Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic by Audrey Horning (review)

As any historian can attest, dead men do indeed tell tales. Crafting stories through extant documents of the “very dead” is, after all, what historians do for a living. Things often tell tales as well, and, as Horning’s Ireland in the Virginian Sea suggests, one set of tales can be at odds with the other. In this book, she surveys a heretofore conventionally accepted story—that English colonization of Ireland preceded and served as a model for English colonization of the Chesapeake—to make her point. Employing Renaissance humanist ideals of cultural difference that demonized the Irish, English adventurers planted themselves in Ireland. Their task, as they saw it, was to reduce the barbarous Irish unto civility. Many of the projectors of Irish plantation schemes also, or so we have been told, planned American colonization projects, and the ideology that they employed in Ireland to horrifying effect served them well in Virginia in reducing its savages unto civility. Conquest led to conquest. For historians studying the documentary record, this is an axiomatic tale.

Horning views the matter differently. “Ireland,” she argues, “did not serve as a model for early Virginia” (277). Relying on archaeological discoveries at sites in Ireland and the Chesapeake, she maintains that the evidence for acculturation and co-existence is equally as strong as that for conquest and exclusivity. Even in forts, places explicitly meant to exclude, unearthed artifacts point toward cooperation or, as she puts it, “mutual accommodation and negotiation” (363). Horning argues that the established narrative of conquest in Ireland has been fueled by presentist concerns, serving only to escalate animosity.

In the American case, although the traumas of colonization have in some ways been underplayed, the idea of two mutually exclusive communities perpetually at war with one another is another mythic conception that obscures more than it enlightens. She reports that material evidence, particularly in Jamestown, seems to contradict the documentary record. Evidences of “syncretic practices undermine the stark narratives of planter-versus-Gael, just as they complicate understandings of the relationship between English settlers and New World Native” (vii). In this regard, Horning is following on the heels of a number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who have softened the conquest motif for early modern Ireland or who have argued that colonists and Indians in some parts of America were able to construct a “middle ground” of understanding.

This is a provocative argument. The question is whether Horning places too much stress on the tale of material “accommodation and negotiation” in the face of a great deal of documentary evidence to the contrary. But she challenges us to revisit or qualify the stark model currently entrenched. As she argues throughout the book, we have to tell tales that make room for “ambiguities.” At its best, her book usefully encourages us to add complexity to often-simplified understandings of cultural conflict. In fact, neither conquest nor co-existence was always a straightforward business. Negotiation and accommodation frequently transpired against a backdrop of hate and appalling violence, on the one hand, and mutual understanding rooted in cooperation, on the other. After all, the past, whether we find it in excavations or in archives, has a penchant for confounding the tales that we tell.