Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (review)

This book is an important contribution to the tendency in recent years to try to integrate Burke’s early aesthetic works, above all his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, into the great body of his political writings. Luke Gibbons succinctly sets out his argument at the beginning of the book. “The concept of the sublime which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of fear and terror, and it is this spectre that haunted Burke’s political imagination throughout his career”(xi). His sense of the sublime made Burke extremely sensitive to accounts of violence and repression in Ireland, France, America and India. Gibbons focuses above all on Ireland, building on the work of L. M. Cullen and others, he shows that in the 1760s Burke was revolted by the rough justice, including the hanging of “miserable wretches”, being meted out in reprisals against the largely Catholic agrarian disorders of the ‘Whiteboys’. “I assure you that I look upon these things with horror”, he wrote (22–3). The horror that he expressed then prefigured the horror that was to consume him when he described the mode of warfare of Britain’s native American allies in the War of American Independence, the treatment of the French royal family and, above all, what he saw as the devastation of much of India by the East India Company.

Horror aroused sympathy. Burke’s sympathy for the sufferings of Irish Catholics grew out of his upbringing with his mother’s Catholic family, the Nagles of county Cork. Although much of his account is highly conjectural, Conor Cruise O’ Brien’s overall verdict that the young Burke had shared something of “the experience of the Irish, Gaelic-speaking Catholic people” and was “somewhat affected by Irish Catholic interpretations of history and aspirations for the future” can hardly be doubted (The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992, 23). Gibbons argues cogently that sympathetic identification with one culture, conventionally seen as outside the mainstream of progress in the Enlightenment scheme of things, gave Burke a highly developed capacity to identify with others. Burke, in his view, certainly had a doctrine of universal human rights, although it was not the conventional one of the rights of the individual that in theory were based on abstract reason but were in reality rooted in European concepts. For him, rights had to be seen in the context of cultures and groups. Differences must be recognised. Difference did not “necessarily entail inferiority” and “civilization” was “not a monopoly of European cultures” (168). Proof of this lies most obviously in Burke’s capacity to identify to a remarkable degree with what he understood to be Hindu values and to shed many, if not quite all, contemporary prejudices about Islam.

For Gibbons, Burke on Ireland, India and (although the case is hardly made) on America emerges as an enemy of “colonialism”. He was taking ethical positions that might in contemporary terms be seen as “post-colonial” (235). As Luke Gibbons is of course perfectly aware, this is lifting Burke out of any context to which he could in any sense have related. It would be curmudgeonly for a historian who cares deeply about Burke to cavil at somewhat unhistorical approaches in an interpretation so profoundly sympathetic to him. If, for instance, Luke Gibbons thinks that it is a meaningful question to ask whether Burke “caused the Great Famine”, let him by all means ask it, especially as he come up with the answer “no”. Nevertheless, setting up Burke as an enemy of a generic “colonialism”, interpreted in the modern mode as a wholly malign set of relations, does create problems of interpretation for this book.

Specifically, Burke would have had great difficulties in accepting that “colonial” could be applied to Ireland. He wrote that the Irish Protestants had indeed considered themselves as “a sort...