Canny - Kingdom and Colony



One of the most curious phenomena to occur in 16th century English/Irish relations was that English settlers from long lines of English settlers in Ireland-known as "Old English," seemed to turn on their mother country in defense of Ireland. We might see this in many lights, including one that might conclude that their families became interested, through long-term settlement, in the Irish "cause." Basically, we might tend to attribute more humanitarianism to their motives than Canny says was truly the case.

In fact, it was more complicated than that. Greed played a role, but so did practicality. Evidence shows that even the Old English were pro-colonization in Ireland. In fact, Canny argues, "Old English objections to the exploitation of Gaelic Irish weakness were based not so much on newly discovered respect for Gaelic society as on the realization that the fulfillment of… forceful [English] policies would greatly increase the number of English-born people in Ireland and would consequently weaken the Old English claim to be the sole upholders of English civil standards in Ireland" (3-4). Basically, they didn't want to lose the social position (and importance that came with it) that serving as sudo-mediators between Gaelic societies and colonization efforts brought them. There was a lot of racism, prejudice, and misunderstanding that was at work here, also. Gaelic peoples to the Old English were lesser people than the English, to be sure. Even a priest said they were a people "who 'for lack of better teaching could never be better'" (5). Canny is not alone in this seemingly negative view of motives. Other historians also point to a kind of greed, both for land and power, even when they use the fact to prove different points.

The Gaelic leaders, on the other side of the coin (there are three players now, English, Old English, and Gaelic Irish), saw colonization as conquest, particularly when it came to policies that essentially planned replacement of Gaelic peoples in certain areas with Englishmen. It is notable both that Gaelic poets reveal an acute awareness of the English position, both local and remote, and that English adventurers paralleled what was happening in Ireland with the literal displacement of Native Americans on the other side of the pond.

There is another part to this and that's the role of the English Reformation in Irish colonization, which overlap. Henry broke with Rome in 1536, the date attributed to the beginning of serious Irish colonization efforts, called "plantation." In 16th and early 17th century English conquest of Ireland was indeed marked by large scale "Plantations", notably in Ulster and Munster. These were both mass dispossessions of Irish landowners who had rebelled against the crown, and sometimes their workers, and the granting of their land to colonists from England and Scotland (38-9). They were also two of very few urban centers that England managed to create as a planned (and failed) method of civilizing the Irish. Irish plantation was similar in theory to U.S. and Caribbean plantation, but different in practice (little to black slavery, although Irish Gaelic were actually rounded up and sent to the Caribbean as slaves under the Cromwellian conquest period between 1649-53, so the potential for Gaelic slaves in their home country might be higher than we know). Not only did colonies threaten to push Gaelics out of their lands and Old English out of their established power structures, but with the startup of the English Reformation, all Irish residents were faced with the potential loss of power and position if they did not convert to Protestantism.

Thus, it seems that there were two major causes of the subsequent conflicts between the two islands: first, there was the diminishing sense of importance among Old English, which I've just described. Old English were "keen to have the country [Ireland] considered as a kingdom [an administrative unit] rather than as a colony" (4). At the same time, there was clear conflict over the religious conversion issue. A third possibility that Canny mentions briefly from a secondary source is that Irish administration functioned too poorly, leading to a general failure of Irish colonization.

None of that, however, is Canny's direct interest. This merely sets the stage for his argument, where he intends to prove that Englishmen (and to some extent Old English) viewed Ireland not as a kingdom to be administered, but as a colonial conquest to be colonized, just like the Americas, Caribbean, and Indian territories. One of the problems he seems to focus on is that people tend to see Ireland as an administrative unit because sixteenth century attempts at colonization involved privatized efforts, where those who could foot such a large bill were granted offices and administrative functions. Just because there were administrators in Ireland, doesn't mean that it was part of the kingdom, another shire to be managed.

This may seem confusing, and it should be, as Canny struggles to readily define exactly what he means. Curtin's World and the West sheds some light on the complexity of "colonialism" that help make Canny's point clearer. Curtin breaks down colonialism into three distinct types: frontierism (like how the in America people started on one side and spread out over time to the other side), territorial empire (few English settlers, mostly administrative and military, just enough to maintain control, as with their Indian territories), and plural society (few English settlers, "living alongside other cultural communities of native inhabitants) (1). Ireland, Canny would argue, was a plural society in the sixteenth century (with some English immigrants who claimed to administer the colony) and only did it start to become a territorial empire in the seventeenth century through the program of plantation.

Colonialism is then tied to the Reform effort in a way I had not thought about before, specifically that colonization was the "preferred strategy for reform" (12-13). Not limited only to religious reform, but also social reform of indigenous populations. Where we might see a justification for the takeover of Irish lands, Canny sees a genuine concern by colonial proponents to bring progress, knowledge, and proper religion to peoples less fortunate than themselves, and a genuine interest in Irish affairs in general. The scholarly trend is far against Canny here, but it is certainly something to think about, this concept of reform through assimilation that sounds like the Borg cybersociety of Star Trek, "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

"Serving English officials… had come to regard the country as a place to be colonized rather than a commonwealth to be governed… colonists rather than administrators" sums up English views of Ireland (26, 28). It was the English who first singled out Old English as Irish patriots, either misunderstanding Old English concerns over the threat of English takeover and loss of social status, or recognizing those concerns and wishing to correct it. English motives are unclear in this book, but at least we know where the first idea outlined herein, that Old English resisted the crown "for Ireland," originates.

Structurally, the book suffers from thought garbling on occasion, and a few severe grammatical errors at critical points, (e.g., 29).

In chapter two, Canny attempts to explain the extreme measures English officials thought necessary to remedy the "endemic instability that had characterized" Ireland's "political history throughout the sixteenth century." He also is interested in showing how these methods compare in theory and practice to those proposed "for the reform of the native inhabitants of British North America." The comparison must be similar, as he intends to use it to show the extent of the "colonial status that had been decreed for Ireland at the outset of the seventeenth century" (31).

One of the biggest qualms England had against Ireland was that of religion. It was both a complaint and a tool of justification that English officials used to force the "civilization" of Ireland into English forms of the term. Old English leaders had a habit of using Gaelic traditions to exert English control there because with much experience they had found that using Irish culture to their advantage worked far better than attempted force. However, this made many English officials view them as having adopted barbaric civilities, as having "become Irish." Topped with their refusal to become Protestant and the growing support for Counter-Reform in the seventeenth century and Old English were not only barbaric, but pagan (not unlike their Gaelic counterparts) (31-33).

The stark contrast to the Native Americans began with heritage. Native Americans were in no way similar to the English as they saw it, while they did recognize that many Irish descended from Anglo-Normans. Using the idea that Old English (and original Anglo-Norman settlers whom they shared ancestry with) had degenerated into barbaric Irish, it was believed that the only way to assimilate the Irish (and I do mean that in the same sense as the Borg in Star Trek) was to overthrow all existing power structures and replace them with fresh English blood that could then go about forcing everyone to comply. The goal of the British policy towards the Irish was to make them "'in tongue and heart and every way else become English so as there will be no difference or distinction but the Irish sea between us'" (38). To the British, the plural society (which before reading Curtin, I had originally described as a different kind of convivencia than that of medieval Spain; Canny calls them "webs of interdependencies," 53) that Old English and Irish and Gaelic peoples had formed (and which lasted through 1641 despite colonization efforts) was appalling at best and at worst an illness that needed to be healed. Opponents of too much assimilation on each side tended to remind and warn their followers not to get too close to each other and of course there was a healthy dose of prejudice and conflict involved. England expected the Irish to become as British as they could be, but at the same time, they feared that these "barbarians" would take the knowledge and common sense they had learned from the British to turn against them; it was this hesitation, among other things, that held England back from successfully administering an Ireland they did not view as an administrative unit.

In the winter months of 1641-42, the plural society / territorial empire system broke down. Catholics began acting hostily towards their Protestant neighbors. Infrequently physical, chapels were attacked and bibles were destroyed, etc. Incidentally, The Stripping of the Altars argues that this had been the policy in England for forcing conversion to Protestantism, so one cannot help but wonder if Irish Catholics were retaliating in the same way with English Protestant policy in mind. In any event, the explanation for the attacks is given as "economic tensions that had developed between the two communities before 1641" (61). Catholics justified it within the context of loyalty to the Crown, as well as on religious terms.

There are a lot of elements at play in the uprising, but to summarize briefly, assimilation policies had worked so well in Ireland over the previous half century that when the revolt of 1641 happened, on several levels it was really a revolt among English subjects, Irish-English versus Native English, using English methods & propaganda. Still, it was nowhere near the level of assimilation that the British had intended when they were muttering ideas about "little Bohemia." For the Irish, evidence shows that it was the religious differences and Counter Reform support they received that kept them from becoming truly English, combined with England's hesitance, Catholic preachers complained, to put its foot down on the religious question that prolonged the Irish culture and caused the resistance.

If we think about this in other terms, it was a very Machiavellian policy that English officials were proposing: wipe out the old customs and give them new ones to fill the void, one of the central tenets that Machiavelli advises all princes to undertake immediately after gaining power/dominance. From a Machiavellian perspective, then, England's dealings with Ireland constituted a case of to little and too strict, too late.

Chapter three is interested in discussing the migratory patterns of English to colonize and add to the Irish populace. His purpose is to shed light on how this migration typified the colonies of Ireland and thus impacted their foundation, to add to the scholarship that does this for North America and other colonies. He also wants to contextualize how migrations to Ireland impacted migrations to other colonized territories, which plays into his thesis. He complains that no one has tried to typify colonies by migration in Ireland, which makes sense when few scholars think of Ireland in such terms. Canny finds that migration to Ireland did not compete with migration to North America, that they in fact "complemented rather than competed with each other" (99).

The fourth chapter is structured a little differently than the others, less an inclusive essay with its own argument than a detailing of what happened post 1641, which up until this point has been the stopping point for Canny's observations. The purpose of the chapter is to bring all the colonization efforts and conflicts together in the context of the events of the eighteenth century to show how, thanks to its colonial roots, Ireland became a kingdom from a colony. It's more narrative than argumentative and so I have little to say here on it, except that it's worth reading.

The final chapter is actually a conclusion that brings in historiography to make his final points and summarize the book. He summarizes the overarching themes of the book clearly in the first paragraph: I think the largest issue I take with the book, despite compelling evidence, is this: "we can see that the subjects of our investigation were colonists according to our modern definition of that term" (140). Canny's choice to look at Ireland through the modern lens strolls far from the usual path of the historian, who looks at history within the context of the people who lived it.
 * the means by which British settlers in Ireland justified their involvement in that country's affairs
 * how they and their descendants fared economically, socially, and demographically, and
 * how spokesmen of this settler population came to so identify themselves with their place of settlement that they began to see themselves as Irishmen and upholders of that country's constitutional status as a kingdom against the pretensions of the English parliament and administration.