What colonization and empire meant for Ireland
IRELAND, COLONIALISM, AND THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION ROBBIE MCVEIGH AND BILL ROLSTON 480pp. Haymarket. Paperback, £19.99.
DURING HIS COUNTRY’S centenary commemorations of the revolutionary era of 1916–23, the Irish president, Michael D. Higgins, wrote in the Guardian about the revealing absence of the word “imperialism” in British and Irish contemplations of the period. Instead there had been a dwelling on the exclusionary and sometimes violent nature of Irish nationalism, perhaps out of shame about this violence, or so as not to disturb some Irish or British sensibilities. Ireland was beyond all that, the Irish state seemed to wish to say. Higgins described a “feigned amnesia around the uncomfortable aspects of our shared history”, including imperialism. He cites among other things the framing of the Enlightenment as a civilizing instrument in order to launder the rapaciousness of Empire. The British, he wrote, had to look down on the Irish in order to dispossess them, and the Irish, with an ancient civilization of their own, had to resist.
As colonial expansion has gone into reverse “Empire” has tended to take on an aspect of the abstract and anodyne. In Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution (first published by Beyond the Pale in 2021, with an additional Irish title, Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh), Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston seek to restore its awful power. Britain’s long and repetitive colonial project in Ireland is persuasively, I would say indisputably, presented as a cruel, psychopathic and insatiable machine made from violence, theft, “law”, starvation, enslavement and religion, or whatever other means might be thought to be necessary, to feed its appetites. Budgetary concerns stalled it sometimes, but pace was restored by further land seizures, so the Irish paid the bill for the armies that were dispossessing them.
This is never more stark than in the authors’ account of the Famine, or An Gorta Mór, of the 1840s. Potato blights were general in northern Europe at the time, to relatively minor effect, but the colonial administrator Charles Trevelyan saw in the Irish manifestation an opportunity, writing that as “God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated”. He conducted the Famine as a reasoned, intentional act of genocide and was highly successful. The population of Ireland was halved.
McVeigh and Rolston distinguish colonialism from imperialism by defining the former as the acts of appropriation and the latter as the glorifying of them as pious and civilizing. They quote the Irish cartoonist Cormac’s summary: “Irish history is divided into two parts. Part One: the agents of British rule make themselves known to the Irish; Part Two: the
