Ireland and the British Empire

Ireland and the British Empire. Edited by KEVIN KENNY (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004; pp. xxiv + 296. £30). THIS is the third in a ‘companion series’ to the Oxford History of the British Empire, the declared purpose of which is to ‘pursue themes that could not be covered adequately in the main series while incorporating recent research and providing fresh interpretations of significant topics’. While gender and ‘black experience’ may merit separate treatment on all three grounds, the selection of Ireland suggests another act of positive discrimination towards the once despised third kingdom. Ireland, unlike Scotland, Wales, or any region of England, was (belatedly) given separate treatment in all five volumes of the main series. No fewer than three of the five contributors have been granted a second airing here, in one case with minimal revision. The justification for this exercise in reappraisal, if not navel-gazing, therefore rests on the value of recent research and the utility of the ‘fresh interpretations’ on offer. The editor, Kevin Kenny, is known for his judicious critique of previous interpretations in The American Irish: A History (2000). Here he supplies an uncompromising introduction ridiculing the lazy use of adjectives such as ‘ambiguous, anomalous, complex, exceptional, unique, or even paradoxical’ by most previous analysts. ‘Assertions that Ireland's place in the Empire was unique or anomalous merely reiterate the shopworn theme of exceptionalism. Such claims are no more or less true of Ireland than of any other part of the Empire. Each of Britain's many possessions was distinctive; none was anomalous’ (p. 3). In his justified rejection of any colonial stereotype against which to measure Ireland, Kenny misses the point, most applicable to the nineteenth century, that Ireland was not just a quasi-colony and a supplier of colonists but also a semi-integral part of the ‘metropolis’. That complication alone validates the ‘exceptionalism’ of Ireland (along, arguably, with Scotland). It is noteworthy that every contributing historian deploys one or more of the terms deplored by the editor. Jane Ohlmeyer observes that ‘no neat imperial or civilizing model can be easily applied to early modern Ireland’, the story being ‘complex, full of contradictions, and in several respects unique’ (pp. 29, 58); Thomas Bartlett promises to resolve the ‘ambiguities’ and ‘contradictions’ inherent in the words used to describe ‘Ireland's position’ in the eighteenth-century Empire, which was ‘problematic’ and endemically ‘indistinct and contested’ (pp. 62, 61, 79); Deirdre McMahon points out ‘the anomalies of Ireland's domestic and imperial position’ as exposed in the debates over Home Rule (p. 182); Alvin Jackson observes that ‘Ireland under the Union epitomized its [the Empire's] elusiveness, its contradictions, and its paradoxes’ (p. 123). Ireland's experience of empire, it seems, was unexceptional only in its exceptionality. Both Stephen Howe, in a pithy historiographical critique elaborated more pugnaciously in his Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (2002), and Joe Cleary on the concept of ‘Postcolonial Ireland’, dismiss all attempts to apply homogeneous ‘colonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ models to Ireland, while suggesting tentatively that carefully qualified international comparisons may supply fresh perspectives to an inward-looking debate. Yet, in the absence of any paradigm of colonial or postcolonial experience, the available theories have little to offer but a tendentious terminology coyly hinting at undemonstrable mental affinities with Indians or Palestinians.