Jane Ohlmeyer

W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Partition’ offered a resounding critique of colonialism. Written in 1966, as the British Empire finally collapsed, it immortalised how the Boundary Commission, presided over by an inept London lawyer called Cyril Radcliffe, who knew nothing of India, settled, using out-of-date maps and inaccurate census returns, ‘the fate of millions’. How, after a few hot weeks in 1947, Radcliffe’s incompetence left ‘a continent for better or worse divided’. How Radcliffe then scuttled back to England ‘afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot’.¹

Auden was educated during the early 1920s at the same Norfolk school as Erskine Childers, later president of Ireland, and became an avid admirer of the work of W. B. Yeats. Well versed in Irish politics, Auden’s ‘Mad Ireland’ had, of course, provided a model for the partition of the Indian subcontinent. In 1947, twenty-five years after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 granted dominion status for the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, a lawyer and president of the Muslim League, invoked the example of Ireland and pushed for the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. As a result, the Government of Ireland Act (of December 1920) formed the basis for the legislation that partitioned India and Pakistan. Leaders of the Indian nationalist movement – especially Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru – staunchly opposed the creation of Pakistan. The division of Bengal and Punjab along communal lines and the creation in the subcontinent of ‘many Ulsters’, as they termed it, particularly concerned Nehru, who wanted to create a secular state. In June 1948 Éamon de Valera demonstrated his solidarity with Indian nationalists when he visited Delhi in an anti-partition tour.

Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan triggered bloody communal violence, massacres, and widespread displacement across the new borders. The figure of 10 million displaced has been recently substantially revised upward to between 15 and 18 million crossing the western border and 200,000 deaths revised to between 2.3 and 3 million deaths.² Tensions with Pakistan over the control of Kashmir erupted immediately. Here Jinnah had again followed the Irish example. Articles 2 and 3 of the 1937 Irish constitution claimed sovereignty over the six counties that comprise Northern Ireland, a lead that Pakistan, which became a sovereign state in 1947, followed in maintaining a claim to Kashmir. Today, after three further wars (in 1965, 1971, and 1999), Kashmir remains contested. Prime Minister Modi’s brutal 2019 crackdown, triggered by the passage of a bill in the Indian parliament that stripped the state of its autonomy and special status, made Kashmir headline news around the world.

The first English colony

The ongoing tensions in Kashmir and, thanks to Brexit, in Northern Ireland are potent reminders of a shared imperial past that in the case of Ireland date back to the Norman conquest of the twelfth century, leading Friedrich Engels to observe in a letter (1856) to Karl Marx that ‘Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony’.³ If the Irish were victims of English (later British) imperialism, they were also active perpetrators of it and subversives within it. Empire building and resistance to it went hand in hand. From the sixteenth until the twentieth centuries, Ireland also served as a laboratory in and for empire. Tools of empire – relating to the law, policing, knowledge gathering, mapping, and partition – were fine tuned in Ireland and then deployed in other colonies. Economic, cultural, and legal policies developed in Ireland were transferred to other English colonies, often by men from Ireland or others who had served there. Thus, ideas about cultural superiority – which later fed a discourse of racism – were forged in early modern Ireland, while plantations, tried and tested in Munster and Ulster, were rolled out in English colonies in North America, the Caribbean, the Indian sub-continent, and later Africa.⁴

In Ireland itself an aggressive policy of plantation, beginning in the 1580s, consolidated control over land, as eight million acres were expropriated and redistributed to settler colonists from England, Scotland, and Wales. By the early eighteenth century nearly one third of the island’s population was of immigrant stock, descendants of 350,000, mostly Protestant, planters (as they were known) who had colonised Ireland during the seventeenth century. The colonists brought with them ideas of cultural superiority, their English language, dress, culture, and commercial ways, which parliamentary legislation privileged while outlawing the Irish language and Irish garments, especially mantles, together with agricultural, social, political, and cultural practices. Colonisation went hand in hand with the use of extreme violence by the state. It has been estimated that two-fifths of the population in Ulster died thanks to the destruction of the Nine Years War (1594–1603). Equally devastating was the conflict of the 1640s, with an estimated population loss of between 20% and 30%. Large numbers of non-combatants, especially women and children, suffered death – from war, exposure, famine, and disease – dislocation, and extreme violence.

Sectarianism, cultural stereotyping, dehumanisation, and expropriation underpinned imperialism as the crown also did everything possible to commercialise and urbanise Ireland and to transform its pastoral and barter economy into one that was market- and money-orientated and into one where profits for England might be made. With the completion of the Cromwellian military reconquest and the mid-century revolution in landholding, a new order founded on English legal, administrative, political, landed and economic structures, the English language, and English culture had been established. Aggressive economic imperialism characterised the later decades of the seventeenth century. Protestant victory in the ‘Wars of the Three Kings’, as the conflict of 1688–91 is known, completed the political subjugation of Catholic Ireland.

Events that occurred during these years profoundly shaped the identity of people living on the island. In 1688/1689 a siege occurred in the city of London/Derry, the memory and commemoration of which has been manipulated over the course of the centuries giving rise, as Ian McBride reminds us, to ‘a cycle of myths concerning the seventeenth-century struggle between Protestant and Catholic, settler and native, for supremacy in Ireland’.⁵ During the siege of Lucknow in 1857, it was invoked by Henry Lawrence, whose dying words were allegedly ‘no surrender’. The siege of Derry, like the Williamite victory at the Battle of the Boyne (1/12 July 1690) or the events surrounding the 1641 rebellion, profoundly shaped Ulster Protestant culture from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries and helped to create a ‘no surrender’ beleaguered identity.

The archive of the Folklore Commission – which from the 1930s chronicled stories from across the island – vividly illustrates how memories of what (allegedly) happened in the seventeenth century have remained alive in social memory. Consider the example of Oliver Cromwell, infamous for his blood lettings in 1649, especially at Drogheda and Wexford. In the stories recorded by the Folklore Commission, Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), Ireland’s ‘great liberator’ who fought for Catholic emancipation, is the only historical figure mentioned more than Cromwell. That these stories, which were gathered from across the island, have been transmitted down over the course of 300 hundred years, roughly nine generations, is remarkable even in a country with a strong oral tradition.

Situating Ireland in colonial narratives

Just as memories remain vivid, language confounds. The use of the word ‘colony’ in relation to Ireland has become politicised, as have discussions around Ireland’s involvement in the British Empire and the extent to which the Republic of Ireland was ‘post-colonial’ and Northern Ireland ‘colonial’. This and the onset of the ‘Troubles’ (1968–1998) helps to explain why historians had difficulty in engaging with postcolonial studies and left discussions of empire to others. Of particular importance was Field Day, which was founded in 1980 by Stephen Rea and Brian Friel as an intellectual response to the Troubles. The 1980s were bleak as bloody sectarian war gripped the North. South of the border, recession mired the economy, outward migration reached high levels, and Catholic doctrine continued to prevail. From the outset, Field Day determined not to privilege one tradition over the other, to use arts and culture to engage and energise local communities, to nurture the notion of a ‘fifth province’ – that of the mind – and to invite people to imagine inclusive possibilities.

Now lauded for having made a remarkable cultural intervention, Field Day was not without its critics. Field Day’s ‘insistence that Irish problems were inextricable from British imperialism’ complicated further matters for some at home. But this also linked Ireland to global debates around post- colonialism.⁶ Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Edward Said redefined and reframed the relationship between literature and empire and put the emphasis on the colonised rather than the coloniser. Postcolonial theories developed by Said, Homi Bhabha, and others took Irish literary criticism by storm. Their works addressed ‘historical and political conditions in Africa, India, Algeria, and the Middle East rather than in Ireland’ but, as the poet Dennis Donoghue noted, ‘these concepts travel well’ and resonated with people from Ireland.⁷ By the 1990s it was impossible to conceive, some have argued, of Irish literature (but not history) ‘outside of the history of colonialism, decolonisation, and nation-making’.⁸

Yet even today any attempt to situate Ireland in a colonial framework remains problematic. In 2013 Audrey Horning, an archaeologist, acknowledged in the preface to her book how the Troubles influenced her research. How ‘memories of the plantation are routinely invoked by partisans of both traditions’ and how the unionist community finds the word ‘colony’ ‘challenging’.⁹ In a 2015 article on ‘Comparative Colonialism’, Horning elaborated:

Understandings (and misunderstandings) of the character of the relationship between Britain and Ireland lie at the root of today’s contemporary dichotomous identities (Protestant/unionist on the one hand, Catholic/nationalist on the other). Different understandings of the actualities and legacies of the past not only inform but also are foundational to contemporary identity and contemporary conflict … Everyone in Northern Ireland is, one way or another, entangled in some form of colonial narrative. … History is not agreed upon.¹⁰

Increasingly interest is – albeit slowly – shifting from the political master-narrative to multiple narratives that embrace the social, economic, environmental, cultural, and shared histories of the peoples living on the island, along with those who left, and of Ireland’s relationships with the wider world, including, of course, Britain, our nearest neighbour. The wider emphasis on transnationalism and global history is empowering Irish scholars to engage with issues of identity, migration, and empire in a more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and comparative way and with a recognition that it is impossible to separate imperial history from national history. ‘Entangled’, ‘connected’ and ‘interconnected’ historical frameworks have also allowed for the analysis of the transfer and operation of imperialism albeit in very different contexts. The terminology may sometimes be awkward, but these fresh frameworks invite us to change the questions we ask.

Also, Ireland in the 2020s is a very different country, something that the referenda on same sex marriage (2015) and abortion (2018) highlighted. However, issues of language, identity, and the relationship between history and myth are as important as ever. The historic visit to Ireland of Queen Elizabeth II (2011) was a moment to bow to the past without being bound by it, and it ushered in, as Guy Beiner notes, a period of ‘new commemorative inclusiveness’.¹¹ During a decade of centenaries (2012–2023) a number of very significant events have been marked, including the First World War (1914–1918), the most imperial of conflicts; the 1916 Rebellion, which helped to trigger the unravelling of the British Empire and inspired freedom fighters around the globe; and the partition of Ireland (1920), which served as the template for the later partitions of India and Pakistan and of Israel and Palestine.

How we remember, how we forget

This period of commemoration, combined with the campaigns, especially in the US and UK, that foreground issues of race and ways of contesting the past are forcing a fundamental re-examination of our history, how we remember, and how we forget. For example, white supremacists in the US misleadingly suggest that Irish indentured servitude in the seventeenth-century Caribbean equated to white chattel slavery and thereby distort the true meaning and misery of black slavery. Around the world statues of individuals associated with imperialism and slavery have been targeted. Over the past 100 years most of the imperial statutes in the Republic of Ireland have been removed. Keen to dissociate themselves from an imperial past, republicans blew up, among others, the statue of William of Orange on College Green in 1929 and Nelson’s Pillar in 1966, while the statute of Queen Victoria was removed from outside the Dáil in 1948 and later gifted to Australia. Yet even though we are not always fully aware of it, the legacy of the British Empire lives on in street names, in Ireland’s built heritage (plantation towns, big houses, government buildings), in the collections in libraries and museums, in fashions, folklore, and foodstuffs and, of course, the English language.

On 25 February 2021 President Higgins gave a lecture that examined the motivations and practices of British imperialism and of resistance to it. This was part of a series of reflections – ‘Machnamh 100’ – on the years between 1920 and 1923, including the War of Independence from England, the Civil War, and partition of the island, where the president – invoking Hannah Arendt and Richard Kearney – placed emphasis on ‘ethical remembering’ and facing the past to avoid being trapped in it. President Higgins wrote in The Guardian that

as I reflect on the topic, I am struck by a disinclination in both academic and journalistic accounts to critique empire and imperialism. Openness to, and engagement in, a critique of nationalism has seemed greater. And while it has been vital to our purposes in Ireland to examine nationalism, doing the same for imperialism is equally important and has a significance far beyond British/Irish relations. Such consideration also helps explain a reluctance in former imperial powers to engage now with their imperialist past and to examine that past with descendants of those previously colonised, many of whom still live with the complex legacies of that colonialism.¹²

While much of what he says also applies to the early modern period, the president’s focus is more recent history.

In the preface to an important book on Ireland and the Caribbean, Sir Hilary Beckles noted that ‘as England’s first colonials the Irish were an experiment in racial and cultural categorisation’. He continued that ‘time heals and hurts; it conceals and reveals. Ireland is now a prime site for the re-examination of the complexity of racism and the hatred it houses.’¹³ Events that occurred in the past remain very much part of the DNA and are core to the identity of people living in Ireland today. Until recently few fully appreciated the significance of Ireland’s imperial past, but this is changing, and there is a growing awareness of the importance of informed discussion and respectful debate.

The fact that the much-celebrated Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), the Church of Ireland bishop of Cloyne, owned slaves caused considerable disquiet, and in April 2023 Trinity College Dublin, itself once an instrument of empire, de-named the Berkeley library. The revelation that John Mitchel, a revered nineteenth-century Irish patriot, supported slavery also made national headlines. As a Young Irelander, Mitchel led strong opposition to empire as well as falling victim to it when he was transported to Van Dieman’s land. On his escape he fled to America, where during the 1850s he continued to oppose empire but also became an apologist for slavery and the confederates. The eighteenth-century statesmen Edmund Burke was a vocal critic of the East India Company and compared Ireland and India on the basis that they were ‘similarly victimised’.¹⁴ On the one hand, Burke thought that empire was morally indefensible; while, on the other, he and his brother had interests in sugar and slaves in the Caribbean and as MP for Bristol (1774–1780) Burke looked after the interests of the slave-trading merchant community.

More controversial still was the role men from Ireland played at the Amritsar Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab. On 13 April 1919 up to 1,500 Indian men, women, and children were butchered at what is now known as the Amritsar Massacre. When this was aired across Irish radio as part of the 2019 commemoration of the massacre, people struggled to comprehend the bloody role played by the commanding officer that day, Colonel Reginald Dyer, educated in Middleton in County Cork, and his superior, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, a Catholic from County Tipperary who, as recent research has shown, considered himself to be an Irish nationalist. Stories like this challenged and complicated the master narrative of the Irish as victims of empire, not active perpetrators of it.

The continued presence of the past

Clearly these discussions can be politically charged at the best of times, but social media has exacerbated matters by giving voice to small and anonymous groups of racist extremists and facilitating their venomous attacks. Despite this, Priya Satia has suggested, in Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, that the UK’s ‘culture wars’ and campaigns connected to ‘Black Lives Matter’ will ‘change popular views of colonialism’ and, as part of other programmes focused on reparations, repatriation, and restitution, will help to decolonise institutions.¹⁵ They have certainly found their mark in Ireland where there appears to be a real appetite for understanding the complexities of empire. As part of a wider attempt to confront racism in Ireland, there have been discussions about how to diversify Irish history and to engage with colonial afterlives in our universities and cultural institutions.¹⁶ Yet the spectre of empire looms large. The harrowing conflicts in the Middle East and the Ukraine are legacies of empire, just as the Troubles in Northern Ireland was. Some cherish connections with the British Empire, which they date back to the Ulster plantation, and deny that Ireland was ever a colony at all. In other quarters discussions of Irish engagement in empire, especially the British one, quickly becomes toxic. Many in Ireland have, however, either conveniently forgotten our imperial past or are simply oblivious to it. Ignorance of Ireland’s engagement with empire has enabled extreme nationalists to manipulate the past. The same holds true for the UK, US, and, increasingly, other European countries where memory of empire is fiercely contested. Yet events of the early twenty-first century – Brexit, ‘the culture wars’, the campaigns around ‘Black Lives Matter’, and ‘Statues must fall’ – along with calls for reparations and the restitution and repatriation of plundered artefacts – have kindled a greater awareness of the importance of revisiting the history of empires. Like it or not, the past is no longer in the past; it is in the present.

Jane Ohlmeyer is the Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her most recent publication is Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, & The Early Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)

Notes

1. W. H. Auden, ‘Partition’, Poeticous (website), www.poeticous.com/w-h-auden/partition
2. Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: SAGE, 2000); Jennifer Leaning and Shubhangi Bhadada, The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations (New Delhi: SAGE, 2022).
3. Quoted in Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter and Jonathan Williams, eds, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), II, pp. 118–9.
4. Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023).
5. Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), p. 1.
6. Ronan McDonald, ‘Irish Studies and Its Discontents’, in Irish Literature in Transition 1980– 2020, ed by Eric Falci and Paige Reynolds (Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 335.
7. Quoted in Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork University Press, 2001), p. 11.
8. Falci and Reynolds, Irish Literature in Transition, p. 15.
9. Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pp. vii, viii.
10. Audrey Horning, ‘Comparative Colonialism: Scales of Analysis and Contemporary Resonances’, in Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, ed by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes (University Press of Florida, 2015), pp. 234– 246, p. 239.
11. Guy Beiner, ‘A Short History of Irish Memory in the Long Twentieth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, ed by Tom Bartlett (Cambridge University Press, 2018), vol. 4 p. 722.
12. Michael D. Higgins, ‘Empire shaped Ireland’s past. A century after partition, it still shapes our present’, The Guardian, 11 February 2021. For the lectures see, www.rte.ie/player/series/ machnamh-100/SI0000008075?epguid=PL000006154. Also see the op. eds in The Irish Times by Jane Ohlmeyer (19 December 2020) and Seamus Nevin (7 February 2021).
13. Sir Hilary Beckles, ‘Irishness Is Back from West Britain to West Indies’, in Finola O’Kane and Ciaran O’Neill, eds, Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 2023), pp. xvi–xix, pp. xvii, xviii.
14. Julia Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.
15. Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (London: Penguin, 2020), p. 274.
16. See for example Shahmima Akhtar, Dónal Hassett, Kevin Kenny, Laura McAtackney, Ian McBride, Timothy McMahon, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, and Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Decolonising Irish History? Possibilities, Challenges, Practices’, Irish Historical Studies, 45 (2021), pp. 1–30.