‘Irish historical geographies: Colonial contexts and postcolonial legacies,’ Historical Geography 41 (2013) 22-34 (original) (raw)

A n independent Irish state will soon attain its centenary and its birth pangs of rebellion, war, and civil strife are being commemorated as a decade of anniversaries. 1 Themes of memory and commemoration have been a particular interest of cultural and historical geographers working on Ireland. 2 Brian Graham and his colleagues, for example, have produced a rich set of studies on the multiple and contested politics of memory, particularly in Northern Ireland. 3 Given such geographical scholarship on the contestability of memory and history in Ireland, we can anticipate that geographers will engage as public intellectuals during this current period of taking our bearings from our past. At such times of reflection upon identity and legacy, there will always be a tension between exceptionalism and generalization. Each vibrates with political resonance, each risks false explanation, and yet each is necessary for critical and effective historical geographies. 4 In introducing this set of historical-geographical essays on Ireland, let me begin at the comparative pole. The Irish Free State of 1921 was haunted by plantation and famine, the two defining moments of its colonial history. The separation of six counties, as the Province of Northern Ireland, from the remaining twenty-six, the Irish Free State, was a legacy of the last and most systematic of the plantations, that of Ulster. With eighteen thousand men, the English army sent to re-conquer Ulster from the Irish was the largest deployed anywhere in the world at that time (larger even than the Spanish army sent to take colonies in South America). 6 As commander of the English forces (1600-1603), Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, determined upon a scorched-earth policy reducing much of the province to starvation, which together with disease and battle, may have killed eighty thousand Irish, halving the population of Ulster. Into this vacated space was poured a new people, one that from the 1603 union of the English and Scots crowns under James I/VI of England/Scotland, was increasingly described as British, such that "the colonization of Ulster" became "the first cooperative British enterprise of James's newly proclaimed Kingdom of Great Britain." 7 With people from Wales, England, and, in particular, Presbyterian Scotland, a distinctive society was made within the half-emptied nest of Gaelic Ireland. From plantation came a religious division integral to the control of Ireland, a divide-and-rule policy that became typical of British colonial rule elsewhere and that encouraged partition as its postcolonial legacy. The Great Famine of 1845-52 was the last in a traumatic series but it was managed by the British in a novel fashion, both modern and cruel. The blight upon the potatoes in Ireland deprived the majority of the population of their daily food. Only exceptional measures could have kept them alive, and at times these were tried. In July of 1847 perhaps three million people were being fed at public or charitable expense, about one-third of the population of the island. 9 Thereafter, policies became more savage. The Irish were not to be encouraged in idleness with Historical Geography Volume 41 (2013): 22-34.