantism. And sometimes these various sort of strands come together. But again, at the risk of oversimplifying it, up until 1603 and the accession of James VI, and first, Ireland had never been fully conquered militarily. So Ireland always represented a security threat to Britain. And we saw that, particularly 1588, the Spanish Armada, the Habsburgs, I mean, foreign princes were always very keen to use Ireland as a backdoor to attack and try and win England. With the military conquest of Ireland completed in 1603, all of a sudden the British crown, as King James of Scotland, liked to think of himself as a British monarch. It was about, well, how can Ireland now become a resource for the better enrichment of England. And how can we use Irish land and labor to, if you want, become part of an English imperial venture? And I'll say something about land, because land is terribly important. And then I'll say something about labor, because basically, over the course of the long 17th century, about 8 million Irish. I mean, 8 million acres of Irish land is expropriated and if you want, reassigned to people who are deemed to be loyal to the crown. The vast majority of the majority, of course, are Protestants, not all of them. We also see how a merchant oligarchy based in London over time uses this Irish land to fuel their own imperial ventures, not just in the Atlantic world, but on the world stage. So Irish land is hugely important at many, many, many levels. And of course, that brought with it. So probably the guts of 300,000 people of English, Scottish and Welsh extraction had moved to Ireland. Certainly by the early decades of the 18th century, it was about 300,000 people were of English, Irish or English, Welsh or Scottish descent living in Ireland. So we see this huge migration to Ireland of colonists who are charged now as they're part of this imperial venture. It has huge implications for the Irish indigenous population, because what happens is these people have lost their lands, their religion is being threatened, because, of course, the crown is trying to convert them to Protestantism, and they feel, quite rightly, very aggrieved. So you have a situation where conflict is inevitable. And, of course, resistance occurs. It takes many different shapes and forms, but we see a number of major rebellions. One would be in the 1590s. It's a war called the Nine Years War. And this is where we see Hugh O' Neill is one of the great leaders of the Irish Catholic resistance to imperial rule. We have another major rebellion in the 1640s that for the first time, Ireland is actually independent of English rule since the 12th century. Now, that' a decade. Because, of course, then Oliver Gromwell comes in, and we see another wave of expropriation and really clamping down on Ireland. And then again, after 1588, there's another attempt, you know, to reclaim for the Catholics, to reclaim what they thought was their own land and rightful inheritance. So it's a very messy process. It occurs over a long period of time. And as I say, we see this very intricate combination of. Of military conquest and political subjugation. And alongside that, we see this wider desire to convert the Irish to Protestantism, but also to make them English, to speak the English language, to wear English fashions, to cut, you know, including their Hairstyles, you know, to cut their hair in the English style, to educate their children in English schools and universities, to use the English legal system. And we see the introduction of English common law in Ireland during these decades. But also it goes further than this. It's about creating a subservient economy. So it's economic imperialism is very much part of this as well, wanting the Irish to use money rather than barter. We see very intensive urbanization occurring in Ireland during, especially the early 17th century. And along with the creation of towns, we see the establishment of markets and fairs. In other words, it's about creating an Anglicised economic order in Ireland. And the reason you want to do that is that you want to make the Irish economy work for England. And by the 1660s, England has effectively created a subservient economy in Ireland. And Ireland is the place that then provisions, if you want, the English colonies, especially in the Atlantic. So all of these processes take place over literally, you know, hundred. Well over a period, about 120, 150 years. And it sort of fits and starts. So. And we'll see emphasis on reform, and then we'll see emphasis on expropriation. So it's very important to take that longer view. But I would say by the mid 18th century, you know, what you have in Ireland is effectively a completely subservient economy. Dublin goes on to become the second city of empire, but the truth is that the regions across Munster, and especially cities like Cork, are provisioning the English empire, as I say, in the Atlantic world and later in Asia. So that's a very broad answer to your question, Miranda. But it's one of these things that. And even now I'm oversimplifying it. It's a complicated story.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, it's complicated. But having the overview is helpful. And of course, it's obviously worth flagging to listeners explicitly that the book has loads more detail. Of course, if listeners want any more detail on any of these things, and really they should want more detail on all of it, because it's fascinating. We're doing sort of a highlights version of it in this capacity. But that was a very helpful overview to understand that the Anglicization process isn't, as you said, kind of one moment or one aspect. It's really across every possible part of life. Even the way, as you talked about mindset, people, you know, everything about kind of someone's life was impacted by this. And so I'd love to ask you about kind of, in some ways, a very personal aspect, but one that I think had some much broader implications, which is about intermarriage. Given the emphasis on changing kind of everything possible about Ireland and down to individual people, individual lives, even inside people's minds. What can we learn about empire if we look at it specifically around the topic of intermarriage?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Well, I mean, for me, one of the most important things about Brian Friel's play is it begins with the marriage of Hugh o', Neill, this great Gaelic Catholic lord, to a much younger daughter of a planter, of a Protestant planter, a woman called Mabel Bagnall. So here we have, from the very outset, the playwright really challenging us about these issues around identity and what Irishness means, what Englishness means. And of course, intermarriage in this period amongst the elite is really quite common, but I think it's also far more common than people wanted to acknowledge. As we go down the social hierarchy, the very fact that Oliver Cromwell has to issue instructions telling his troops not to marry local Catholic women is an indication that it was happening. Miranda so the first thing to note is that intermarriage is happening, and I think much more extensively than we've given credit for. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that at a very human level within communities, you're seeing a level of integration between. Between ethnic groups and between religious communities. There's always a struggle about how the children are going to be brought up. Obviously, the Protestants hope that Protestant women will bring the children up as Protestants, even if they've married a Catholic, and the Catholics are hoping vice versa. And it depends where you look, but you find examples of both things happening. So, in other words, sometimes the most Protestant families within three generations are the most zealous Catholics, and vice versa. That is a story that has just not really been told in an Irish context because we're so focused on sort of the colonized and the colonizer. We don't want to look at the. If you want the nitty gritty and sometimes quite messy story that subjects like intermarriage bring to the fore, I think the other thing I'm very keen to explore, and obviously there's a whole chapter devoted to this in Making Empire, but I'm very interested as well in. Is when we look at the. When we look at empire through the prism of gender and women, well, what does that look like? And this is where I've been very inspired by the work of historians like Philippa Levine and Margot Finn, who have really challenged this idea that empire is a masculine space. And wherever I can, I am looking at how colonial women, in other words, those women who came as colonists to Ireland, the operation of their daily lives, including the extent to which they intermarried with Catholics. I'm very interested in seeing how Catholic Irish women responded to colonialism because many are regarded as being the ones who are the great protectors of Irish culture, of the Irish religion, of Catholicism. So I think when you start to look at all of these things through the prism of gender and women, actually, we get a much more, I think, interesting, but a much more nuanced story as well. But it also helps us to make sense of the very negative representations there are of Irish women. So we see particularly English writers, including the great Edmund Spenser, that great Renaissance poet, and I have that great inadverted commas here, because Spenser, probably more than any other English writer, denigrated Irish women wherever he could. He saw them as being particularly politically subversive and as dangerous because he recognized that they were the ones who ensured that children were brought up in the Catholic faith and that they were the guardians of language and culture. And, you know, obviously these negative writings, I'm sort of trying to turn them on their head and say, well, was Spencer right? You know, And I think it actually confers tremendous agency to these women. And let's remember this is the 17th century, so women don't have a legal existence except through their husbands or their fathers. And so they're very much in the shadows. But work that I'm doing, we might come back to it in terms of. My next project is actually looking at these women and putting them center stage. And how does that change the narrative? How does that change the picture? And my book would suggest it changes it very radically. And it's a far more interesting story as a result.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, definitely adding nuance to history, I think, always gives us. Maybe always gives us a more complicated picture, but almost certainly always gives us a more interesting one as well. So thank you for talking us through that lens. I'd like to ask you about another group of people in empire that also had some agency. And these, they're literally called agents of empire in some cases. What does looking at them tell us about kind of the on the ground aspects of imperialism and Ireland's role in England's empire?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Well, I was extremely interested in looking at people who, I use that word collaborate, but in sort of inverted commas, who. Who are working with the crown to effectively pursue an imperial agenda in Ireland. And these are invariably people of high status, usually members of the titled peerage or titled el and they're very clever at how. Or actually clever is the wrong word. They're very pragmatic in how they work with the king as his loyal servants and subjects. But as they do so, they also are protecting their own estates, their own followers. So in other words, they may be imperial agents, but they're using. They're sort of almost turning empire on its head because by playing the game, they're also protecting their own. So I'm very interested in looking at their stories. So they tend to be the ones who are in Ireland itself, usually the Catholics, the Protestant agents of empire are much more overtly men on the make who are land grabbers who are there to make their fortunes in Ireland. The best example is a man called the Earl of Cork who basically arrives in Ireland as a pennile opportunist and within three gen, three decades is, you know, he dies the richest man not just in Ireland, but, but these islands. So. So, you know, he would be a really good example of somebody who, who uses these imperial opportunities to advance himself and, and his lineage. They're the ones who stay in Ireland. I'm also extremely interested in the men, and it mostly is men, although a significant number of women do migrate across empire, we go back to them. But the men who then also use opportunities for their own enrichment on the back of not just the British English Empire, but also the empires of the other European powers. And they go out as merchants primarily. But very quickly we see the Irish becoming very engaged in tobacco, sugar slavery. They're very, very effective merchants. They're very effective plantation overseers and sometimes plantation owners. And they do extremely well, not just, as I say, in the English empire, but the empires of all of the early modern European powers. And it's really the 1610s and 20s. We see the first, you know, Irish imperial imperialists or these agents of empire operating in the Amazon where they are selling timber and tobacco and they actually work in collaboration with the English, but also the Dutch and the Portuguese. So the Irish are trans imperial. They're really good at piggybacking on the empires of others. And I do think, though it's very important to remember that the vast majority of people, people who are engaged in empire, don't do so on a voluntary basis. And we'll come back and talk about them. But in addition to those merchants, there are two other areas where we see Irish, again, predominantly men, very active. One area is as mercenaries, as soldiers. And many of them will serve not just in the navies and the armies of the English, but particularly of Spain and France. France. And they'll use then these military networks to develop mercantile ones. And then the final sort of big area where we see large numbers of Irish, both Protestants in the English Empire and Catholics in the Spanish and French empires is as clergy, as missionaries. And they participate very actively in the great spiritual empires, whether it's the Franciscans, the Jesuits, or the Anglican empire in the Atlantic. So when we think about agents of empire, we need to think about it within Ireland and then across, if you want the globe. And looking at it through the lens, as I say, of. Of missionaries, it's God's gains and Godly. God's gains and godliness. Gods, obviously, the missionaries gains, the merchants. And guns are. Are so soldiers.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that makes sense as a way of thinking about this, to narrow down the world into something perhaps slightly more manageable to ask you about. In this instance, can we talk about Tangier and why it makes an interesting case study to kind of look at this a little bit further. And especially, I just find it so curious to imagine these different people there with the different goals. And if someone says, you know, where are you from? What are you part of? What does it mean at this point to claim Irishness or claim Englishness? How can we maybe investigate that by looking at Tangier?
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Well, Tangier came to Charles II as part of his dowry when Charles II married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. So as part of her diary, she wrote Tangier and Bombay. Anyway, Tangier effectively became an Irish colony because it was largely administered, and most of the soldiers in Tangier were Irish. And it's not that they were just Irish. They were mostly Irish Catholics. And the fact that they were able to use the Irish language as a secret language is something that was commented upon. But this was controversial. Controversial that Charles II had opted to send so many Irish Catholics to Cangier because, of course, many of his English subjects would have seen the Irish as being disloyal. And the fact that they were Catholic added to this sense that you couldn't trust the barbarous Irish. So it became a very interesting place where we see Englishness, Irishness being played out. And it is Englishness and Irishness. It's not Britishness. Britishness is very much a constructed identity in this period. And the one thing that you never see people talking about is being. So they'll always refer to themselves as Irish or English, but they'll never describe themselves as being British. But Tangier, as I say, is just this interesting little case study where we see these issues around Identity in a very clear cut way. We do see it in other parts, especially the Atlantic, but it tends to be less clear cut than it is in Tangier.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, making it a very good place to investigate. One of the main themes of the book, and I think something very much present in some of the ways that empires remembered regarding Ireland is the idea of Ireland as England's longest colony and therefore as something of a laboratory, as a starting point, as a testing ground for English empire that maybe then gets exported more broadly. So obviously this again is another big question that I'm throwing at you, but maybe you could take us through one or two ways or an overview of how Ireland was a laboratory in this sense.
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Dr. Jane Almayer
Yes, and it is a big area. And I think just at a high level, what we could. What I do argue is that Ireland is a laboratory where ideas and policy are formulated that are then, if you want, rolled out elsewhere across the English empire. But Ireland is also a place where people go to learn the business of empire and they can then take those learnings to them to the Atlantic world or later to India and later again to Africa. So this notion of Ireland being a laboratory isn't just in the early modern period that continues the whole way through until the 20th century, but maybe just to give you one sort of specific example, and it really relates to ideology because what we see being developed in Ireland and is an ideology of otherness. So we see a development of an ideology of ethnocentricity. Now, by the 19th century it would be called racism. But that racism is not a concept that applies in the 17th century. Rather it's about cultural superiority. And this goes back to writers like Edmund Spencer. Spencer who has in turn been influenced by a medieval writer, a man called Giraldus Cambrensis, who was writing in the 12th century. And he said, you know, the Irish are uncivil, they're barbarous, they're cannibals. And Spencer picks up this very negative portrayal of the Irish. And of course then their Catholicism is compounding the their barbarity, their incivility, their savageness. And Spencer writes a very important tract called the State of the View of Ireland. And that becomes a foundational text then for the British Empire right through into the 19th century, where this discussion then has morphed into one of racism. But all of those early ideas are really worked out in an Irish context. Context, which it's about anti Catholicism, but it's more than that. It's about the Irish as a race, being second class citizens, the English being somehow superior to the Irish. So I think that's a really, you know, interesting example of how, you know, that's played out in Ireland and then as I say, exported around the British Empire. Empire and. But it wouldn't be the only one. We've other examples of legal imperialism, in other words. And Jennifer Wells has done fabulous work on this. She's a historian at George Washington University whose own book on Ireland and the Atlantic world is coming out, if it's not already out, where she looks at how laws that were formulated in Ireland were then later in re if you want repurposed in other parts of the English empire, especially in the Caribbean, laws against, if you want indigenous native Irish are repurposed and used against slaves. So I think, you know, there's a lot of examples here and architecture would be another one. And I suppose the final thing just to simply flag which and again it's all developed in the book is mapping because Ireland maps are tools of empire and Ireland is probably the most extensively mapped place in the early modern world. I would stick my neck out here. And those techniques for mapping and for knowledge gathering and counting resources, human and natural, that is really fine tuned in Ireland largely under a man called Sir William Petty, who is of course the father of political economy. And then it's applied very much around the Atlantic world and then later in India as well. So in so many ways we see Ireland being that laboratory for empire, as I say, not just in the early modern period, but right through into the 20th century.
- [44:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And it's in fact one of those continuities and exports that I'd love to ask you about about kind of in some ways as a follow up to that very helpful answer. But I guess my question now is less about the ways in which the English and then British state used Ireland and then exported it as sort of something that came out of Ireland that maybe the government was less happy about, but nevertheless had consequences beyond Ireland, which is specifically Irish resistance to empire and the consequences it had for.
- [45:22]
Dr. Jane Almayer
For India. Yeah, and it's not just India actually the American civil war was very influenced by what had happened in Ireland earlier. So in addition, if you want to being servants of empire, the Irish are subversives within empire. But if we look particularly at the example of India, the Irish first are engaged in the East India company from the 1670s. The founding father of Bombay Bay is a man called Gerald Anger, who would be Ireland's first neighbor. So they've got a very long history of engaging as if you want servants of empire first the East India Company and then the raj. By the 1890s, something like 2 thirds of the white troops in India are Irish. And of the eight provinces in India and Burma, seven of them are ruled by Irishmen. And Lord Dufferin would be the Viceroy at that point. So. So the Irish all over the British Empire in India, but they also are the ones who are challenging British rule in India. And we see this really from the 1890s, and they're challenging it as members of the Raj or as of the East India Company, but they're also doing it in other ways. We see the Irish constitutional nationalists, the home rulers, effectively making common quote cause with the Indian Home Rule League, and especially a woman called Annie Besant, who is herself of Irish extraction, who goes on to be the first president of the Home Rule League in India. She and her colleagues are working very, very closely with their counterparts in Ireland. We see a lot of links between the cultural nationalists, so WB Yates and Rabindra Tagore, who was, of course, the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Well, he and Yates were hugely influenced by each other and worked very closely to create, if you want, a common cause for the nationalist movements. And then Indian Republican nationalists followed the Irish Republican cause. They watched very closely what was happening in 1916, which, of course, was the beginning of the process that triggered the ultimate independence of Ireland from Britain. And they worked very, very closely with figures like where they admired hugely Patrick Pearce, Michael Collins, and worked very closely with Eamon de Valera, who would have been one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland. You know, I think the Irish taught the Indians their ABC of freedom fighting and are recognized as such. And especially in Bengal, you see a copycat rising at chittagong, that it's 1931, but it's an exact copy of what has happened in Ireland in 1916. And you see these Bengali nationalists really drawing inspiration from what the. The Irish Republican nationalists are doing. So, you know, again, it's a complicated story, but I think that on many occasions, Ireland, and it's not just in an Indian context. Irish resistance to empire, especially in the 20th century, did inspire other nationalist movements, not just across the British Empire, but across the other European empires as well.
- [49:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, absolutely fascinating to think about how all those pieces interact within empire, but also against it, bringing us right all the way back to the present, if you don't mind. I know we're skipping over loads of things, but again, the book has more detail, I promise. How has early modern empire, this period in particular, been remembering in Ireland?
- [49:40]
Dr. Jane Almayer
You know, it's a really good question, Miranda, because I think people have a very selective memory of it and it depends on your perspective. But some of the big events that occurred in this period are very important in shaping in what we would call a Protestant. Sorry, a number of events are very important in shaping a Protestant loyalist agenda. And I mean events like The Rebellion of 16411 when the Catholics rose up and attacked many of the Protestant colonists. That became a very important event in sort of across the centuries. Protestants would, would use that evidence as evidence of treachery. You can never trust the perfidious Irish Catholics and would have used it to whip up anti Catholic historians hysteria, as I say, from the 1640s right through until very, very recently. So I think that that's, you know, 1641 is, is a good example, obviously 1690 and the battle of the Boyne, another very, very good example of something that is still very much part of the DNA of the loyalist community. The Orangeman still march on the 12th of July. The siege of Derry would be something that is commemorated every year or the relief of the, the Siege of Derry that's taking us to the conflict of the 1690s as well. So all of these are very key moments that have profoundly shaped identity in modern Ireland. And then for the Catholics, you've got anything to do with Oliver Cromwell. You know, Oliver Cromwell got an amazing archive called the Folklore Archive, which is housed in UC ucd. And basically that folklore archive, the most mentioned historic figure is Daniel o'. Connell. And after Daniel o' Connell it's Oliver Cromwell. And my colleague Sarah Covington has written an amazing book about the social memory of Oliver Cromwell. So it's very interesting to see how Cromwell is remembered even in Ireland today. The other thing I would just make a point of though is because the plantations and the. The fact that Ireland was very much part of the British empire up until 100 years ago. I also think that this selective memory of it and we're not willing to come to terms with it in its totality and I think that's something that I'm hoping that the book will do that will allow us to say, well, why are these particular events so important in shaping identity across time? Because I think as Ireland island moves to hopefully having a future where we can continue to live peacefully on the island, we have to actually think about, well, what did empire mean for us as a people? How has it shaped us? Because it's only by having these sort of rather difficult conversations and bowing to the past without being bound by it, that we'll ever sort of have a shared future. And for me, that's one of the most important things about talking about empire. But as I say, always doing so in an empirically grounded way and in a respectful one. Because the last thing I would want is to stir up a debate about empire that wasn't actually constructive or helping us to actually negotiate treacherous waters. And hopefully we will see a healthy debate. So far it has been healthy. You'll get craziness on, on, on social media and there's obviously toxicity out there about many of these issues. The one thing I hate to see is what we see with the extreme white supremacists in the United States who are using instances of Irish indentured service to, if you want, claim that, you know, the white supremacists were the first white slaves. You know, there's a fundamental difference between black chattel slaves, slavery and indentured service. So, you know, history is a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. So it's really important that we call out people who are trying to use it inappropriately and destructively and to support initiatives and research that is actually based on fact.
- [54:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, in fact, that's what I'd love to ask you about because that's clearly something that you're doing not just with this book, but you hinted at a next project as well. So could we finish off with maybe a little preview of what you might be working on next?
- [54:24]
Dr. Jane Almayer
Oh, I'd love to, Miranda, and hopefully I can come back and talk about it. So I was very fortunate to receive an advanced grant from the European Research Council. It's a five year project to work on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. So I've been able to put together a fabulous team of historians and computer scientists and literary scholars. So it's very. A very interdisciplinary team to say, well, now these women have been hiding in plain sight. We've paid no attention to them whatsoever. Let's now put their stories and their lived experiences at the heart of Irish history. But as we do that, I'm so keen to look comparatively across the early modern imperial world because I think the experiences of women colonizing Ireland and those colonizing, for example, Portuguese, Brazil or New Spain, you know, what do these women enjoy? You know, what commonalities are there? Obviously there are differences as well. The other thing I'm trying to do with this project, I look at women during times of peace, and there we're looking at their labor, how they deploy their labor. We're looking at their relationship with their land within their communities, their networks, their families. But I'm also looking at them during times of war and obviously the 1590s, the 1640s, and then again at the end of the 17th century. And there we're finding, you know, some really harrowing material of how women experienced violence, particularly sexual violence, some of it very extreme indeed, but also then how they negotiated wartime as refugees, particularly, particularly, and demonstrated a great agency as, as well. So this project is just beginning. We're very fortunate to have a lot of digital, a lot of historic data available in digital format. My other colleague, Peter Crooks is, is leading an amazing project called called the Virtual Treasury. It's basically aiming to reconstitute an archive that was destroyed 100 years ago. It's called the so. So. So it means that for the first time we've got this amazing wealth of 17th century digital material that I think will be extremely important as we retell this story of the lives of ordinary women in Ireland. And we combine that material with records like the 1641 depositions, which I would have been a PI in helping to digitize, but also this amazing cartographic material that I mentioned earlier. Ireland, the most mapped country in the early modern world. So by bringing all of this together, it'll give us, as I say, hopefully a very fresh, very new historical story. And I'm getting very tired here, Miranda,
- [57:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
so you're just gonna have to edit
- [57:48]
Dr. Jane Almayer
this in whatever way you can. I think my brain is starting to shut down.
- [57:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, no, let's just finish off. Thank you for telling us about that fabulous, fascinating new project. And of course, while you're you and your team are working on it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Making Empire, Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World, published by Oxford University Press. Jane, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [58:15]
Dr. Jane Almayer
My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.