Retrieving eighteenth-century Ireland

The Rev. Thomas Campbell, a clergyman from Ireland’s northern province of Ulster who toured the southern part of the country in the mid-1770s, provided a durable metaphor for his observations in A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (1777):

my picture of Ireland should be mulier formosa superne—a woman exquisitely beautiful, with her head and neck richly attired, her bosom full, but meanly dressed, her lower parts lean and emaciated, half covered with tattered weeds, her legs and feet bare, with burned shins, and all the squalor of indigent sloth.

(p. 138)

Campbell’s image embodies, of course, Ireland’s stark social and physical contrasts in his time. Its natural beauties were complemented by the graceful seats of an Anglo-Irish gentry, their elegant Dublin residences fancifully ornamented by Italian plasterers, yet throngs of disheartened, pathetic wretches were never, in country or city, outside the viewer’s frame. Indeed, Campbell’s phrase “all the squalor of indigent sloth” echoes concisely the images of A Modest Proposal nearly half a century after Swift’s satire appeared, but the split Swift implied between Ireland’s hegemonic and helot classes is overt in Campbell’s sharp sartorial transition. In fact this division was less abrupt than Campbell’s imagistic shift—for there was an Irish middle class—but it was nonetheless broadly apparent, a polarity enforced by Britain’s colonial project in Ireland. That polarity between Protestant colonizers of British stock and colonized native Irish Catholics, frequently noticed in the eighteenth century, continued well into the nineteenth; many would assert its persistence in Northern Ireland even at present. It has been analyzed often since the eighteenth century, but most commonly in terms of political or religious allegiance. Whether simplistic or sophisticated, such analysis reflected the ultimately exogenous perspective of English royal or national ambition and security, which were threatened by the demographic strength of the colonized, Catholic Irish. And though characterizations of that threat, salient in the pathos of Campbell’s image, were in turn underpinned by politico-military facts or inflated by rhetorical fervor on either side, its historiographical interpretation—and thus the manner in which the British colonial project in Ireland was itself understood—was implicated for many years in the long-standing scholarly tendency toward analysis of “high politics.”

This tendency has lately been challenged internationally by the scholarly shift toward postcolonial theories that reflect and indeed privilege the perspective of the colonized, a “subaltern” category that can expand to include not only the native masses but even the local hegemonic class, dependent for its status upon the ultimately governing “mother country,” whose imperatives frequently disadvantaged its local interests. Such inclusiveness in the subaltern has complicated Irish historiography; the “high politics” tendency took allegiance and national identity as essentially synonymous, while the subaltern perspective emboldens stress upon their distinctness. Thus while for much of the eighteenth century in Ireland Protestants were loyal to the Hanoverians and Catholics were seen as Jacobites, it is now at least as important to notice that identities as “Irish” advanced markedly among Protestants...