A Crucial Administrative Interlude: Sir Antony MacDonnell's Return to Ireland, 1902-04

"You are about to leave India," George Curzon, the viceroy of British India, told Sir Antony Patrick MacDonnell in 1901 at the end of a long career, "with a record—unprecedented at the present moment—and equal to the most illustrious of Indian administrators in the past."¹ Curzon, at times a very harsh critic, was not alone in his estimation of MacDonnell, the most eminent and accomplished of late-Victorian civil servants in India. What was even more extraordinary was that even though the Viceroy's words in 1901 were written after MacDonnell had been a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) for some thirty-six years, he was about to embark upon a second distinguished administrative career as under secretary for Ireland.²

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, India and Ireland were Britain's most important overseas territories. These two dependencies possessed a number of similarities in what Scott B. Cook has described as "intra-imperial analogies."³ Both India and Ireland constituted crown colonies, defined as those that were controlled directly from Westminster, spawned constitutional and revolutionary nationalist movements, possessed a plurality of religions and cultures, and were basically agricultural peasant economies. The Irish administration, with its viceroy, who represented the crown, and its chief secretary, who represented parliament, served loosely as a model for the governmental structure of post-Mutiny India.⁴ Ireland's close proximity to London, of course, allowed the center to exercise direct control over the periphery, often as a political or economic laboratory for legislating for other colonies, or for Britain itself. Irish governments, like the Indian, placed an emphasis on order and stability over liberty and the rights of property.⁵ Indian and Irish nationalists also influenced one another and members of the Indian National Congress and Irish parliamentary party exchanged ideas and sympathies.⁶ Indeed, commensurate difficulties resulted from a variety of political, social, and economic forces; however, as manifold as the "intra-imperial analogies" and exchanges between Ireland and India were, they were also limited.

For all of the similarities between India and Ireland, there existed stark contrasts: among the most important was that the Irish played a prominent role in the British colonial venture, especially in India. Ireland, when discussed in an imperial context, usually conjures up notions of a manichean duality of Irish colonial subjugation and British colonial authority. Such a view, however, masks the complexities inherent in the Irish relationship to Britain and the Empire. Unlike the Indian case, the Irish were in an anomalous position between colonizer and colonized. Certain attributes afforded Ireland a unique place within the Empire. In theory, the Act of Union of 1801 was legislated on the premise that Ireland would be integrated as an equal partner within the United Kingdom, and although this was not put into practice, the characteristics of Ireland's colonial status distinguished it from other dependencies. Representation in both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament, which gave the island fifteen percent of the United Kingdom's total representation, were a compromise relative to Ireland's smaller economy and size, but a privileged position nonetheless. The one hundred Irish seats in the Commons and the thirty-two seats in the Lords, for example, were a prerogative that neither crown nor parliament would have considered granting to Indian subjects. Although the promise of the Union proved to be imaginary in terms of Irish equality within the United Kingdom, Ireland's vigorous and relatively equal participation in the Empire between the passing of the Union and the emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922 turned out to be very real. Indeed, the Irish were found not only among the exploited, but also among the imperialists. Sir Antony MacDonnell, for one, based his entire career upon imperial administration and its meaning in both periphery and core...