Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914

General Introduction

General Introduction For the student of the Irish experience, agrarian movements, rural sectarianism , and popular political unrest in the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries are subjects that deserve particular attention at the present time. This volume, which undertakes to pull together divergent strands of current research on these topics and to initiate the process of fitting them into larger conceptual frameworks, will, we hope, prove to be more than merely a convenient compendium of individual works. To some extent, such a collection of essays yields a varied picture of seemingly unconnected developments. In a broader sense, however, the very act of assembling a diverse set of works like these serves to aid in the identification of general questions and issues that should be of paramount concern in Irish studies. We have grouped the essays into three sections in accordance with our perception of the major historical problems which Irish scholars have faced in studying agrarian society and popular politics in Ireland. In the first section are those works that seek to understand the nature of traditional rural collective action during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second consists of the fruits of research on the very distinctive patterns of collective action in the province of Ulster. And the third comprises studies of various facets of the modernization of rural collective action in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not all the essays in this volume fall perfectly into only one of these categories, but we have been able to organize them roughly on this basis. At the beginning of each section we have provided a brief historical introduction to help to orient the nonspecialized reader 3 4 GENERAL INTRODUCTION and to tie together the individual contributions. These contributions themselves examine quite specific topics; in most cases they are empirical studies heavily based on primary sources. As a rule, we endeavored to obtain works focusing on relatively neglected subjects in Irish agrarian history, such as the impact of taxation, rural sectarianism, agrarian politics in Ulster, agricultural laborers, and the cleavage between graziers and small farmers. Better-known subjects, such as the tithe war, the Tenant League, and the land war, have been wholly or largely set aside, not because we deny their importance, but because they have received a disproportionate share of attention in existing works. The present book hopes to contribute to the expansion of Irish historiography into new areas of inquiry. Some of our contributors are traditional in their approaches; when we commissioned their essays, we made no attempt to force them to address larger theoretical issues. Yet we have consciously sought to produce a volume that will be useful not just to Irish specialists but also to historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists interested in the study of agrarian peoples and their collective action. All of the articles in this book have relevance to broad questions posed by students of peasant movements, even if this relevance is not always made explicit. To facilitate the integration of Irish social history with general theoretical issues, this introduction is devoted to surveying some of the principal questions that students of peasant movements have been trying to answer. We shall consider three of the issues that have dominated the literature in this field: 1. What impact does modernization have on peasant societies? Does it increase the likelihood of peasant movements? 2. How do peasants become mobilized into collective action? What are the major obstacles to their mobilization? What social factors tend to promote their mobilization? 3. How are differences in agrarian social structure related to peasant movements? What classes or types of peasants have the most revolutionary potential? What follows is a review of recent literature that seeks to answer these questions. We shall also indicate some of the ways in which Irish peasants conform to or differ from the general patterns. Modernization There is a highly diverse body of literature which treats the effect of modernization on peasant societies. Until recently, it was generally held that modernization increases the probability of unrest among peasants General Introduction 5 by helping to overcome their parochialism, thereby exposing them to new, more egalitarian and democratic influences, making them politically more conscious and active, or raising their expectations. l Although some of these arguments can still find highly credible proponents,2 it is now common to take a less positive view of the...