Ireland in the World

Comparative, Transnational, and Personal Perspectives

Angela McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317607847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This international edited book collection of ten original contributions from established and emerging scholars explores aspects of Ireland's place in the world since the 1780s. It imaginatively blends comparative, transnational, and personal perspectives to examine migration in a range of diverse geographical locations including Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Jamaica, and the British Empire more broadly. Deploying diverse sources including letters, interviews, press reports, convict records, and social media, contributors canvas important themes such as slavery, convicts, policing, landlordism, print culture, loyalism, nationalism, sectarianism, politics, and electronic media. A range of perspectives including Catholic and Protestant, men and women, convicts and settlers are included, and the volume is accompanied by a range of striking images.

1 Ireland, Jamaica, and the Fate of White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s

Trevor Burnard

At the conclusion of the American Revolution, the white Protestant residents of Jamaica in the West Indies and Ireland in the British archipelago faced a different imperial prospect than that which they had anticipated in the 1760s and 1770s. In those halcyon days for ‘dominant minorities’¹ in the British Empire, white Protestants were part of an expanding settler population of white colonials. Most of these white Protestant colonials lived in the thirteen colonies of British America that were to break away from Britain in the American Revolution that started in 1776. Before that breakaway, however, white Protestants in the British Empire looked as if they might match in numbers and importance the large and growing population of white people in England, Wales, and Scotland.

Benjamin Franklin predicted in 1760 that in a few generations white settlers in British North America would eventually outnumber the number of people in the metropolis, to the mutual benefit, he thought, of both areas, adding to the great glory of a glorious empire. He crowed in Observations on the Increase of Mankind that rapid population increase in North America will mean that there ‘will in another Century be more than the People of England, the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side of the Water. What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen!’ These new Britons would be firm defenders of empire, as ‘there is not a single native of our country who is not firmly attached to our King by principle and affection’. Britain had to do nothing to maintain that affection. There was no danger, he thought, of America ‘uniting against their own nation, which protects and encourages them, with which they have so many connections and ties of blood, interest and affection and which ‘tis well known they all love more than they love one another’. Indeed, Franklin continued: ‘I will venture to say, an union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible’.²

The American Revolution put paid to Franklin’s dream. In the mid-1780s, the white population of empire had declined dramatically from what it had been in the mid-1770s. The loss of 3 million white North Americans from the imperial population ledger meant an irreplaceable diminution of settler numbers. By the mid-1780s, white Protestants were a minority population in their own lands—the Anglo-Irish made up about the same proportion (10 per cent) of the Irish population that whites accounted for in the British West Indian population. In addition, white Protestants in colonial settings were now a minority of the population of the empire as a whole. That empire was now clearly a black and brown empire rather than a white empire. Indeed, the British Empire was probably less white in the mid-1780s than at any other time in imperial history. The last quarter of the eighteenth century signalled a brief period, before the mass emigration of Britons to the white dominions following Waterloo in 1815, in which the empire had few white settlers, especially white Protestant settlers.³ White colonists were a minority of the population of the empire as a whole, an empire in which inhabitants in Britain’s colonies were coloured rather than white, enslaved, or otherwise coerced, rather than free, subjects more than citizens, and much more likely to live in India than in America, the West Indies, or Ireland.⁴

British politicians tried to reassure these minority populations (the attention in this chapter is on Protestant Irishmen and white Jamaicans) that they were still foremost in their attentions, even as they started to think of the empire in more authoritarian terms than previously. In 1785, for example, William Pitt told the House of Commons that Great Britain and Ireland were ‘now the only considerable members … in what yet remained of our reduced and shattered empire’. He implored that ‘[t]here ought to be no object more impressive on the feelings of the House’ than how to maintain the Anglo-Irish connection.⁵ The message to Jamaicans was not quite as positive and was a little different, as might be expected from a politician who was soon to become the most prominent supporter of a burgeoning abolitionist movement. Jamaicans were not conceived of as kin in the same way as Protestant Irish people were often conceived. Indeed, the feelings of kinship between white West Indians and metropolitan Britons noticeably declined during the course of the American Revolution. As Stephen Conway has argued, Americans were perceived in the metropolitan imagination not so much as fellow countrymen as foreigners, and, after the entry of France into the American Revolution in 1780, as traitorous foreigners at that. White West Indians, to their horror and amazement, were caught in the wake of such a tidal wave of change in public opinion. Their decline in public reputation was compounded both by the rise of the abolitionist movement from 1785 and by the fact that many of the most prominent American opponents of the British—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, just to name four—were planters whose behaviour and character could easily be compared to West Indians.⁶

The Importance of Jamaica

The message that Jamaicans received related to their continual geopolitical importance, rather than to their character or to their frequent claims of Englishness. Jamaica, it was argued, was the indispensable island, the colonial possession that Britain was determined to hold onto, by hell or high water, and at almost any cost.⁷ Indeed, by diverting its navy in September 1781 from outside Yorktown to confront an imminent invasion of Jamaica that they thought would happen in the first few months of 1782, the British, as Andrew O’Shaughnessy has argued, gave the Americans the chance to pull off a decisive victory that secured American independence.⁸ By 1782, even George III was willing to let the troublesome 13 colonies have their independence.⁹ But neither the King, nor anyone else was prepared to have the same fate occur for Jamaica. When Admiral George Rodney won the Battle of the Saints in April 1782, outside Dominica, thus preserving Jamaica from invasion, the British public was beside itself, delirious with joy.¹⁰ The high military importance of Jamaica continued after peace with America had been declared. Troops continued to be sent to Jamaica during the 1780s, including a new unit led by Lord Charles Montagu, ex-governor of South Carolina and the brother of the government minister, the Duke of Manchester.¹¹

This chapter compares two colonies—Ireland and Jamaica—that were placed in a different situation than they expected as a result of the tumultuous changes initiated by a war in which they were anxious observers rather than active participants. White Protestants in Ireland and white planters and merchants in Jamaica were both relatively satisfied in the early 1770s with their position within the British Empire and found it difficult to understand the motivations that led Americans to foment revolution in 1776.¹² The focus in this chapter is on the 1780s, a decade that is often overlooked between the tumults of the 1770s, as the 13 colonies slid into rebellion, and the conflagrations of the 1790s, in which the world was turned upside down by the global ramifications of the French Revolution. In this latter decade, both Jamaica and Ireland were swept up in the maelstrom of the French Revolution, even more than had been the case in the years of the American Revolution. In the case of Ireland, the tumults started by the French Revolution led to the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the incorporation in 1801 of Ireland into a new national entity, the United Kingdom. That becoming a formal part of Britain was never an option for Jamaica points to one significant difference between the two colonies. In the case of Jamaica, the 1790s were not as dramatic in their consequences as the 1790s were in Ireland. Nevertheless, the island faced massive pressure from two interrelated outside forces: the Saint Domingue revolt of 1791–1804 and the gathering strength of Britain’s first and most humanitarian reform movement, the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.¹³

The Value of Comparison

Despite the differences between the two colonies, there is good reason why a comparison of each place in the 1780s makes sense. As the introduction to this chapter suggests, they both shared a common experience in the 1780s. They were places full of people loyal to the British Empire who found themselves living in a quite different imperial polity than what they had envisaged living in a decade earlier. It is useful to look at these conspicuously loyal (at least loyal as measured by attitudes among colonial governing elites) colonies as loyalist enclaves after what Maya Jasanoff calls the ‘1783 moment’. By the ‘1783 moment’, she is referring to the year in which a different kind of British Empire emerged out of the rubble of British defeat in British North America. Jasanoff’s argument is intriguing but not wholly convincing and is somewhat overstated. Not everything changed after 1783, despite her claims to the contrary. Nevertheless, what is correct about her contentions is that Britain had to decide important matters about those remaining colonies in which there were substantial proportions of white Protestants. It had to decide whether it would learn the sort of lesson that rebellious Americans had intended them to learn through their actions taken after 1776. Essentially, the lesson that American revolutionaries had wanted Britain to learn was that colonials who were loyal to Britain and who had legitimate claims to being thought of as equal to metropolitan Britons should have a considerable degree of local autonomy, especially over areas of local expertise. These areas of expertise included the right to control Catholics in Ireland and the right to determine policy towards slaves in Jamaica.¹⁴

What became clear, however, was that after 1783 rewards given to individuals and societies for staying loyal during the American Revolution were slight. Ireland did better in the 1780s in getting concessions from the imperial state than did Jamaica. Nevertheless, their relative success came about less because metropolitan Britons recognised and accepted their constitutional pretensions than because Ireland was both able to exert greater political pressure on the metropolis than was the case anywhere else in the empire and also because the Protestant Irish, especially Anglicans in Dublin, were seen as more unequivocally white than were white Jamaicans, whose claims to being British were increasingly disputed.¹⁵

What needs to be stressed in this comparison is that the experience of whites in Jamaica during the 1780s had poignant relevance for episodes later than the 1780s in Irish history. White West Indians were the first group of loyalist white colonials to experience what Richard Bourke, drawing on the work of J.G.A. Pocock in the mid-1970s, has acutely described as the ‘Ulsterisation’ of small groups of colonials whose values came to be seen as aberrant to metropolitan opinion and who were abandoned by the people they most looked up to as cultural models.¹⁶ By Ulsterisation, Bourke means the treatment of a loyal population of people of British descent as if they were illegitimate or unreal Britons, people whose claims to Britishness could, for a variety of reasons, be denied or downgraded from the importance given to it by those who proclaimed Britishness as a cardinal virtue. This process of Ulsterisation, or, to use an ugly neologism ‘Un-Britishing’, occurred, Bourke contends, again and again in the history of the British Empire. It happened with increasing frequency and ferocity in the twentieth century as Britain tried to shed itself of empire and its imperial trappings. We can trace Ulsterisation in the treatment of Anglo-Indians in India and Pakistan after partition in 1947, in the demonisation of South Africans and Rhodesians in the 1960s and, of course, to the residents of Ulster in the time of troubles in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁷

Ulsterisation in Jamaica

The earliest example of Bourke’s ‘Ulsterisation’ process happened in Jamaica, most prominently in the 1780s. Before this decade, white West Indians were generally viewed positively in Britain as people who brought wealth to Britain and who were generally ornaments of empire.¹⁸ The image of the West Indian before the American Revolution was not entirely positive. They were sometimes resented as nouveau riche parvenus with dubious genealogical inheritances who had too much money and too much influence (mostly thought of as malign) within English politics. In short, they were thought of like American soldiers in Britain during the Second World War—overpaid, oversexed, and over here. But if West Indians were resented, they were also respected, as people who made a vital contribution to the British Empire through their islands’ massive and growing production of luxury tropical goods such as sugar, rum, indigo, cotton, and mahogany. They tended to get their way in imperial disputes and their massive constitutional pretensions to be a largely self-governing country of free and independent British subjects was generally accepted as correct.¹⁹

During the 1780s, however, despite their conspicuous loyalty to the British Crown during the tumults of the American Revolution, the image of the West Indian planter went through a sea change. West Indians came to be seen in metropolitan opinion as profoundly disturbing people who were fundamentally non-British. There was a variety of reasons for the sudden denigration of white West Indians in the 1780s, but the main reason why they lost so spectacularly in the public relations battle for representation in the 1780s was because their cultural style came to be increasingly depreciated. Cast against their self-image as proud, loyal, productive son...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ireland in the World: Comparative, Transnational, and Personal Perspectives
• 1 Ireland, Jamaica, and the Fate of White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s
• 2 From Cronelea to Emu Bay to Timaru and Back: Uncovering the Convict Story
• 3 Policing Ireland, Policing Colonies: The Irish Constabulary ‘Model’
• 4 ‘From beyond the Sea’: The Irish Catholic Press in the Southern Hemisphere
• 5 ‘In Harmony’: A Comparative View of Female Orangeism, 1887–2000
• 6 An Irish Landlord and His Daughter: A Story of War and Survival in America and Ireland
• 7 Coming from over the Waves: The Emergence of Collaborative Action in Ireland and Wales
• 8 Ireland and Scotland: From Partition to Peace Process
• 9 Emigration in the Age of Electronic Media: Personal Perspectives of Irish Migrants to Australia, 1969–2013
• Contributors
• Index