These days, the history of Ireland's relationship to empire is all the rage. There is discussion on campuses of the need to 'decolonise' the curriculum, to 'decolonise' English or History or other humanities disciplines. In older institutions, such as Trinity College Dublin, there is the felt need to acknowledge the connection of the University to the history of empire.
Much of this emphasis is, it seems to me, to be welcomed, though I also think that the capacity of modern university management cadres to appropriate, de-fang and re-purpose seemingly radical ideas - historically, there are few more radical than 'decolonisation' - in order to hegemonize, cloak and deliver downwards bureaucratic, undemocratic, and anti-intellectual 'reforms' is almost unlimited. The Irish universities, most of them developed after the mid-nineteenth century, trained students at the height of the Union and going into the age of high empire in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s. It is inconceivable that the horizons for such students and for their teachers did not extend to empire - as a sphere in which to travel, work, learn, make money fast, get involved in politics, forge a career. That Irish people experienced what Edward Said called 'the pleasures of imperialism' (writing about an Irish character's ability to move around India in the novel Kim) is in no way contradicted by the fact that a modern mass nationalism developed in Ireland at exactly the same time. Only the most crudely undialectical analysis could see an antinomy here.
And yet a certain purblind focus in Irish historiography, whether of the old nationalist or of the newer liberal 'revisionist' kind, has led the discipline to concentrate overwhelmingly on the history of the nation, of its cultural development, and on the expansion and contraction of the British state in it - expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the expansion of the economy and state apparatus in the nineteenth century, and then the great struggles to shake these connections off whether by constitutional-democratic means (Home Rule) or by force (violent uprisings in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916). But comparative focus has been much much rarer, and the new interest in empire is to that extent alone salutary.
So one must welcome Jane Ohlmayer's book, Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World, published only last autumn. One welcomes too her recent Irish Times article, on the function of Ireland as a kind of 'laboratory' for colonial and imperial projects ('How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British Empire', Irish Times, December 27, 2023). One notes with interest, also, her rather more clunky or unsubtle wish to argue that the current 'conflict' in Israel/Palestine shows the watermark of the imperial age with which she is keen now to associate Ireland. There are indeed connections and points of comparison - partition, forms of nationalism and state-building, the involvement of former Black and Tan militiamen in policing the great Palestinian revolt of 1936 - 1939. And if one looks further, there is the interest of Zionist campaigners in the history of Irish nationalism, and more recently, the sense of a shared destiny between Northern Irish nationalists and the Palestinian nation under occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. These more local or detailed elements Ohlmayer does not focus on - she is a scholar of the early modern period.
But as a literary scholar, it is impossible to read this recent historiographic fascination with empire without the most profound and wry sense of déja vu. It is natural, as well as professionally and in careerist terms inevitable, that a writer like Ohlmayer will make her work and that of her confederates seem like some extraordinary novelty in her discipline, a paradigm shift which allegedly reflects the 'new Ireland' or 'multicultural Ireland' or 'global Ireland' or (worst of all) 'a more mature Ireland'. The felt need to de-name TCD's Berkeley Library, because the Irish philosopher was a slave owner is, apparently, evidence of the spirit of the age to which Ohlmayer is answering. But the simple fact is that she and her generation are not the first Irish historians to tackle this issue, and when one looks to literary studies, her work mostly executes an extraordinary elision of the work of a major group of Irish scholars. In her own discipline, historians like David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny were focused on Ireland's relation to early modern colonisation in the Americas as long ago as the 1970s. And Nicholas Mansergh, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge in the 1960s, wrote major books on Irish constitutional history in the context of empire. Turning to literary studies, my own area, the 1980s witnessed a torrent of interest in postcolonial studies. Influenced but not entirely steered by the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, major Irish scholars such as Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Emer Nolan, Colin Graham and Luke Gibbons completely revolutionized the way that Irish literature was read. Great writers such as Spenser, Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Yeats, Synge, Joyce and even Beckett were partly wrenched away from purely Anglocentric frames of understanding. The Irish element or context was shown to be of crucial importance to such figures. The plays and pamphlets of the Field Day company, starting most importantly with Brian Friel's Translations in 1980, put the themes of empire and colonisation and their cultural, ideological, ethical, linguistic implications, and the responses to them, on the cultural map. Deane's pamphlet 'Civilians and Barbarians' and Kiberd's pamphlet 'Anglo-Irish Attitudes', published in 1983 and 1984 respectively, explicitly argued for Ireland's role as an imperial laboratory. All of this, 40 years before the current wave of apparently 'innovative' enthusiasm for empire studies. And yet, most of this work is, in the current excitement, set aside or even forgotten. Not entirely forgotten by Ohlmayer - but not treated as an inheritance to be discussed either.
And, in comparison to the eager readership and welcome now accorded to Ohlmayer's work, what was the reward of the Field Day writers and other 'postcolonial' critics? Conor Cruise O'Brien and Colm Toibin suggested that the Field Day pamphleteers were the 'literary wing of the IRA'. Edna Longley, a southern Irish liberal who made her career as a revisionist polemicist and gifted poetry critic at Queens, could only sneer at the imbrication of 'Derry and Derrida' which she, ignorantly, found in Deane's work. Faced with Said's argument that Yeats partook in his poetry in the processes of Irish decolonisation, she could only crassly and mockingly suggest that Said's Ireland had clearly 'gone floatabout' to the Caribbean, while she alluded to Deane's 'powerful sense of Palestinian dispossession' without ever bothering to think about the implications of such a comparison. As late as 2000, a purportedly left-wing British historian, Stephen Howe, could write a large and apparently scholarly tome, devoted entirely to debunking the colonial and imperial framework for understanding Irish history and culture.
The great period of Irish literary postcolonial studies is over. The theme has become, as happens to every radical intellectual movement, an orthodoxy, one among many in literary studies. But this does not mean that the self-appointed new brooms in history-writing, such as Jane Ohlmayer, should not acknowledge the work of the recent past and see how they build upon the work of pioneers who faced opprobrium of a unique kind.
Conor
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