Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947 [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-25983-9, 978-3-030-25984-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Introduction (Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright)....Pages 1-14
Front Matter ....Pages 15-15
“Residing in this distant portion of the great empire”: The Irish in Imperial Halifax, Nova Scotia (Peter Ludlow, Terrence Murphy)....Pages 17-35
From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa (Eve Patten)....Pages 37-56
Walking to China: Infatuation and the Irish in New South Wales (Killian Quigley)....Pages 57-74
Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-Century America (Martyn Powell)....Pages 75-99
Front Matter ....Pages 101-101
“Humble Obedience to the Will of Heaven”: Charles Johnston’s Providential and Migratory Sensibility (Daniel Sanjiv Roberts)....Pages 103-120
Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s “Murad the Unlucky” (1804) (Sonja Lawrenson)....Pages 121-141
“A work purely local?”: Narratives of Empire in George Benn’s A History of the Town of Belfast (Jonathan Jeffrey Wright)....Pages 143-168
Front Matter ....Pages 169-169
The 1857 Indian Uprising in Irish Ballads: Voices of the Subaltern (Raphaela Adjobimey)....Pages 171-189
Afghanistan, the Indian “Mutiny,” and the Bicultural Stereotype of John Nicholson (Pramod K. Nayar)....Pages 191-212
Violent Resistance: The Irish Revolution and India (Kate O’Malley)....Pages 213-229
Front Matter ....Pages 231-231
Stateless and Destitute: The O’Rourke Family of Saint-Domingue, Nantes and Wexford, 1788–1805 (Orla Power)....Pages 233-250
An Irish Surgeon in Barbados and Demerara: Vexation, Misery and Opportunity (Jennifer McLaren)....Pages 251-272
“Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund (Sarah Hunter)....Pages 273-290
Back Matter ....Pages 291-323

Citation preview

Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947 Edited by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts · Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Editors Richard Drayton Department of History King’s College London London, UK Saul Dubow Magdalene College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial theme. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937

Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Jonathan Jeffrey Wright Editors

Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947

Editors Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, UK

Jonathan Jeffrey Wright Maynooth University Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ISBN 978-3-030-25983-9    ISBN 978-3-030-25984-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Mieneke Andeweg-van Rijn / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book originated in a conference organized by the editors under the auspices of the erstwhile Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities (ICRH) at Queen’s University Belfast. We would like to thank its then Director, Prof. John Thompson, and the staff of the ICRH, for their support. We are greatly indebted to all the participants of that conference for their collegiality and for the many fruitful ideas that were generated by the event. Those who continued to collaborate with us towards this publication, and others whom we approached to join us at a later stage, are gratefully and equally acknowledged. We learned much from them, and are delighted to present their work within the framework envisioned by our call. On a practical level, we are very much indebted to our indexer Averill Buchanan for her meticulous work accomplished in a timely way. We are grateful, likewise, to the editors of the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series for accepting our work and bringing it to press, and to Maeve Sinnott at Palgrave Macmillan for guiding us through the submission process. Jonathan Jeffery Wright would also like to acknowledge the encouragement and support of his colleagues in the Department of History at Maynooth University, and, above all, to thank Rhiannon for her patience and good humour, and George and Clara for filling the house with laughter, noise, and much-needed distraction. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts is grateful to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, which provided the research facilities and a collegial environment for the growth of this project. He is grateful to Queen’s for v

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research and publication funding towards this book. Finally, he thanks his family, Satya, Syama, and Tanvi, for their support, interest, and love; he hopes that their family connections spread between many of the locations covered in this book will have made this project all the more endearing to them.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Daniel Sanjiv Roberts and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

Part I Inhabiting Empire  15 2 “Residing in this distant portion of the great empire”: The Irish in Imperial Halifax, Nova Scotia 17 Peter Ludlow and Terrence Murphy 3 From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa 37 Eve Patten 4 Walking to China: Infatuation and the Irish in New South Wales 57 Killian Quigley 5 Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-­Century America 75 Martyn Powell

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Contents

Part II Writing/Imagining Empire 101 6 “Humble Obedience to the Will of Heaven”: Charles Johnston’s Providential and Migratory Sensibility103 Daniel Sanjiv Roberts 7 Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s “Murad the Unlucky” (1804)121 Sonja Lawrenson 8 “A work purely local?”: Narratives of Empire in George Benn’s A History of the Town of Belfast143 Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

Part III Resistance/Collusion 169 9 The 1857 Indian Uprising in Irish Ballads: Voices of the Subaltern171 Raphaela Adjobimey 10 Afghanistan, the Indian “Mutiny,” and the Bicultural Stereotype of John Nicholson191 Pramod K. Nayar 11 Violent Resistance: The Irish Revolution and India213 Kate O’Malley

Part IV Networking 231 12 Stateless and Destitute: The O’Rourke Family of SaintDomingue, Nantes and Wexford, 1788–1805233 Orla Power

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13 An Irish Surgeon in Barbados and Demerara: Vexation, Misery and Opportunity251 Jennifer McLaren 14 “Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund273 Sarah Hunter Bibliography of Principal Works Cited291 Index315

Notes on Contributors

Raphaela  Adjobimey teaches English and Religion at the Städtische Gymnasium Sedanstraße in Wuppertal, Germany. She holds a BA in English and American Studies and Theology (2007) and an MEd (2009) (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany). She completed her MA in Modern Literary Studies (Queen’s University Belfast, 2008) after being awarded a scholarship from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). She subsequently completed her PhD on “Irish Perspectives on the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857” in 2013 as a recipient of a grant from the English Department of QUB. Sarah Hunter  was awarded a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin in 2015. Her PhD, titled “The Dublin University Mission—Irish medical missionaries in Britain’s empire in India, 1891–1929: identity, impact and sustainability,” assessed the role of, and contribution made by, predominately female doctors and nurses working in a remote region of India. She works in university partnerships for the Global Team at Ulster University. Sonja Lawrenson  lectures on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research centres on women’s writing in eighteenth-century and Romantic Ireland. She has published on authors such as Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson, and more broadly on Romantic Orientalism, Romantic popular fiction and the eighteenth-­century Irish stage. Peter Ludlow  is an adjunct professor of Catholic Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. As the President of the xi

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Canadian Catholic Historical Association, he has published widely on religion and migration in Atlantic Canada. His first book The Canny Scot: Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2015. Jennifer McLaren  returned to study after a legal career in Australia and the UK, and she completed her PhD at Macquarie University in 2018. Her thesis utilised the biographies of ten sojourners in the Caribbean to examine the Irish experience of empire during the revolutionary era. Her Masters of Research thesis on the reporting of imperial news in England and Ireland regarding the Battle of the Saintes (1783) was adapted for publication in a special issue of Éire-Ireland on transnational Ireland in 2016. Terrence Murphy  is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies and History at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax), where he previously served as Vice-­ President, Academic and Research. A specialist in the religious history of Canada, with an emphasis on the Atlantic region, he is the co-author of a number of books and articles including A Concise History of Christianity in Canada (1996) and Creed and Culture: The Place of English-speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1780–1930 (1993). He is the former editor of Historical Studies, the annual journal of the Canadian Catholic Historical Society. Pramod K. Nayar  teaches at the Department of English, the University of Hyderabad. He is the author, most recently, of Ecoprecarity: Vulnerability in Literature and Culture (2019), Brand Postcolonial (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), The Extreme in Contemporary Culture (2017), Human Rights and Literature (2016) and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016) besides essays on graphic novels, celebrity studies, Fanon and others in several journals. His current projects include a book on human rights comics and one on Indian travel writing, 1830–1947. Kate  O’Malley is Managing Editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB). She was Assistant Editor with the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series from 2005 to 2019. She is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (BA, PhD). She has written extensively on Indo-Irish relations and her book Ireland, India and Empire was published by Manchester University Press in 2008. Her research interests encompass Irish diplomatic and political history, twentieth-­century Indian history, British imperial and Commonwealth history and British decoloni-

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sation. She is an occasional lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin as well as an associate of the Centre for Contemporary Irish History. She has also taught at University College Dublin and at Queen’s University, Belfast. Eve  Patten  is a professor in the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, and Director of the MPhil in Irish Writing at Trinity’s Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish and Creative Writing. She has published widely on modern Irish literary and cultural studies and is the author of Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2004) and Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (2012). She is the editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2020, and is researching a book on the representation of Ireland in English literary modernism. Martyn Powell  is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in Irish political, cultural and social history, and his publications include Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-­ Century Crisis of Empire (2003), The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland (2005), Piss-Pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (2009), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland (2010) (edited with James Kelly), and many articles and essays. He is working on a study of violence in Irish society, titled “Houghers and Chalkers: The Knife in Revolutionary Ireland, 1760– 1815,” and an edition of the political works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, part of a Leverhulme-funded research project, for Oxford University Press. Orla Power  completed her PhD “Irish Planters, Atlantic Merchants: The Development of Saint Croix, Danish West Indies, 1750–1766” at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway in 2011. She was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin from 2012 to 2014. Her areas of interest include eighteenth-century Irish merchant families and their activities in Europe and the French, Spanish and Danish Caribbean. She lives in Galway with her husband and two children where she also works as medical doctor. Killian  Quigley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. His PhD was awarded by the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He has recently been investigating the poetics and aesthetics of oceanic, and particularly submarine, environ-

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ments. He is co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea (Routledge Environmental Humanities, 2019) and author of a manuscript entitled The Myriad Sea: Submarine Poetics (under review). His research is also available in Eighteenth-Century Studies, EighteenthCentury Life, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and forthcoming in A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury) and elsewhere. Daniel  Sanjiv  Roberts is a reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast and the current Director of its Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He has published major scholarly editions of works by Charles Johnston, Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey, and written widely on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature in relation to empire. His edition of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama won a citation from the MLA as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition in 2005. Jonathan Jeffrey Wright  is Lecturer in History at Maynooth University. His research focuses on Ulster’s connections with the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution. He has recently completed an edition of the letters of the Belfast-born Trinidadian slave-owner John Black, and his previous publications include The “Natural Leaders” and Their World: Politics, Culture and Society in Belfast, c. 1801–1832 (2012), Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire (2015, edited with Diarmid A.  Finnegan) and Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018, edited with Georgina Laragy and Olwen Purdue).

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The fourth Earl of Enniskillen with family and senior estate servants at Florence Court, County Fermanagh. (Enniskillen Papers, by kind permission of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland) 38 Fig. 3.2 Berkeley, Galbraith and Florence Cole as children at Florence Court, County Fermanagh. (Enniskillen Papers, by kind permission of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland) 39 Fig. 10.1 Brigadier-General John Nicholson, Memorial Statue, Lisburn, Northern Ireland (Copyright, Alamy Stock Photo) 192 Fig. 13.1 The late John Crawford MD RWGM of Masons in Maryland. Engraved agreeably to a resolution of Cassia Lodge, No.45, as a tribute in personal regard and of respect for the many virtues that adorn his character, 1814. (Source: Julia E. Wilson, “Dr. John Crawford, 1746–1813.” Bulletin of the School of Medicine University of Maryland 25 (1950): 121. Reproduced with permission from the University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library. https://archive.org/details/ bulletinofuniver2525/page/120)252

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Introduction Daniel Sanjiv Roberts and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

Among the many statues and memorials surrounding Belfast’s impressive City Hall, “much the finest” (in the opinion of architectural historian C. E. B. Brett) is that of the first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1826–1902).1 Posing in full regalia, which recall his distinguished career as a former Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India (among other eminent posts), Lord Dufferin is attended by two imperial subjects, a Canadian boatman seated on the body of a moose, and a turbaned Sikh warrior, with a sword, seated on a cannon (see the cover image for the latter). Though it is the imperial grandee, Lord Dufferin, standing with insouciant ease, who is undoubtedly meant to be the focus of attention, his attentive and unnamed attendants are nonetheless, in their own way, finely realised portraits, their different histories, geographies and ethnicities suggestive of the reach and power of the empire. Their generally overlooked presence in the heart of Belfast, alongside their imperial master (his statue, an adjunct to the more imposing, though somewhat less successful, memorial to Queen Victoria, D. S. Roberts (*) Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. J. Wright Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_1

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Empress of India, in front of the City Hall) serves also to foreground the thematic concern of the present volume—that of Ireland’s relationship with the wider British Empire. Viewed one way, the history of Ireland during the long period covered by this collection (1775–1947) evokes a narrative characterised by the gradual wresting of national self-determination, the overthrow of British rule and the emergence of the modern nation. At the same time, however, this period saw British imperial power reach its peak, before dramatically declining in the post–Second World War era of de-colonisation. Hence, an equally important and intertwined dimension of Ireland’s historical experience within this timeframe concerns its diffuse and multifaceted connections with the empire. Despite Ireland being formally recognised as a kingdom in 1541, some Irish writers and politicians had, by the eighteenth century, come to compare its treatment to that meted out to Britain’s colonies. In the late seventeenth century William Molyneux protested, in his influential work, The Case of Ireland, Stated (1698), against the notion that “Ireland is to be looked upon only as a Colony from England.”2 But Molyneux’s protestation notwithstanding, Ireland’s parliament was rendered subservient to Westminster by the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1720—subservient, that is, until 1782, when, against the backdrop of imperial conflict in North America, parliamentary and popular agitation in Ireland led Britain to concede the legislative independence of the Irish parliament. Ireland’s experience of parliamentary independence was, though, short-lived. Following the dramatic convulsions of the 1790s in the wake of the American and French revolutions—reformist and radical agitation, rebellion, counter-reaction and, in places, sectarian blood-letting—the British government looked again at its relationship with its sister kingdom and, on 1 January 1801, as is well known, Ireland was subsumed within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, under the terms of the Act of Union.3 In theory, Ireland under the union was an equal partner in Britain’s imperial enterprise; in reality, things were more complex. The union was, as Alvin Jackson has noted, “incomplete.” Catholic Emancipation was not granted until 1829 and “Ireland was ruled partly in colonial and partly in metropolitan terms.” Thus, while political representatives were sent to Westminster, a Lord Lieutenant resided in Dublin and, as was the case elsewhere in the empire, elements of Irish bureaucracy, not least policing, were “highly centralized.”4 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Ireland’s perceived subservience to Britain would generate powerful calls

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for reform and freedom. From repeal to Home Rule, O’Connell to Parnell, and Young Ireland to the Fenians, the political narrative of nineteenth-­ century Ireland is well known.5 Yet against this backdrop, Ireland took its place within the imperial order, despatching disproportionately high numbers of men (and later, increasingly, women) to serve in the colonies. “As well as belonging to a colony at the heart of the British Empire,” Kevin Kenny has written, “Irish people helped, conquer, populate, and govern the colonies overseas.”6 The early years of the twentieth century would, of course, bring Ireland’s independence. With the creation of the Free State in 1921, the curtain fell on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, rising instead on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and in 1949 a further, formal distancing from empire on Ireland’s part occurred, as it became a republic and left the Commonwealth. Such attempts at distancing, though understandable in an emerging republic, might be said, at a popular level, to have left a residue of imperial amnesia—that is, a tendency to overlook the imperial past of Ireland and the Irish. This is particularly true of those whose careers, whether as soldiers or administrators, contributed to the development of empire and whose stories form, in Hiram Morgan’s words, “an uncomfortable Irish heritage.”7 In recent years, however, this heritage has attracted increasing scholarly attention. In his Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Stephen Howe has undertaken a sustained examination of “the ways in which the languages of imperialism, colonialism, postcoloniality and anticolonialism have been deployed in Irish contexts,” and a series of monographs and essay collections published within the last twenty years has sought to shed light on the Irish men and women who were active within the empire, to highlight connections between Irish and Indian nationalists and, from a critical perspective, to apply the insights of postcolonial and subaltern studies to Irish cultural productions.8 Such work has served to raise a raft of important and often difficult questions for the modern nation. Should we view Ireland as a colony? What role did the Irish play in the oppression of other, now postcolonial, nations? And, by contrast, to what extent did Ireland encourage or serve as an example for other anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the empire? As for the Irish themselves, how did they view empire as it applied to them? Was it viewed as an opportunity or as a curse? Were the Anglo-Irish overseas subsumed into Britishness by the empire or did they retain a distinctive Irish side to their identity even as they went abroad? Did the bifurcated

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identities of Ireland—“native” and “settler,” Protestant and Catholic, loyalist and republican—manifest and perpetuate themselves in imperial contexts or were these irrelevant to the empire? If Ireland were to be considered a colony, was its plight under British rule as abject as that of other colonies which were judged to be racially “inferior,” or was it racially privileged as white? And what of Irish migration: did it result in the loss or abandonment of Irish identity, or in its enhancement and diversification overseas? Such questions have prompted debate (at times heated) and generated a series of valuable historical and cultural meditations in recent years. All of these evidently antagonistic or exclusive positions have been plausibly demonstrated under some sets of circumstances. Equally, none of these questions has been entirely resolved in any absolute sense, though many useful distinctions have been drawn and crucial ambiguities made manifest. Fundamentally, it has become increasingly apparent through such debates that Ireland’s constitutional status—and, indeed, its imperial status—was inherently equivocal.9 This allowed for a range of attitudes to be held, both by administrators and subjects. Furthermore, the regional, religious and ethnic divisions within Ireland, and the immense variety of Britain’s overseas colonies and imperial relationships, necessitate a variegated approach to empire, one that takes into consideration the specificity of particular imperial contexts. With this in mind, the current volume seeks to avoid the pitfalls of polarised debate and simplistic dichotomy, instead embracing particularity, nuance and complexity. While some of the contributors whose essays are presented in the pages that follow espouse methodological and historiographical approaches informed by postcolonial theory or the insights of the “new imperial history,” no single editorial line has been imposed and the various case studies, close readings and explorations gathered here have been informed by a plurality of methodological assumptions, often working in revealingly mutual ways. Covering the period from the commencement of the American revolutionary war in 1775 to the declaration of independence by India (the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s eastern empire10) in 1947, the chapters that follow have been subdivided into four major thematic areas, though each, as will be evident, overlaps in some respects with others. The opening part, “Inhabiting Empire,” addresses the issue of emigration, an area of obvious significance given the scale, diversity and continuity of Irish outward migration throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although associated most strongly with the mid-­ nineteenth-­century famine in popular imagination and visual illustration,

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emigration proceeded apace before and after the famine years, making the Irish diaspora the largest of all European nations when taken over the entire period. Although statistics are problematic, it has been estimated that between 1820 and 1920 around 5 million migrated to the United States alone, and that by 1890, 39% of all Irish-born people were living abroad, variously adapting to and recreating anew their living environments wherever they went. As Roy Foster has commented pithily: “There was, in a very real sense, an Ireland abroad.”11 Peter Ludlow and Terry Murphy’s chapter on imperial Halifax—one of Britain’s most important naval garrison cities by the mid-nineteenth century—provides a revealing account of the largely Catholic (though partially mixed) Irish population within the establishment of this multi-ethnic military and urban location. Their chapter analyses the staggered “two-boat” or “three-boat” nature of their passage and throws interesting light on their interactions with neighbours and internecine disputes with coreligionists. What emerges most distinctly, quite in opposition to stereotypical views of Irish sectarianism and Irish Catholic unruliness, is the extent to which this pre-famine migrant population can be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, to have played an energetic and well-integrated role in the development of the city’s imperial institutions and character. Following this, Eve Patten’s chapter, “From Enniskillen to Nairobi: the Coles in British East Africa,” turns from urban history to the pioneer and plantation ethos cultivated by an aristocratic Ulster family in former Rhodesia. Patten traces an intriguing connection from Ireland to British East Africa in the early twentieth century, covering three of the children of the fourth Earl of Enniskillen (Florence Cole, b. 1878; Galbraith Cole, b. 1881; and Berkeley Cole, b. 1882), who became pioneer settlers in British East Africa between the 1890s Protectorate and the 1920 establishment of the crown colony. Their experiences, encountered through letters, memoirs and the work of authors Karen Blixen and Llewelyn Powys, are perhaps idiosyncratic but offer nonetheless an illumination of the complex position of Ulster-born aristocrat imperialists, in relation to Irish national narratives on one hand, and colonial settlement history on the other. The chapter hints at the ways in which the Coles—Ireland’s “livestock barons of the Rift Valley,” as described by Elspeth Huxley—saw events back home, from the Home Rule crisis to the Rising, as bearing on the emergence of a modern Kenya, and places their embryonic white-settler nationalism in ironic juxtaposition to their political views on Ireland’s revolutionary transition.

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The next two chapters within this  section, one focusing on Australia and the other returning to North America, examine through print culture what might be called mythical or mediated views of Irish plight (and, indeed, flight) in colonial outposts. In “Walking to China: Infatuation and the Irish in New South Wales,” Killian Quigley examines the puzzling phenomenon of Irish convict transportees to Australia who supposedly attempted to escape to China on foot. Quigley considers these accounts not with a view to explicating or resolving them, but in order to analyse the discursive connections that are manifested in them regarding tropes of infatuation, convict labour, Irishness and apparently pathological forms of mobility. As Quigley argues, when observers commented that the wouldbe China-bound travellers were engaged in undermining the colonial ­ enterprise, what they were describing was a form of resistance that was oblique and uncertain but which bore comparison with colonial and anti-­ colonial movements across the globe. Martyn Powell’s chapter, “Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-­ Eighteenth-­Century America,” examines how Irish servitude in America after independence was uneasily aligned with slavery in the Irish and American press. Powell’s chapter serves as an important reminder that Ireland’s connections with British colonies would persist even after major structural developments had occurred within the empire, developments including the securing of American independence. The importance of America as a destination for Irish migrants in the colonial period and, again, in the nineteenth century is well known. However, as Powell shows, the Irish continued to emigrate to North America in large numbers in the years immediately following the American War of Independence and, equally importantly, the former American colonies remained significant in Irish political discourse. It is arguably the case, Powell’s discussion suggests, that the conventional chronologies of colonisation and de-­ colonisation can obscure as much as they reveal. Here, and elsewhere in the volume (as, for instance, in Raphaela Adjobimey’s discussion of “mutiny ballads”), one becomes aware of just how malleable sympathy for the colonial and racial “other” could be from an Irish point of view. Examining various versions of Irish settler cultures from institutional and personal records, and analysing the mythology and print cultures that they generated, these chapters  demonstrate the multifaceted and evolving nature of the Irish diaspora within the empire. Part II, “Writing/Imagining Empire,” gathers three chapters, two discussing literary production and one on the writing of history, specifically the

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history of Belfast, which emerged as a leading imperial city during the nineteenth century. Here, issues of print culture flow into broader concerns relating to the production of imperial histories and literatures. An influential study on this subject indebted obviously to Edward Said’s landmark work, Orientalism (1978), was Joseph Lennon’s book Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004). Lennon’s work investigated a long genealogy in Irish writing from the medieval period into the mid-twentieth century, with roots in classical tradition, that found affinities between Ireland and the Oriental world. Such affinities would acquire resonant political connotations via the construction of Celticism over the nineteenth century as Britain’s empire expanded eastwards. Located in this broad context, Daniel S. Roberts’s chapter, “‘Humble Obedience to the Will of Heaven’: Charles Johnston’s Providential and Migratory Sensibility,” foregrounds continuities between the novelist Johnston’s narrative technique—which typically portrayed objects and people circulating in the empire—and the writer’s own sensibility as a migrant and an Irishman. Roberts demonstrates a continuity between Johnston’s providential theology, derived from the works of Irish Enlightenment philosophers George Berkeley and Robert Clayton, and his fictional writings published in Britain and in India. Also drawing upon Enlightenment ideas for its analysis of a fictional work (and concentrating upon themes of identity and circulation), Sonja Lawrenson’s chapter, “Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky’ (1804),” issues a useful gender corrective to Lennon’s influential study of “Irish Orientalism,” the Celtic-Oriental affinity developed in antiquarian discourse of the eighteenth century. Highlighting the relatively neglected aspect of gender politics within this discourse, Lawrenson places Edgeworth’s Oriental fable in the context of competing theories of identity and exchange, arguing that Edgeworth ultimately relinquishes Edmund Burke’s traditional and conservative model of cultural inheritance in favour of an extension of Adam Smith’s concept of free commercial exchange. Despite wide differences in style, Johnston and Edgeworth, from these readings, show interesting discursive similarities, drawing on Irish Orientalism and Enlightenment thinking while veering between conservative theories of imperialism and those based on liberal ideas of commercial exchange. Fiction is, of course, only one form of literary production, and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright’s essay, “‘A work purely local?’: Narratives of Empire in George Benn’s History of the Town of Belfast,” focuses on another form of

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literary production—the writing of history. Its subject, George Benn, was a nineteenth-century historian of Belfast, whose major work, his two-­ volume History, published in 1870 and 1880, remains influential to this day. While a superficial reading of this text would suggest it is a limited, local history, with little to interest the historian of empire, Wright here reveals, and explores the significance of, a series of references to empire and imperial dynamics that appear in the work. In so doing he establishes Benn’s History as a work that reflects both the historic realities of Belfast, a town with numerous connections to empire, and the ways in which an awareness of empire shaped Benn’s thinking. Part III, “Resistance/Collusion,” returns to the vexed question of Ireland’s complicity in, and opposition to, Britain’s treatment of its empire’s “others.” Two chapters here, both literary in orientation, focus on a key moment of native resistance, the so-called Indian “Mutiny” of 1857,12 which saw Indian troops (“sepoys”), supported by civilian populations, across the North and East of India, rebelling against the rule of the East India Company. By contrast, the third looks at radical connections between Ireland and India during the 1930s and beyond. The Indian uprising of 1857 posed the greatest crisis faced by the empire since the American War of Independence, resulting in widespread horror and disquiet amongst the metropolitan public, and prompting the reconstitution of British rule in India from Westminster. Ireland’s disproportionately high contribution to the East India Company Army—estimated at 50% of its white soldiers13—meant that Irish interest in India ran deep, spawning media reports as well as references to the mutiny in sermons and popular literature. Unpublished materials in the form of correspondence and journals from India during the mutiny are also available in various archives.14 Yet the dispersal of such archives in locations across Britain and India, and the often unidentified nature of Irish involvement, has led to a relative neglect of such materials from a specifically Irish point of view.15 Raphaela Adjobimey’s chapter, “The 1857 Indian Uprising in Irish Ballads: Voices of the Subaltern,” provides valuable service in identifying and analysing representations of the mutiny in songs and ballads of the Irish broadside tradition preserved in archives. These orally circulated ballads, as Adjobimey argues, provide us with unique access to public opinion amongst those members of Irish society whose voices, if heard at all, are perceived as faint echoes in contemporary published accounts. As she suggests, responses to the uprising were diverse and mutable, ranging from solidarity with the sepoys and their cause to the lamentation of Irish

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v­ ictims and the condemnation of the rebels and, by extension, all Indians. Furthermore, closer examination reveals an inflection of Irish political interests running through this corpus, demonstrating the way in which India could serve as a canvas for the projection of Irish causes, signalling on occasion calls for independence, and at other times loyalty to Britain and its empire. Taking a slightly different approach, Pramod K. Nayar’s chapter, “Afghanistan, the Indian ‘Mutiny’, and the Bicultural Stereotype of John Nicholson,” examines constructions of imperial heroism surrounding the figure of the Lisburn-born soldier, John Nicholson, whose death in the siege of Delhi in 1857 was followed by widespread literary and biographical commemoration of his valour. Arguing that such constructions drew upon his typecasting in subcontinental terms as much as in Irish terms, Nayar analyses three such stereotypes attaching to Nicholson’s posthumous reputation: that of the “redemptive character” who has come to terms with the trauma of his earlier military involvements; that of the “avenging hero” whose excesses are an appropriate response to the horrors of the mutiny; and that of the co-opted and “creolized figure” whose savage ideas of justice equate with those imputed to the military races (Sikh and Afghan) recognised by the Raj. Turning from literary considerations to political history, the final chapter in Part III, “Violent Resistance: The Irish Revolution and India” by Kate O’Malley, looks at the impact of the revolutionary phase in Ireland on Indian nationalism, focusing on the Chittagong uprising of 1930 and Subhas Chandra Bose’s revolutionary activities over the period of the Second World War, to suggest the importance of Irish influence on these events. Although the Indian national movement is widely remembered in the popular imagination as a largely peaceful one thanks to Gandhi’s powerfully influential aspiration for it—creating an idealised vision of the freedom movement that was swiftly commemorated by the newly formed nation—the reality of Indian nationalism prior to its successful outcome (and overlooking the violence of partition) was, in reality, a far more fragmented and involved process, often espousing explicitly violent means. O’Malley’s excavation of the multilayered process by which recollections of the 1916 Easter uprising were channelled by Surya Sen, the leader of the Chittagong uprising, into his own revolutionary message and model for activism, and her detailing of Bose’s Irish influences and friendships, provide an important insight into some of the lesser-known undercurrents that flowed between the two nationalist movements. Though separated by nearly a century, the events surrounding the 1857 mutiny (retrospectively

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labelled by the Indian freedom fighter Vinayak Damodar Sarvakar as India’s “first war of independence”) and the acquisition of Indian independence in 1947 are similarly revealed through literature and political history alike to be susceptible to revisionary impulses that colour representations of these major occurrences, feeding into the dominant cultural versions of national histories. Historical approaches based on the evidences of personal correspondence and connections, as well as literary approaches based on discursive analysis of stereotypes and representations, are both shown in these chapters to be mutually rewarding in deconstructing and reconstructing the complexities of political sympathy between Ireland and India. The final part of this volume focuses on Irish “networks” of the empire, that is, the structures of interconnectedness that enabled the trade and movement of people and objects not only between metropolitan and peripheral locations, but also between colonies and imperial peripheries. Linked in many ways to the diasporic theme with which the volume opens, the concept of imperial networks, developed in the context of the “new imperial history,” offers us, as Barry Crosbie has suggested in his study focused on networks between Ireland and India in the nineteenth century, a useful methodological tool with which to approach “the range and scope of connections” that linked the empire together and “evade the narrowly national focus of earlier (and very limited) accounts of Ireland’s imperial role.”16 In the first of these chapters, “The O’Rourke Family of French Saint-Domingue (1780–1804): Irish Merchant Planters during the Age of Revolution,” Orla Power examines the role and fate of Irish landowners and merchants in the Caribbean in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Focusing on the prosperous O’Rourke brothers from Co. Wexford, Patrick and Edward, who had established themselves on the island of French Saint-Domingue, Power traces, through family correspondence, their rise to affluence in the American revolutionary period and their loss of fortunes following the French and Haitian revolutions of 1789 and 1791, respectively. Exiled from Saint-Domingue, members of the family sought refuge in France, Ireland, London and Baltimore through their family connections and later experienced the rebellion of 1798 in Wexford. Power’s reading of the family correspondence through these various revolutionary moments across the Atlantic World recreates for us what Emma Rothschild has termed in her study of the Scottish Johnstone family, the “Inner Life” of empire.17 Turning from the commercial world to that of medicine and medical funding, the two concluding chapters of the volume examine the ways in

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which imperial structures could enable professional advancement and could be used for gender outreach as well. Jennifer McLaren’s chapter, “An Irish Surgeon in Barbados and Demerara: Vexation, Misery and Opportunity,” considers how John Crawford, a Co. Antrim doctor, negotiated his career, working on East India Company ships, moving to Barbados for several years, working in Essequibo and Demerara and finally settling in Baltimore in North America. His example of working across British and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean shows not only how imperial networks could enable and mobilise medical careers, but also how the physical boundaries of the empire could be porous, allowing for transferences between European imperial powers. Finally, Sarah Hunter’s chapter, “‘Colouring the Map Red’: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund,” examines the records of “The National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India,” better known as the Dufferin Fund, to examine how Lady Dufferin used imperial networks to establish her Fund on a national footing, breaking with social conventions and extending philanthropism into the inner spaces of female domesticity in India, particularly into the hitherto unreachable zenana. Returning to issues of gender raised in the earlier chapter by Lawrenson, Hunter’s essay shows how women, despite their marginality in the empire, could not only imagine and write about but also participate in, reshape and extend the parameters of the empire. As has already been noted, this collection does not seek to offer a simplified or unitary version of Ireland’s engagement with the empire. Its varied contributions do, however, reflect major thematic preoccupations and suggest modes of understanding that may be applied to Ireland’s imperial experience. During the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain’s empire was, for the Irish, a political and geographical environment to be lived in, moved within, written about and imagined; it was a reality that could be supported or resisted, or that could be utilised and negotiated, using the varied networks that existed within it. Wars and revolutions; the legislative frameworks of trade and commerce; the formation of new colonies, urban centres and travel routes; and the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment: all played their part in the growth of empire, and all were entangled inextricably in the experiences and thinking of Irish people whose responses to empire were multifarious. Consequently, attention both to individual circumstances and historical context is necessary in order to fully understand the variegated nature of Ireland’s imperial experience; neither on its own will suffice. Though the

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chapters in this book are separated into parts that display obvious thematic similarities, readers are invited to consider these chapters as interacting with each other in ways that could appeal to other interconnected and cross-fertilising critical and historical interests. Issues of race, gender, class, religious belief, political ideology, intellectual and historical understanding, chronology and geography run through the volume, allowing for many such correlations. Furthermore, these chapters offer a wide range of exemplary case studies, discursive analyses and historical, literary and historiographical reflections on Ireland and the empire. Taken together, they serve as a salutary reminder of Ireland’s shared political experience and development under the aegis of the British Empire at a time when relations between North and South are fraught with fears of a renewed rift in the form of a “hard border” between the regions.

Notes 1. C.E.B.  Brett, Buildings of Belfast, 1700–1914, rev. ed. (Belfast: Friar’s Bush, 1985), 67. See also Richard Davenport-Hines, “Blackwood, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple, First Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1806–1902),” last modified 3 January 2008, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31914. 2. The Case of Ireland, Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, rev. ed. (London: J. Almon, 1770), 111. 3. For an authoritative overview of the political developments of the late eighteenth century, see S.J.  Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630– 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 384–484. 4. Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 124–25. See also David Fitzpatrick, “Ireland and the Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew N.  Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 494–97. 5. Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798–1988: War, Peace, and Beyond (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), provides a nuanced narrative of politics in nineteenth-­century Ireland. 6. Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 92. 7. Hiram Morgan, “Empire-Building: An Uncomfortable Irish Heritage,” Linen Hall Review 10 (1993): 8–11. 8. Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. In addition to Howe’s

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work, other recent interventions include Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire; Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Terrence McDonough, ed., Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); Julia Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-­Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Keith Jeffery and Robert J.  Blyth, eds., The British Empire and its Contested Pasts, Historical Studies XXVI (Irish Academic Press, 2009); Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Dickson, Justyna Pyz and Christopher Shepard, eds., Irish Classrooms and British Empire: Imperial Contexts in the Origins of Modern Education (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012); Kevin O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Timothy G. McMahon, Michael de Nie and Paul Townend, eds., Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunity and Subversion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 9. See, especially, Kenny, “Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kenny, 2–4, and Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire,” 123–25 and 136. 10. It is worth noting that the phrase was earlier used of Ireland by William Molyneux. Arguing that Poyning’s Law was not to be applied to the detriment of Ireland, Molyneux insisted, “his Majesty will be very loth to have such a precious Jewel of his Crown handled so roughly.” See The Case of Ireland, 127. 11. See Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” 98–101, and R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 345. For a recent overview of famine-era migration, see also William J.  Smyth, “Exodus from Ireland—Patterns of Emigration,” in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, eds. John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 494–503.

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12. Though this term has been criticised for political incorrectness in the wake of Indian-nationalist and postcolonial critiques, we retain its use (though mindful of imperialist implications) as it remains the most convenient and frequently cited shorthand phrase covering the events of 1857. 13. Sir Patrick Cadell, “Irish Soldiers in India,” Irish Sword 1, no. 2 (1950– 1951): 79. 14. The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), for instance, possesses a significant archive of papers from the middle-class Ulster Graham family, several of whom served in India during the mutiny; see A.T. Harrison, ed., The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers (Belfast: PRONI, 1980). 15. Michael Silvestri’s book, Ireland and India, earlier cited, includes significant discussions of the mutiny and its commemoration in Ireland. 16. Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 17. 17. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

PART I

Inhabiting Empire

CHAPTER 2

“Residing in this distant portion of the great empire”: The Irish in Imperial Halifax, Nova Scotia Peter Ludlow and Terrence Murphy

Settled in 1749 under the auspices of the Lords of Trade and Plantation, the fortified port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was one of the most important garrisons in the British Empire.1 It was, notes one eminent Nova Scotian historian, “founded as a conscious imperial effort of the British Government.”2 Eventually known by both Jack Tars and naval officers alike as the “Warden of the North,” with a large harbour sheltered from harsh northwest winds, access to plentiful stands of timber, and a strategic location directly between Boston, Massachusetts, to the south and the French Fortress of Louisbourg to the north, Halifax was the ideal site for British military investment. From 1794 to 1798, the Duke of Kent, the father of Queen Victoria, resided at Halifax (with his French mistress) and was responsible for modern improvements in infrastructure and communication.3 By the early nineteenth century, Halifax was a thriving port and some of its 8500 P. Ludlow (*) St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada T. Murphy Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_2

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inhabitants amassed great wealth in trade with the West Indies, Europe, and the United States. Moreover, the lucrative military contracts which financed dockyard repairs, the construction of barracks, and soldiers’ salaries kept Halifax’s citizens at work and its public houses and shops full of patrons. It was a settlement where grog shops and brothels sat within a “good bottle throw” of fine mansions and “within a shout” of St. Paul’s Cathedral (the first cathedral of the Church of England outside of Britain).4 By 1845, Halifax was not only the summer home of the admiral of the North American Station, but it was also a hub of trade, finance, and communication linking the new world with the old. Although Halifax always had an English (or indeed a New England) character, the garrison town attracted settlers from all over the Atlantic World. The indigenous Mi’kmaq, for example, joined those French-­ speaking Acadians who had returned after the violent expulsions of 1755– 1764, people from Scotland and Wales, and freed African slaves from the United States. Yet, by the early nineteenth century, one of the largest ethnic groups residing and working under the shadow of the town’s great citadel were Irish Catholics. Of course, Irish Protestants, like the Uniacke family, were some of Halifax’s most influential citizens,5 and there was migration from Ulster to other parts of Nova Scotia (especially Colchester County), but the Irish working on Halifax’s docks and muddy alleyways were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and Catholic merchants and shopkeepers were increasingly present among the city’s middling class.6 For the most part, Catholics and Protestants lived in harmony. The principal Irish ethnic association, the Charitable Irish Society, was founded in 1786 as an explicitly non-denominational organisation. With the increase in Irish immigration after 1815, its membership became overwhelmingly Catholic, but Protestants continued to participate, often serving as president. Sectors of the Protestant population, both Irish and otherwise, harboured deep anti-Catholic sentiments, but except for a brief period in the 1850s these feelings were not expressed through hostile organisations, nor did they lead to the kind of violence experienced in other British North American cities such as Saint John and Toronto. In recent years there has been a newfound scholarly interest in the narrative of the Halifax-Irish. In 2015, a special edition of Historical Studies, the journal of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association, edited by Mark G.  McGowan and Michael Vance, entitled Irish Catholic Halifax: From the Napoleonic Wars to the Great War, brought historians, sociologists, and geographers together to examine migration, religious reform,

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social mobility, and responses to nationalism. Most recently, McGill-­ Queen’s University Press released A Land of Dreams: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Irish in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Maine, 1880–1923, in which Patrick Mannion demonstrates that the Irish in northern North American communities like Halifax were connected to a transnational Irish diaspora and experienced strong waves of Irish nationalist fervour well into the twentieth century.7 The fact that Irish Catholic immigrants and institutions were tolerated and able to advance in the very heart of a British military complex in North America is largely responsible for this spike in interest. McGowan and Vance have argued that it was “the pervasive influence of the British military that distinguishes the Irish Catholic experience in Halifax.”8 The thoroughly British imperial atmosphere of the city was no lasting obstacle to their progress. Terrence Punch, the pioneer historian of the Halifax-Irish, put it simply by writing that the Irish were “remarkably successful in assimilating into Halifax Society.”9 While there were barriers to overcome, there were also opportunities to seize. In this, the Nova Scotian Irish were no different from the Irish elsewhere in the British Empire, for the ambivalent experience of Irish colonists in the empire has emerged as an important theme in Irish historiography. Indeed, Alvin Jackson has remarked that “[f]or Ireland … the Empire was simultaneously a chain and a key: it was a source both of constraint and of liberation.”10 As the ensuing discussion will demonstrate, for a significant segment of the Halifax-Irish, the balance was tipped towards openings for inclusion and prosperity. One important feature of the Halifax-Irish experience relates to the chronology of their migration into the colony of Nova Scotia. While the perception of Irish migration to North America is still profoundly influenced by the famine narrative of 1845–1852, the men and women who built the Irish community under the tall masts of warships like HMS Shannon were almost wholly pre-famine immigrants (in 1813 the Shannon famously captured the American frigate USS Chesapeake in the “battle of Boston Harbour”).11 Perhaps more interesting, most of the early Halifax-­ Irish who left their homes in Waterford, Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Cork, were originally bound not for Nova Scotia but for the North Atlantic colony of Newfoundland.12 In other words, to understand Irish migration to British North America in the late eighteenth century, one must appreciate the role of the southwest English fishery in transporting migrants to the new world.13 In fact, it was the West Country fishing fleets sent to

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Talamh an Éisc (the land of the fish) that were most responsible for the Irish going to Halifax. While West Country fishing captains hired Irishmen in droves to work aboard ship and spend the summer drying fish on the rugged Newfoundland shoreline, the English mercantile elite were determined to keep the Newfoundland cod fishery as a migratory ship fishery only. “One of the consistent aims in imperial policy,” writes historian Jerry Bannister, “was to prevent surplus labour from accumulating after the summer fishery had ended.”14 Irish fishermen were expected to return to Ireland immediately after the fishing season concluded. Or as one period petition noted, Newfoundland was treated “not like a province to be settled, but like a ship moored in the ocean for the use of the fishery.”15 There were a number of reasons for this policy, but perhaps most important, the Board of Trade and Plantations wanted the migratory fishing industry to act as a “nursery for seamen,” creating a well-trained pool of sailors to serve aboard warships in time of conflict.16 While many Irish “stragglers” defied policy and settled in Newfoundland (by 1820 some 30,000–35,000 immigrants resided on that island), many others migrated onward across the Cabot Strait to the colony of Nova Scotia. Some men found work in the primitive Cape Breton coal mines, others acquired farmland in Inverness and Guysborough counties, while many more made their way to the dockyards of Halifax.17 This Ireland– Newfoundland–Nova Scotia migration is clearly evident in the official bureaucratic and ecclesiastical correspondence of the period. The Charitable Irish Society of Halifax had been formed, as noted, in 1786, and offered charity (without distinction of religion) to the large groups of waylaid Irishmen sojourning in the colony.18 Ten years later, a Catholic missionary priest in the settlement noted that most of his parishioners had come from the Newfoundland settlement of Placentia.19 Nine years after that, Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Wentworth, himself a loyalist refugee from New Hampshire, complained of the “useless Irishmen who pass annually from Newfoundland through the Province.”20 The “two-boat” experience of the Halifax-Irish demonstrates that Irish migration within British North America did not end after primary contact. The journey from Ireland to North America was frequently the first stop on what was a lengthy road of migration and settlement. Instead of sea-­ weary souls exiting down a gangway after a long transatlantic passage, the men and women who migrated into fortress Halifax had been in North America for some time and were very familiar with colonial society. This

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had a tremendous impact on how the Halifax-Irish viewed their own community, how they practised their religion, and how they interpreted their early place as residents, as one wealthy Halifax merchant noted, “in this distant portion of the great empire” (interestingly, by the mid-nineteenth century, Halifax itself became a gateway for Irish migrants and not a stopping place). Another factor that makes the Halifax-Irish interesting to scholars is the rise of an Irish Catholic mercantile elite. The merchants of Halifax, noted D. C. Harvey, “were at first transients and recognized neither racial nor religious lines. They traded where money was to be made, regardless of friend or foe, peace or war.”21 Although most Irish migrants faced considerable economic barriers, by the early nineteenth century there was a burgeoning class of Irish entrepreneurs that employed imperial trade to further their own personal ambitions and also the aspirations of the local Irish generally. While recognising that the vast majority of Irish Catholics on the Halifax dockyards were unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the gradual ascendancy of the Irish into the ranks of respectable shopkeepers, independent artisans, and wealthy traders shows that “the usual picture of immigrant Irish as militant, impoverished and stupid masses does not apply to the majority of the Irish who came to Halifax and who remained, if it applies at all.”22 Many affluent Irish merchants like Edward Kenny, who later received a Knighthood, had migrated into Halifax as lowly clerks only to eventually break out on their own. James Tobin, the son of an Irish-born butcher, created the firm J. & M. Tobin in the 1820s, which traded with the West Indies, and made a fortune through the purchase of “prizes” from the Royal Navy (historians also speculate that the firm had shares in privateering vessels). In a recent examination of J. & M. Tobin’s trade routes, historian Allen Roberson noted that: Irish ports included Cork and the Tobin ancestral district of Waterford. England provided the cities of London, Bristol, Poole and Liverpool for the importation of British goods. In British North America J. & M.  Tobin traded heavily with New Brunswick (Miramichi, Restigouche and St. John) and Newfoundland (St. John’s, Harbour Grace, Burin and Carbonear), as well as with Pictou in Nova Scotia and Quebec City along the St. Lawrence River. There are records of trading with at least five American states—New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. There is at least one trace of a venture to Gibraltar in southern Europe and one to the Isle of

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May in Scotland. By far the major trading ties were with the British West Indies and other Caribbean contacts: St. Vincent, Trinidad, St. Kitt’s, St. Lucia, Bermuda, Jamaica, Demerara, Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, Barbuda, Antigua, St. Thomas, and the Bahamas; they also traded further south with Brazil (usually called the Brazils) at Pernambuco and Bahia. Sugar, molasses and rum were the main imports from the West Indies while dry and pickled fish were the principle exports to the islands.23

Benefitting from the free intercourse within the British colonies and reciprocating countries, an Irishman, like Daniel Cronan, born to a customs official in London, England, could rise from a fur dealer with a “sideline” in dry fish to the owner of a vast fleet of trading vessels. Here were Nova Scotian Irishmen, noted one chronicler of the community, “who had risen from commonplace surroundings” to become “the merchant princes of Halifax.”24 As a class of elite Irish merchants developed in Halifax, they sought to practise their Roman Catholicism in a modest and liberal manner. In the early nineteenth century, Irish migrants were initially served by Hibernian missionary priests, like James Jones a Capuchin from Cork, but by 1817 the Vicariate Apostolic of Nova Scotia had been organised under the administration of the County Laois native, Bishop Edmund Burke.25 Yet, the prelate died within three years of his appointment and it took almost seven years for Rome to appoint a successor. In this chaotic environment, the mercantile elite, allied with a handful of professionals and independent artisans, had a profound influence over the local parish (St. Mary’s) and as “wardens” and “electors” they tightly controlled finances and decorum.26 Consequently, the great yearning of the Irish Catholic elite to be tolerated by their Protestant neighbours fostered Halifax’s particular brand of liberal Catholicism. Like in St. John’s Newfoundland, to “improve the image” of Catholicism in the parlour rooms of officers and ship captains, Catholics focused more on preaching than the sacraments, attended Protestant churches, and openly accepted mixed marriages.27 Yet, while the merchants had control of the Halifax Church, unlike in other parts of the British Empire the Irish were not the only contingent of Roman Catholics in the colony. There were, in fact, indigenous peoples who had been converted by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, communities of French-speaking Acadians who had escaped the Grand Derangement of 1755–1764 and, in the early nineteenth century, thousands of Highland Scottish Catholics from places like South Uist, Eigg, and Lochaber, who had settled in the colony’s eastern counties and on

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Cape Breton Island. Consequently, while these Catholics were generally isolated from each other, control over the ecclesiastical territory of Nova Scotia after 1820 was contested fiercely on ethnic grounds. As one representative of the Roman Curia would later confess, “the Irish are inclined to complain should the bishop be a Scot, and the Scots if he be Irish.”28 The bitter struggle between the Halifax-Irish and the Highland Scots for control over Nova Scotia’s Catholic Church has been covered at some depth.29 Yet, this fascinating episode demonstrates a number of important realities. First, the Roman Curia clearly had little understanding of the ethnic and linguistic differences between settlers in British North America. Or as Terence Fay notes, the Propaganda Fide, the branch of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary lands, simply failed “to appreciate the cultural differences in Canada between the Scots, Irish and French.”30 Second, Rome also had little understanding of class within the British colonial context. When two of Bishop Burke’s hand-picked successors declined to move from Ireland to far-flung Nova Scotia in 1825, the Curia looked not to the great centre of trade at Halifax for a successor but to the rural Nova Scotian countryside and the rugged Highlander William Fraser. Consecrated as Vicar Apostolic in 1827, the 48-year-old Bishop Fraser, a former rector of the small seminary at Lismore, Scotland, had no intention of residing next to the naval officers and government bureaucrats in fortress Halifax.31 Instead, he was consecrated some 215 kilometres to the northeast in the small relatively isolated village of Antigonish. It was a bitter blow to the Irish merchants who were dismayed “that a Gaelic-speaking backwoods boy of little experience with church governance, society or politics was placed in such a sensitive position.”32 Not only did the Halifax-­ Irish have a firmly established parish, a flourishing mercantile elite (to help pay for priests), and considerably more social credibility than their Scottish counterparts in the hinterland, but any Bishop in Nova Scotia surely needed to reside within the centre of British legislative and military power.33 Describing Halifax in this period, one writer noted that the garrison town “faced a century of peace after Waterloo.”34 Yet, there would be little tranquillity for Nova Scotia’s Catholics. Almost immediately, Bishop Fraser and his Irish representative in Halifax, John Loughnan, began to feud with the powerful wardens at St. Mary’s. Besides the ordinary clashes of personality, the wardens blamed Loughnan for forcing Bishop Burke’s nephew, the popular John Carroll, to leave the parish (the priest moved on to minister in other Irish communities in New Brunswick and then Toronto, Ontario). More damaging, Bishop Fraser refused to permit

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members of the influential Irish families to enter into mixed marriages (Loughnan refused a dispensation for Anne Tobin, the granddaughter of James Tobin, to marry the prominent Presbyterian attorney William Young), which was a major hindrance in their attempt to ascend the social ladder.35 According to Terrence Punch, Tobin, Kenny and others believed that Loughnan “and hence Fraser, was too strict and uninterested in them.”36 Bishop Fraser once complained that the mitre carried “more thorns than berries,” and the feud with the Halifax-Irish seemed never-ending.37 The ecclesiastical attack on the religious authority of the Halifax wardens came during an important period of intellectual awakening in Nova Scotia. As new institutions like the Mechanic’s Institute (the poor man’s university) were organised in Halifax, the Irish elite worried that a loss of influence within the local parish might hinder Catholic participation in this process. Just as it seemed that Nova Scotians were “rubbing the sleep out of their eyes,” Halifax Catholics were being dictated to by a Highlander from a rural shire town. In 1833, Bishop Fraser amended the constitution of the Halifax board of “wardens and electors” to include all pew-holders as voting members. While ostensibly democratic, this was clearly done to weaken the power of the powerful merchants over the congregation.38 While the details of the quarrel between the Halifax-Irish and Bishop Fraser are interesting, one of the important consequences for historians is that it forced the community to turn back to Dublin for support. In 1839, with Fraser’s permission, Archbishop Daniel Murray sent two clergymen to Halifax to minister within St. Mary’s. Yet, instead of engendering harmony, the priests soon became embroiled in the dispute and Fraser grumbled that they had sided with those “rich and powerful persons” (soon after one of the priests returned to Ireland).39 In 1841, another appeal was made to Dublin. Yet, this time the Halifax-Irish asked that Archbishop Murray take their case to Rome. In doing so, the case of the Irish in “this distant portion of the great empire” landed directly on the desk of Msgr (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen of the Irish College in Rome. Soon after, Halifax was entangled in a broader programme of global Irish Catholic episcopal imperialism. As Colin Barr has demonstrated, from 1832 Msgr Cullen “set out with great success to mould the Roman Catholic Church in the English-­ speaking world to his vision of Catholicism.”40 Through a vast network of Irish clergy ministering in both Europe and throughout the British world, Cullen was able to produce what Barr has described as a “ ­ Hibernio-­Roman”

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empire among Anglo-Catholics in the new world.41 Nova Scotia, ruled as it was by a Scottish Highlander, was clearly a problem spot. In December 1841, the Curia, with the support of Cullen, appointed William Walsh, pastor at Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), as Bishop Fraser’s coadjutor bishop with right of succession.42 Taking full advantage of the ethnic and class discord in Nova Scotia, Cullen had successfully made Halifax the latest conquest in a global campaign.43 By naming Walsh as Fraser’s successor, Cullen was hoping for a prompt ultramontane Hiberno-­ Roman realignment of Nova Scotia. When Bishop Fraser learned that an Irish coadjutor had been appointed without his knowledge, he blamed the “contemptible faction of misbehaved Catholics in the Metropolis.”44 Although the Scottish and Hibernian prelates managed to coexist for two difficult years, the personal and ethnic hostility was often overwhelming. So too was the contempt that the ultramontane and gentrified Walsh had for the customs of Bishop Fraser. When he visited Fraser in Antigonish, for example, Walsh recalled that his host’s habits were “those of the plainest farmer.”45 In July 1844 the ecclesiastical territory of Nova Scotia was partitioned into dioceses for the Scots (Arichat) and the Irish (Halifax). Although it was a significant victory for the Scots (as Fraser’s successor Walsh would have succeeded to the entire territory), “the Irish Catholics of Halifax found the spiritual leader they had long wanted, one of their own.”46 Bishop Walsh quickly removed any hint of Scottish ascendancy, recruited a number of Irish clergymen, and began what Colin Barr has described as “a new stage in the development of the Catholic Church in British North America.”47 When Bishop Fraser died in 1851, Halifax was raised to an archdiocese making Irish-Halifax superior to Scottish Arichat. In the following years, Archbishop Walsh frequently lobbied Rome to add the mainland counties of Pictou, Guysborough, and Antigonish to his archdiocese, but he was unsuccessful. While they were working to gain control over their ecclesiastical affairs, the Irish Catholics of Nova Scotia were also campaigning for full political rights.48 While their advances came in increments over four decades, there were few if any places in the Empire where emancipation was achieved with such ease. Most anti-Catholic laws in Nova Scotia had been repealed by the end of the eighteenth century and Catholic freeholders could vote in elections for the Assembly from 1789. However, they were still prevented from sitting in the Legislature by the requirement to take the State Oaths and Declaration against Transubstantiation. This began to change

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in 1823, six years before the British Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act, when Laurence Kavanagh, an Irish Catholic merchant from Cape Breton, which was united to Nova Scotia in 1820, was permitted to take his seat by taking a simple Oath of Allegiance. This step enjoyed the support of sympathetic Protestants, and the Assembly indicated its willingness to admit any duly elected Catholic in the future on the same terms, even though this practice was clearly in violation of the Royal Instructions which required the obnoxious oaths. In 1827, 1000 Halifax Catholics signed a petition asking the Assembly to address the Crown to dispense with this provision. The Colonial Office did not respond to the petition, but events were moving strongly in the direction of Catholic Emancipation in Britain. As soon as the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed by the imperial parliament in 1829, the Nova Scotia Legislature passed a similar statute of its own, thus eliminating definitively the last legal barrier to political participation by Catholics.49 Yet, legal emancipation did not automatically mean equitable treatment in public life.50  By 1833, two Irish Catholics had been  elected to the Assembly and another was eventually appointed to the Legislative Council. But several years passed before the presence of Catholics in the Legislature or in the Executive Council of the province reflected their percentage of the population. Much the same was true in municipal politics. When Halifax was incorporated as a city in 1841, Irish Catholics, who comprised nearly 40 per cent of the population, held only a few seats on the city council. Moreover, other grievances related to patronage appointments, jury duty, and education led Irish Catholic leaders to clamour for fair representation and a just share of the more substantial public appointments. Recognition of the status of the Irish Catholic community was at stake as were the emoluments that came with public office. These issues “might not concern a day-labourer,” noted one local historian, “but an ambitious Irish storekeeper might resent a system that relegated his race and creed to process-servers and cullers of fish.”51 As the Halifax-Irish community struggled for more political representation, it naturally became allied with the wider struggle for political reform in Nova Scotia. When the liberal agitators, led by the outspoken journalist, politician, and one-time Protestant president of the Charitable Irish Society, Joseph Howe,52 challenged the Council of Twelve (military officers and members of the Anglican elite who advised the governor and acted as the “upper house” of the colonial legislature), the limited powers of the assembly, and the excessive salaries of unelected officials, I­ rish-­Halifax

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fell into support.53 As a cadre of politicians that united Nova Scotians across religious and ethnic lines between 1838 and 1848, the reform leadership courted the support of Irish property holders in the Halifax districts, while the Irish recognised that responsible government was the only means of achieving political power. Yet, while Halifax-Irish leaders, like the Halifax-born Laurence O’Connor Doyle, fought tenaciously for responsible government, sectarian resentments slowly crept into the liberal reform movement. While the Irish had not hitherto been seriously hampered by discrimination, as the community grew more confident a segment of Protestant reformers wondered if the Irish were interested in reform merely as a means to strengthen and elevate the Roman Catholic Church. In 1843, for example, Catholics rose in fury when the popular reform newspaper, the Novascotian, attacked Walsh over a petty diocesan dispute. The insult had been penned by its editor (ironically an Irishman) but as he was Howe’s protégé, the Catholics blamed the liberal reform leadership for the insult.54 Moreover, as advocates for the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union, the Halifax-Irish were also in conflict with the often-fierce imperialism of liberal reformers. By 1843, the Repeal Association of Halifax had some 386 members but in one of the great northern bastions of Empire the topic was very controversial.55 While the Halifax-Irish were still absorbed by the politics of Ireland and followed O’Connell, they were strictly constitutional and loyal in their advocacy of repeal. Nevertheless, according to historian Brian Cuthbertson a number of reformers thought the cause of repeal “smacked of disloyalty.”56 Furthermore, the distaste for repeal among wealthy Protestants was evident as Irish reformers like Laurence O’Connor Doyle had “forever shut [themselves] out from place of preferment.”57 Other merchants soon found that there was a price to be paid for their loyalty to Ireland. The “peaceful revolution” ended in Nova Scotia with the announcement of responsible government in 1848 (the first system of its kind outside of the United Kingdom). Yet, Nova Scotians now faced a political process that practically guaranteed that religion and ethnicity would be at the centre of elections for generations. In fact, no sooner had the Liberals (as the reformers were now called) taken power than the Tories tactically began to disparage them as the political arm of the Catholic Church. As the former president of the Charitable Irish Society, Joseph Howe was labelled a servant to the Pope and was accused of drinking “a whole bucket of Holy Water.”58 Although partisan papers like the Halifax Times

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c­autioned Nova Scotians to carefully watch “the proceedings of a Denomination, which is striving for undue power, spiritual and temporal, in every part of the Christian world,” few took this seriously.59 By the mid-1850s, however, the Halifax-Irish had firm control of their church, representation in the colony’s legislature, a small college, a share of patronage, and mounting confidence. It was a period of “transformation and triumphalism.” Through the construction of new cemeteries, public liturgical displays, clerical reforms, the recruitment of women religious from the United States, and expansion of lay associational life, it was clear that the Catholic community had boosted both their resources and collective self-esteem.60 It is somewhat ironic then, that this community, which flourished within the centre of British military might in North America, would be drawn into a sectarian spat over a conflict in a far-flung corner of the globe. During the Crimean War of 1853–1856, the British Parliament passed the British Foreign Enlistment Act, which permitted American volunteers to serve in the British army. In the spring of 1855, Sir John Gaspard le Marchant, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia and the son of a great cavalry commander, corresponded with John Crampton, British Ambassador to the United States, about the possibility of sending unemployed Americans to Halifax to fill the ranks of regiments destined for the Crimea. Le Marchant found a “most willing” collaborator in Joseph Howe (by then Nova Scotia’s first Chief Commissioner of Railways), who travelled to Washington in the Spring of 1855 to discuss recruiting possibilities with Crampton.61 The plan, however ill-conceived, was to recruit soldiers without violating the domestic laws of the United States. The neutrality laws, noted Crampton, “confines us to narrow limits in our measures here, but I think we shall be able to show some people the way to Halifax without ‘hiring or retaining’ them.”62 While the process of recruitment is shrouded in mystery, when a contingent of American Irishmen reached Halifax (German Americans were also recruited), they were intercepted by the newly elected president of the Charitable Irish Society, William Condon, who persuaded them not to enlist in the army.63 Shortly after, 50 more refused enlistment in Halifax.64 The Halifax Catholic newspaper, being devoted to the immediate interests of Catholics in the province, exposed Howe’s mission and also the fact that he sent the recruits to Nova Scotia with permits as “labourers for the railway.”65

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Although there was heavy Irish participation in the Crimean war, it was not a popular conflict among the Halifax-Irish generally. More importantly, however, the community resented Howe sending penniless Irishmen to Halifax without adequate means for their upkeep. On 7 April 1855, the Halifax Catholic published another strong editorial condemning Howe’s recruitment assignment. That same day, Condon wired a New York newspaper with the message “Sixty Irishmen entrapped at Boston as railway labourers sent here for the ‘foreign legion.’”66 By this point, American authorities were already investigating Howe’s activities, and the Nova Scotian was forced to return home before he found himself in a New York jail cell (a group of angry protesters had turned up at his hotel). With tensions high between Howe and the Catholics, in May 1856 Catholic labourers constructing a railway line from Halifax to Windsor, most of them Irish, attacked a Protestant boarding house called Gourley’s Shanty. By the evening 100 militia men were sent to the scene and a number of the rioters were arrested. They were, according to later reports, “tough illiterate men,” who were recent arrivals to the colony.67 The Gourley Shanty Riot might be dismissed as just another incident of sporadic nineteenth-century sectarian violence, were it not for the sacking of John Crampton (along with three consuls) from his post as ambassador to the United States, which took place shortly afterwards.68 On the heels of the Gourley Shanty Riot, in early June 1856 Crampton stopped in Halifax on his way back to London. To demonstrate the loyalty of Nova Scotians, and to display their sympathy with the disgraced ambassador, a public meeting was organised. During the gathering, the mayor of Halifax gave a flattering address to the guest of honour. After the address, a Mr Thomas Cunningham (an Irishmen with a Scottish surname) stood up and asserted that Crampton had violated the laws of the United States and was therefore unworthy of praise. According to the British Colonist, an infuriated Howe then rose and “commenced one of the most cunning, merciless attacks on the Irish—here, there and everywhere—that it is possible for any of our readers, even those who have listened to the gentleman in his bitterest strain of invective, to imagine.”69 The failure of Howe’s recruiting mission, the insult to Crampton, and the eventual failure to convict the Gourley Shanty culprits combined to drive a lasting wedge between the liberal reformers and the Halifax-Irish. There was even a short-lived “Protestant Alliance,” with the stated goal of addressing the “crimes of Irish Catholics,” although it was fleeting and had little impact. Yet, while illustrating that sectarian clashes had become

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a part of mid-nineteenth-century Halifax society, it is also evident that the anti-Catholic rhetoric of Joseph Howe actually wounded the Liberals. In fact, instead of hurting the Irish, “it blackened Howe’s reputation” and drove the Irish Catholics into an alliance with the Conservatives that would have a tremendous effect on the future of the colony.70 Not least of the benefits of the new alliance between Catholics and Conservatives is that it paved the way to an agreement in the 1860s that provided de facto, publicly funded Catholic schools in Halifax. The experience of the Halifax-Irish thus offers an interesting case study within the wider diaspora narrative. Unquestionably, Irish Catholics flourished within imperial Halifax. When the esteemed Michael Tobin resigned as a member of the Charitable Irish Society due to ill-health in 1842, he commented that his fellow members were a “respectable body of Irishmen, residing in this distant portion of the great empire.”71 Moreover, through their contributions to the commercial, political, institutional, and religious life of the Nova Scotian capital, the Halifax-Irish were empire builders. Combined with the prevailing willingness of Halifax Protestants to accept their rightful position in Halifax society, this experience defies the simplistic assumption, increasingly challenged in Irish historiography, that the Irish were always victims or opponents of imperialism.72 Unquestionably, there were incidents of “no popery” in Halifax and the sectarian clashes of the 1850s were often intense, but the Irish held their own and answered anti-Catholic attacks with growing confidence and self-assertion. In some cases, greater confidence spilled over into combative or provocative behaviour, and when the peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants was disrupted, Catholics as well as Protestants often deserved the blame.

Notes 1. On Halifax, see T. B. Akins, History of Halifax City (Halifax: Nova Scotia Historical Society, 1895). 2. D.C. Harvey, “The Intellectual Awakening in Nova Scotia,” Dalhousie Review 13, no. 1 (1933): 2. 3. On the early development of the Halifax naval yard, see Julian Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard Before 1820 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004); Frigates and Foremasts: The North American Squadron in Nova Scotia Waters, 1745–1815 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).

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4. See Thomas Raddall, Halifax: Warden of the North (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948), 159. 5. On the Uniackes, see Brian Cuthbertson, The Old Attorney General: A Biography of Richard John Uniacke (Halifax: Nimbus, 1980); Sister Mary Liguori, “Haliburton and the Uniackes: Protestant Champions of Catholic Liberty (a study in Catholic emancipation in Nova Scotia),” CCHA Report 20 (1953): 37–48. 6. On Ulster migration to communities like Londonderry, Colchester County, see Thomas Miller, Historical and Genealogical Record of the First Settlers of Colchester County: Down to the Present Time, Compiled from the Most Authentic Sources (Halifax: A. & W.  MacKinlay, 1873); Terrence M.  Punch, Erin’s Sons: Irish Arrivals in Atlantic Canada, 1751–1858 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2009). 7. Mark G. McGowan and Michael E. Vance, eds., Irish Catholic Halifax: From the Napoleonic Wars to the Great War (Toronto: Canadian Catholic Historical Studies, 2015); Patrick Mannion, A Land of Dreams: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Irish in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Maine, 1880–1923 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018). 8. Mark G. McGowan and Michael E. Vance, “Introduction,” in Irish Catholic Halifax, ed. McGowan and Vance, 7. 9. Mark G.  McGowan and Michael  E.  Vance, “Introduction,” in  Irish Catholic Halifax, ed. McGowan and Vance, 6. See also, Terrence M. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 1815–1859 (Halifax: Ethnic Heritage Series, 1981), 1–2. 10. Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 136. 11. See Terrence M. Punch, Some Sons of Erin in Nova Scotia (Halifax: Petheric Press 1980); “The Irish in Halifax, 1836–1871: A Study in Ethnic Assimilation” (MA Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1976). 12. On Irish migration to Newfoundland, see John Mannion, “Irish Migration and Settlement in Newfoundland: The Formative Phase, 1697–1732,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 17, no. 2 (2001): 257–93; “Migration and Upward Mobility: The Meagher Family in Ireland and Newfoundland, 1780–1830,” Irish Economic and Social History 15 (1988): 54–70; The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography (St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1977); “Transatlantic Disaffection: Wexford and Newfoundland 1798–1800,” Journal of the Wexford Historical Society 17 (1998–1999): 30–59; Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Culture and Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 13. See Ralph Greenlee Lounsbury, The British Fishery at Newfoundland, 1634–1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934).

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14. Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Customs and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 11. 15. Joseph Howe, William Annand, and Hugh MacDonald, A Letter Addressed to the Earl of Carnarvon: Stating their Objections to the Proposed Scheme of Union of the British North American Provinces (London: G.E.  Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1867), 15. 16. “The Newfoundland fishery of the mother country is a constant nursery of seamen for the navy, that great bulwark of the nation…” noted a 1775 petition from the merchants and traders of the town of Poole. Quoted in William Cobbett and John Wright, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T.C. Hansard, 1813), 382. 17. A.A. MacKenzie, The Irish in Cape Breton (Antigonish: Formac, 1979). 18. On the Charitable Irish Society of Nova Scotia, see Herbert Leslie Stewart, The Irish in Nova Scotia (Kentville: Kentville Publishing Company, 1949); Robert P.  Harvey, “Black Beans, Banners and Banquets: The Charitable Irish Society of Halifax at Two Hundred,” Nova Scotia Historical Review 6, no. 1 (1986): 16–35. 19. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 7. 20. John Wentworth to Lord Castlereagh, 3 February 1806, Public Archive of Nova Scotia, R.G. 1, Vol. 54, p.  146; Terrence M.  Punch, “Anti-Irish Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia: The Literary and Statistical Evidence,” in The Irish in Atlantic Canada, 1780–1900, ed. Thomas P. Power (Fredericton: New Ireland Press, 1991), 13. 21. Harvey, “The Great Awakening in Nova Scotia,” 15. 22. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 1. 23. Allen Robertson, “James Tobin (1774–1838): Forging an Irish Merchant Network in Colonial Halifax Nova Scotia,” Unpublished Paper, 2014, p. 8. Our thanks to Dr Robertson for allowing us to quote from his paper. 24. Punch, Some Sons of Erin, 61–67. 25. On the Halifax Church in this period, see Terrence Murphy, “Priests, People, and Polity: Trusteeism in the First Catholic Congregation at Halifax, 1785–1801,” in Religion and Identity: The Experience of Irish and Scottish Catholics in Nova Scotia, eds. Terrence Murphy and Cyril J. Byrne (St. John’s: Jesperson Press, 1987), 68–79; Terrence Murphy, “James Jones and the Establishment of Roman Catholic Church Government in the Maritime Provinces,” CCHA Study Sessions 48 (1981): 26–42. 26. Terrence Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada: The Struggle for Leadership among the Irish Catholics of Halifax, St. John’s, and Saint John, 1780–1850,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking

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Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, eds. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 128. 27. Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada,” 129. On the similar situation in Newfoundland, see John Fitzgerald, “Michael Anthony Fleming and Ultramontanism in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829– 1850,” CCHA Historical Studies 64 (1998): 27–45. 28. Antigonish Diocesan Archives (hereafter ADA), Angus Anthony Johnston Papers (hereafter AAJP), Antonio De Luca, Report on Nova Scotia, 15 July 1844. 29. Colin Barr, “‘Imperium in Imperio’: Irish Episcopal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century,” English Historical Review 123, no. 502 (2008): 621–24; Brian Hanington, Every Popish Person: The Story of Roman Catholicism in Nova Scotia and the Church of Halifax, 1604–1984 (Halifax: Archdiocese of Halifax, 1984), 75–107; David Flemming, “William Fraser,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography 8 (1851–1860) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985): 306–08; A.A.  Johnston, A History of the Catholic Church in Eastern Nova Scotia, vol. 2 (Antigonish: St. Francis Xavier University Press, 1971), 198–215; Peter Ludlow “‘Disturbed by the Irish Howl’: Irish and Scottish Roman Catholics in Nova Scotia, 1844–1860,” in Irish Catholic Halifax, eds. McGowan and Vance, 32–55. 30. Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism and Canadianism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 49. 31. On Bishop William Fraser, see A.A.  Johnston, “The Right Reverend William Fraser, Second Vicar Apostolic of Nova Scotia, First Bishop of Halifax, and First Bishop of Arichat,” CCHA Report 3 (1935–1936): 23–30; “A Scottish Bishop in New Scotland: the Right Reverend William Fraser, Second Vicar Apostolic of Nova Scotia, First Bishop of Halifax, and First Bishop of Arichat,” Innes Review 6 (1955): 107–24. 32. Hanington, Every Popish Person, 78. 33. Brian Cuthbertson, Johnny Bluenose at the Polls: Epic Nova Scotian Election Battles 1758–1848 (Halifax: Formac, 1994), 74. 34. Raddall, Warden of the North, 174. 35. Punch, “The Irish in Halifax,” 126. 36. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 29. 37. Johnston, A History of the Catholic Church, ii, 87. 38. Johnston, A History of the Catholic Church, ii, 177. 39. Johnston, A History of the Catholic Church, ii, 179–80. 40. Barr, “Imperium in Imperio,” 650. 41. Barr, “Imperium in Imperio,” 645.

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42. Punch, Some Sons of Erin, 55. 43. Sheridan Gilley, “The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-­ Century Irish Diaspora,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 188. 44. David B. Flemming, “William Walsh,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 8 (1851–1860) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 919–21. 45. Peter Ludlow, “Disturbed by the Irish Howl,” 41. 46. Punch, Some Sons of Erin, 56. 47. Barr, “Imperium in Imperio,” 623. 48. In the spring of 1843, Fr (later Bishop) Colin F.  MacKinnon wrote to Bishop William Walsh that in the colony there were “no great Tory Bigots, no great Fanatics, no Protestant Association to obstruct the progress of religion.” While a short-lived “Protestant Alliance” was later formed, MacKinnon’s words demonstrate that Catholicism in Nova Scotia progressed unabated. Colin F. MacKinnon to William Walsh (copy), 12 April 1843, Antigonish Diocesan Archives, Angus Anthony Johnston Papers, Fonds 8, series 10, sub-series 1, folder 29. 49. John Garner, “The Enfranchisement of Roman Catholics in the Maritimes,” Canadian Historical Review 34, no. 3 (September 1953): 203–18; Terrence Murphy, “The Emergence of Maritime Catholicism, 1781– 1830,” Acadiensis 13, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 29–49. 50. Terrence Murphy, “Emancipation vs. Equity: Civic Inclusion of Halifax Catholics, 1830–1865,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association Historical Studies 83 (2017): 7–24. 51. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Emigrant Generation, 38. 52. On Joseph Howe, see J. Murray Beck, Joseph Howe, Volume 1: Conservative Reformer 1804–1848 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982); Joseph Howe, Volume 2: The Britain Becomes Canadian 1848– 1873 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983); Bruce Fergusson, Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia (Windsor: Lancelot Press, 1973); J.W. Longley, Joseph Howe (Toronto: Morang & Co., 1904); James A. Roy, Joseph Howe: A Study in Achievement and Frustration (Toronto: Macmillan, 1935). 53. Nicholas Meagher, The Religious Warfare in Nova Scotia, 1855–1860 (Halifax, 1927), 13. 54. Brian Cuthbertson, Johnny Bluenose at the Polls: Epic Nova Scotian Election Battles (Halifax: Formac, 1994), 78. 55. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 33. 56. Cuthbertson, Johnny Bluenose at the Polls, 78. 57. The Register, 7 November 1843. 58. Beck, Joseph Howe, Conservative Reformer, 305.

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59. Ibid. 60. Terrence Murphy, “Transformation and Triumphalism: the Irish Catholics of Halifax, 1839–1858,” in Irish Catholic Halifax,  eds. McGowan and Vance, 73. 61. Beck, The Politics of Nova Scotia, i, 142. 62. Richard W. Van Alstyne, “John F. Crampton, Conspirator or Dupe?,” The American Historical Review 41, no. 3 (1936): 496. 63. H.R. Percy, Joseph Howe (Don Mills: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1976), 46. For a biographical sketch of William Condon see Punch, Some Sons of Erin, 77–82. 64. Beck, Joseph Howe: The Briton Becomes Canadian, 89. 65. The Halifax Catholic, 31 March 1855. 66. Punch, Some Sons of Erin, 79. 67. Meagher, The Religious Warfare, 74. 68. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, Volume 1 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 75. 69. The British Colonist, 7 June 1856. 70. Punch, Irish Halifax: The Immigrant Generation, 68. 71. The Acadian Recorder, 28 May 1842. 72. See, for example, Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire; Peter Gray, ed., Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004); Hiram Morgan, “An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire-Building,” History of European Ideas 19, nos. 4–6 (1994): 619–25; Oliver P. Rafferty, “The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British Empire, 1800–1921,” Historical Research 84, no. 224 (May, 2011): 288–309.

CHAPTER 3

From Enniskillen to Nairobi: The Coles in British East Africa Eve Patten

In the opening decades of the twentieth century a close connection was forged between Ireland and British East Africa (or the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya as it became in 1920) by three of the children of the fourth Earl of Enniskillen: Florence Cole (b. 1878), Galbraith Lowry Cole (b. 1881) and Reginald Berkeley Cole (b. 1882). All three were part of the pioneering settlement of the East African territory in the wake of the Boer War and through the course of the First World War—events which in turn served as portals to colonial land-purchase more widely across the African continent. During this period their letters to friends or home to Florence Court, the family’s ancestral seat in County Fermanagh, provide an intriguing portrait of these Ulster-born aristocrats and their participation in Britain’s colonial expansion and consolidation. The siblings also feature in literary accounts and memoirs of Kenya by Elspeth Huxley, Karen Blixen and various other authors who were their contemporaries in the formative years of the Protectorate. Such recollections inevitably nuance and often romanticise the pioneer culture of British East Africa but remain one of the few resources available for recovering this transient Irish presence in the imperial landscape (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). E. Patten (*) Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_3

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Fig. 3.1  The fourth Earl of Enniskillen with family and senior estate servants at Florence Court, County Fermanagh. (Enniskillen Papers, by kind permission of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland)

The experiences of the three Coles also highlight the intermittent dovetailing of Ireland and British East Africa as they each passed through defining stages of territorial and legislative realignment in the first two decades of the century. An Irish chronology from the agitations of the third Home Rule Bill to the 1916 Rising, and in turn the Civil War and the frangible arrangements of partition—with the new border looped across lands just a few miles south of Florence Court itself—runs in a temporal parallel to the evolution of British East Africa from an insecure protectorate, carved out expediently between Mombasa and the Ugandan border in the 1890s, to a designated crown colony in 1920. Indeed, by 1922, the year that saw the publication of Lord Lugard’s landmark manifesto for continued imperial intervention, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, the confluence of Irish Free State and Kenya Colony’s “political calendars” marks what Michael North has identified as the beginning of the postcolonial era.1 In bridging the two locations, the Enniskillen family illuminates the

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Fig. 3.2  Berkeley, Galbraith and Florence Cole as children at Florence Court, County Fermanagh. (Enniskillen Papers, by kind permission of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland)

convoluted patterns of refraction, replication and irony that frequently characterise Irish liaisons with the wider projects of Britain’s imperial mission. Growing up at the Florence Court estate, just eight miles south of Fermanagh’s county town of Enniskillen, the Cole children were immersed

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in provincial Ireland’s highly developed sense of affiliation to an international imperial culture. At home, the family’s archive records a long history of overseas administrative and military service in outposts such as Madras (Chennai), the Cape Province and Mauritius, and also evidence of their sustained interest in the development of the colonies (a scrapbook in the Enniskillen Papers includes, for example, newspaper cuttings about the “Africa and the East Exhibition” held in Belfast’s Ulster Hall in 1910).2 These interests were reinforced by the local culture and economy. While Fermanagh itself was largely Catholic and agricultural, the civic life of Enniskillen epitomised a Protestant unionist sensibility tuned to the frequencies of the Empire, a connection underpinned by the town’s castle garrison, which quartered the long-serving cavalry regiment of the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards—veterans of the Boyne, Waterloo and Balaclava—and the more recently established Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Set far over to the western periphery of Britain’s imperial landscape, Enniskillen was nonetheless closely linked to the heartlands of the Empire through its commercial investments, with its shops and businesses fuelled by the commodities of colonial enterprise and its main post office advertising daily delivery rates to Zanzibar, the Cape and South Africa.3 The town’s connections to London, meanwhile, had been smoothed by the merging of several local train lines throughout the later nineteenth century into the Great Northern Line railway, which ran the 120  miles to Dublin for the boat passage through Wales to England. This was the route taken by the Cole daughters when they travelled across for the London society “season,” and by the Cole brothers making the same journey each term to attend school at Eton. After completing their schooling, the boys followed their older brother John to the Military Academy at Woolwich before taking up army commissions, Galbraith with the 10th Hussars, Berkeley with the 9th Lancers. Both were called up separately for duty relatively late on in the Second Boer War, sailing from Southampton for the Cape Colony over the winter of 1900–1901. The War itself was petering out to a ragged conclusion. Galbraith’s regiment saw some action at Uniondale but was mostly exercised by chasing down rogue Boer units across the Transvaal; Berkeley was put to work on the more demoralising task of farm clearances, a legacy of Lord Roberts’ punitive strategy against Boer civilians. Aside from the brutalities and ignominy of these military duties however, the brothers were both enchanted with Africa from their first view of the landscape on arriving at the Cape, where the mountain above the bay immediately reminded

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Berkeley of the Cuilcaigh mountain behind Florence Court. Their letters home in this period list the deprivations and tedium of military routine together with their many illnesses (including malaria, sciatica and rheumatic fever that would dog both of them for the rest of their lives), but they also detail the richness of their new environment with its vast open spaces and vibrant colours. Galbraith would often ride out of camp at night to sleep under the stars with only a horse blanket as protection against the biting cold, while Berkeley sent home for his camera and rolls of film so that he could try to record the local wildlife, including the regiment of tortoises that, much to his delight, assembled each morning outside his tent.4 Their sister Florence, meanwhile, had married Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere, a notoriously accident-prone aristocrat adventurer who would come to be regarded as one of the founders of modern Kenya. Delamere first encountered the East African Protectorate after cutting a route through the bush and swamp from Somaliland in 1895 and had decided to return there to invest in livestock farming.5 In 1899, while back home at Vale Royal in Cheshire, he became engaged to Florence Cole. They married in a high-profile society wedding held in London’s Knightsbridge, at which the bridesmaids wore shamrock-shaped brooches given as gifts by the groom in honour of his new Irish connection.6 The Delameres then departed almost immediately for Africa, Florence exchanging the glamorous routines of debutante society for what was—initially at least—a fairly comfortless existence in a pair of mud-floored huts in the African wilderness. In 1904 Delamere established more solid lodgings, known as “Equator Ranch,” on an expansive 100,000 acre lease granted by the Crown Lands Ordinance on the western rim of the Great Rift Valley. It was still a rough lifestyle for the couple, the dangers of smallpox, ticks, snakes, malaria and locusts combining with the inevitable isolation of the new settlement, but in the early years Florence appears to have endured it reasonably well: a Country Life feature from December 1906, preserved in the family’s cuttings, pictures her cheerfully planting a flower garden and running the dairy on her husband’s “African estate.” The feature also recorded the couple’s close relations with the nomadic Masai, something that would underpin the strength of all three Cole siblings’ integration in Africa (both brothers learned to speak Masai and Berkeley compiled a basic English-Masai vocabulary list, collected with his papers). “Lord Delamere is the only settler of importance who employs Masai,” the Country Life article reported, “but he, and perhaps especially Lady

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Delamere, who speaks these native dialects, has succeeded in so winning their affection that no difficulty is experienced in controlling them.”7 Gradually the Delameres expanded their land and livestock holdings and established a small social circle among white settlers. They regularly hosted visitors to the country, including a young Winston Churchill who stayed with them on his visit to the Protectorate in 1907, joining in enthusiastically with Delamere’s pig-sticking and lion-hunting sorties.8 In 1910, they took on a larger enterprise near Soysambo in the Rift Valley. But Florence, who had left the couple’s infant son at home in the care of family, was increasingly alone on the ranch, with the responsibility of managing the native staff, the livestock and the dairy while Delamere travelled to purchase sheep or to go on hunting safaris. In 1911 she suffered a breakdown and went home, returning to Africa only briefly before her death from heart failure in 1914 at the age of 36. “She had all the charm, wit and sparkle expected of the Irish, as well as generosity of spirit and loyalty to a husband who, while not unkind or probably not unfaithful, gave more of his heart to his dreams and schemes for the growth of his adopted land than to his wife’s happiness,” recalled Elspeth Huxley: “[T]hat was the lot of many European wives and few complained.”9 Florence Cole’s experience of early pioneering life in British East Africa coincided with the boom period for white settlement in the Protectorate. At the turn of the century there were only a handful of white inhabitants, mainly colonial officials linked to the Imperial East Africa Company, set up in 1888 with an office in Mombasa. This community increased with the development of the new railway line—the so-called lunatic express—an extraordinary feat of engineering undertaken largely by imported Indian labourers and constructed at huge expense to link the coast to Lake Victoria and Uganda, with the aim of gaining easier access to the Nile.10 Europeans were welcomed with 99-year leases on land frequently already inhabited by native tribes, leading to a sequence of messy and controversial attempts at the relocation of the Kikuyu and Masai.11 For white settlers, civic life was still limited: early twentieth-century Nairobi was little more than a shanty town built to service railway construction workers, but with the arrival of new pioneers it began to develop a thin veneer of colonial society. Delamere advertised for English planters from his native Cheshire to join him in Africa, and his wife wrote to her two younger brothers, Galbraith and Berkeley, now released from their military engagements, suggesting they come out from Ireland to try their hand at farming the land.

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The story of Delamere and the Cole brothers, the “livestock barons of the Rift Valley” as Elspeth Huxley dubs them in her memoir Out in the Midday Sun, takes on legendary qualities in the accounts of Kenya’s several memoirists, all of whom testify to the extraordinary initiative and resilience of this trio while downplaying their part in the embryonic administration’s exploitation of the East African Protectorate’s natural resources. Several repeat for example, the story of how in 1904, a newly arrived Galbraith Cole encountered the impossibly steep gradient of the Rift Valley slope up to his allotted land beyond Thomson’s Falls and calmly dismantled his wagons to carry them up the escarpment, wheel by wheel, undaunted by the herds of rhino that surrounded him as he reached the plains above the valley floor.12 Like his brother-in-law Delamere, Galbraith saw many of his early experiments with livestock on his new farm end in failure as cattle and sheep imported from Australia and New Zealand proved too small, or too susceptible to disease, the night-time cold or marauding wild animals to survive in Africa. Even the construction of drainage and irrigation systems was a constant battle against the elements and without the benefit of trained ranch hands. Enduring these difficulties added to the mythology of these early white settlers in Kenya’s colonial folklore, with their strength of character read repeatedly as a justification, in itself, of their appropriation of the country. “Like most of these pioneers the Coles and the Delameres were imbued with a tenacious courage which accepts defeat, and tries again,” one memoirist observes. “It is true that land was bought cheaply by people of great wealth. But as they grappled with problems, and watched great herds of imported pedigree cattle dwindle with new viruses which they could not counteract, the coming to terms with nature’s stern rules was an arduous and sometimes hopeless process. It took a special brand of perseverance to cope with disappointment.”13 For Galbraith Cole, however, farming life in the new colony became disastrously caught up in the precarious balancing act between white-­ settler autonomy and native rights. His second farm at Kekopey was next to the new Masai reserve and was regularly invaded, according to reports, by Masai poachers in search of cattle. In 1911, Cole fired a shot at a party of cattle-thieves; one of the poachers was hit and subsequently died. The incident was brought to the governor’s attention and set up as something of a test case for colonial relations. “No local jury would convict Cole of any major crime,” records Bertram (Lord) Cranworth in his memoir Kenya Chronicles, “and the tribe in question, with whom the punishment

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for cattle-stealing from time immemorial had been death, saw no justifiable grounds for complaint.”14 The affair reads rather differently in a transcript of the trial assembled by the Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), another contemporary, whose version of events—though still sympathetic to Cole—puts a less ambiguous spin on the affair. The judge said to Galbraith, “It’s not, you know, that we don’t understand that you shot only to stop the thieves.” “No,” Galbraith said, “I shot to kill. I said that I would do so.” “Think again, Mr Cole,” said the judge. “We are convinced that you only shot to stop them.” “No, by God,” Galbraith said. “I shot to kill.”15

The episode itself is blurred by the likely embellishments of such memoir accounts. A central fact remains however: Galbraith Cole was sentenced to immediate deportation from the territory. Given the volatile politics of settler-tribal relations, it was felt that he should serve as an example of democratic white justice and he was expelled from the Protectorate in September of 1911. Back home in Florence Court he was miserable and frustrated, writing to friends of his distress and disorientation on being banished from Africa. After almost three years in exile he managed to return as far as Zanzibar where, on hearing that war had broken out, he jumped ship and sailed for 26 stormy hours in a chartered dhow to Mombasa. At the port he tracked down his brother Berkeley who took him back to his farm, until Galbraith was discovered and ejected from the country once again. He was saved this time however, by the outbreak of the War in the summer of 1914. He shaved off his moustache, assumed a false name and managed to get himself taken on by the military, re-­entering the Protectorate in the guise of an army stockman charged with shepherding a large herd of goats to Nairobi.16 From this point on, Galbraith Cole retreated to a relatively quiet life on his farm at Kekopey, near Gilgil on the shores of Lake Naivasha, his life increasingly constrained by worsening bouts of the rheumatoid arthritis that had first afflicted him during the Boer War. An unexpectedly detailed portrait of him during this period comes from the British writer Llewlyn Powys, later the author of a vivid modernist Africa-set memoir, Black Laughter (1924). Powys came to Africa in the hope that the climate would help his tuberculosis, and in 1914 took over from his brother Willie—who had enlisted in the army—as the farm manager on Galbraith Cole’s ranch,

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where he stayed until the end of the War. The relationship between the two men was surprisingly warm: Powys was sympathetic to the debilitated Cole and came to regard him as a fellow intellectual in the midst of the wilderness, Galbraith meanwhile recognised his new employee’s literary interests and asked him to assemble a gentleman’s library for the house at Kekopey. Powys’s writings based on this period, including Black Laughter and his shorter piece, “Diary of an African Sheep Farm,” contain detailed accounts of the everyday hardships of life on the ranch as Cole attempted to maintain a sheep-farming business in the face of disease (both livestock and human, including bubonic plague), wild animals, recurrent drought and famine. His correspondence similarly portrays this difficult environment but also emphasises the intellectual range and capacity of his employer. “Cole is a great satisfaction and consolation to me,” Powys wrote to his brother in 1916: “he may be as hard as flint and crafty as a snake, and cold as ice, but by jove he has a brain and one can say anything to him, and he will switch his brain onto it and ferret it out. He has more intelligence than anybody in East Africa and more distinction of mind.”17 Galbraith’s younger brother Berkeley Cole is a more familiar figure in the history of British East Africa, at least in the version of him that emerges from Karen Blixen’s 1937 literary memoir Out of Africa (better known through director Sydney Pollack’s much romanticised 1985 screen adaptation). Berkeley’s real-life story is sometimes difficult to retrieve from beneath a cinematic gloss. Certainly, he seems to have been a more dashing figure than Galbraith. Having arrived in the Protectorate shortly after his brother, he bought land high up at Narro Meru, a location fed by a clear natural trout stream running down from the flanks of Mount Kenya and populated by gazelle, zebra, warthog, rhino and leopards.18 Initially he involved himself in the timber trade, foresting cedar, camphor and podocarpus on a 3000-acre site north of Nyeri, working alongside another Boer War veteran and new arrival to the colony, Bertram Cranworth. “Cole knew much more about the business than I ever did,” Cranworth later reported. “He was a natural mechanic, and saws, circular or band, represented no mystery to him. Furthermore he was the big noise in the district, and our bad debts among the settlers were consequently comparatively few.”19 Having access to plentiful timber, Berkeley also flirted with hotel building in a now fast-expanding Nairobi, but his real interest was livestock, particularly horses. Together with yet another fellow old-­Etonian adventurer, Denys Finch Hatton, he set up in horse trading in Abyssinia and helped to establish the new race course at Nairobi.20 And in 1914, he

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was the founding member of Nairobi’s notorious Muthaiga Social Club. “[I]n an unusual outburst of respectability he said that he was sick of being treated like a pig,” Cranworth recalls, “and that he yearned for a club of a refined nature where, when you wanted a drink, you rang the bell and it was brought to you on a spotless tray.” The bar of the Muthaiga Club became the favoured watering-hole for the colony’s expanding white community (or its male constituents at least) of civil servants, merchants, hunters and entrepreneurs, while in the grounds its members played cricket and polo, the latter allowing Berkeley Cole to offload his imported Abyssinian ponies onto numerous lukewarm customers.21 Meanwhile, events in Ireland (and after 1914, in France) cast their long shadow over the formative years of the East African settlement. As Donal Lowry observes, the Irish Home Rule crisis in parliament reverberated across the settler communities of the Empire, with echoes of Ulster’s vocal loyalist resistance sounding throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Rhodesia, Natal and what would become Kenya.22 The wariness of Irish aristocrat imperialism in Africa was heightened by the perceived threat of London’s creeping disengagement from its colonial attachments, and the added insult of the 1916 Rising further reinforced hard-line unionist perspectives. John Cole wrote home from France, where he was serving with the North Ireland Horse Brigade, to suggest that the British Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, “ought to be hung beside Casement” for his disastrous failure to quell the insurgency, and to express his relief that his father was safe and well, having heard reports that members of Dublin’s Kildare Street Club, on their way home from the Fairyhouse races, had been seized by the rebels and kept as hostages: “…the idea of you languishing in a papist guard room is too aweful (sic),” he wrote. The war would exact its own revenge, he added later, once conscription was introduced, as he hoped it soon would be. “There will be great play dragging the papists off the mountains,” he enthused. “All my men are looking forward to the papists being made to join.”23 The continuities of domestic loyalism were complicated however, by the complex positioning of those witnessing the War abroad. In Africa the two younger Cole brothers were kept abreast of events at home in Florence Court, where their father had leased land to the War Office for practice trenches. By this stage, Galbraith and Berkeley Cole were caught up in ironic refractions of Irish political themes, as tensions in the Protectorate increased, partly over the continuing question of securing native land rights but more pressingly over local political hierarchies, with the white

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settlers (numbering 8000  in 1916) desperately seeking to maintain supremacy over a significantly larger Indian cohort of over 20,000.24 In a knock-on effect of this demographic instability, the outbreak of war simultaneously elicited from white settlers a range of embryonic nationalist sentiments relating to the concept of British East Africa as a distinct entity, a country—not just an imperial land-grab—to be saved from the expansionist ambitions of neighbouring German East Africa. Newly returned after his deportation adventure, Galbraith Cole was adamant that the British Protectorate had an independent identity in its own right, and one worth fighting for. He railed against the crippling arthritis that rendered him unable to join a regiment in France. “I think I know something now of the feelings of women when they are obliged to be inactive and await results,” he wrote to a friend in the spring of 1915, insisting too that “I should like to be there but even if I were fit, I should consider it incumbent on me to help this country. It annoys me very much to hear people here say they want to go home and that fighting here is rot, etc. This is their country and I consider they ought to do their best to help here. Supposing everyone went home we shouldn’t hold this country long.”25 The confusion over the exact status of “this country” was replicated in the confusion of the call to arms as news of the War spread. Several reports of the variegated white constituency that assembled in Nairobi in August 1914, ready to volunteer, indicate the uncertainty among the pioneers surrounding the exact national and international alignments of the conflict. As one account details: They came in shorts, in breeches, in helmets, in Stetsons, in double terais, high-laced boots, in shoes or puttees, in leggings, in tunics, in khaki shirts open at the neck, displaying brawny chests. They arrived in buggies, on horseback, on muleback, on motor-cycles, motorcars of every make, kind and age, plus bicycles and ox wagons, by train and on foot. Great hefty giants from the Uashin Gishu Plateau, Dutchmen, tall blond Norwegians, Swedes, swarthy Italians, lean muscular British settlers all gravitated at the call.26

Once the battle lines were better established, many of these settlers would go on to enlist in the newly constituted East African Mounted Rifles. Their defensive task was not an easy one. By November of 1914 morale in the Protectorate was shattered, first by the Tanga disaster, when a 4000-strong British Indian Expeditionary Force was devastated in a

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­ isastrous attempt to attack the German coastal port, and second by d depressing reports that Kitchener, the newly appointed Secretary of State for War, had described the East African territory as “strategically worthless.” Already disenchanted with the cavalier attitude of their imperial government, the British settlers were now aggravated by the interference in the life of the colony by parvenu military bureaucrats fresh off the boat from England, with little knowledge of local resources or tribal protocol. And the War itself seemed to some former military combatants a bedraggled affair, often amounting to nothing more heroic than a few skirmishes around the railway line, with troops defeated by illness, thirst and exhaustion long before any encounter with enemy forces.27 For Berkeley Cole however, the conflict presented a timely opportunity to put both military horsemanship and local knowledge to good use. Together with Denys Finch Hatton, Berkeley travelled to the Protectorate’s northern frontier to recruit a contingent of several hundred Somalis and some mules and set about patrolling a stretch of the railway line near Kilimanjaro.28 This irregular platoon was initially a promising venture; the Somali horsemen were clever and resourceful trackers, able to survive on local game—guinea fowl, quail and francolin—and fearless in the face of danger. Accounts of the endeavour suggest that Berkeley was an excellent commander, assuming “the complete brisk cheerful carriage and expression of an efficient young officer,” according to one commentator, and presiding over a disciplined unit which set up a well-organised camp on the racecourse at Nairobi.29 The Somali troops were called into action on a number of occasions during 1915. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, they rebelled. Cole—almost killed in the course of the mutiny—was instead put in charge of a unit of Loyal North Lancashires, and these, merging with the few Somalis who remained with him, became known as Cole’s Scouts. The unit worked closely with Masai guides and as a result moved effectively and quietly through the bush, using iodine to paint stripes on their horses to disguise them as zebras.30 “My brother has just been in a red hot engagement on the German border in which we lost 50 killed and 200 wounded out of 800 engaged,” wrote Galbraith Cole. “I am thankful to say he got through safely and only got some mules killed in his lot.”31 The unit was later disbanded and Cole transferred into the East African Mounted Rifles for the remainder of his war service.32 Inevitably, the conflict intensified pressure on the colony’s resources, both material and human. Conscription for black and white civilians was introduced in March 1917. “It makes life very difficult at times,” wrote

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Karen Blixen, bereft of servants and farm labourers, “but of course it is good if it leads to an end of the crazy war out here.” With the War’s end the colony’s suffering continued, however, in the form of a devastating drought that stretched throughout May and June of 1918 and left many local tribes on the brink of famine. Blixen describes how Delamere shot zebra on his estate and sent the meat to Nairobi for the native children but it was little help against widespread malnutrition. Many settlers meanwhile fell victim to the rapacious Spanish influenza that spread in the wake of the War, and several white farms and businesses went bankrupt.33 After the War, the Cole brothers stayed on in the Protectorate and managed to restore their estates. In 1918 Galbraith Cole married Eleanor Balfour (a niece of the former Conservative Prime Minister and Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour) to whom he had been introduced two years earlier in Nairobi. Eleanor Cole’s recollections of her life in British East Africa describe their twelve years of happy marriage and the birth of two children but also the continued decline of Galbraith’s health. He became almost completely immobile and blind in one eye, suffering severe pain as a result of his arthritis. The family moved briefly to England but Galbraith complained that he felt as if he were in prison and that he wanted to die where he could “hear a zebra barking.”34 The couple returned to Africa, leaving their sons behind at boarding school. In October 1929 Eleanor Cole loaded her husband’s revolver and then went for a walk, and Galbraith, assisted by his long-time servant Jama, shot himself. The colony’s well-known Irish doctor, Roland Burkitt, was sent for to confirm the death, and the next day, several friends arrived for the burial of Galbraith’s body near the house. A letter from Eleanor to John Cole gives an account of what had happened and includes a request that in the future her two children might spend their summers at Florence Court. “You can give them there what went to make G. and Berkeley, and which they can’t hope to get in any other way,” she wrote.35 Eleanor Cole stayed on in British East Africa for the rest of her life, witnessing the volatile years of the Second World War and the Mau Mau rebellion and eventually, independence in 1963, when she was one of the first white settlers to take citizenship of the new Republic of Kenya.36 Berkeley Cole remained single (giving rise to rumours of Somali mistresses and a homosexual relationship with Finch Hatton) and seems to have interspersed occasional bouts of inebriated excess in Nairobi with long periods of seclusion at his isolated farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya. One visitor to his house at this time later described how he appeared

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“dressed for dinner in a pair of shrunken crepe drawers that failed to cover his naked legs, and a patched old jacket. A huge Russian bear-hound eats off our plates at will. Three sheep came in at luncheon and hens pecked around the table….”37 It is through Karen Blixen’s writing, however, that Berkeley comes into some kind of ideological focus in the context of the new colony’s political constituency and with reference to his status as a scion of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. Blixen depicts Cole as the last inheritor of aristocratic imperialism, set defensively against an encroaching middle-class settler culture in Nairobi. She locates him, together with his brother Galbraith, Delamere and Finch Hatton, within the “first wave” of white settlers in the country, a pioneer caste defined in Shadows on the Grass as the “Mayflower people,” and characterised by a benevolent and selfless paternalism that validated the colonial project.38 Blixen was close to Berkeley and after her divorce from her Swedish husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, talked of marrying him, less for love than for his “Honourable” title as the son of a peer, and his land. “I like him very much and enjoy being with him,” she wrote to her brother in 1924, “and he is to get 150,000 acres in the north as a gift from the government—and that is always something.”39 Blixen fixed on the Cole brothers as embodiments of a refinement that was fast being eroded by Kenya’s post-war push towards modern commercial development. In a letter to her mother, sent from her farm at Ngong in 1917, she wrote of the “fearful living death of the English middle class mediocrity” that had beset the colony. Those of the “old Settler Club” who had come out before the railway was built, she continued, maintained their distance from this arriviste cohort, living close to nature with the Masai and rarely venturing into town for the vulgar social pursuits held at venues such as Nairobi’s Carleton hotel.40 In Blixen’s profile, Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch Hatton become the upholders of the Protectorate’s feudal ancien regime. By the time of writing Out of Africa she had further romanticised the two men into exiles cast out from an unsympathetic homeland and destined to “wander here and there” as if in instinctual brotherhood with the nomadic Masai. They were charming, uncompromising and resilient. “Such types,” she insisted, “were the natural leaders of native Africans.”41 The idea of “natural” leadership exemplifies Blixen’s rear-guard attempt throughout her writing to recruit Berkeley Cole to a broader justification of the European colonial project. This justification worked in tandem with a reiterated configuration of settler relations with the Masai, long regarded in white European perspectives as the aristocrats of the East African

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tribes.42 Through their bonds with the Masai, a select caste of settlers— and Berkeley in particular—provides Blixen with a felicitous image of instinctual aristocratic leadership, influenced, one suspects, by her enthusiastic reading of W. B. Yeats in the period. “Berkeley … is one of the old ‘Masai people’, who have lived among the Masai thoroughly, and have a great interest in and a sympathy for this ill-fated race,” she wrote to her mother.43 The theme is picked up in Out of Africa. When Berkeley stayed on her farm, she recalled, “the Masai came over the river to see him. The old chiefs sat and discussed their troubles of the present time with him, his jokes would make them laugh, and it was as if a hard stone had laughed.”44 Politically, Cole was consistently active on behalf of the Masai—he had defended them passionately against War Office interference when the tribe rebelled in 1918, in violent reaction to an attempt at conscription. But the relationship as Blixen saw it was also richly symbolic and necessarily theatrical. After the War, Berkeley Cole was asked by the government to award medals to those Masai chiefs who had helped with intelligence on German troop movements, and Blixen describes the ceremony that took place in the gardens of her house at Ngong. The Masai waited on the lawn, she recalled, and Berkeley kept them waiting, which was in order. “When in the end he came forth from the house he looked, in this dark company, very fair, red-haired and light eyed. He stands upright, and they stand, speaks in Masai; both sides inscrutable.” Despite the implicit comedy of a rather small Irish aristocrat attempting to pin medals on very tall men who were naked from the waist up, the account is reverential and solemn. “The ceremony could only have been carried through so well,” Blixen concludes, “by two parties of noble blood and great family traditions; may democracy take no offence.”45 Blixen’s portrait of Berkeley Cole reflects what Donald Hannah refers to as the “schizophrenic” condition of Kenya in its formative years—a pervasive feudalism running alongside developed European farming patterns and a modern business enterprise mentality.46 The Cole brothers can be seen to have spliced these two temporal states of existence. Berkeley’s characteristic theatricality seems to have allowed him to play the role of a feudal lord, swathed in a blanket in the style of the Masai, and ordering champagne to be brought to him each morning in the woods on Blixen’s farm.47 Yet he was simultaneously a calculating colonial entrepreneur, swift to recognise the natural resources of his adopted land and to exploit them in a series of building schemes and agricultural ventures. He was also— much more than Galbraith—an active member of the colony’s white

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administrative elite, not only in the bacchanalian environs of the Muthaiga Club but on the committees of Kenya’s “Legco” or Legislative Council, where he intervened in several long-running issues and in particular, on what he saw as the continuing mismanagement of native tribal resettlement.48 Like his sister and brother, however, Berkeley lacked physical robustness. He died in 1925 of a heart attack (and not, as his cinematic fate suggests, of blackwater fever). His elegists seize upon his death as symbolic of a sea change in the history and culture of Kenya Colony. In Forks and Hope, Elspeth Huxley, who made a pilgrimage to see his overgrown and empty house on the slopes of Mount Kenya, sets him up as the last in a retinue of effervescent early settlers. “Berkeley Cole was one of the old, colonial Kenya’s legends, impossible now to pin down,” she recalled, “a man whose brilliant colours faded, when he died, like those of a tropical fish or a blue-and-orange lizard. He had fine looks, supple conversation, grey eyes and a gay Irish wit. He never made money, entered politics or took life too seriously.”49 Karen Blixen similarly positioned his death as a dividing line between the old and new versions of the country. “An epoch in the history of the colony came to an end with him,” she writes in Out of Africa. “Up until his death the country had been the Happy Hunting Grounds, now it was slowly changing and turning into a business proposition.”50 The theme of an Irish aristocrat inheritance was sustained in the architecture of his memorial: both Berkeley and his brother Galbraith were commemorated by Irish round-tower style monuments, built to designs brought out from Enniskillen by John Cole, by now the fifth Earl.51 The transition from old to new Kenya had in fact been marked much earlier than the deaths of the two brothers in the 1920s. Even before the War, it was apparent that the keynote of white-settler imperialism had already shifted from what might be seen as an indirect, paternalist adventurism to a strategic commercial entrepreneurship. Along this same trajectory, economic and political interests were twinned in the ending of the British East African Protectorate at midnight on the 31st of December 1920, when Kenya was officially designated as a British Colony. Frequently at odds with London’s foreign office bureaucrats, a large cohort of the white settlers—numbering around 10,000 in total—now began to press for self-government in the country, in aggrieved response to London’s insistence on equal rights and representation for the Indian community. Under their slogan of resistance, “For King and Kenya,” the white-settler “Vigilance Committee,” as it styled itself, had Delamere and his colleagues

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reaching for analogies with 1912 and the mass signing of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant at the prospect of Irish Home Rule.52 The conflict over the hierarchy of the new colony dominated the debates of Kenya’s Legislative Council for years to come and in the end frustrated the early pioneer dream of a “white man’s country,” with aristocrat and Masai living undisturbed in quasi-feudal harmony. Recent lines of thought in Irish political and imperial history have pushed for us “to know far more than we yet do” about the Irish presence in the elsewheres of the British Empire.53 British East Africa is one of the less familiar “elsewheres” in this category. Many Irish men and women passed through or settled in the Protectorate in the years before 1920, but they lack visibility in Irish history, perhaps because their varied stories undermine a one-dimensional political narrative. The resources engaged in this account of the Coles show how such individuals are more readily recuperated through the anecdotal and biographical snapshots of literary memoir than through the collective architecture of colonial theory. This prismatic approach has its value, for while we might look for straightforward ideological parallels between an Ulster colonialist sensibility in early twentieth-century Ireland and the incentives of “frontier” communities across the Empire, such equations quickly become reductive. The Cole siblings are a case in point. Though they were willing participants in the high-watermark reach of British overseas expansion, the mixed motives and disparate fortunes of Enniskillen’s three British East Africa expatriates, Florence, Galbraith and Berkeley, also suggest a maverick element that complicates this overview. Their lives speak eloquently to the play of irony and paradox surrounding the role of numerous Irish settler-colonials who were first dislocated by the realignments of the Boer War and then embedded in a global imperial hinterland, which, in turn, conditioned and shaped their perspective on Ireland’s distant independence drama.

Notes 1. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford UP 1999), 7. 2. Enniskillen Papers (hereafter EP) at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), D1702/9/7. I am grateful to the Deputy Keeper of the Records, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for permission to quote from these sources throughout this chapter.

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3. For details of Enniskillen’s commercial landscape in this period see Henry N.  Lowe’s County Fermanagh One Hundred Years Ago: A Guide and Directory, rev. ed. (1880; repr., Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press, 1990). 4. EP, D1702/12/46/21–40 includes most of the 1901–1902 Boer War correspondence between the family members. Specific references above are from EP D1702/12/47, 11–20, Berkeley Cole to Charlotte Cole, 15 April 1901 and 28 June 1901. See also Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2000), 94–95. 5. Details from Charles Trevenix Trench, The Men Who Ruled Kenya: The Kenya Administration 1892–1963 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), 135– 37. Delamere’s settlement in Africa is also covered in Elspeth Huxley’s biography, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya, 2 vols. (London: Chatto, 1935, 1953). 6. “Court Circular,” Times, 12 July 1899, 12. 7. Country Life, 15 December 1906, n.p.; EP, D1702/9/4; see also D1702/12/48/30 for Berkeley Cole’s 35-page Masai vocabulary typescript. 8. Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), see 3–7. 9. Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 93. Florence Cole also features in the aviator Beryl Markham’s descriptions of her Kenyan adolescence in her 1942 memoir West with the Night (London: Virago, 1984). 10. See Charles Miller’s The Lunatic Express (London: Macmillan, 1971) for a full account of the railway venture. 11. Trench gives some overview of these attempted relocations, The Men who ruled Kenya, 97–99. 12. See, for example, Eleanor Cole, Random Recollections of a Pioneer Kenya Settler (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Random Publishing, 1975), 34–35. 13. Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relationship with Karen Blixen (London: Grafton, 1985), 122. See also her similar endorsement of the Coles in The Kenya Pioneers: The Frontiersmen of an Adopted Land (London: Mandarin, 1991). 14. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles (London: Macmillan, 1939), 64. Cranworth’s earlier (and tellingly entitled) account of this era, A Colony in the Making, or, Sport and Profit in British East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1912) is dedicated to Lord Delamere and Lady Florence Delamere (Cole). 15. Cited by Donald Hannah, ‘Isak Dinesen’ and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality (London: Putnam and Co., 1971), 35–36; see also Trzebinski, Silence will Speak, 127–28. 16. Much of this episode is described in his correspondence: see EP D1702/48/11, Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, 14 September 1914.

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17. The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, ed.  Louis Wilkinson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), 86. See also Malcolm Ellis, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), chapter 7. Ebony and Ivory—containing some of Powys’s “Diary of an African Sheep Farm”—was published in 1923. 18. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 6 and 131. 19. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 46. 20. The personal and business relationship between the two settlers is described by Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: the Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton (London: Vintage, 2007). 21. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 83 and 87–88. 22. Donal Lowry, “Ulster Resistance and Loyalist Rebellion in the Empire,” in An Irish Empire: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Keith Jeffery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 191–215. 23. John Cole’s war correspondence is mostly undated and subject to wartime censorship; for these references, see EP D1702/12/50/9, 50/10, 50/30. 24. Full demographics over the period are supplied by Keith Kyle, The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 25. Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, 9 March 1915, EP D1702/43/3. 26. A.  Davies and H.G.  Robinson, Chronicles of Kenya (1928), cited in Trzebinski, Silence will Speak, 164–65. 27. This period is charted by Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu (London: Macdonald and James, 1974); see especially 90–97. 28. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 187–88. 29. Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 165. 30. Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles, 196. 31. Galbraith Cole to Mrs Adrian Cave, n.d., EP D1702/48/9; see also Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 213–16. 32. Sara Wheeler discusses the Cole brothers in relation to Finch Hatton’s wartime operations at this time in Too Close to the Sun, chapter 4. 33. See Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) to Ingeborg Dinesen, 31 March 1917; and 29 June 1928, in Letters from Africa 1914–31, ed. Frans Lasson (for the Rungstedlund Foundation; trans. Anne Born) (London: Picador, 1983), 43 and 73. 34. Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 102–3. 35. Eleanor Cole to John Cole, 6 November 1929, EP 1702/48/29. For details of Roland Wilks Burkitt, known locally as “Kill or Cure Burkitt,” who arrived in the Protectorate in 1911, see Bernard Glemser, The Long Safari (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 22–25. 36. The remainder of Eleanor Cole’s life is described in her autobiography, Random Recollections; see in particular, 102. 37. Lady Frances Scott, cited by Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun, 240.

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38. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Shadows on the Grass (London: Penguin, 1984), 17. See also Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen, The Life of Karen Blixen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 114–15. 39. Isak Dinesen to Thomas Dinesen, 3 August 1924, in  Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 223. 40. Isak Dinesen to Ingeborg Dinesen, 14 June 1917, in  Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 49. 41. Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Out of Africa (London: Penguin, 1989), 185. 42. Several influential studies of the Masai in this regard appeared from the establishment of the Protectorate onwards: see in particular A.C. Hollis, The Masai: Their Language and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), introduced by Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner to British East Africa between 1900 and 1904. 43. Isak Dinesen to Ingeborg Dinesen, 1 June 1924, in Letters from Africa, ed. Lasson, 219. 44. Blixen, Out of Africa, 188. 45. Blixen, Out of Africa, 191. 46. Hannah, “Isak Dinesen” and Karen Blixen, 30. 47. Blixen, Out of Africa, 229–32. 48. There is some discussion of Berkeley Cole’s activity on the Council in C.J.  Duder and G.L.  Simpson, “Land and Murder in Colonial Kenya,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 3 (1997): 440–65; 442. See also Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, 123. 49. Elspeth Huxley, Forks and Hope: An African Notebook (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 87. 50. Blixen, Out of Africa, 193. 51. See Eleanor Cole, Random Recollections, 57. 52. See Lowry, “Ulster Resistance,” 198–99. The longer trajectory of settler agitation over Indian equal rights policy in Kenya is addressed by Christopher P.  Youé, “The Threat of Settler Rebellion and the Imperial Predicament: The Denial of Indian rights in Kenya, 1923,” Canadian Journal of History 12 (1978): 347–60. 53. Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xv.

CHAPTER 4

Walking to China: Infatuation and the Irish in New South Wales Killian Quigley

In 1826, the Anglican-Irish doctor and civil servant Robert Montgomery Martin travelled of his own volition to New South Wales, where he found work as a surgeon for a couple of years. He would write a History of Austral-Asia, the early pages of which emphasise the “great difficulties” plaguing the first period of settlement. Not least among the hindrances was the ground under the colonists’ feet: the “soil around Sydney Cove,” he explained, “was found to be extremely sterile, so that the possibility of immediately raising sufficient grain for the settlement was out of the question.”1 What efforts were made to clear and cultivate only quickened processes of erosion and sedimentation, and so, as Gavin Birch has made plain, until the settlers took their farming endeavours westward, they were basically making bad matters worse.2 Jonathan Lamb has lately explained that one consequence of this particular, alimentary hardship was a disastrous incidence of scurvy, and of the energies it entailed. The early colony, Lamb writes, “was nutritionally speaking no better than a becalmed large ship.”3 For Montgomery Martin, the fact that New South Wales weathered these circumstances was best understood as the sign of national, not to say quasi-racial, virtue: without “the most extraordinary perseverance,” K. Quigley (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_4

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as well as “that moral and physical courage which Britons possess in so eminent a degree,” the whole enterprise would surely have failed.4 The sentence containing the History of Austral-Asia’s agricultural complaint pauses at, and is extended by, a semicolon. In its latter segment, it communicates other sorts of grievance, these respecting “the conduct of the prisoners,” which “was, on several occasions, very detrimental to the public weal, theft being general, and desertion into the woods not unfrequent.” The word “prisoners” refers of course to some portion of the vanguard of the approximately 160,000 persons who were forcibly transported from the British Isles to Australia in the period 1787–1868.5 Montgomery Martin continues by recounting one of the more notorious varieties of convict conduct: At one time forty persons were absent from the settlement on their road to China! These travellers consisted principally of Irish convicts, who were convinced that China was not far distant to the northward, and were always making up parties for the purpose of decamping thither. Most of the wanderers perished of hunger, or were speared, and probably eaten by the natives.6

The notion of “public weal,” or weal-public, is doing curious work in these lines. By definition, the phrase conjures variously a people, a public, a community, and even a nation—and the well-being of the same. These seem aspirational, not to say utopian, notions in a colony built on the forced labour of persons whose arrival there signified their allegedly failing to participate productively in weals public on the opposite extremity of the globe. The singling out of Irishness is important here, too. Irish men and women comprised more than a quarter of all transportees,7 and during the very early years of the colony, observers made much of the various ways in which Irishry appeared to distinguish itself—to constitute, that is, a group and a character distinctly apart. For the History of Austral-Asia that distinction expressed itself with unusual force through the persons of pathetically deluded, and bizarrely persistent—the walkers “were always making up parties”—Irish expeditionists. Montgomery Martin carries on with the supposed story of one walker, in particular, whose identity and conduct, though narratively individualised, seem bare synecdoches for some endemic Hibernianism:

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An anecdote is told of one who, after traversing the woods near Sydney for several weeks, endeavouring to find out the road to China, had not only lost his way, but, as is often the case when the traveller is bewildered in a forest, lost also his senses. As good luck would have it, Pat, almost famishing, reached what he thought was a Chinese town; instinct drew him towards one bark hut in particular, which he cautiously approached, and was most agreeably astonished to find his wife, whom he hailed with joy, exclaiming, ‘Oh! Judy dear, how did you find your way to China?’8

Recognisable in Montgomery Martin’s story, which reached him at who-­ knows-­what remove, is a congeries of energies which this essay undertakes to explore. Those energies include, in a very basic sense, the construction of the character of the Irish convict in New South Wales—better perhaps to say very early colonial New South Wales—and that character’s special links to indolence, as well as to escapism, or what Pat and Judy’s overseers might have called bolting. They also express a sense of the colony at Port Jackson as a spot of comprehensibility adjacent to an undifferentiated zone—“the woods”—of wildness so perplexing that its disorientations imprinted themselves upon the physiology of the wanderer. That confusion cannot be unravelled from the fact that at that serendipitous juncture when he reaches a settlement, Pat is nearly “famishing”: his is furthermore a story of malnutrition and starvation, and of the various pathologies, such as scurvy, which attend thereupon, and which were, in Pat’s epoch, regularly taken to have a special connection to Irishness. This essay does not aim to settle the lineaments of the Irish convict character, nor to explicate the many Chinese treks the Irish were supposed to have deliriously assayed. It intends, rather, to consider the ways that character and those treks were apprehended and rendered in terms of circuits of pathological motion—of motion that is compulsive, repetitive, and without end. The literature of convict transportation to New South Wales, taking in not only early commentators, like David Collins and Matthew Flinders, but somewhat later writers, like Montgomery Martin, and indeed influential twentieth-century historians, such as Robert Hughes, has tended, with fascinating consistency, to feature the China-­ bound traveller as irresolvable, whether apprehended as a curiosity, an object of pity, or a frightful threat to the Australian project. New South Wales was a carceral colony that relied for its justification, and for its success, on its inhabitants’ manual work. By attending to stories like Pat and Judy’s, we might perceive a real existential anxiety provoked by figures

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who were taken to be sick—infatuated—with fantasies of a labourless somewhere, fantasies that seemingly impelled convicts to walk into the unknown, and to die, disappear, or arrive right back where they began. The persons to whom those figures refer—the real Pats and Judys, as it were—do not speak from the archive, and this paper will not render them plainly scrutable. It prefers instead to detain attention at a meaningful aporia, or what might be called, borrowing from Gayatri Spivak, an “inaccessible blankness.”9 Abiding with perplexity—without idealising it—may not so much recover Irish convict stories for posterity as invite them to estrange the record.

I Montgomery Martin’s story ends with its punchline, and does not tell us whether Pat returned to his senses or continued in the perhaps happy belief that Judy had reached China before he did, and had brought their hut along with her. Tales like this one are, as we will see, light on narrative closure, and it is their incomprehensibility that seems often to inspire their retelling. Once started walking to China, an Irish convict embarks on a repetitive cycle of disastrous failure and unfathomable refleeing, a cycle interrupted only temporarily by events like recapture and brought to terminal end only by death. The first significant exodus to pseudo-China appears to have happened in November 1791, and to have involved twenty men and one woman from the Queen transport ship, which arrived in New South Wales from Ireland earlier in the same year. They made their flight from Rose Hill, later known as Parramatta, a settlement about fifteen miles west of Port Jackson, or Sydney Cove. Seven of them died before the remainder were apprehended.10 Three of the recovered walked off again, and did not return.11 The following year, forty-four men and nine women, all Irish, departed; the Commissary’s Report for 1792 lists them all as presumed perished.12 Later, and in apparent connection, the colony’s judge-advocate-colonel, David Collins, would cite an ex-convict named Wilson, who preferred the hinterland to colonial society, and described the discovery of at least fifty skeletons in the woods beyond Sydney.13 Watkin Tench, officer of marines, wrote that he was “certain” these were all Irish bones.14 Over the course of early Australian history, the frequency of these incidents eventually diminishes, but not until thirty years or so after the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788. Parties of “Chinese ­travellers”

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were still undertaking the trek by the dozen in 1798 and 1803. John Hunter, Governor of New South Wales from 1795 to 1800, was sufficiently concerned with the material and psychological strain of the excursions as to organise a sort of refutative expedition, in which four Irish convicts were actually invited to attempt the route, accompanied by four soldiers and three guides. The idea, of course, was to prove beyond a doubt that the Chinese walk—or any liberatory perambulation, for that matter—was utterly impracticable, and it is worth emphasising that Hunter felt himself pushed to this exigency by the fact that the spectacle of former, gruesome failures had not affected the anticipated, and hoped-for, discouragement. Matthew Flinders, naval officer and author of A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), wrote of Hunter’s remedy that the soldiers and three of the convicts were back within ten days, but that one of the Irish refused to give in, and kept the guides out with him for almost four weeks. They covered only 140 miles, and in a southwesterly direction. (Were it possible to walk to China, one would need to span about 7000  miles, north-north-west.)15 Descriptions of these incidents tend to alternate in tone among pity, ridicule, and a kind of dumbfounded exasperation. George Barrington, himself Irish-born and a convict transportee who was first pardoned and then installed as chief constable at Parramatta, claimed that the escapees, of whose number he decidedly was not, were subject to a “strong conjunction” of “daring folly” and “extreme ignorance.”16 The Catholic priest and historian John Kenny was somewhat more sympathetic, if rather opportunistic, in his 1886 explanation, chalking up the China myth to an Irish “innate love of liberty,” as well as to an understanding hampered by the educational restrictions imposed for Irish Catholics by the Penal Laws.17 The Sydney-based newspaperman Samuel Bennett pointed to illiteracy, as well as the unfortunate influence of knowledge “unwritten” and “traditionary,” to account for the superstition.18 Barrington’s diagnosis of collaborative folly and ignorance, if perhaps unkind, may be the subtler, and it seems to relate closely to the wonderment of some of his near contemporaries, like that of Matthew Flinders and of Philip Gidley King, John Hunter’s successor as governor. Both Flinders and King accounted for the disturbing and proliferating escapes by referring to some variety of Irish “infatuation.”19 Flinders claimed that some “singular species of infatuation had taken hold of the minds” of the Irish walkers.20 In 1803, King fixed the punishment for absconding at 500 lashes per convict, along with double chains for the duration of their

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s­ entence. This determination was made after fifteen “infatuated” Irish ran away from the government farm at Castle Hill, which had been established two years previously to the north of Rose Hill.21 Two of those fifteen were hanged for this and other crimes. (It is perhaps worth contemplating the incident, and King’s response, in connection to the disastrous Castle Hill rising of 1804, in the course of which twenty-four convicts, mostly Irish, were killed, and in the wake of which numerous more were sentenced to death.22) The recourse to infatuation as an explanatory term may be a result of the fact that for all the signs of hazard and failure, the travellers swelled in ranks and in boldness with the passing years. Flinders, for instance, complained that “the sufferings and the danger” of the party Hunter had sent into the bush “had not the desired effect of preventing desertion, and numbers every year continued to meet their fate in the woods.”23 As a pseudo-medical concept, infatuation signifies possession of the subject with extravagant folly, or extravagant passion. It also, and more basically, denotes rationality’s contrary term. Reason conventionally opposes itself to passion, instinct, and will, and makes the counterintuitive claim that by suppressing raw self-interest, humans can attain to freedom.24 The travellers located their chance at liberty in a course that seemed to lookers-on, and to historians, like a deliberate and perverse affront to the very notions of the consensus view, and of considered choice. A demonstration like Hunter’s appears not to have impressed itself upon the minds of its intended audience: neither, that is, to have convinced them of the fantasy’s falsehood, nor to have encouraged them in the understanding that they were simply better off where and as they were—to encourage them, Hunter might have said, to take care for their selves. These Irish convict selves were out of control, in the thrall of absurdity and derangements and fundamentally dislocated from anything like collectivity or concord.

II The idea of infatuation as reason’s absence, or reason’s antagonist, expressed itself through a range of discourses, not least religious ones. The anonymous English author of one 1770s polemic assailed mindless faith as conducive to “blind and infatuated Bigotry,” the work and source of “ignorant devotees...who affix their names, their assent and consent to Doctrines, which they can neither form any rational notion of, by the powers of their own mind, nor, by the vehicle of language, can explain or

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communicate to others.”25 The infatuated can articulate their beliefs neither to themselves nor to others, but for all that are no less committed thereto. Language’s explicatory and persuasive functions cease to operate, and the self operates singularly, but without any capacity for accounting for its own behaviour, not even to itself. One of infatuation’s closest kin is fatuity, which designates a kind of dementia, or “mental blindness.”26 The educator and Anglican clergyman John Bidlake relied on a dichotomy between fatuity and divinely enlightened thought in his sermons (1795–1799), which call their auditors “to shew forth our light unto men” and so avoid falling prey to the “fatal fatuity” of failed self-knowledge.27 For Bidlake, “infatuation” is the state of the person who cannot perform the sort of calculus that would lead to good behaviour—who does not grasp even “the present advantage of virtue over vice,” let alone the more lasting benefits thereof.28 It is also the state of the superstitious and idolatrous, and in this way fatuity begins to resemble a disease of archaism, and the infatuated a crowd of obsoletes.29 Superstitious and idolatrous were, of course, not unusual epithets for the Catholic Irish, in New South Wales as elsewhere. And in a general sense, Bidlake’s archetypal infatuated closely resemble the walkers, who refused to give up their attempts despite the most glaring encouragement to the contrary: they proved impervious to “inducement” towards rational, and so upright, action.30 Infatuation’s eighteenth-century logic also suggests that the travellers were ill. The idea of mental blindness could and regularly did span the line separating physiological from a moral malady. The minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse condemned, in his influential The American Geography (1789), the terrifying “spirit of infatuation” that had reigned during the New England witch trials of the previous century. That spirit, Morse wrote, exercised itself through the persons of the accusers and their apologists, and was associated, vaguely but certainly, with “bodily disorders” of some kind.31 And Jonathan Lamb has outlined the manners in which infatuation intersected with specifically maritime medical discourse, especially in its aptness for describing the psychological situation of persons afflicted with scurvy, “a disease that infiltrates and advertises infatuation.”32 Under these lights, Herman Melville’s Ahab, from Moby Dick (1851), becomes an emblem of scorbutic fatuity and its dire effects on expeditionary ventures: “Inexplicable, terrible, and capricious,” Lamb argues, Ahab and his ilk are “lieutenants of a dangerous and unpredictable force menacing the system.”33

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Threats to systems—of belief, of knowledge, of economy, of identity, and indeed of state—crop up everywhere in infatuation’s vicinity. Fatuitous behaviour, Lamb shows, is typified by the extreme elevation of “ego,” as opposed to the sort of mutually beneficial workings that might conduce to the success of a collective project, such as a voyage, a state, or the establishment of a colony.34 In a relevant discussion of retreat and retirement (retraite), Roland Barthes associated selfishness of this order with idleness (oisiveté) and a sort of minor-key self-possession (la propriété menue).35 Infatuation discourse renders this kind of thing monstrous when it attests to the potential for egoism to transcend the boundaries of a self to become, paradoxically, an epidemic condition: Lamb has shown how the early eighteenth-­century speculative financial disaster known in retrospect as the South Sea Bubble was interpreted as the sign of infatuation’s propensity to spread itself from individuals to possess a population.36 Daniel Defoe, who at one stage had advocated on behalf of the South Sea Company, was impelled eventually to grant “that it was a terrible infatuation with terra incognita.”37 Relevant, too, is David Bindman’s analysis of infatuation’s valence in settler-colonial writings from the Caribbean: in The History of Jamaica (1774), Edward Long lamented the “infatuated attachments” obtaining among “white men in that colony” and “black women.” As Bindman shows, Long’s disparagement issued from an ineluctable combination of racism and the conviction that such affairs were potentially, seriously injurious to the fate of the colony.38 Such racialisation is worth juxtaposing, in turn, with the manner in which Captain James Cook was thought “infatuated” by lookers-on in the period just preceding his death: his passions, in the ascendant, seemed to loosen his grip on reason, and even to make him appear more Maori than English.39 It is apparent that the travellers to China were regarded as representatives, and reproducers, of the sort of inscrutable chaos expressed by delusional sailors at moments of unusual insalubrity. And it is by no means impossible that some of the Irish escapees were suffering, or would suffer, from scurvy. As I have written elsewhere, from the late eighteenth century and well into the following one, doctors and ships’ surgeons began registering, and attempting to interpret, apparent linkages between Irish convict transportees—and Irishry writ large—and scurvy.40 These linkages were for the most part accounted for by a diffuse sense of the potential for certain factors to predispose one to the disease, and the tendency of the Irish constitution to exhibit those factors. Aboard the Royal Admiral, a convict transport ship that arrived in New South Wales in 1833, the naval

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surgeon Andrew Henderson claimed that the “habits” of the Irish “predisposed” them to scurvy, and that this had something important to do with superstition, melancholy, indolence, and a kind of inscrutability. The Irish response to melancholy, he wrote, distinguished them from the English or Scottish insofar as the first, “from a sort of Superstition, or some other Cause, are constantly brooding over their misfortunes— encouraging one another in this particular rather than otherwise.” The Irish were, Henderson wrote, “indolent,” “filthy” and refractory, “sure to engage [in work of any kind] in a contrary way.” He thinks this partly explicable via reference to conditions, but concludes, vaguely, that it’s all “part of their character.” Preventing further deterioration of the situation aboard the Royal Admiral would involve, in part, avoiding at all costs the reminding of the Irish prisoners of their “degraded condition.”41 To combat scurvy and its attendants, Henderson seems to stay, best to encourage a kind of distraction—a form of mental blindness, perhaps—among the Irish, so as to keep them from considering their circumstances. Bringing the scorbutic question into contact with the route to China does not solve the riddle of the absconding soul, but it does help illustrate the ways that infatuation could signify a physiological, as well as a moral, condition. And it also indicates the manner in which groups of people, not least the Irish, were imaginable, and actively imagined, as linked and distinguished by certain predispositions. In the course of a colonial project, and at an extraordinarily far-flung spot, such imaginings became tools for thinking, as well as sources of profound unease. Lamb shows how Britain’s New South Welsh enterprise involved simultaneously the establishment of a new civil society and the incorporation of new natural knowledge into a rational system.42 The Chinese travellers, and the derangement they expressed and reproduced, took bizarre exception to these missions. For Henderson, the Irish were not only depressed, but liable to spread their depression to their fellows, as if it were a sort of sympathetic contagion. Walking to China operated similarly, and helped hail into existence an Irish convict character, one defined by conjoined pathology and refusal to perform labour.

III It is significant that, as Governor King undertook to slow the tide of Irish travellers by ramping up their punishment, he operated under the assumption that the Chinese fantasy signified work’s opposite term: the flight was,

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he wrote, primarily a matter of “leaving public labor.”43 And according to some, there was yet another utopia, somewhere around 300 to 400 miles to the southwest, a parallel colony whose only distinguishing characteristic seems to have been that no one there had to work.44 In rather a pithy turn of phrase, David Collins referred to bolting as the “practice of flying from labour into the woods,” as though work constituted a literal locality as well as an occupation. Of the first party of walkers, in 1791, Collins recalled the protestations of some of the captured—the same who would depart again, and disappear—that “they wanted nothing more than to live free from labour.” Indeed, in Collins’s understanding, there was little difference, in the minds of the convicts, between an actual place called China and, more abstractly, “some country wherein they would be received and entertained without labour”—wherein they would be made guests, the sort of guests who would not be asked to do any work.45 Lamb has argued that the New South Wales colony was to a large extent a “utopian exercise in the management and reformation of criminals as citizens of a new commonwealth.”46 If this is right, then it is tempting to regard pseudo-China and its relations as alternative arcadias. The latter might resemble the (colonial) island commonwealth conjured by the passionate, gormless Gonzalo, in his intoxicated reverie from Act 2 of The Tempest (1611):           I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries           Execute all things; for no kind of traffic           Would I admit; no name of magistrate;           Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,           And use of service, none; contract, succession,           Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;           No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;           No occupation; all mine idle, all;           And women too, but innocent and pure;           No sovereignty;—47

Shakespeare’s audience is invited to believe that, if Gonzalo is naïve, he is also humane, and basically good; by the play’s end, he has been placed firmly within the zone of their sympathy. The same can hardly be said of the travellers to China, descriptions of whom are pitched to prompt at least bafflement, and not infrequently disgust. As John Kerrigan notes, the indolent attitude of Gonzalo’s speech does disqualify it, if not its orator,

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from The Tempest’s final attitude, which is georgic.48 And this is what makes it worth contemplating in conjunction with impressions of Irish escapees, and with attempts to interpret their motives: by narrating the travellers as seeking, above all, an end to work, their observers define their efforts as ontologically inimical to the colonial endeavour, in something like the way that Gonzalo’s discourse—which was inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes”—is finally heard as an imaginative and temporary diversion from the path to sovereign consolidation at the end of Shakespeare’s drama. Visions of indolent idyll did not have a place in a colony that existed by virtue of manual labour, most of it forced, and I am proposing that, ludicrous as the Chinese traveller appears from our remove, we take Montgomery Martin rather seriously when he proposes that the flights were “very detrimental to the public weal.” It may be worth asking to what extent a “public weal,” or even a “public,” can be said to have actually existed in the first fifteen years of the Australian colony, when a small population was engaged as much in survival—in avoiding starvation, for example—as in anything else. In a basic sense, it is perhaps worth stressing that the flight of what were apparently hundreds of convicts into the woods between 1791 and 1803 would have created numerical difficulties: the European population of New South Wales was only about 3500 by 1796, and about 900 were Irish.49 For a group of sixty to take off into the woods at once—a phenomenon which Hughes claims was happening regularly—must have been a cause for serious practical concern. In any case, if a public weal could have been said to exist, it would surely have relied for its existence on the presence and power of physical work engaged in the georgic transformation of earth and woods to farm and settlement. The pathological disinclination or inability of a large portion of the population to carry out such work must have seemed, at times, to expose a frightening kind of instability at the bottom of the enterprise. Of course, the Irish in New South Wales are by no means unique figures in colonial history for having resisted displacement, management, and toil, or for having conjured, and attempted, less-intolerable alternatives. At the same time, analogic thinking carries hazards: comparing the Chinese travellers to, for instance, enslaved persons transported to European colonies in the Caribbean and North America risks neutralising the distinctive features of disparate contexts, not to mention setting up weird and insupportable correspondences. Still, it would be remiss not to recognise the complex and differentiated histories of escapism that

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a­ ccompany and complicate colonial narratives the world over. Such histories emerge from, for instance, Monique Allewaert’s analysis of the figure of the maroon in the writings of the American botanist John Bartram. For Bartram, maroons, and enslaved persons more broadly, are apprehended in proximity to tropical environments, and particularly to habitats such as swamps. Wetlands not only harbour maroon communities but vex colonial methods for conceptualising and organising space.50 J. R. McNeill is one other scholar to have pondered maroon settlements in connection to environmental history: in Cuba, escapees made homes in the woods, and planters responded by cutting and burning trees.51 Allewaert explains that, for Bartram, maroons were “potent revolutionaries” who “used the ecology of the tropics to their advantage.”52 In stark contrast, it practically goes without saying that the Irish walkers were recorded as neither efficacious nor environmentally savvy. As transplants from the British Isles, they may express a vexed relation to the Australian colony, but they are not identified with their new surroundings, nor conflated with Montgomery Martin’s “natives.”53 Likewise, if Neil Roberts’s formulation of marronage is worth considering in proximity to Irish convicts, it is as much for the incongruities as for the affinities that appear thereby. On the one hand, the Chinese journey appears a definitively “liminal” domain, and, as this essay has attempted to show, manifests in the literature as a more or less “constant act of flight.”54 And the regular use of the word “bolter” to signify the Irish convict escapee55 invokes an extra-­ human referent not unlike the bovine one at root of cimarrón.56 At the same time, while Collins and others did not refrain from invoking race to other the Irish,57 marronage’s ties to biases based in chromatic difference and explicitly anti-black racism and violence surely complicate the comparison. And of course, what may most firmly distinguish the Chinese venture from Roberts’s subjects is the fact that the former is never invoked as a means for successfully enacting revolutionary freedom.58 This is not to say that the Irish escapees were not resisting. But it is to say that the ends of that resistance remain fundamentally unresolved. The vector of the walkers’ resistance is correspondingly oblique. In a letter to the Duke of Portland, in 1798, Governor Hunter warned that “if so large a proportion of these lawless and turbulent people, the Irish convicts, are sent into this country, it will scarcely be possible to maintain the order so highly essential to our well-being.”59 This is probably better understood less in terms of xenophobia than as a response to a general impression of derangement, a derangement which the colonial project was

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actively exacerbating. Hunter was sensitive, for example, to what he perceived as the especially compromised status of the Irish, who were sent to New South Wales, he wrote, in an “extremely careless and irregular” manner. The Australian enterprise was experienced, by many, as insensible and arbitrary, and while this was by no means uniquely true of Irish convicts, there existed a widespread impression among early colonial administrators that theirs was a particularly indeterminate position. Matthew Flinders ascribed the Irish convicts’ troublesomeness, in part, to the fact that they’d been sent to Australia without proper documentation, and so neither they nor their hosts knew how long were their sentences.60 Henderson had called the character of the Irish convicts he encountered “a complete tissue of inconsistency,” but surely that phrase was at least as apt a figure for the convict’s situation in Australia. From a position of essential indeterminacy, the Irish set off on a ludicrous route to a country that was either impossible to reach or simply made up. From the experiences of characters like Pat, as well as from the situation of Irish convicts more generally, a sense emerges of a character multiply subject to compulsory motion, motion that sometimes took the form of a disordered circle. The better figure, as far as Pat and Judy are concerned, might be a spiral, as the walker rounds the twist to come to a place that is simultaneously home, prison, and a figment of the imagination. There is another story, famous and dubious, of a group of Irish walkers who, upon journeying into the bush, found themselves lost. One of them recalled having seen a compass on the transport ship that had carried him, and set about making one, so that he and his compatriots could direct themselves. So he tore a piece of bark from a tree and drew the instrument, including its magnetic needle, thereupon. Equipped with this implement of bewilderment—Hughes called it a “magical facsimile”—the convict is reported to have led his group in a large circle.61 The fake likeness is a recurring theme in recent literary treatments of early Australia, such as Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker (1987), where the convict Will Bryant describes feeling that in the course of transportation he has “passed through a mirror, a fiery and transforming one” which “buggers up…the numbers on the page.”62 Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), likewise, conjures an atmosphere in which belief in changelings—in secret, imperceptible substitutions—is rampant. This might apply to the ground under one’s feet: the bushranger Ned complains that he and his ilk are “ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon.”63

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Hughes called the idea of escaping to China one of the early colony’s “obsessive images,” its enthusiasts primarily those Irish who “had constructed a Paradise myth to alleviate their antipodean Purgatory.”64 In a review of Carey’s True History, John Updike lengthened Hughes’s thread by establishing an ennobling succession from “bolter” to “bandit-­ bushranger,” the latter being settler-colonial Australia’s romantic outlaw figure par excellence.65 But these seem too-straightforward accountings for and extrapolations from a phenomenon that dumbfounded so many of its witnesses. And further, it is not at all clear that pseudo-China alleviated anything for anyone, unless one is inclined to idealise disorientation, starvation, and death. At the same time, however, Hughes’s and Updike’s analyses testify usefully on behalf of a kind of poetics of obsession, or—to transpose our key term—infatuation. The Chinese travellers were certainly engaged, imaginatively and bodily, in creative acts, acts that clearly did not rely for their instigation, continuance, or repetition upon sure knowledge of their fulfilment. This is worth pondering in relation to R. P. Blackmur’s discussion of an infatuated poetics. Vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s sonnets (1590– 1609), Blackmur adumbrates: “If I cannot have my love I will create it, but with never a lessening, always an intensification of the loss, the treachery, the chaos in reality.”66 What this suggests, and what it has in common with Chinese travel, is the centrality of fabrication to the walkers’ work, and the refusal—the incapacity—to interpret that work as inclining towards a state of completion. Of course, whom Pat was overjoyed to find was Judy, and what he was overjoyed to find was home. The relations existing, and absent, between convict transportees and home-places haunt New South Wales to this day: in the course of remembering her childhood at Echo Point, in Sydney’s Middle Harbour, Delia Falconer is spurred by the spot’s sense of incompleteness and haphazardness to conjure the ghosts of a group of China-­ bound walkers, who she reckons would have passed by, “picking their way among its mangrove roots and across the sticky mud that popped with crab-holes.”67 And one wonders what place nostalgia might occupy in this atmosphere, bearing that disorder’s explicitly pathological meanings in mind: after all, the Scottish pathologist William Aitken wrote that Irish soldiers constituted one category of person most likely to manifest the nostalgic “form of insanity.”68 Furthermore, Kevis Goodman has written about nostalgia as a “mobility disability,” one that functioned, in the contexts of war and colonialism, to produce “[cogs] in the wheel of political economies premised on circulation and assimilation.”69 This is because of

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the languor nostalgia induced. But if, on the other hand, travellers to China were cogs in the wheel of the Australian enterprise, they were so because they declined—or failed—to stop moving. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that they refused to effect the kinds of motion that the colony appeared to need, alternating instead between indolence and extraordinary abscondment. If they were sick with a craving for someplace, they were also sick with a sort of compulsive, repetitive motion. This motion was, this paper has argued, powerfully active in early New South Wales, deeply concerning for its managers, and connected to pathologies of Irishness. Were the Chinese travellers looking for home? It would take at least another paper to grapple with what home might have meant for Irish transportees in the late eighteenth century, and whether returning there, particularly after 1798, would have appealed. (For many former convicts, it clearly would not.) But it seems at least worth considering whether the infatuated Irish were involved in a creative substitution of their own, one that exploited the potentialities, as well as the terrors, of moving through mirrors. And it may be most insensible of all to call absurd the movements of persons thrust into positions of permanent confusion. As to whether Pat found China, this essay is not equipped to say, but I would not be the first to tell him that he didn’t.

Notes 1. Robert Montgomery Martin, History of Austral-Asia: Comprising New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Swan River, South Australia, &c., 2nd ed. (London: Whittaker & Co., 1839), 25. 2. Gavin Birch, “A Short Geological and Environmental History of the Sydney Estuary, Australia,” in Water, Wind, Art and Debate, ed. Gavin Birch (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007), 220. 3. Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 166. 4. Montgomery Martin, History of Austral-Asia, 24–25. 5. See Katherine Foxhall, “From Convicts to Colonists: The Health of Prisoners and the Voyage to Australia, 1823–53,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 1 (March 2011): 3. 6. Montgomery Martin, History of Austral-Asia, 25. 7. See Con Costello, Botany Bay: The Story of the Convicts Transported from Ireland to Australia, 1791–1853 (Cork and Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1987), 9. 8. Montgomery Martin, History of Austral-Asia, 25.

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9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 89. 10. Charles White, Convict Life in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, parts 1 and 2 (Bathurst: C. & G. S. White, 1889), 89. 11. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 204. 12. White, Convict Life, 89. 13. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1804), 438. 14. Quoted in Tim Flannery, ed., Watkin Tench’s 1788 (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009), 209. 15. Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1986), 22. 16. George Barrington, The History of New South Wales (London: M. Jones, 1810), 231. 17. John Kenny, A History of the Commencement and Progress of Catholicity in Australia, up to the Year 1840 (Sydney: F. Cunninghame & Co., 1886), 20–21. 18. Samuel Bennett, The History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation (Sydney: Hanson & Bennett, 1867), 166. 19. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 204. 20. Matthew Flinders, “A Voyage to Terra Australis,” The Quarterly Review (October 1814): 34. 21. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 204. Also Barbara Hall, A Nimble Fingered Tribe: The Convicts of the Sugar Cane, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1793 (Coogee: B. Hall, 2002), viii. 22. Helen Doyle, “Castle Hill Rising,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), n.p. 23. Flinders, “A Voyage to Terra Australis,” 35. 24. Ian Buchanan, “Rationality,” in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), n.p. 25. A Layman, Strictures, Miscellaneous and Comparative, on the Churches of Rome, England and Scotland (Dublin: A. Kilburn, 1775), 96. 26. “Fatuity, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), n.p. 27. John Bidlake, Sermons, on Various Subjects, 2 vols. (London: Murray, Highley, & Chapman, 1799), vol. 2, 12–13. 28. Bidlake, Sermons, 37. 29. Bidlake, Sermons, 143. 30. Bidlake, Sermons, 209.

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31. Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography; or, A View of the Present Situation of the United States of America (Elizabethtown: Shepard Kollock, 1789), 191. 32. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 133. 33. Lamb, Scurvy, 54–55. 34. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 131. 35. Roland Barthes, Le Neutre: Notes de cours au Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Thomas Clerc (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 179–87. 36. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 86. 37. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 75. 38. David Bindman, “Representing Race in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean: Brunias in Dominica and St. Vincent,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 4. 39. Lamb, Scurvy, 57. Also Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 122–23. 40. Killian Quigley, “Indolence and Illness: Scurvy, the Irish, and Early Australia,” Eighteenth-Century Life 41, no. 2 (2017): 139–53. 41. Andrew Henderson, Medical and Surgical Journal, Male Convict Ship “Royal Admiral,” The National Archives, Kew, ADM 101/65/2, 1833. 42. Lamb, Scurvy, 156. 43. Quoted in Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 204. 44. Ibid. Nicolas Baudin reported hearing of yet another, around the “northern extremity” of the Blue Mountains. See Baudin, “Letter from Captain Baudin, to Citizen Jussieu, dated New Holland, Port Jackson, the 20th Brumaire, Year XI,” Monthly Magazine 18, no. 121 (1804): 306. 45. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 150–51. 46. Lamb, Scurvy, 156. 47. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Works of William Shakespeare, eds. William George Clark and John Glover, 9 vols. (Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co., 1863), vol. 1, 29. 48. John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 89–103. 49. Barbara Hall, A Desperate Set of Villains: the Convicts of the Marquis Cornwallis, Ireland to Botany Bay 1796 (Coogee: B. Hall, 2000), 11. 50. M. Allewaert, “Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 340–57. 51. J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30–31. 52. Allewaert, “Swamp Sublime,” 346–50. 53. The meanings and positions of “natives” in these narratives are untreated by this essay, and demand substantial further consideration.

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54. Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4, 9. 55. See for instance Alan Day, “Irish Convicts,” in The A to Z of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2009), 114. 56. Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, 5. 57. To wit: Collins asked of the Irish whether it “could be imagined that, at this day, there was existing in a polished civilized kingdom a race of beings (for they do not deserve the appellation of men) so extremely ignorant, and so little humanised as these were, compared with whom the naked savages of the mountains were an enlightened people?” Quoted in Costello, Botany Bay, 23. 58. Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, 5, 26 59. Quoted in O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, 37. 60. Flinders, “A Voyage to Terra Australis,” 35. 61. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 204. 62. Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker (London: Serpentine, 1987), 180. 63. Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 296–97. 64. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 203. 65. John Updike, “Both Rough and Tender,” in Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (London: Penguin, 2007), 349. 66. R.  P. Blackmur, “A Poetics for Infatuation,” The Kenyon Review 23, no. 4 (1961): 648. 67. Delia Falconer, Sydney (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 118. 68. William Aitken, The Science and Practice of Medicine (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1866), ii, 455. 69. Kevis Goodman, “Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, eds. James Chandler and Maureen N.  McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 200.

CHAPTER 5

Competing Narratives: White Slavery, Servitude and the Irish in Late-Eighteenth-­ Century America Martyn Powell

In the autumn of 2017, the popular Irish history journal History Ireland found itself embroiled in an uncomfortable controversy, facing the ire of a sizeable number of academics and other scholars over the publication of a letter by a prominent member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Mike McCormack, on the subject of Irish “slavery.” McCormack had referenced the work of the Limerick librarian and political activist Liam Hogan, which had found its way into the New York Times, in the form of an article by Liam Stack on St. Patrick’s Day, 2017, titled “Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too.” Though covering Hogan’s work, McCormack’s letter was actually in reply to a History Ireland  essay by John Donoghue titled “The Curse of Cromwell: Revisiting the Irish slavery debate,” which notes the way in which the Irish nationalist take on “white slavery” has been utilised by the Alt-Right, but then goes on to argue for the reality of Irish “slavery.”1 McCormack’s letter was particularly problematic as not only did it accuse Hogan of “trying to create an audience for his controversial book on white racism,” but it also included M. Powell (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_5

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criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement—a potent subject given the Alt-Right’s determination to undermine black slavery by casting doubt on its exceptionalism.2 Although McCormack has received the lion’s share of the coverage of this episode, the Donoghue article should not be passed over. It focuses on indentured Irish servants in the seventeenth century, suggesting that they were treated in a similar fashion to enslaved Africans and that their self-perception as “slaves” should be noted. His section dealing with William Petty’s views has been challenged by Ted McCormick, a Petty expert.3 However, the more general point on the Irish indentured-servant experience is less straightforward to deal with, as it has an increasingly high public profile thanks to works like Michael Hoffman’s They were White and They were Slaves (1993), Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (2008) and a range of other contributions across a variety of forms of media.4 Part of the problem lies in the refusal to take the category of indentured servant seriously. As John Martin, author of one of the most high-profile internet essays on the subject, comments: “Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like ‘Indentured Servants’ to describe what occurred to the Irish.”5 Even Donoghue states: “Unfree whites who called themselves slaves or were called such by black slaves were known in law as ‘indentured servants,’” as if this was simply a legal nicety.6 The line taken by such authors tends to be that this was slavery because the individuals were bought and sold, they were mistreated and their personal liberty restricted.7 While Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C.  Reilly have contested this handling of the subject matter with an accent on the seventeenth-­ century experience,8 more work is needed on combating the myth of Irish slavery as it relates to the eighteenth century. Though this later period features in Jordan and Walsh’s book, it has been crowded out of the more recent furore over Irish “white slavery.” The back and forth over McCormack’s letter, which eventually saw an apology issued by History Ireland’s editor after a concerted campaign in defence of Hogan, and then a further riposte by Hogan,9 has continued to focus on the seventeenth century. Here, historical myth-making has arguably been at its most potent.10 Nevertheless, the eighteenth century is a key part of this debate. The scale of migration, the narratives of those involved and the extent of its coverage in the Irish, British and American press have ensured that the

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eighteenth century provides fertile territory for those wishing to dwell upon a post-colonisation period of “white slavery.” In the Irish context, the high watermark of this debate is arguably the 1780s. First, because this decade saw a return to very high levels of migration from Ireland,11 and secondly, because of a sharp change in the political context. On the one hand, the war with America made the destination of migrants seeking better lives politically loaded: radical Irish patriots pointed to the attractions of a newly free society, while those backing government found only ill-fortune amongst the post-war economic and constitutional chaos. This divide was sharpened by a change in Irish domestic politics. The rise of Volunteering—a politicised paramilitary movement initially set up for defence purposes—the “Free Trade” dispute, legislative independence and the campaign for parliamentary reform had reshaped the Irish public sphere. There may have been relatively few Irish MPs and peers in parliament who were prepared to speak out for the newly independent Americans, but coverage in Ireland’s patriotic newspapers, and in a multitude of clubs and societies, was much more pungent. Parliamentary reform and the threat of Catholics entering Irish political life was arguably the dominant issue in the mid-1780s. Indeed, by 1785 it had—via the Rightboy anti-tithe rural protests—resulted in the recognition by some politicians of the need to bolster Protestant domination of political life, crystallised in the form of “Protestant Ascendancy.” In the public sphere, the Dublin Castle government moved to subsidise newspapers, after being heavily outgunned in the late 1770s and the early 1780s. Consequently, the Freeman’s Journal switched sides, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal  was given more bite and a new, much more explicitly “loyal” newspaper emerged, in the form of the Volunteer Evening Post—in many ways a direct response to a new radical newspaper, the Volunteers Journal, printed by a Catholic, Mathew Carey.12 Though the two new organs crossed swords on a predictable range of issues—parliamentary reform, the entrance of Catholics into Volunteer corps and the behaviour of the military to name just a few—the return of migration as a significant issue in the post-war years ensured coverage in both newspapers. Irish migration in this period has received attention from James Kelly, Kerby Miller and David Noel Doyle, among others, and Maurice Bric’s book Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America 1760–1800 has made a particularly important contribution.13 Bric discusses the Irish print skirmishes on migration, as does Kelly,14 and it is clear that the Volunteer Evening Post deliberately ran stories designed to directly

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­ iscourage migration and impugn the government that was welcoming d them. Where Mathew Carey’s Volunteers Journal bemoaned the failure to introduce protecting duties, forcing thousands of skilled workers out of the kingdom,15 the Volunteer Evening Post emphasised the tales of calamity on the trip to America, the financial and political instability of the newly free colonies and the grim status awaiting those travelling as indentured servants or redemptioners.16 The relationship between print culture and the status of these migrants is of particular interest here, for the portrayal of Irish migrants in the press speaks directly to the “white slavery” charge. The Volunteer Evening Post regularly used this term, and it also appears—albeit less frequently—in the London and American press at this point. The following passage is typical of the Volunteer Evening Post reporting of the subject: If Nature shudders when it reflects on that most inhuman traffic the Black Slave Trade, what must it not feel when informed of a new rising commerce of White Slaves? Numbers of persons emigrating to America, from this country, indent themselves to the masters of vessels, who dispose of them in whatever manner they think proper after they have crossed the Atlantic.17

While some writers and historians have used the term “white slaves” in describing the trade in indentured servants in the eighteenth-century context, such migrants were clearly not slaves.18 Indentured servants were usually bound to a contract that lasted somewhere in the region of four to seven years, and this was a transaction that enabled the payment of passage to America; “redemptioners” would seek a contract on arrival, again, enabling them to pay for their passage. Eighteenth-century discourse around Irish indentured servants and redemptioners has legitimised this obfuscation, but it must be recognised that using such terminology was often a political decision and had a complex relationship with reality. The focus of this essay is to probe this “reality,” looking in particular at the period from 1783 to 1787, which saw the involvement of Mathew Carey in newspaper ventures in both Dublin and Philadelphia. Carey’s pre-Volunteers Journal career in Ireland had seen him publish an anonymous pamphlet arguing against the Penal Laws, but he found notoriety as a consequence of the Volunteers Journal’s punchy politics—which eventually got him exiled. He fled to Philadelphia, and after setting up the Pennsylvania Evening Herald and then the American Museum magazine—with financial assistance from the Marquis de Lafayette, and a

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s­ubscription from George Washington—settled into a prosperous life as bookseller and prominent Philadelphia businessman.19 Carey was a key part of the initial spat with the Volunteer Evening Post on the subject, and his American start-up paper had both an intimate relationship with the Irish political scene, and, like so many other newspapers, the trade in runaway slaves and Irish servants. Runaways, as we shall see, also played a key part in the Irish propaganda war, and the first section of this essay focuses upon the way in which this trade was inserted into a febrile Irish politics, before moving on to explore the intimate relationship between print culture and advertisements for runaways in the American—and particularly Pennsylvanian—context.20 These interlinking themes allow us to unpack the misery of the Irish servant experience, while offering a further reason to be cynical about “white slavery.” At the same time, attending to these issues sheds light on the nature and persistence of Ireland’s connections with Britain’s former colonies in the years immediately following independence—and in particular the notion that the status of the Irish in the empire was complex—the “colonised” could become “imperial.”21

I In his book Runaway America David Waldstreicher emphasises that servants might be regarded as household dependents rather than chattel, but he also argues that during this period “servants and slaves became more and more interchangeable,” and that “slaves and servants alike were regularly sold and rented.”22 In 1787 another printer offered Mathew Carey “the remaining time of an apprentice of mine, who has two years and eight months to serve”; “the purchase money,” he said, “shall be very reasonable.”23 But the fundamental differences between slaves and indentured servants—rights to legal recourse, the possibility of freedom after the period of indenture had ended—remain of critical importance to the historian. Contemporaries might have elided terms, feeling oppressed, or contemptuous; indeed, Waldstreicher notes that indentured servants referred to themselves as “white slaves,”24 and it seems as though “white negro” had entered broader political and cultural discourse—in the debates on a national bank, for example, and in the theatre.25 But this is not equivalence, and it should be recognised that contemporary terminology was informed by debates in the public sphere that were designed— even fabricated—to achieve an effect.

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As has been shown in the work of Sharon Salinger and Bernard Bailyn, there was a qualitative weight to some of the charges levied in the Volunteer Evening Post during this period.26 Indentured and redemptioner servants endured grim conditions during a “middle passage” that had some similar features to crossings endured by slaves. Servants were tightly packed, and provisions were far from plentiful—indeed there were suspicions that for redemptioners they were deliberately made less plentiful, as once they had made the halfway point in the crossing their families became liable for their fare.27 The Volunteer Evening Post described the migrants, “[c]onfined like felons in the hold of a bad-fitted vessel, restricted in their diet, and every punishment inflicted during the voyage, that the pride or caprice of a cruel captain can devise.”28 Fatality rates were also exceptionally high. However, while Mike McCormack argues that “for those who later unwisely volunteered to become indentured to secure a ticket to America, it is recorded that only about 40% survived to become free men,”29 accurate figures for deaths on the voyages to America are in fact difficult to come by. The Volunteer Evening Post claimed that a quarter of emigrants on the way to America perished—coincidentally the same figure arrived at by Sharon Salinger for German migrants, with the Irish numbers likely to have been higher.30 Once arrived in America, according to the Volunteer Evening Post, indentured servants were sold in “slave markets,” and those unfortunate enough to be forced to take on agricultural work had “their half-naked bodies exposed to pinching cold or scorching heat” and “the bloody punishment of the whip.”31 Bernard Bailyn argues that some of the more fierce denunciations of indentured servitude were “usually of dubious provenance.” He cites here material carried in Etherington’s York Chronicle which describes indentured servants being offered “for slaves at public sale,” “subject to nearly the same laws as negroes” with “their masters generally endeavouring to work them to death by the time their term of slavery is to expire.”32 In this light it is worth considering the exact relationship between the Volunteer Evening Post’s reports and those that appeared in the newspapers published in the United States. It is nearly impossible to verify whether these articles and letters were actually real— from an American source—or fictions created in the printshop of the Volunteer Evening Post, or elsewhere, and this problem is not helped by the fact that some Irish newspapers “footnoted” American titles erroneously. The Dublin Morning Post noted that some of its American material was taken from the Philadelphia Journal, an organ that does not seem to

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have existed.33 This might have been the Pennsylvania Journal, although in a later issue the Dublin Morning Post was taking news from the Pennsylvania Packet.34 Nevertheless, there are a number of excerpts supposedly taken directly from the American press, and these offer a realistic possibility of proving their veracity, and, if not locating the actual advertisement, then at least finding other evidence. In one particular example the Volunteer Evening Post reprinted an advertisement relating to “[a]bout seventy white slaves” arriving in Charlestown aboard the Irish Volunteer: “said passengers want masters: such as are not provided with masters at the expiration of 20 days, their time will be sold by the supercargoes on board.”35 The italicised “sold” was clearly at the core of the message that the Volunteer Evening Post wanted to get across. But such language was not out of the ordinary, and the Irish Volunteer did sail to America in 1783, arriving in August.36 Parts of the following advertisement offering rewards for runaways and the sale of servants’ “time” in the Volunteer Evening Post can be traced back to its American origins. Crucially, its fictionalised account does not stray far from the reality of the notices: To be sold cheap—for cash—A stout hearty Irish Man, 20 years of age, enquire at the printer’s—Pennsylvania Gazette. To be sold—a handsome strong Irish Girl, about 19 years of age—Note, she is a fresh slave, having arrived in the last ship from Dublin. Ran away, an Irish slave, named Robert Walsh, came from Belfast last fall, in the brig Recovery. It then goes on to describe poor Walsh—to offer a reward for securing him—and to charge all masters of ships on their peril, not to receive him on board. Run away, a negro, named Will—describes him, offers a reward, and charges as before. Run away, an Irish slave, named John Neil; describes Neil &c as before.37

The last two entries are clearly summarising runaway notices, but in general terms these snippets stay close to genuine adverts. The only obvious falsehoods are the references to “Irish” and “fresh” slaves. It is clear that whenever variations on the “white slave” theme appeared in runaway adverts they were inserted at a later point—most likely in the Volunteer Evening Post’s print office in Dublin. For example, the Robert Welsh—or rather “Walsh” advertisement is genuine, and originally appeared in

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Philadelphia’s Freeman’s Journal. However, in the American version, he was termed “an Irish servant man” rather than a “slave.”38 The remainder of this Volunteer Evening Post list contains material that is very typical of the genre, in a number of ways. Irish runaways were often placed above or below black absconders; indeed, gaolers advertised black and white runaways in the same advertisements,39 and sometimes servants and slaves ran away together.40 In the Philadelphia context Sharon Salinger notes that “[s]ervants belonged to a distinct subculture that embraced both the free and unfree labouring classes,” and she cites fairs, taverns, and dram shops as places where they would be seen in each other’s company.41 An advertisement placed by Philadelphia’s workhouse listed runaways under two categories—“whites,” both of whom had Irish names, and “blacks.” Their masters were given six weeks to “prove their property.”42 Even so, the Volunteer Evening Post was deliberately pointing to an equivalence between the two by the inclusion of a runaway black slave in the middle of the Irish servants.43 A later list of arrivals and runaways that appeared in the Volunteer Evening Post stayed much closer to the text in the American newspapers, with very few significant differences. The paper made it clear that the details were from the Pennsylvania Packet and explained that its purpose in reprinting them was to enable readers to “learn the fate of their friends and relations, whose folly and intemperance have led them to emigrate from their native country—a land of liberty and plenty, to become the bond slaves of every petty tradesman or farmer in America, who finds it necessary to make a purchase of the sons and daughters of Hibernia.”44 The list of arrivals and runaways can be traced to three separate issues of the Pennsylvania Packet, and the first was clearly selected to support a narrative around the servant marketplace: Just arrived, in the Brig William, Capt. Charles Eaglesfield, from Newry—a number of Servants and Redemptioners; consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls, whose terms of servitude are to be disposed of on the most reasonable term. The greater part of them were raised in the interior part of the country, are very industrious, sober and honest.

The remaining three were runaway notices that provide, in different ways, evidence of the “folly and intemperance” referenced in the introduction:

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Eight dollars reward. Ran away, on Sunday the 30th May, an Irish servant man, named William Earld, a very stout lusty fellow, about 22 years of age, 5 feet 10 or 11 inches high, much freckled in the face, and has short, red, curled hair. He is much given to drinking, and swearing when drunk; has grey eyes, and a very ill-natured, forbidding look, and speaks much with the brogue. Four dollars reward—Ran away from the subscriber on the 24th of last month, an indented Irish servant girl, named Mary Cawfield, from Belfast; has been nine months in America, has a fair complexion, and is short in person, speaks much with the brogue, is very talkative, much addicted to swearing and abusive language. Apply to Mary Foulke. Eight dollars reward—Ran-away from the subscriber. Irish Servant Man—James Points, appears to have been brought up genteelly, married in Ireland, left his wife there, 20–21 years old. Jesse Sharples.45

One feature of this selection—surely not accidental—is that it provides evidence of the manner in which Irish servants were demeaned and objectified. Simon Newman notes the similarities between the advertisements for runaway slaves and Irish indentured servants.46 But the differences are important, and are accidentally replicated by the printer of the Volunteer Evening Post, heightening plausibility. Generally speaking, advertisements for runaway slaves gave only first names. By contrast, in the examples given here, the independent existence of Irish servants was indicated by the fact that they were permitted a surname; though in at least one New Jersey case it was the surname of the master.47 There were some other major differences; in the physical injuries—particularly scars, and even branding—that black slaves carried; though the Volunteer Evening Post alleged that runaway servants were “branded in the forehead with a hot iron.”48 One notice explained that the scarring of a “mulatto man named Jem” came when he resisted being taken the last time he had run away.49 A runaway slave was “much marked on the back by frequent flagellation, which from all accounts he justly merited.”50 This was generally in contrast to the Irish, an indication of the more severe forms of punishment endured by slaves.51 Some slaves escaped wearing iron collars.52 Irish newspapers, however, knew that tales of this sort of brutality made good copy. An account of a Baltimore court case in the Belfast News-Letter in 1790—“printed to deter our countrymen from going out as servants or Redemptioners to that province”—involved an Irish runaway who had suffered “immoderate whippings.”53 Wounds were also caused by labour, and were shared by the Irish—scythe injuries, for

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example.54 Another point to consider here is that the rewards offered for runaway servants appeared to be influenced by the amount of goods taken when they absconded—such items were useful as they could be exchanged or sold, be worn as a disguise, or provide warmth if running away in winter. Though black slaves took similar opportunities, their rewards had a much more direct relationship with physical strength, and the potential value of labour.55 There was a similarity in the way that physical imperfections or peculiarities were commented upon. A love of drink frequently appeared, but more often than not in terms of a potentially obstreperous nature rather than issues of addiction or workshy tendencies.56 Women were treated in a demeaning fashion—the Irish runaway servant girl Mary Lawless was described as follows: “sometimes uses a short tottering quick step, her dialect is a little mixed with the brogue, has a round face, marked with the small-pox, of a dirty red complexion, remarkable ill-looking, heavy grey eyes, much sunk in her head, under a full prominent brow.”57 Other terms are suggestive of animal-like labouring capabilities. John Dunlap, Irish-­ born printer of the Pennsylvania Packet, advertised for a runaway in the Pennsylvania Gazette describing her as “a tall, lusty, hearty fresh looking wench”; the term “fresh” had, of course, been used in the fictional Volunteer Evening Post additions elsewhere and Mathew Carey’s Pennsylvania Evening Herald used similar terms for black women, though not those from Ireland.58 There was a very particular language attached to both black slave and Irish servant advertisements: for example, a “down look” made regular appearances. There was a reward in the Pennsylvania Evening Herald for a runaway Irish tailor, “pale complexion, has a down look, talks much when he is in liquor.”59 In the Pennsylvania Gazette another Irishman was said to be “slow spoken” and to have a “down look.”60 But the fact that these newspapers might be owned by Irishmen adds another perspective. The following advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette for a runaway Irishman may not have passed Carey’s scrutiny: the shoemaker George Long had “a dark swarthy complexion, a very flat nose, and down look, remarkably fond of liquor, and has all the fallacy of the vulgar part of his country.”61 Comments on the stuttering use of English by black runaways—“speaks somewhat broken,” “has a stoppage or stuttering in his common talk, and when spoke to sharp cannot speak for some time”62— have some similarities in the Irish context; Samuel Smith, was “slow spoken,” Patrick Reynolds, “stammers pretty much, especially when

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examined,” John McCallun, “stammers when he talks.”63 More prevalent was the contempt shown for idiosyncrasies in the Irish language or speech patterns. Mathew Carey’s advertisements commented on fluency in Irish—“speaks…the Irish language,” or “speaks on the Irish dialect”—but did not use the phrase “the brogue,” a term frequently used by the Pennsylvania Packet, or “gives blarney plentifully,” which appears in the Pennsylvania Gazette.64 We might add that the terms of servitude for both black and Irish Americans were detailed in the same fashion. There is a good reason for this, which is that due to the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania, many of the advertisements featuring black men, women, and children, may not have been dealing with slaves but rather with another type of indentured servant.65 This final point can be linked to the fact that the adverts for runaway servants outnumbered those noting runaway black slaves. The Pennsylvania Gazette appeared to be the primary choice for those wishing to advertise rewards for runaway servants, and it usually had three or four new cases in every issue. The vast majority of runaway indentured servants were for Irish men and women, with a very minor percentage being for those of Germanic origin.

II If the Volunteer Evening Post’s line offered a cautionary tale for migrants, combining the unwittingly accurate with the wittingly imaginary, Mathew Carey’s Volunteers Journal took a different tack on migrant experience, focusing on the oppression they were escaping, the large numbers leaving, and the fact that they were joining an Irish community in Philadelphia that was increasing in its significance.66 Carey’s American newspaper, the Pennsylvania Evening Herald, as might be expected, was also interested in Irish migration. It printed letters from Dublin expressing alarm at the number of Irish people migrating to America, focusing on the impact upon Ireland’s economy and the linen trade in particular.67 One letter referred to Ireland as “a country in which they behold no prospect but misery and slavery.” In language much less likely to have appeared in Carey’s Irish newspaper, it noted: “Notwithstanding the disappointment of many adventurers to America, we are informed, that multitudes continue to emigrate whenever an opportunity presents itself, under the illusory hope of better fortune.”68

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Rival newspapers in Philadelphia also printed material on this new wave of Irish migration, the majority of it positive in tone. This was for the most part a consequence of the sources of the information—Ireland’s foremost patriot newspapers. Stories emphasised how respectable the migrants were, which makes sense in the case of the Pennsylvania Gazette since they ran alongside adverts for the sale of redemptioners on newly arrived ships.69 The Anne, leaving from Cork for Philadelphia, had no redemptioners on board according to the Pennsylvanian Packet: “They have all paid their passage—10 guineas in the cabin—6 in the steerage—and 4 in the hold.”70 Another notice in the Pennsylvania Packet read: “We are sorry to add, that one hundred passengers, most of whom were tradesmen from Cork and Waterford, embarked as settlers in the new world, the land of liberty and brotherly love, where no tyrants vex, no representatives betray the constitution, or invade the rights they were elected to defend.”71 Elsewhere it suggested that demand could not be satisfied, with 2000 Limerick passengers rejected.72 Again, it had a vested interest in the redemptioner trade, and its views on Ireland were influenced by the fact that it took material from the Volunteers Journal, now printed by Carey’s brother.73 However, the material finding its way into the American press did not always conjure up an image of prosperous workers. One piece from the Pennsylvania Packet described Irish migrants leaving “their dearest and tenderest forever, merely because they could not stay to see their unhappy wives and children perishing with hunger before their face.” The tale of the “unhappy wife, and her helpless naked infants, hanging on the distracted father, beseeching him to die with them” was a consequence, of course, of “the impolitic laws of his country.”74 The same newspaper carried articles blaming migration on the “extravagant rapaciousness” of Irish landlords.75 The South Carolina Gazette highlighted a negative news story relating to America that had appeared in the British press under the banner “Another SAMPLE of English FABRICATION,” said to be sourced from “the Morning Chronicle and Morning Post.” The article can indeed be traced back to London—it was printed in the Morning Chronicle in August 1783.76 It included the news that a ship set up in Ireland to transport emigrants to America had had to depart without a single passenger, such was the impact of the news of political strife in the States.77 Mathew Carey had become involved in the cause of migrants facing difficulties, and he acknowledged that “Those of the emigrants, who have no friends here, to receive them, and point out what steps they are to take,

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suffer considerable hardships at first.”78 He praised a German society set up to aid migrants, and in his newspaper opposed aliens acts and suggested a fund to assist poor migrants.79 There may or may not be a correlation, but in contrast with the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Packet, Carey’s Pennsylvania Evening Herald dealt with the slave and servant advertisements—runaways and sales—rather less frequently. In the first month of publication, the only advert for a servant related to an apprentice required to work on Carey’s own newspaper.80 There were occasionally notices, but these numbered less than one per month in the paper’s first year. They were fairly typical of the genre, though did feature some of the ethnic barbs that appeared in other notices. The following examples are indicative: Ran away. From the subscriber indented servant Owen O’Brady, 20, speaks good English, likewise the Irish language. Took with his three different coloured coats. Edward Edair. Phila. Six pence reward. Ran away, apprentice boy George Adams, 15 of a clumsy make, a remarkable high mouth, his lips can hardly cover his teeth. Rebecca Fannan. Third St, Phila. 8 dollars reward—ran away—James Nicholson, Scotch man, also William Coe an Irish lad “rather fat, speaks good English,” carpenter. William Dobbel, Mount Benger. Ran away from Front street, an Irish servant lad named Hugh Morgan, by trade a taylor, 19. Supposed to have gone off with John Holles who worked in the shop with him. Samuel Harvey. Phila. Six pounds reward. Ran away—apprentice lad—John Griffin. James Corkran, House Carpenter, 5th st. Thought to have gone with a capt Murray in the sloop Isabella to Georgia. Phila. 8 dollars reward. Ran away—indented Irish servant girl. Mary Barril, signed Mathew Irvin. 20 dollars reward. Ran away. On 28th. John Lynch from Ireland. 5 ft 8. Chews tobacco, apt to drink, very talkative, swears hard, values himself as a sailor and traveller, large eyes and prominent cheek bones. Enquire of the printers.81

Carey also carried an advert for Francis White’s “Intelligence Office” on Chestnut Street. White was a broker, but was also involved in print, producing The Philadelphia Directory in 1785. His “Office” dealt with servants and plantations and on 15 March 1785 Carey carried an advert on his behalf announcing the “sale” of “a Negro Boy, twelve years old.”82 As

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with other newspapers, those wishing to sell indentured servants and slaves were invited to enquire as to prices at the printshop, thus implicating Carey directly in the trade of slaves and servants, though on at least one occasion he also used his address as a point of contact to unite an Irish family.83 On 30 April 1785, Carey printed the following advertisement: To be sold a stout healthy negro wench about eighteen-nineteen, has had small pox and measles, “is a compleat house negro” and can do town or country work. For terms enquire of the printers. Phila.84

He did not advertise another black person for sale until December 1785, when an advert appeared for A likely negro girl, about 18 years, has had the small pox and the measles and is registered according to Law. Enquire of the printers.85

These individuals might have been servants, though a notice published in March 1786 made the distinction clearer: Wanted a negro servant man who can dress victuals properly. If he can dress hair, it will be all the more agreeable. For particulars enquire of the printer.86

However, two notices dating from April and May 1786 almost certainly relate to slaves: Ran away from the subscriber living in Talbot co. on 28th March. A Negro man named Ben, he is a black fellow about 22, five ft 5 or 6. Foster Maynard. NB it is probable the above fellow may change his name and pass for a freeman. 16 dollars reward. Ran away from his master in Baltimore. Negro man named Ned. 5 ft 6. Reason to suspect he has left the city and hired himself as a free negro. Mordecai Lewis and Co. Phila. 10 May.87

Other black runaway adverts related to children—a nine-year-old, with a “[c]ut on his left cheek”—and included revealing personal and physical descriptions: an advert relating to “a negro man named Will, about 45,” appeared in September 1786; he was described as a “well set fellow, talks loud, walks brisk and is much given to strong drink.” Likewise, there was an advert in the same month for “a likely negro lad named Abraham about

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20, well limbed, both his ankles swelled and broke out in pimples all over his body, about 6 ft high.”88 Two advertisements appeared early 1787 just as Carey sold his stake in the newspaper, both utilising demeaning physical descriptions: the first concerned a twenty-year-old, “of a very black complexion and an old look” with “a very aukward gait and form, and a stammering in his speech: he is much addicted to lying,” while the second related to “a young negro name is George,” “a sober fellow, slow of speech, strong and well made.”89 It is difficult to say for certain whether Carey deliberately shied away from slave sale and runaway adverts; other newspapers might have been regarded as more natural homes. Indeed, it was infused into the print culture of many newspapers. There are examples of advertisers posting runaway notices in the form of poems. A runaway servant poem appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1784, and in February 1787, after Carey had sold the paper, the Pennsylvania Evening Herald included an advert for what appeared to be a runaway slave in the form of a poem, which focused at length—in an unpleasant attempt at humour—on the runaway’s “knocker knees.”90 Slave notices certainly sat uneasily with sentiments expressed elsewhere in this newspaper while Carey was at the helm. It had criticised the New York assembly for rejecting a bill to abolish slavery in 1785, and there was praise for the New Jersey assembly for taking the opposite line a year later.91 It argued that “[t]he resolutions that have passed in some of the American states against slavery, extend the influence of the late great revolution, in some degree, to the swarthy sons of Africa.”92 Commenting on retaliation by a black man after being assaulted by a white man in Philadelphia’s Market Street, the newspaper opined: “The inherent right which many ignorant white people suppose they have, of abusing those swarthy victims to the avarice and tyranny of the very humane and refined Europeans and their American descendants, deserves to meet with similar punishment.”93 Carey’s advertising appeared to be holding up in other areas of business, and there is no reason for us to think that he was unable to secure the custom. It is notable that after he sold his interest in the newspaper, the number of slave advertisements grew markedly. Also significant is the fact that other American newspapers expressed specific unease with some elements of the “trade” in indentured servants, suggesting that the Volunteer Evening Post was tapping into something in the American public sphere, though perhaps unwittingly. The Connecticut Journal reflected on a Pennsylvanian businessman who “had for some

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time carried on a profitable traffic by purchasing redemptioners, and driving them up the country, where he disposed of them for a considerable advance.” The tale it recounted of “a young Irishman of so very unpromising an appearance as to occasion his being rejected by all degrees of persons,” is interesting in two ways. First, in the newspaper’s use of language. The businessman is described as a “dealer in human flesh,” and the indentured servant his “white slave.” Second, the tale itself is intriguing. After stopping at an inn, the Irishman woke first in the morning, dressed in the merchant’s clothes, went downstairs, told the landlord that he had one last redemptioner asleep upstairs, and proceeded to sell him for two-­ and-­a-half “joes” before escaping. The Irishman was termed an “ingenious adventurer” for having “carried off the cloaths, and every shilling of his master’s property.”94 Whether true or not it was clearly an appealing story as it featured in Connecticut’s Norwich Packet, Massachusetts’ Salem Gazette and the New-Hampshire Gazette.95 It also crossed the Atlantic, appearing in London’s St. James’s Chronicle and General Evening Post.96 Slaves who stole their master’s clothes often found it easier to avoid recapture, and the same was likely true for Irish servants.97 The very particular standpoints offered above in the Connecticut Journal and South Carolina Gazette indicate the way in which printers inserted themselves into the transatlantic debate over the nature of the indentured-servant experience in America. But in many cases their culpability went beyond polemic—in a very practical manner, printers were part of the trade in runaways. The posting of runaway servant advertisements was not a binary relationship between master and servant; the printer must be seen as an important intermediary. Many would not have recognised this as a problem as they relied upon indentured-servant labour in their own printshops, and printers from Ireland (and Scotland) made use of migrant networks in their employment practices.98 There was an additional economic imperative. Printing in the Atlantic World was a precarious business, and the money from advertisements was key to a newspaper’s survival. It was, indeed, more valuable than subscriptions, and the human dimension was especially pertinent in Pennsylvania where there was the unusual combination of runaway indentured servants and slaves.99 The trade in runaways—servants and slaves—has been meshed together by some historians, and from certain perspectives this makes sense. In both cases, given the number of runaway notices carried in some newspapers, the printers involved were clearly profiting from a trade—involving masters and merchants, ship captains, and prison

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­ arshals—that could be lucrative.100 Waldstreicher goes as far as describm ing the notices as “a missing link between capitalism and servitude.”101 There was also a geographical-spatial dimension to the business. Gaolers were using newspapers to enforce the law,102 but outside of their gaols, given that many runaways had come from far afield—occasionally even from the southern states—it was essential for there to be a physical location where seekers and finders could apply: the print shop. This was of crucial importance in Philadelphia, as it was one of the most popular destinations for runaways in America. While black men and women found refuge in the city’s growing free community, its varied ethnic make-up provided opportunities for Irish servants.103 It is important to recognise that printers were not passive recipients of runaway servant and slave advertisements. They played a role in shaping and moulding advertisements and notices for publication: printers frequently transformed letters into advertisement designs.104 Franklin went further, and even held individuals for periods as payment, or as a favour.105 Of course, questions of moral culpability need to take into account the trade that they were facilitating—servant or slave. Printers took different positions, for different reasons. Those making their way in the world of print were not necessarily the most wealthy in society, with many, including Mathew Carey, William and John Dunlap, and Patrick Byrne, being immigrants themselves, and having their own difficulties with forms of indebtedness. Another printer, and ex-United Irishman, William Sampson would later justify his employment of Irish servant girls over allowing them schooling in his correspondence with Mathew Carey, who favoured the latter.106 Despite the individual differences, these men were all using the critical position of print in the early republic to build status and boost themselves in a reasonably fluid social hierarchy. The advertisements that they were placing were doing very similar sorts of things. All of those involved in the trade in runaways were, as Simon Newman puts it, “imposing control over impoverished bodies, thereby defending social order and hierarchy.”107 Carey was not one of the most culpable perhaps, but he was inserting himself into a social elite that felt threatened by the influx of both runaway black slaves and Irish migrants.108 After all, gaolers were employed to arrest those suspected of being in this category and, thus, by placing advertisements describing suspected slaves or other runaways in gaol, the city was placing itself firmly in this print-runaway nexus.

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III Mathew Carey is not unique among the founding fathers’ generation in having a complex relationship with slavery. Waldstreicher refers to Benjamin Franklin as “master printer, a facilitator of the trade in persons.”109 If we are considering only the early part of his career as a newspaper man, then it is clear that, like so many other participants in this trade, Carey’s livelihood was enmeshed in the practice of indentured servitude and, more significantly, the continuation of slavery. He made money—though not as much as some—from both. This was money, however, that could be ploughed straight back into societies for the relief or emancipation of those unfortunates involved; ill-treated indentured servants wrote to him requesting aid.110 The content of Carey’s newspapers illustrates similar complexities if not contradictions. When Carey was starting the Pennsylvania Evening Herald, he needed the revenue from advertisements relating to white servants and black slaves. Only a few years afterwards, anti-slave trade material would dominate his American Museum periodical. But his subsequent venture does not offer a neat point of demarcation, for in his later life Carey was censured for his controversial yellow fever pamphlet, which downplayed the role of black nurses during the episode, and accused other African Americans of profiteering.111 More importantly, he was later willing to permit the westward expansion of slavery in order to preserve the unity of the United States, even while he regarded slavery as a “pernicious evil.”112 As we have seen, some of the material that played upon narratives of “white slavery” was fake. Sharp linguistic practices were employed by Irish and British printers, who, encouraged by their paymasters, were fighting a war of political economy in the wake of the real thing. The Volunteers Evening Post is the best example here and its concerns over indentured servitude allowed it to play a patriot card alongside its pungent brand of loyalism. To a degree, its efforts around indentured servitude were perhaps unnecessary. Advertisements for runaway slaves and the indentured Irish were already blurred, and must have played a role in shaping the way that the Irish were viewed in the early republic. Adverts played up to the usual national stereotypes, taking a good many Ascendancy prejudices from Ireland into the colonies—further evidence of the complexity of the Irish imperial experience—and even Catholic printers like Mathew Carey were happy to go along. At the same time, however, although print culture was deeply enmeshed in the trade in both runaway slaves and

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i­ndentured servants, the differences between the two, even at this level of enquiry, must be emphasised.113 They were not equivalent, and advertisements hinted at some other distinctions that can be put alongside the important legal, socio-economic, and moral differences. The hazy way in which print culture dealt with indentured servants and slaves has been given new importance as a consequence of modern political developments. It has proven to be an enabler for modern commentators eager to make capital out of a discrete class of worker who could be imprisoned within the most unpleasant of contractual relationships. The involuntary nature of some indentures has allowed Mike McCormack to claim, “That sounds like slavery to me!” “Sounds like” is perhaps the key phrase here. In the eighteenth century there were ship-board “markets,” and those unable to achieve satisfactory contracts may have been forced to sell themselves into less agreeable servant arrangements or resort to debtors’ prisons.114 But these were the consequences of a failure to fulfil the migrant’s end of an economic transaction. Though of course the issue of the migrant’s “choice” in entering this bargain is another matter, and, in the eyes of newspapers like the Pennsylvania Evening Herald, cutting and pasting from the Irish radical press, indentured servitude was a choice forced upon individuals by British governmental policy and the social and economic iniquities of Ascendancy Ireland. This argument would be more persuasive if Carey’s Irish newspaper, and its fellow radical titles, were not regularly painting the new United States as a destination of good fortune for those travelling. It could be contended therefore that Mathew Carey was a facilitator of indentured servitude at both the Irish and American ends. However, he did have a long-term commitment to the fortunes of Irish migrants and continued to promote immigration more broadly in his writings well into the nineteenth century.115 Ultimately, it is of critical importance to recognise that the world of the indentured migrant was complicated by both lived experience and print culture. In 1784, scissor-happy approaches to editing—liberally cutting and pasting—meant that while the New-York Packet published a list of toasts given at a New York dinner for La Fayette that included, no. 8 “May America ever afford an asylum for the industrious and oppressed,” on the very same page a section of Edinburgh news noted that most of those sailing on three ships to America from Londonderry and Belfast were “redemptioners or white slaves.”116

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Notes 1. John Donoghue, “The Curse of Cromwell: Revisiting the Irish Slavery Debate,” History Ireland 25, no. 4 (July/August, 2017): 24–28. 2. In the same piece McCormack distanced himself from such approaches, noting: “Hogan chose to declare Irish slavery a myth and selectively cited a few insensitive Irish-Americans who brought up Irish slavery as a counterpoint to Black Lives Matter arguing ‘We got over it why can’t they’?,” History Ireland 25, no. 5 (September/October): 12. 3. Ted McCormick, “How to Change History: William Petty, Irish slavery, and a fake debate,” available at https://memoriousblog.com/2017/09/13/ how-to-change-history-william-petty-irish-slavery-and-a-fake-debate/. 4. Michael A. Hoffman II, They were White and They were Slaves: The Untold Story of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America (New York: Wiswell Ruffin House, 1991); Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Also see Rhetta Akamatsu’s The Irish Slaves: Slavery, Indenture and Contract Labor Among Irish Immigrants (Independent Publishing Platform, 2010). 5. John Martin, “The Irish Slave Trade—The Forgotten ‘White Slaves’,” available at  https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-theforgotten-white-slaves/31076. 6. Donogue, “The Curse of Cromwell,” 28. 7. Indentured servants in America were bought and sold more frequently than servants and apprentices in England, Aaron S.  Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (1998): 52. 8. Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, “Contesting ‘White Slavery’ in the Caribbean: Enslaved Africans and European Indentured Servants in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” New West Indian Guide 91 (2017): 30–55. 9. Liam Hogan, “The Ancient Order of Hibernians, History Ireland magazine and the legitimisation of a historical propaganda,” available at https://medium.com/@Limerick1914/the-ancient-order-of-hibernians-history-ireland-magazine-and-the-accommodation-of-ahistoricalec393928e787. 10. One of the most cited texts has been Sean O’Callaghan’s controversial To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dublin: Brandon, 2000). 11. Fogelman estimates that 11,300 Irish indentured servants (including redemptioners) arrived in America between 1776 and 1809, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants,” 74.

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12. For the Volunteer Evening Post see Martyn J.  Powell, “The Volunteer Evening Post and Patriotic Print Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800, eds. Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (Woodbridge, 2010), 113–35. For the Volunteers Journal, see James Kelly, “Mathew Carey’s Irish Apprenticeship: Editing the Volunteers Journal, 1783–4,” Éire-Ireland 49, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 201–43. 13. David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1981); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); James Kelly, “The Resumption of Emigration from Ireland after the American War of Independence: 1783–1787,” Studia Hibernica 24 (1988): 61–88; Maurice Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America 1760–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008). Also see Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1997); David A.  Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 14. Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 98–99; Kelly, “Resumption of Emigration,” 80–85. 15. Volunteers Journal, 5 May, 2 June 1784. 16. See, for example, Volunteer Evening Post, 27–29, 29–31 July, 28–30 September 1784. 17. Volunteer Evening Post, 29 April–1 May 1784. 18. See, for instance, David Meades, Eighteenth-Century White Slaves: Fugitive Notices, Volume 1: Pennsylvania, 1729–1760 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1993). 19. For Mathew Carey’s career see James N. Green, Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985); Early American Studies, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013); Essays by Higgins, Kelly, Wolf in Éire-Ireland 49, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter, 2014); Essays by Powell, Magennis, Bankhurst, Wolf in Éire-Ireland 50, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2015). 20. For the significance of runaways in American print culture see in particular David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). Also on runaway notices see Philip D.  Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina’s Runaways: Their Significance for Slave Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 57–78; Lathan A.  Windley, A Profile of Runaway Slaves in

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Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787 (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Low Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Woody Holton, Forced Founders, Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Catharine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Shaun Wallace, “Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Rebelliousness of Enslaved People in Georgia and Maryland, 1790–1810” (PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2017). 21. See Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93. 22. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 21–23. 23. Historical Society of Pennsylvania [afterwards HSP], Lea and Febiger, 227B/1/1/3684, James Adams to Carey, 27 April 1789. 24. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 23. 25. Middlesex Gazette [Connecticut], 1 May 1786; Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 99n. 26. Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling  of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 27. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 94. 28. Volunteer Evening Post, 27–29 July 1784. 29. Mike McCormack, “It’s still happening,” available at http://www.nyaoh. com/2017/03/30/historical-happenings-for-april-2017/. 30. Volunteer Evening Post, 3–6 July 1784; Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 91. 31. Volunteer Evening Post, 1–4 January 1785. 32. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 174n  and 324. Also see Marilyn Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America 1607–1800” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 33. Morning Post, 28 September 1784. 34. Morning Post, 23 October 1784. 35. Volunteer Evening Post, 6–8 May 1784. 36. David Dobson, Ships from Ireland to Early America, (Baltimore, MD, 2001) i, 75. 37. Volunteer Evening Post, 29–31 July 1784. 38. Freeman’s Journal [Philadelphia], 14 April 1784.

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39. Pennsylvania Gazette, 3 March 1784. 40. Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 June 1784. 41. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 101–2. 42. Pennsylvania Packet, 20 August 1784. 43. Independent Gazeteer, 5 June 1784. 44. Volunteer Evening Post, 9–11 September 1784. 45. Volunteer Evening Post, 9–11 September 1784. These notices can be found in Pennsylvania Packet, 8 June 1784, 3, 10 July 1784. In the American and Irish versions the public are warned not to give Cawfield credit on Foulke’s account, as debts will not be paid. The Pennsylvania Packet version notes that Points was a “sadler by trade but has a great turn for engraving.” 46. Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 83. 47. Pennsylvania Gazette, 30 June 1784. 48. There are a number of Irish servants with facial scars, and both groups had missing digits from frost-bite, Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 January 7, 28 July 1784, 13 October 1784, 16 June 1785; Pennsylvania Packet, 8 July 1784; Volunteer Evening Post, 11–14 September 1786. 49. Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 November 1784. 50. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 24 March 1787. 51. Julie Anne Sweet notes that whippings could be a sanction for indentured servants in Georgia, but that severe punishments were the exception rather than the rule; Julie Anne Sweet, “The Murder of William Wise: An Examination of Indentured Servitude, Anti-Irish Prejudice, and Crime in Early Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2012): 6. 52. Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 August, 22 December 1784. 53. Belfast News-Letter, 2–5 February 1790. 54. Pennsylvania Packet, 17 November 1784. 55. Antonio T. Bly, “A Prince among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited,” Massachusetts Historical Review 14 (2012): 89 and 99. 56. Newman, Embodied History, 91. 57. Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 March 1784. 58. Pennsylvania Gazette, 31 December 1783; Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 10 January 1787. Behind this terminology, there was a very real threat of rape—and an unwanted child might extend a period of service (Newman, Embodied History, 86). 59. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 25 November 1786. 60. Pennsylvania Gazette, 16 June 1784. 61. Pennsylvania Gazette, 11 February 1784, supplement no. 2800. 62. Pennsylvania Gazette, 14 January, 1 December 1784. 63. Pennsylvania Packet, 17 April 1784; Pennsylvania Gazette, 29 September 1784; Pennsylvania Packet, 4 November 1784.

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64. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 March, 1785, 11 November 1786; Pennsylvania Packet, 10 June 1784; Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 February 1784; 27 November 1784. 65. Newman, Embodied History, 83. 66. Volunteers Journal, 14 May, 2 June 1784. 67. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 1 March 1785, 28 June 1786. 68. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 26 April 1785. 69. Pennsylvania Gazette, 28 July, 4 August 1784. 70. Pennsylvania Packet, 30 September 1784. 71. Pennsylvania Packet, 25 September 1784. 72. Pennsylvania Packet, 5 October 1784. 73. See for example a Volunteers Journal article of 26 March 1784 reprinted in Pennsylvania Packet, 20 May 1784. 74. Pennsylvania Packet, 19 June 1784. 75. Pennsylvania Packet, 1 July 1784. 76. Morning Chronicle, 30 August 1783. 77. South-Carolina Gazette, 18–22 November 1783. 78. HSP, Lea and Febiger, Letterbooks 1/F278, “Mr P. Carey,” 12 September 1791. 79. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 2 July, 3 August 1785. 80. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 February 1785. 81. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 March, 2 April, 6 July, 24 September, 30 November, 10 December 1785, 5 July 1786. 82. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 15, 19 March 1785. 83. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 26 April 1786. 84. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 30 April 1785. 85. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 14 December 1785. 86. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 15 March 1786. 87. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 8 April, 13 May 1786. 88. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 July, 9 September, 27 September 1786. 89. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 27 January, 10 February 1787. 90. Pennsylvania Gazette, 6 October 1784; Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 24 February 1787. 91. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 12 April 1785, 25 October 1786. 92. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 22 October 1785. 93. Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 13 August 1785. 94. Connecticut Journal, 6 October 1784. 95. Norwich Packet, 7 October 1784; Salem Gazette, 12 October 1784; NewHampshire Gazette, 14 October 1784. 96. St. James’s Chronicle, 9–11 December 1784; General Evening Post, 9–11 December 1784. 97. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 7–8.

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98. See Joseph M.  Adelman, “Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America,” Early American Studies 11, no. 3 (2013): 526–28. 99. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 20. 100. Ibid., 17. 101. Ibid., 23. 102. Ibid. 103. Newman, Embodied History, 14. 104. Meades, Eighteenth-Century White Slaves, x. 105. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 25. 106. HSP, Edward Carey Gardiner, 227A 22/8/F2 William Sampson to Carey, 31 May 1830. 107. Newman, Embodied History, 9. 108. Newman, Embodied History, 14. 109. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 18. 110. Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 159. 111. Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793). 112. A Pennsylvanian, Considerations on the Impropriety and Inexpediency of Renewing the Missouri Question (Philadelphia, 1820), 3–4. 113. Simon Newman, historian of runaways, is criticised by Handler and Reilly for lacking precision in his use of the term “white slaves” in the context of indentured servants in seventeenth-century Barbados in his A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Handler and Reilly, “Contesting ‘White Slavery’ in the Caribbean,” 46–47. 114. Mike McCormack, “It’s still happening,” available at http://www.nyaoh. com/2017/03/30/historical-happenings-for-april-2017/; Farley Grubb, “The Auction of Redemptioner Servants, Philadelphia, 1771–1804: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History 48, no. 3 (1988): 586. 115. Adelman, “Trans-Atlantic Migration,” 544. 116. New-York Packet, 16 September 1784.

PART II

Writing/Imagining Empire

CHAPTER 6

“Humble Obedience to the Will of Heaven”: Charles Johnston’s Providential and Migratory Sensibility Daniel Sanjiv Roberts

While the revolutionary rumblings in America in the early 1770s have often been linked with the rise of patriotism in Ireland, and though the loss of Britain’s first empire in America was followed, over the course of the nineteenth century, by the rise of its second, eastern, empire, focused in India, these major events have generally been treated in the literary and historical record as discrete and unconnected. Indeed, the very nomenclature of a “first” and “second” empire implies, as P.  J. Marshall has remarked, a “historiographical tradition that sees these developments as largely unrelated to each other and as belonging to distinct phases of British imperialism.”1 In the following chapter, I wish to build upon Marshall’s exemplary critique of this historiographical tradition in three ways: firstly, by suggesting that this insight might be further enhanced by attention to discursive practices, such as those embodied in literature, which allow for these evidently geographically and historically separated phenomena to be more readily imagined together; secondly, by introducing a complicating Irish element into the triangulation of Britain, America, D. S. Roberts (*) Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_6

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and India that comprises the coordinates of his historical study; and, thirdly, by pointing to what may be termed a “migratory sensibility,”2 by which I mean the need commonly experienced by Irish migrants in this period, to reimagine the world and refashion themselves in pursuit of their destiny, as a significant factor in understanding this view of a globalised and historically integrated empire. The literary figure I shall focus on for the purpose of this chapter is Charles Johnston (c.1719–c.1800), a satirical writer who first came to prominence during the Seven Years’ War as the author of the hugely popular and often reprinted Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760), and whose considerable fictional oeuvre includes a consistent engagement with imperial themes and settings.3 This chapter will focus on his third novel, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), published on the eve of American independence, and will look briefly at his surviving Indian newspaper articles, published in 1785, to suggest how Johnston’s fictional writings enable him to imagine and to negotiate imperialism in its widest global dimensions both as a writer and a migrant himself within the empire. Although details of Johnston’s life are relatively few, owing perhaps partly to the fact that he spent the last decades of his life in India, contemporary accounts agree that he was himself of migrant stock. Descended from a branch of the Scottish Johnston family, he was “well known to be the next, though distant heir” to the Marquisate of Annandale. His own means, however, were insufficient to claim and maintain the property attached to this inheritance.4 He was born and educated at the Protestant Diocesan School in County Limerick before moving to Trinity College in Dublin and the Middle Temple in London, from whence he was called to the bar—evidently in more senses than one, since it took him fifteen years to qualify, a duration which might be explained by a disposition described by Sir Walter Scott as “of a lively and companionable sort.”5 His movement to London and long residence at the Middle Temple, common to many young Irishmen ambitious of a legal career, would typically have been achieved through the many Irish networks that enabled such aspirants to seek their fortune in the metropolis.6 Once at the Temple though, he was clearly attracted, like several other Templars who achieved distinguished literary careers, to literature before the law. His most successful work, and one which would continue to define his literary reputation throughout his life, was undoubtedly Chrysal; or the Adventures of Guinea, a scandalous fiction exposing in veiled form the lives of the rich and the famous. First published in 1760, Chrysal ran through several revisions,

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extensions, and reprints through the eighteenth century and remained in print well into the nineteenth.7 Chrysal, the narrator of this sequential narrative ever-open to extension, is “the spirit of gold,” the animating characteristic of the precious metal that facilitates its progress through the world in the many forms of currency that it assumes. Mined, melted, and recast in many guises (most notably as an English guinea), the spirit of gold circulates through the empire, influencing characters and actions in a way that might seem capricious to humans, but was overseen by the “great author” of Nature, God.8 Whereas Chrysal conjured up the contemporary imperial world of the Seven Years War and of public life in Britain, The History of Arsaces turned ostensibly to an antiquarian view of the east and appeared to eschew any sensationalism. The barbed satirical edge of the former work, detailing activities such as those of the notorious Hell-Fire Club at Medmenham Abbey and encouraging contemporaries to guess the identities of the characters involved, may well have earned Johnston powerful enemies in high places; in the latter work, he promises in the preface, placatingly, a more polite form of fiction in which “there is not one soft scene of love, one sentiment of loose desire.”9 Yet both works are linked by a common motif of travel and migration, albeit that the latter involves human agents rather than objects. Dedicated to Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, the English constitutional lawyer and politician, and a leading conciliatory voice in the parliamentary debates around American taxation in the run up to the revolution, whose “spirit” Johnston professes to convey in his book, The History of Arsaces involves two interwoven narratives, the story of Selim, an Arab youth who leaves his father, Abudah (a moralising, Polonius-like, figure who appears over-protective of his son) and his parental home to learn about the world for himself, and the interpolated story of Himilco, a father figure whom he meets in the desert, and who is instrumental in enabling Selim’s discovery of his true father and, consequently, of his own identity, by the end of the novel. The novel commences with Selim brought in chains as a prisoner of war before the emperor Temugin (Genghis Khan), “Lord of the Earth” and ruler of the “mighty empire of Khouaresm” (41). Impressed by the youth’s bearing and courage the emperor demands to hear his story. Selim reveals that he had left the shelter of his home in Felix Arabia prompted by a spirit to seek the truth. His various adventures—which take up all of book 1 and include being enslaved by the Bedouins, sold to a merchant, and escaping from a lion (amongst other likely occurrences)—lead him to the ruins of a vast ancient

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city where he meets the wise Himilco and his daughter Arpasia. Himilco now proceeds to narrate his story to Selim. Selim’s tale, until this point primarily a geographical fantasy of travelling through strange lands (influenced, clearly, by Swift), now unfolds (and enfolds, in the form of Himilco’s story), a lengthy historical narrative which, again, admits several contemporary political references. Born of royal lineage, Himilco is the descendant of a group of survivors and refugees from the fall of Carthage who had established a colony named Byrsa along the African coast of the Red Sea. Founded on the principles of a limited monarchy and a sound constitution, the Byrsans were initially successful, establishing a peaceful and prosperous kingdom in their new land on the basis of a pastoral and communal ethic. Growing in wealth, however, later generations began to forgo their earlier simplicity of manners, abandoning the cultivation of land for commerce, and embracing the vices of ostentation and luxury. The Byrsans now promoted their commercial ambitions by planting colonies which “drained their country of its most useful inhabitants,” exposing the “industrious poor” who make up “the real strength of a state” to “all the miseries of want” and forcing them to “seek subsistence elsewhere.” These colonies, gradually becoming stronger, began to consider themselves as “states allied upon equal terms, rather than subjects” and began to challenge the authority of their “mother country” (80). At this critical stage in his country’s development, prompted by his father, Himilco undertakes a journey, like Selim’s, in search of wisdom. He meets a sage, Myrza, who discourses on the existence of spirits which he reasons must influence the course of events and of human action. Travelling to India in the company of a merchant they find that formerly flourishing land to be devastated by famine. They learn from a Brahmin that a band of “prowlers […] from the remotest regions of the West” have repaid the hospitality of the natives by seizing their lands and imposing on them a ruinous form of government (103–04). Returning to Byrsa after further adventures, Himilco discovers his country preparing for war with the Coptes, a tough and industrious neighbouring nation which had, like the Byrsans, been driven away from their homeland in Egypt. The Byrsans have now degenerated into an effete and corrupt order of society, and they are easily overcome in battle. Despite his best efforts to rally support and save his country, Himilco is forced to flee, taking with him a Coptic priest whose life he had saved (and who later returned the favour), and the priest’s daughter, whom he weds. Travelling overland into the interior parts of the country, they settle near Biledulgerid,

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an uninhabited but promising land, and establish a colony. After a series of tragic occurrences, however, in which he loses his companions, his father and his wife, Himilco is left alone with his daughter, inhabiting the ruins of the ancient city where Selim discovers them. Noting similarities between Himilco’s progress through the world and his own, and realising that their meeting is divinely ordained for “mutual happiness,” Selim decides to return home to make amends for his unannounced departure and seek the blessings of his father to marry Arpasia (145). After further adventures along the way, he is imprisoned by Temugin, returning this mirrored and looping narrative back to the commencement of the novel. Selim, renamed now by Temugin as Togrul, enters his service, rising in his favour, mitigating the emperor’s severity with various kingdoms under his sway, and curbing the injustices of his governors. Commissioned by Temugin to subdue the small but resilient kingdom of Betlis which alone resisted his authority, Togrul leads the emperor’s forces against the king of Betlis and is about to kill him in battle when he is stopped short by a cry that proclaims the king to be his true father, Astyages. He now learns that Abudah was in reality his foster father, appointed by Astyages to raise him without the privileges—and attendant temptations, of luxury, and idleness—of a royal upbringing. Finally discovering his own true identity and destiny as the Prince of Betlis, Arsaces (aka Selim/Togrul) brokers a peaceful settlement between Temugin and Astyages. With Temugin’s acquiescence, Astyages is given the freedom to rule his kingdom in accordance with its own laws and traditions; Arsaces receives his father’s blessings to marry Arpasia; and Arsaces joyfully brings Himilco and Arpasia to the court of Astyages. The novel ends with Arsaces’ pious and hard-won realisation that “true wisdom” consists in obedience to “the will of heaven,” without a presumptuous desire “to scan its ways” (209). Drawing widely and freely on Enlightenment historical and geographical knowledge, The History of Arsaces—as even this brief precis should indicate—is nevertheless a pointedly political work which may be seen to address the 1770s crisis of empire in Britain while looking eastward and westward, backward and forward, in articulating its concerns. The Monthly Review’s notice opined that the novel offered “striking intimations, of the utmost national importance, with respect to over-grown empire and colony connexions.” “Let our Nabobs look to this!” it counselled.10 Selim’s valuable service to the Oriental despot Temugin in moderating the harshness of his imperial dispensation draws on what he has learned not only from his own experiences of various societies, but also from Himilco’s

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personal and historical experience of the Byrsan state. The parallels between Himilco’s and Selim’s narratives offer a doubly reinforced message of conciliatory urgency repeating and relaying Lord Camden’s stance on the American colonies while transposing its “spirit” into the fictional realm.11 Far from suggesting a neat hiatus between Britain’s waxing Eastern and waning Western empires, Johnston’s novel repeatedly suggests the interconnectedness of both. Despite the inability of the indolent Indians to counter the rapacity of their Western oppressors, the Brahmin— notably, of an elite caste, akin to the Anglo-Irish in relation to its society— points portentously to a divine retribution falling upon them: “heaven, by a signal instance of its justice, hath made them avenge our wrongs, upon their own heads” (108). Here, the ruinous operations of the East India Company and its presumptuous officials in India appear to find a rebuke in the rebellion of the American colonies in the west, and the widespread public disparagement and anger heaped upon them in Britain in the early 1770s. By the early 1770s, descriptions of the Bengal famine of 1770 which resulted in an estimated ten million deaths, around a third of the region’s population, had begun to circulate in Europe to widespread public horror. The connection suggested by Johnston between the commercial aims of the Company and the catastrophic crop failure causing famine in India recall similar and persistent connections made between famines and the colonial economy with regard to Ireland from as early as Swift’s 1728 A Short View of the State of Ireland. Johnston himself would have been in his early twenties and a student at Trinity College during the devastating famine of 1740–1741 which killed between 13 and 20% of the population (a higher proportion even than the Great Famine of 1840), bringing starving victims from the countryside and food riots to the streets of Dublin. As contemporaries viewed it, this cataclysmic event, so destructive of life especially amongst the poorer classes, resulted too in the widespread breakdown of social order and morality.12 As Himilco discovers in India, starvation had forced virgins into prostituting themselves, sons to sell their fathers, and mothers to devour “the infant, which sucked her breast” (112). The sheer abjection of the wretched famine victims, forced into eating their own children from desperation, evokes negative stereotypes long associated with the native Irish of barbarism and cannibalism.13 Himilco’s pity for their plight mixes horror with sympathy as the natives’ indolence and savagery combine to render them complicit in their own downfall and degradation. Such complexities of emotion might appear to express a particularly Anglo-Irish sensibility (Swift offers an instructive

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comparison here), at once moved and disgusted by the extremities to which people could be reduced by poverty. These representations of colonial rapacity, famine, and patriotic discontent would thus have carried powerful resonances to Johnston’s Irish readers both in London and Dublin, from whence the novel was published, and further afield, within the migratory networks in which his works evidently circulated.14 Apart from such contemporary resonances, the historical and Oriental setting of the novel evokes a somewhat recondite strain of eighteenth-­ century antiquarian thinking which suggests an ancient migratory connection between Ireland and areas of North Africa and the East including Carthage and other Phoenician cities. Such narratives, evidently asserting an antiquity and civility to Ireland predating Britain’s Roman conquest were combined with orientalist and philological researches of the period to project a collective identity for native and settler groups in Ireland, combating rebarbative stereotypes of Irish savagery, and opposing England’s Roman imperial heritage, with myths of a Carthaginian or eastern origin through stories of voyages, trade, and migratory settlements in the ancient past.15 According to The Periplus of Himilco, a lost work that survives only in a Latin version of the fourth century, though often cited by antiquarians in the period, the Carthaginian traveller Himilco had sailed along the European Atlantic coast in the sixth century BCE, referring to the Irish as “Hierni.” Such a sense of a mythical past is of course a recurring feature of the storyline in The History of Arsaces in which one of the central characters is named Himilco, representing a splinter group of refugees that had migrated from Carthage following the city’s destruction by Rome in the third Punic war. This mythical foundation, by Himilco’s ancestors, of the city state of Byrsa, named after the site of the ancient Carthaginian citadel overlooking its harbour, suggests an obvious resonance with Irish origin myths. Yet, in the novel, Selim’s discovery of Himilco within the ruins of an ancient city of Roman origin (including, “to the disgrace of humanity,” an amphitheatre) suggests too a reversal of imperial fortunes whereby the Romans, corrupted by luxury, had fallen in turn, leaving the descendants of its formerly vanquished empire to re-­ inhabit its vestiges (72). This cyclical view of history in which the present is haunted by the ghosts of the past speaks urgently to an imperial Britain engaged in successful (though guilefully and harmfully conducted) warfare in the east, even as its Western colonies were threatening rebellion. The overweening arrogance of the Byrsans leading to their downfall against the neighbouring Coptes (a more recent and hard-working migrant

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settler group in the region) serves as a warning to contemporary Britain faced with colonial rebellion on one hand and imperial devastation on the other. Byrsan desire to “carry on their commerce to greater advantage” fuels their imperial ambitions, leading to a migratory drain on the home country (80). Britain’s tendency to disperse the more enterprising and industrious of its population into its colonial hinterlands are now revealed as a weakness inherent in its commercial and imperial over-growth. The pastoralism and relative frugality of the Coptes, on the other hand, and the haughty treatment they face from the Byrsans, would resonate with patriotic feelings regarding Britains’s treatment of Ireland as a sister kingdom for loyal Irish readers. The relationship of the protagonist of the novel, variously named Selim, Togrul, and Arsaces, with a series of father figures and spiritual advisors, Abudah, Himilco, and, finally, Astyages, reiterates a conservative and paternalistic theme that is central to its political and theological vision. At the commencement of the novel, Selim recalls to Temugin the wisdom and kindness of his father, Abudah, who had instructed him in virtue and instilled in him a sense of divine justice. From Abudah he learns that power “was originally conferred as a reward of superior merit and virtue,” so much so that “still the hand of heaven doth often most unexpectedly raise from the cottage to the throne, the man who is found worthy to govern” (44). This pious message, somewhat patronisingly judged by Temugin to be reflective of Abudah’s humble station—“Had he been a sovereign he would have thought otherwise”—proves nevertheless to be deeply troubling to the youthful Selim who sees a contradiction between such virtuous sentiments and the vicious tendency of the world, losing his faith temporarily in divine justice. Instead of confiding his difficulties to his father, however, he seeks from “false shame” and “pride” to “struggle through them by the strength of [his] own mind.” Selim’s decision to leave his parental home to learn about the world through first-hand experience rather than speculation, though rightly prompted by his guardian angel, is nevertheless carried out in a hasty and ill-considered way, since he lacks the courage to inform his father of it, forgetting Abudah’s somewhat sententious maxim that “candour is of the essence with every virtue” (46). Within the divine economy of justice that the novel affirms, Selim’s many sufferings and travails may be attributed to this early failure which he only fully realises and seeks to rectify when he encounters Himilco, whose first appearance, with a beard “bright as burnished silver down his breast,” fills his “heart with awe,” but who quickly puts him at ease by assuring him of

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his humanity and addressing him as “son” (69). Himilco’s narration of his life story to Selim unfolds his own journey in search of truth which had led him to another father figure, a sage named Myrza, whom Himilco addresses as father, and who appears to be the innermost spiritual figure within a Chinese box arrangement that structures the novel’s articulation of its theological core. In keeping with the novel’s reiterated theme of personal questing prompted by spiritual yearnings, Myrza explains to Himilco his philosophical view of human destiny as being shaped by “spiritual beings, who watch over the actions of man.” Such a view, borne out, as Myrza insists, by testimonies from “every age, and county,” implies that “the several elements of which this world is composed, as well as the earth inhabited by man” is inhabited by “spiritual beings”: The infinite variety of animated beings, which we behold cover the face of the earth, so as not to leave one atom of it uninhabited, gives cause to conclude that the other elements are peopled also as fully, by beings to whose organs of life they are adapted, though imperceptibly to the grosser senses of man; as else there would be a void, an useless part in the works of the Deity; a supposition contradicting the sacred, and self-evident truth, that he doth nothing in vain. (p. 94)

Here, Johnston is obviously indebted to the work of Robert Clayton (1695–1758), a somewhat eccentric and unorthodox Irish bishop whose theological views were nevertheless remarkably influential on the fictional works on numerous Irish novelists.16 In this, Johnston harks backs to his own earlier work, Chrysal, in which the eponymous narrator who is “the spirit of gold” explains to the visionary “adept” who records his story, citing the works of George Berkeley and Clayton in his footnotes to the text, that “in the œconomy of nature […] a subordination of ministerial spirits” is required to execute the “system of [divine] government.”17 Johnston’s ascription of voice to the spirit of gold and his refusal to separate sharply between animate and inanimate objects in this respect suggests a continuity between the circulating “object narrative” of his earlier work and the migratory characterisation of Arsaces. Departing from Berkeleyan idealism mainly with regard to the dualistic opposition between body and spirit which Berkeley insists upon,18 Clayton nevertheless, like his fellow Irish prelate Berkeley (whom he knew and corresponded with), argues for a spiritually animating conception of nature

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whereby all of creation is sustained by divine order. In Clayton’s more hierarchised notion of spiritual essences however—which is evidently closer to Johnston’s view of a “subordination of ministerial spirits”—not all spirits were equally endowed; rather they could be ranked with respect to their functions and purposes as determined by the divine author, and, hence, the “whole world,” as he put it, was “replete with Spirits formed with different Kinds and Degrees of Abilities, according to the various Ends and Uses, for which they were designed by their Creator.”19 Although a full exposition of Clayton’s unorthodox Arian theology—which denied the doctrine of the Trinity (ascribed by the worthy bishop to an erroneous interpretation of the Nicene Creed)—has no place in the argument of this chapter, what is central both to Clayton’s theological thinking and to Johnston’s fictional use of it is the providential role envisaged for the various spirits assigned to material bodies and things. Elevating the godhead to an “unembodied Spirit” giving rise to all other spirits in the world but not limited or clogged by corporeal nature; Clayton argued that the orthodox understanding of the consubstantiality of Christ with the Father—a fundamental tenet of the Nicene creed in both Catholic and Anglican versions—was fundamentally flawed and contradictory. As the son of God, Christ was both subsequent and subordinated to God the father, though simultaneously his supreme agent on earth and sharing in his divine spirit. Here, Clayton’s Arian view of Christ as the corporeal embodiment of divine agency was melded crucially with an eighteenth-­ century imperialist vision of the Christian dispensation throughout time and space: “all Nations were made of one Blood under him, and the Bounds of their Habitations were brought within the Line of his Inheritance: And there was given unto him Dominion and Glory, and a Kingdom, that all People, Nations, and Languages should serve him.”20 And, while such an order of things had clearly not fully come to pass, the growth of empire would indicate that this was part of God’s plan, a furtherance of the providential view of Christianity. A further aspect of Clayton’s theory of spirits that is germane to Johnston’s narrative theory is Clayton’s interpretation of the term “person” with reference to the three persons supposedly constituting the unified godhead of the Christian trinity. As Clayton argued, the consubstantialist view of God the father and the son as “coequal and coeternal…is by no means consistent with the Relation that there is between Father and Son,” i.e. they could not be physically and substantially the same person. Distinguishing between personality as identity in the Lockean sense21—

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“whereby any one intelligent Agent is distinguished from any other intelligent Agent”—and personality as a relational feature denoting “only the Relation which one intelligent Agent bears to another,” Clayton suggests that in the latter sense “the same individual Person, or intelligent Agent, may be considered as twenty different Persons all at the same Time: For thus the same intelligent Agent may be considered in the Person of a King, of a General, of an Ally, of a Philosopher, of a Father, or of a Son, of an Husband, or of a Batchelor, of an old Man, or of a young Man, etc. etc.”22 These twin aspects of Clayton’s theory—of spiritual guidance offered by a ministerial order that is immanent in all of creation, and of the duty of human beings to discover their true identity and destiny by due attention to this order—are both integral to Johnston’s narrative forms, and are vital to his political vision and articulation of character development. Yet Clayton’s willingness to admit another commonly held meaning to the word “person,” implying that the same person might identify differently on the basis of gender, sexuality, familial role, profession, hereditary factors, etc. allows for a variable and transformative aspect to personal identity, allowing for growth and change, crucial aspects obviously for any notion of character development. Returning to Johnston’s dedication in 1774 of The History of Arsaces to Camden, we might note how the work proclaims at once the author’s political allegiance while at the same time alluding subtly to Clayton’s work. Claiming the rights of patronage, Johnston nevertheless declares the “Spirit” of the book to be Camden’s, and not his own; he himself had merely “caught it” by “long and close Attention to his Lordship.” Camden’s spirit had thus been “let loose into the World” through Johnston’s work, and it was only natural that it should fly “back to its Parent for Protection.” Playing on Clayton’s theological ideas, Johnston’s book becomes the “body” that carries Camden’s “spirit” into the world; its author, named on the title page, only as “the EDITOR of CHRYSAL” is merely a mediator of that spirit; and Johnston in his Dedication is able to step back from the creative process and declare modestly: “If I have been so happy as to make the Body worthy of such a Spirit, that is all the Merit I pretend to” (33). Yet, far from making direct allusion to the American context, The History of Arsaces sets its narrative far back in time, and in the East rather than the West. Such distancing devices in time and space, familiar to Johnston no doubt on account of the scandalous nature of his earlier work, are, as we have seen, not to be taken at face value as past historical events are evidently shown to speak to contemporary

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c­ oncerns, while the widely spread eastern locations from North Africa and Arabia to India and China also conceal in plain sight several recognisably British, Irish, and American contexts. This mobility of the narrative, like that of Camden’s “spirit,” of the “body” of the book, and of Johnston himself, takes his readers through time and space, allowing them to view the interconnectedness of past and present, east and west, in a single telescopic manifestation. Such a vision also held the potential to merge and transpose identities through the communicative effects of “long and close Attention” to the spirit of another being. These transpositional and transformative aspects of character are further revealed in the numerous father-­ and-­son relationships that feature in the novel, reiterating a similar spiritual message that affirms a divine and paternalistic view of providence, handed on through succession, despite involving consubstantially discrete characters (in line with Clayton’s Arianist views). The political resolution of the novel in which Temugin accedes a degree of control to Astyages’ Betlis through the intercession of Arsaces represents an earthly and conciliatory fulfilment of Clayton’s Biblical notion of empire, that “all nations” were of “one Blood,” and that “the Bounds of their Habitations” would be “brought within the Line of his Inheritance.” Though the ending of the novel elevates Arsaces to his rightful place as Prince of Betlis, he is yet bound in filial duty to his father Astyages; while Astyages’ right to hereditary kingship is recognised, his subordination to Temugin is confirmed; and though Temugin is acknowledged to be “sovereign of the world” (206), his somewhat despotic tendencies, a function no doubt of his essentially Oriental spirit, are curbed and moderated by his trusted lieutenant Togrul (aka Selim), finally revealed at the very end of the novel to be none other than the mysterious prince Arsaces of the title. Despite the resoundingly Christian providential nature of its conclusion, the conciliatory politics of the novel requires its readers—Irish, British, and American—to imagine others as they might see them, and to exercise tolerance in a world increasingly riven by differences of religious belief. The significance of religious tolerance alongside a loosening of imperial taxation and trading controls could hardly be underestimated in this context, as demands in the Atlantic world for free trade in goods were (in the words of historian Boyd Schlenther), “accompanied by equally potent forces expounding free trade in religious ideas and practices.”23 Though its theology is of a distinctly heterodox and Protestant nature, the protagonist of this Oriental novel is ostensibly a Muslim, and its cast of characters includes Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Zoroastrians. By

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displacing the action of the novel into the Orient, Johnston himself, a Protestant raised in the Catholic environment of Limerick, avoids any direct reference to topical religious controversies, shifting their location eastwards in a pacificatory move. Hearing Himilco’s description of the flight of the Coptic Christians of Egypt from the prosecution of the Muslims invaders—reflecting a typically eighteenth-century understanding of the seventh-century Arab invasions of North Africa and Spain24— Selim is “appalled at this arraignment of the religion” in which he had been educated, and interrupts: “‘Mercy, gracious heaven! […] what do I hear? Can any duty be more incumbent on man, than to propagate the true religion, even by force, where persuasion fails?’” Selim’s zealous piety is, however, reproved by Himilco: “‘Beware, O my son,’ he replied, with a look and accent of greatest earnestness, ‘beware of intruding thyself into the councils of heaven! Has the Supreme Being told you, that only one religion is acceptable to him? […] If you alledge [sic] a particular revelation of your religion, do not others rest upon a like foundation? And doth not every man believe his own to be true?’” (81–82). Though Johnston’s other works include anti-Semitic and often far from tolerant ideas, Arsaces’ imperial context appears to influence the tolerant spirit animating this work.25 Johnston’s own transformation in this regard was thus entirely in keeping with the spirit of the work. Johnston’s own migration to Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1782 following his upbringing in Ireland and a writing career in England has been described by Aileen Douglas as a fitting conclusion to his imperial outlook.26 Although it was long known that he had written in a Calcutta newspaper under the name of Oneiropolos, no recovery of his writings in India had been accomplished for over two centuries until the recent identification of a brief series of articles in The Calcutta Gazette by the present author.27 I would like to conclude this chapter with a brief examination of this series with a view to exploring Johnston’s last known avatar, as Oneiropolos (“reader of dreams”), in his shifting career as a writer. An expression of the newly emerging public sphere in Anglo-India, The Calcutta Gazette, founded by the Orientalist Francis Gladwin, offered a digest of news from Britain and across the colonies, abstracts of parliamentary reports, literary compositions, and translations from Oriental languages as well government advertisements and tenders. Appearing from 10 March of 1785, and playing upon the ballooning craze that had swept across Europe in the wake of the Montgolfier brothers’ experiments of 1783, the weekly articles reveal Oneiropolos as the inventor of a flying balloon, a mode of transport that

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he playfully suggests might offer many advantages in the political world of British India, cut off by a journey of several months from the metropolis though beholden to its imperial authority, not to mention its tastes in cuisine and  clothing. Oneiropolos discloses the extent to which European inventions define life in Anglo-India. Food was “served with every culinary vegetable of Europe in essences. […] Nor was it to be doubted, but there might be an essence of wheat that would serve for bread; of flesh, that would be as nourishing as meat in kind.”28 Balloons, like culinary essences, and the operation of celestial beings, perform here a transporting function, promoting the movement of objects and people, but also facilitating the flow of aesthetic and spiritual qualities from the metropole to its colony for the delectation and sustenance of its inhabitants and for their true orientation in the imperial order. Setting out at dawn “from the same prudential forecast which made Teague desire to be hanged early […] as he had a long journey before him,” Oneiropolos finds his plans taking an unexpected turn as his balloon departs the earth’s gravitational field and drifts on to the moon.29 There he is met by the Greek satirist Lucian, a character whose extraordinary smile appeared to express “neither approbation, contempt, pleasure, nor indignation, but all jumbled together in one heterogenous compound.”30 Lucian explains that the moon was inhabited by those who had died on earth—Oneiropolos being exceptional in this regard on account of his mode of transport—and proceeds to undertake his satirical education commenting with jocular abandon on the follies of all ages and nations. Suggesting evidently a parallel with Johnston’s satirical career, Lucian discloses that he had been “sent to this place for a folly not uncommon with those who have more wit than prudence to guide it, forfeiting my friends for the sake of my jokes.”31 Recognising the new visitor as an Englishman, Lucian shows no surprise at his arrival: And so, my friend (said he, reaching me his hand), you are come at last. We have expected a visitant from your country for some time, to take possession of the empire you have got among us, in exchange for the one that you have lost […] Success had made you so fond of fighting that when you had conquered all your enemies, you e’en fell upon each other, like Cadmus’s crop of teeth, rather than stand still.32

Lucian’s somewhat macabre implication that Britain’s new lunar empire now consisted of those killed in the American colonial war dampens any

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self-congratulatory English feelings that Oneiropolos—who prides himself on being “a true Briton” (though, as we have seen, he reveals a streak of the “Teague”)—might have felt, even while it plays on the conceit that Britain’s loss of the American colonies had been neatly replaced by its eastern territories. The reference to the Phoenician prince, Cadmus, alludes subtly to the founding of Thebes,33 another reminder of the reiterated bloodiness associated with the founding of cities in relation to empire. This would have been a sombre and sobering comparison for the Anglo-­ Indian inhabitants of Kolkata which was being built at this time in the image of Georgian England, and emerging as one of the grandest cities in the eastern hemisphere. Oneiropolos’s self-righteous attempts to stand up for the honour of his country are jocularly brushed away by Lucian, “suspend your patriotism for a few minutes, and you shall see enough to make you sick of it for ever.”34 With Lucian acting as Oneiropolos’s guide, they are met on the moon by various figures from classical to contemporary times. These figures continue their earthly arguments with unabated zeal, reflecting the past and present in a synchronic vision of human folly. An argument between a Stoic and an Epicurean regarding the nature and origin of the soul is interrupted by a group displaying newly arrived French and English people. The former pair of contestants debate whether the soul is to be regarded as “a particle of the soul of the universe” or if  it “derives its essence from the parents” (showing Johnston’s continued interest in such speculations), while the latter company (a “motley group […] never meant by nature to incorporate” in Lucian’s view) exhibits the odd spectacle of the newly founded Anglo-French amity in the wake of the Seven Years War and prior to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Johnston’s richly satirical representation of lunar society, darkly reflecting on Britain’s imperial pretensions in the east, and on the mixed and displaced society of Europeans in India, and challenging to any stable notions of identity, was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not particularly palatable to his audience in the Gazette. Readers evidently objected to the “obscurity” and offensiveness in these articles. By 21 July 1785, Johnston suffered the humiliation of finding his article moved from its customary opening position in the paper to page 4. The series was wound up in the following number of 28 July, with Oneiropolos consoling himself (tongue firmly in cheek) “that my dream will not bear any interpretation that can possibly give offence to any person, it evidently being no more than the work of mere imagination.”35

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Despite the immense popularity of his early work, Johnston remains a largely neglected and somewhat shadowy figure in Irish literary history. While his first migration to the metropolitan centre of London brought him success and fame as an author; his later movement to the colonial outpost of Kolkata seems to have eclipsed his reputation considerably, leaving his last years nearly a blank. His remarkably diverse oeuvre (including satire, fiction, drama, as well as newly attributed poetry, and newspaper writings) reveal a shifting and mutable figure adapting himself to new patrons, contexts, and locations within what Dror Wahrman describes as an “ancien regime” understanding of human identity prevailing in the eighteenth century.36 A committed imperialist who discerned a providential direction to empire, he was also one of its earliest, and most perceptive critics. His texts reiterate compulsive attention to material phenomena— guineas, balloons, and books—that have the capacity to interact with human beings, engaging people and things in constant movement, reflecting his own migratory sensibility as an Irishman, and involving a spiritual, even mystical, outlook on life. This unusual aspect of this thinking, developed from a theological tradition of the Irish Enlightenment, may be discerned through his varied writings, rather like the “Teague” who slips through the voice of the classical figure of Oneiropolos.

Notes 1. P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1. 2. I adopt this term from its use largely in the context of contemporary postcolonial migrant literatures. As described, for instance, by Pèrez-Torres, “migratory sensibility” is associated with the notion of “deterritorialization” as propounded by Deleuze and Guattari, and involves “the ability to move through several realms, becoming a part of without fully submitting to them”; see Rafael Pèrez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge, 2008), 3. The formation of such a sensibility, I would like to suggest, might be productively related to the early displacements engendered by eighteenth-century imperialism in the Irish context, involving comparable factors of capitalism, agency and mobility. 3. See Aileen Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 147–61, and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, “A ‘Teague’ and a ‘True Briton’: Charles Johnstone, Ireland, and Empire,” Irish University Review

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41, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 133–50. Until recently, Johnston’s name has generally been spelt with a final “e,” a practice initiated in Walter Scott’s 1822 edition of Chrysal; more recent scholarship has returned, correctly, to the spelling used by Johnston himself in the dedications of several of his novels. 4. “[Conservator,]” “An Account of the Life and Writing of Charles Johnston, Esq.,” The European Magazine, and London Review 57 (March 1810): 216. 5. Walter Scott, ed., Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1822), xxviii. 6. See Craig Bailey, Irish London: Middle-Class Migration in the Global Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 19–86. 7. See Charles Johnstone, Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea, ed. Kevin Bourque, 2 vols. (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2011), I: viii–x. 8. Johnstone, Chrysal, I: 21. 9. Charles Johnston, The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (Dublin: Four Courts, 2014), 35. Page numbers cited in-text refer to this edition. 10. Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal 51 (1774): 237–38. 11. Camden also supported Irish calls for greater legislative freedom in parliament, recognising the interlinked aspirations of American colonists and Irish patriots. See H.S.  Eeles, Lord Chancellor Camden and his Family (London: Philip Allan, 1934), 140. 12. Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009), 106–07. 13. This stereotype is famously played upon with savage irony in Swift’s A Modest Proposal. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.  17–91; see also Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 49. 14. Several notices of his life and work appear in Irish or locally oriented sources, one of the earliest being John Ferrar’s History of Limerick (Limerick: A. Watson, 1787). 15. See Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c. 1750–1800 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), 41–70, and Lennon, Irish Orientalism, 58–114. 16. Moyra Haslett, “Experimentalism in the Irish Novel, 1750–1770,” Irish University Review 11, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 63–79. 17. Johnston, Chrysal, I, 21. Berkeley and Clayton are major representative figures in the intellectual tradition flourishing in the eighteenth century that is denominated by David Berman as the “Irish Enlightenment”; see David Berman and Patricia O’Riordan, The Irish Enlightenment and Counter-­Enlightenment, 6 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002). See also

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Michael Brown, The Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 18. Robert Clayton, An Essay on Spirit (Dublin: S. Powell, 1750), 12. 19. Clayton, An Essay, 14. 20. Ibid., 118–19. 21. “The same thinking thing in different times and places” in Locke’s famous phrase; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 335. However, the apparent stability of the Lockean conception is partially undermined by his later discussion of duplication and mutability in the same work; see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 189–94. 22. Clayton, An Essay, 156. In Locke’s often cited formulation from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), personal identity might be premised on the basis of recognising “the same thinking thing in different times and places.” 23. Boyd Stanley Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 128. 24. See, for example, the Marquis d’Argens, The Jewish Spy: Being a Philosophical, Historical and Critical Correspondence, 5 vols (London: D. Browne, 1739) II, 221. 25. Chrysal, for instance, includes several disparaging representations of Jesuits and Jews. 26. Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule,” 159. 27. Daniel S. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles from The Calcutta Gazette by Charles Johnstone,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 26 (2011): 140–69. 28. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 147. 29. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 148. 30. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 150. 31. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 153. 32. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 151. 33. In Greek mythology, when Cadmus, following Athena’s instructions, sowed the dragon’s teeth, a fully armed set of warriors, the Spartoi, sprang up from the ground. By casting a stone amongst them, Cadmus caused the Spartoi to fall upon each other until only five were left. These five Spartoi were Cadmus’ helpers in the founding of Thebes. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III. 34. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 151. 35. Roberts, “Newly Recovered Articles,” 169. 36. For a broadly historical view of eighteenth-century Ireland as an ancien regime society, see Warhman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press 2007) and S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

CHAPTER 7

Prudence and Prejudice in Maria Edgeworth’s “Murad the Unlucky” (1804) Sonja Lawrenson

In contrast to the majority of Maria Edgeworth’s short fiction, “Murad the Unlucky” has enjoyed a small but sustained readership over the centuries. First published in Popular Tales (1804), it was not only republished in 1891 under the title Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales, but has also been anthologised in three modern scholarly editions.1 And yet, while the tale’s ostensibly “straightforward”2 narrative has proved appealing to contemporary editors, it has often been dismissed as “schoolmistressy” by critics.3 Typically regarded as a late example of an earlier “moralistic group of Oriental tales,”4 this chapter contends that the overt didacticism of “Murad the Unlucky” belies its profound engagement with an impressive array of historical, anthropological, and philosophical sources. Drawing on Joseph Lennon’s study of the “unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism,”5 it argues that Edgeworth’s Oriental tale employs this discursive mode to explore the myriad political and cultural implications of imperial exchange in this period. Overall, in its subtle yet salient scrutiny of the socio-economic realities of the modern East, “Murad the Unlucky” aligns itself more readily to Irish Orientalist modes of representation than those of the British Romantic tradition, in which it is generally considered. S. Lawrenson (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_7

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As asserted by Edward Said in his ground-breaking study, Orientalism (1978), the late eighteenth century saw Anglo-French conceptions of the Orient become increasingly predicated upon “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”6 Of course, Ireland was also subject to this politicised representation with British formulations of a Celtic-Oriental affinity often serving to underscore a shared inferiority. In eighteenth-century Ireland, however, a burgeoning interest in Orientalism grew alongside a resurgent commitment to Celtic nationalism. Informed by Joep Leerssen’s argument that “Irish cultural nationalism, grown as it has out of a culturally and politically divided country, is to a large extent an interiorized form of exoticism,”7 Lennon defines Irish Orientalism as an ambivalent discourse that “often claims direct allegiance to the narratives of both the colonizer and the colonized.”8 He also identifies Edgeworth’s contemporaries, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore, as formative figures in the development of “Irish Romantic Orientalism,” which is influenced by British Romantic writings on the East yet alert to “the constructed nature of the Orient, and its supposed lure of sensuality.”9 Acknowledging this, Edgeworth’s omission from Lennon’s analysis appears as something of a missed opportunity. This exclusion is even more curious given the fact that scholars such as Julia M. Wright and Sharon Murphy have devoted considerable attention to the connections between Edgeworth’s Orientalist fiction and the politics of her “Irish” writing.10 According to Lennon, both Owenson and Moore “celebrated the Celtic and Oriental […] and created a dialogue between them in their allegorical and allusive works.”11 Edgeworth’s commitment to the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism12 rendered her sceptical of such a “semiotic symbiosis of the Oriental and the Celt.”13 Still, she shared with these authors “the liminal position often occupied by Irish writers within the British Empire, [who] could belong both to the imperial metropole and the colonized periphery.”14 By neglecting to engage with Edgeworth’s Enlightenment-inspired Orientalism, Lennon inevitably underestimates the full scope of “the many permutations and variances” of Irish Orientalism.15 Furthermore, while Lennon’s consideration of female contributors to this discourse is rather negligible, Edgeworth’s Oriental tale both evidences the relatively unappreciated role of gender politics within the construction of imperialist discourses and undermines the notion of Orientalism as a predominantly male sphere. Hence, by contextualising

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“Murad the Unlucky” in relation to Irish Orientalism, this chapter not only reveals the complexities of Edgeworth’s global-political vision but also renegotiates the critical contours of this “dialectical and cumulative” discourse to include her female-centred and Enlightenment-oriented perspective.

Murad and the Ropemaker Set in Turkey, “Murad the Unlucky” acquires its atmosphere and ambience directly from the Arabian Nights Entertainment—a text that, as Ros Ballaster notes, remained “the touchstone and paradigm of the Oriental tale” throughout the eighteenth century.16 Commencing with a declaration that “the grand seignior amuses himself by going at night, in disguise through the streets of Constantinople; as the Caliph, Haroun Alraschid, used formerly to do in Bagdad,”17 the tale pronounces its debt to the Arabian saga by overtly imitating its style, tone, and tropes. Considering that the Arabian Nights “went into multiple reprints and generated countless imitations” following its first European publication at the beginning of the eighteenth century,18 Edgeworth’s contemporaries could hardly fail to recognise this explicit allusion to its “Story of the Three Calendars, Sons of Kings; and of the Five Ladies of Bagdad,” in which the reader is similarly informed that “the Caliph Haroun Alraschid was accustomed to walk abroad in disguise very often by night.”19 Nor were they likely to misidentify the ensuing allusion to “The Story of Cogia-Hassan Alhabal,” another popular fable in the Arabian Nights’ compendium: [A]s they were passing a rope-maker’s, the sultan recollected the Arabian story of Cogia-Hassan Alhabal, the rope-maker, and his two friends, Saad and Saadi, who differed so much in their opinion concerning the influence of fortune over human affairs. (215)

However, whereas contemporary translations of the ropemaker’s story presented the competing claims of wealth and morality as the thematic crux of its narrative, Edgeworth contorts the original significance of this discussion by adjusting the implied denotations of the word “fortune” to suit her own purposes. Hence, although Saad and Saadi in the original story debate over “riches” and “virtue,”20 the Sultan and Vizier who introduce Murad’s narrative reconceptualise this dialogue as a discourse concerning “luck” and “prudence” (215). These two characters assess the

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“fortunes” of the Turkish brothers Murad and Saladin according to Enlightenment principles rather than religious precepts. Thus, when the Sultan concludes that “the histories of Saladin the Lucky and Murad the Unlucky, favour [the] opinion, that prudence has more influence than chance in human affairs” (255), he radically revises the epistemological parameters upon which the traditional Arabian Nights’ narrative was predicated. As Ballaster points out, Edgeworth “had elsewhere warned against the effect of reading Oriental tales on the young”21 fearing their provoking effects upon the imagination. In fact, this had been a matter of concern to her father and mentor, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, at least as far back as the 1770s. While at boarding school in November 1779, the 12-year-old Maria received a letter from her father containing a story which he requested her to complete. This “Arabian fable” concerned the exploits of three brothers arraigned before the Sultan for the theft of a camel. Suspected of possessing too detailed a knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the camel’s disappearance, the brothers protest that they are “neither deceivers nor necromancers.”22 Richard Lovell asked his daughter to resolve the narrative providing rational explanations as to how the brothers may have “divined the foregoing circumstances” without employing “any other means of divination than [their] senses and [their] Reason.”23 This is the first piece of fiction that Edgeworth is known to have written, yet it evidently informed her later Oriental tale. As with this juvenile composition, the rhetorical and dramatic effectiveness of “Murad the Unlucky” depends on the cogent explication of events that are initially attributed to numinous forces. Despite his fervent protestations to the contrary, all the unfortunate incidents that beset Murad are ultimately revealed as the fruit of his own imprudence. Hence, for many recent commentators on the tale, “Murad the Unlucky” represents an attempt to impose Western “bourgeois empiricist convictions”24 upon an Orient that is explicitly “defined against Britain.”25 Even those who challenge such claims nonetheless read “Murad the Unlucky” as “redirect[ing] the oriental tale away from its associations with romance and magic towards an allegory about hard-headed practicality, the importance of self-government, and an openness to opportunity.”26 It is my contention that prevailing scholarly assumptions about the fantastical nature of Edgeworth’s source text has resulted in a misapprehension of the motives behind her intertextual engagement with the Arabian Nights. Unquestionably, Arabian Night’s stories such as the aforementioned

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“Story of the Three Calendars” abound in terrifying genii, amazing ­transmogrifications, and elaborate castles in the air. “The Story of Cogia-­ Hassan Alhabal,” however, engages no supernatural machinery whatsoever. Instead, this tale centres on a socio-economic experiment conducted by the wealthy merchant, Saadi. In fact, the narrative offers a strikingly acute examination of economic theories that were to gain great currency in eighteenth-century Europe. While his friend, Saad, believes that financial prosperity is a matter of “mere chance”27 and happiness should be sought elsewhere, Saadi claims: [M]ost people’s poverty is owing to their wanting at first a sufficient sum of money to employ their industry with, and by that means increase it […] if they once had such a sum, and made a right use of it, they would not only live well, but would infallibly grow rich in time.28

Here, Saadi expounds an economic thesis that would later attract Adam Smith’s enquiry in his seminal treatise of political economy, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Even the eponymous hero of the tale, the old ropemaker Hassan, demonstrates what Edgeworth must have regarded as a prescient understanding of economic principles. Though gladly accepting Saadi’s benevolent patronage, he refuses to allow his wife to purchase expensive clothes: I told her we ought not to begin with such expences; for […] though the money is made to be spent, yet we must proceed to lay a good foundation, that we may not exhaust our stock […] I spent all that day […] going to the people of my own trade, […] and giving them money beforehand, engaged them to work for me in different sorts of rope-making, according to their ability…29

This fictional account of the co-operative manufacture of rope curiously foreshadows Smith’s celebrated analysis of pin-making in The Wealth of Nations, where “the division of labour … occasions … a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour.”30 Moreover, Hassan’s distinction here between wasteful prodigality and prudent consumerism articulates a concern with excessive consumption that also preoccupied Smith. As an avid and conscientious reader of Smith, it is hardly surprising that Edgeworth should be drawn to the ropemaker’s story as inspiration. What is more intriguing, however, is the fact that the tale concludes with

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Saadi being forced to concede that his abstract economic model fails to account for the social and cultural contingencies of everyday commerce. The ropemaker loses most of the gold Saadi donates to him because he cannot afford a safe place to store it. In this way, “The Story of Cogia Al Hassan” proleptically defies not only the principles of Smithian economics but also the ideal of enlightened paternalism that Edgeworth promoted so heavily in her pedagogical works and elsewhere. Thus, rather than convert the exotic and erotic Orient of the Arabian Nights into a more prosaic and pragmatic world better suited to her moral philosophy, Edgeworth arguably engaged with this tale precisely because it posed a provocative challenge to her worldview. In so doing, Edgeworth participates in a self-reflexive intertextual practice that Srinivas Aravamudan regards as the distinguishing feature of an Enlightenment-inspired Orientalism that criss-crossed eighteenth-century Europe. Identifying this mode of “Enlightenment Orientalism” as “a universalism that is not about a separate sphere—whether geographical, ethnocultural, or religious,” but “interconnected multiple frameworks and epistemologies,”31 Aravamudan argues that such works “projected Europe onto the Orient and vice versa in order to make larger inductions about sexuality, religion and politics.”32 By choosing to respond to an Arabian Nights’ tale that exposed her own political philosophy to scrutiny, Edgeworth’s Enlightenment Orientalism “aimed at mutual understanding across cultural differences” and ensured that “the self was under critique as much as any ‘other’.”33 Lennon pays little heed to this Enlightenment-­ inspired discourse in his examination of Irish Orientalism, instead grounding his thesis in “the malleability and cultural power of representations of both the Oriental and the Celtic” in Irish literature.34 And yet, Enlightenment Orientalism provided Edgeworth with a more outward-­ facing and empirically-based framework in which to contemplate Irish culture and nationhood, as well as Ireland’s status in relation to the British Empire. As with “Lame Jervas,” Edgeworth’s other Eastern-based Popular Tale, “Murad the Unlucky” does not treat Ireland’s position within the British Empire as an explicit narrative concern. The Irish inflections of Edgeworth’s Orientalism are nonetheless glimpsed in the tale’s taut fusion of Oriental fable and Orientalist scholarship, which produce a “rhetorical doubleness” that characterises the Irish Orientalist tradition.35 Indeed, for Lennon, “such conflicting strategies of representation constitute the strange, ambivalent tandem within the discourse of Irish Orientalism.”36 Hence, while recognising “Murad the Unlucky” as a conscientious

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endeavour to engage seriously and critically with both the Arabian Nights tradition and the changing social, political, and economic realities of the modern East, this chapter concomitantly traces the discursive interstices that surreptitiously trouble and disrupt Edgeworth’s enlightened, yet distinctly Irish, Orientalism.

Enlightening the Orient or Reorienting the Enlightenment? As asserted above, despite its redolent evocations of the Arabian Nights, “Murad the Unlucky” props its central storyline upon a robust scaffold of historical, political, and cultural documentation. In fact, this tale is expressly and specifically situated during the recent turmoil of France’s Egyptian campaign of 1797–1801.37 Murad’s misadventures in Egypt with the grand seignior’s army and subsequent encounters with “a detachment of English soldiers” (229) suggest that this historical context not only supplies the story with a convincing background setting but much of its principal action. Both Murad’s unhappy fate and his brother Saladin’s more felicitous one are materially affected by their encounters with the competing European military forces at war in the Ottomans during this period. Moreover, the narrative is underpinned by the scholarship of late eighteenth-­century European travellers to the East. Though less conspicuous than the eye-catching allusions to the Arabian Nights, Orientalist travelogues such as John Antes’ Observations on the Manners and Customs of Egyptians (1800)38 and the Memoirs of François Baron de Tott (1785)39 encroach subtly yet no less pervasively upon the overall plot and structure of this tale. While Edgeworth’s appendixed references to these works may initially strike as tangential, accumulatively they endow the narrative with the authoritative tone of Enlightenment ethnography. Moreover, as Robert L. Mack notes, many plot elements recollect and reproduce key passages from each of these works. Both Murad’s account of his persecution during a ferocious riot over “the weight and quality of the bread, furnished by the bakers” (221) and Saladin’s report of frequent fires in Constantinople mirror de Tott’s descriptions of events that occurred during his residence in Turkey.40 Similarly, Antes’ remarks upon a plague that ravished Cairo in 1781 provide both the inspiration and detail for Murad’s encounter with the Jewish vendor of a contaminated casket of Smyrnian

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garments.41 Mack further proposes that the story’s protagonist was drawn from de Tott’s characterisation of the wealthy Turkish effendi, Murad Mollach, as a superstitious, imprudent and drunken fainéant.42 Reflecting upon the role of such historical and geo-political contextualisation within “Murad the Unlucky,” Mack declares that “the world of Edgeworth’s tale is emphatically not the hazy, opulent landscape of the earliest Eastern tales” but “a world ravaged by the plague, threatened constantly by natural disasters and social unrest and inhabited by the forces of a foreign occupation.”43 He thus regards these contextual and intertextual references “as part of [a] conscious attempt to deconstruct earlier Eastern narratives.” He concludes that “in Murad we see at least one writer beginning to come to grips with the realization that the Orientalism of the nineteenth century will have to be less fanciful and more culturally responsible.”44 Expanding upon Mack’s argument, Ballaster outlines the ways in which Edgeworth’s narrative opposes the solipsistic subjectivism that subsumed many Romantic depictions of the Orient: Edgeworth appears to associate the Romantic aesthetic of solitary growth of the imagination in communion with natural objects, landscape, and self-­ examination with imperial/colonial ambition, its self-regard and wilful blindness to the social fabric of the spaces it occupies.45

Both Mack and Ballaster regard Edgeworth’s emphasis upon geo-political contextualisation not only as a rejection of the eroticism and exoticism of Romantic Orientalism but also the political and economic chauvinism that often lay behind this ostensibly whimsical and capricious discourse. On the other hand—but by the same token—one might argue that the “empirical evidence” provided by Edgeworth’s scholarly informants is no less beholden to Anglo-French discursive proscriptions. As postcolonial criticism of the last few decades has repeatedly evidenced, the truth claims propounded by Orientalist scholarship of this period frequently served to gloss a scientific veneer on an otherwise deliberately distorted and highly controlled version of eastern “reality.” As Saladin reveals in the process of recounting his personal story, he “attributes [his] success and his [brother’s] misfortunes” to their “different beliefs” (245). Whereas, Murad refuses to relinquish his autochthonic superstitions, a youthful mishap convinces Saladin to heed the counsel of a French military engineer who encourages him to denounce his faith in predestination and adopt a position of rational scepticism:

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During the time I was confined to my bed, the French gentleman came frequently to see me. He was a very sensible man; and the conversations he had with me enlarged my mind, and cured me of any foolish prejudices, especially … concerning the predominance of what is called luck or fortune in human affairs. (244–45)

Mack suggests that the “French gentleman” described here is in fact a literary depiction of none other than the Baron de Tott.46 Napoleon had prepared for his Egyptian military campaign by assembling a group of civilian experts in engineering, surveying, translation and science in order to assist his military operations—an elite cadre of which Baron de Tott was evidently a member. As Darrell Dykstra observes: The inclusion of the savants in the expedition suggests a wish to bring civilian expertise—the self-conscious expertise of the Enlightenment—to bear on the pragmatic problems that would face an army of occupation: to communicate, to administer, to adjudicate, to tax.47

Although this primary aim of propagating Enlightenment “expertise” did by no means “exclude a second goal of cultural trophy-hunting,”48 Edgeworth apparently accepts the French engineer’s ostensibly altruistic motives at face value. Casting his inherited beliefs aside, Saladin conforms to the rationalist pedagogy propounded by his erudite European mentor. Once a “presumptuous and rash” Oriental (244), he rapidly perpetuates the European model of enlightened rationalism throughout the Ottoman, with the Sultan’s endorsement of his prudent pragmatism confirming his propagatory prowess: Saladin, I rejoice to have heard, from your own lips, the history of your life. I acknowledge [that] I have been in the wrong … I acknowledge that the histories of Saladin, the Lucky and Murad, the Unlucky, favour [the] opinion, that prudence has more influence than chance in human affairs. (255)

Alan Richardson thus characterises “Murad the Unlucky” as an “improving fiction … [that] implicitly argues for the superiority of European over ‘Oriental’ values.”49 Indeed, by thrusting her protagonist into the midst of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, Edgeworth facilitates a plumb comparison between the British and Turkish armed forces. Despite the fact that Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt posed a direct threat to the Ottomans’ suzerainty in North Africa, the narrative portrays the imperial army of the

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Ottoman as incompetent, apathetic, and haphazard in its defence against this powerful European enemy. In “defiance of all orders” (226), the soldiers in Murad’s camp recklessly amuse themselves with opium, thievery, and firing at their fellow conscripts. This glib exposé of Turkish martial practices serves to illustrate the apparent absurdity of the “Islamic” doctrine of predestination. In direct contrast, the benevolence shown to Murad by the advancing British troops compels him to confess that “Christians though they were … I had reason to love them better than any of the followers of Mahomet, my good brother only excepted” (229). Furthermore, although both Britain and the Ottoman Empire rallied against the French in point of fact, Edgeworth’s fictional representation of the three imperial forces symbolically recants this Anglo-Turkish alliance and idealistically realigns British and French colonial interests. Murad’s account of his life-saving encounter with a detachment of “humane” and “tender” English soldiers and their learned “men of science” (229), not only accentuates the callous indifference of his fellow Turks (who have abandoned him to perish alone) but also prompts a figurative association between these English rescuers and the French engineer who effected Saladin’s transformation. Whereas the Turkish Empire is depicted as barbaric and brutal, Britain and France cohere as enlightened and progressive Western nations. By positioning the European and Turkish armies in opposition, Edgeworth promotes the already prevalent view that British military intervention alone could secure for the Ottomans such decisive victories as the Battle of the Nile.50 In so doing, she reiterates the supercilious jingoism embedded within much Anglo-French Orientalism of the early nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, these fictional portraits are largely indebted to the observations of the aforementioned Orientalists John Antes and François Baron de Tott, both of whom exalt European military practice over the martial regime of the Ottoman’s Muslim forces.51 Navigating a politically narrow strait between Antes’ anti-Gallicanism and de Tott’s French patriotism, Edgeworth fuses the imagery and rhetoric of each source to achieve a reconciliative vision of European dominion in the East. From this perspective, “Murad the Unlucky” merges Oriental fable with historical fact in order to emphasise Britain’s imperial ascendancy over France, while reinforcing their mutual superiority over the Eastern Empire of the Turks. On reflection, then, does the tale’s assimilation of Orientalist scholarship symbolise “nothing less than a not-so-subtle critique of British imperial policy”52 as Mack proposes, or, does it merely endorse “a bourgeois

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ethic of work, discipline and delayed gratification,”53 as Richardson concludes? We might further query whether the tale’s subversion of Romantic Orientalism necessarily entails a critique of European colonialism in the East or whether it simply reflects Edgeworth’s desire to replace an older and more amorphous phase of imperialism with a better-regulated and more efficient model. Arguably, Edgeworth’s deliberate and repeated invocation of historical, geographical, and socio-political referents throughout “Murad the Unlucky” may be interpreted as evidence of “the political liminality of Irish Orientalism: subversive in intent yet often strategically complicit within the overarching discourse.”54 For, as Lennon notes, “most Irish Orientalist authors, although often complicit in the creation of the discourse of European imperial domination, usually had a different agenda than imperial Orientalists in Britain and France.”55 By responding to the political realities of the modern East while engaging intertextually with the Arabian Nights, Edgeworth achieves a contextually rich and complex narrative that contributes to the “syncretistic” discourse of Irish Orientalism. Even so, the imprint of this Irish Orientalist tradition is patently tempered in Edgeworth’s tale. As previously asserted, Edgeworth’s commitment to Enlightenment rationalism rendered her unwilling to countenance the “ancient Irish consanguinities with the Orient”56 that were promulgated in the works of Irish contemporaries such as the aforementioned Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore. Nevertheless, in “Murad the Unlucky,” Edgeworth  still “interrogated the exoticizing lenses of imperial culture.”57 However, rather than pursue a strategy of “cross-colony identification” based on Celtic-Oriental affinities to do so,58 Edgeworth predicated her critique of empire upon an enlightened vision of universalised mutuality operating via networks of commercial exchange. Redeploying Smithian political economy as a model for transcultural transactions, Edgeworth promoted Smith’s argument for the “principles of common prudence”59 as a means to overcome what she regarded as the irrational impulses of prejudice and intolerance. Yet, notwithstanding her attempts to “expose the Orient as a construct” via this ideal of mutually beneficial exchange,60 Edgeworth struggles to calibrate the uneven power dynamics that often derange such interactions. As in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the dangers of excessive consumption persistently trouble this abstracted commercial economy, rendering Edgeworth’s attempted riposte to “The Story of Cogia-Hassan Alhabal” somewhat fractured and incomplete.

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Imperial Commerce and Irish Consumption Noting that to “many observers Adam Smith seems to have conflicting views about consumption,”61 Paul Mueller remarks that, though “Smith favors consumption on the whole as contributing to people’s happiness,”62 Smith also acknowledges that “consumption can be wasteful, extravagant, ill-conceived, and socially-damaging.”63 In Smith’s view, the general human propensity towards “frugality and good conduct” is generally “sufficient to compensate, not only the private prodigality and misconduct of individuals, but the publick extravagance of government.”64 Yet, Smith also recognises that the commercial virtue of prudence had quickly receded within the global-political context of late eighteenth-century imperialism, where mercantile monopolies such as the East India Company appeared to “found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers.”65 According to Smith, the most exigent solution to the “injustices” of this colonial system is “the mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally … carries.”66 Turning his critical attention to British restrictions on Irish trade, he argues: By an union with Great Britain the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally compleat deliverance from […] an aristocracy […] founded […] in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices.67

An avowed disciple of Smith, Edgeworth must nonetheless have struggled to share his confidence in the “equality of force”68 promised by a union of free trade. Writing Popular Tales during the implementation of the Act of Union, Edgeworth was all too aware of the persistent venality and prodigality within the Irish political and economic system. In 1800, her father actually voted against the union in protest at the extreme levels of bribery he witnessed as the British government sought to secure a majority. Moreover, the excessive consumption of Ireland’s elite caste of absentee landlords was a central preoccupation of her post-union fiction. Registering this ambivalence, Fraser Easton argues that Edgeworth’s fiction derives a “progressive” imperial paradigm from Smith—an “alternative vision of Empire based not on political conquest but on the ameliorative economic forces of enlarged markets.”69 And yet, whereas Smith envisages the inevitable decline of national manners under “a world system

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of commerce,” Easton contends that Edgeworth’s Irish writings “all seek to defend the Irish national character within a cosmopolitical frame of reference.”70 Easton suggests that Edgeworth maintains this complex geo-­ political dynamic via a strategic confluence of “certain specific features of Burke and Smith—of paternalistic tradition and enlightened cosmopolitics.”71 Undoubtedly, in her sentimentalised portrayal of Saladin’s sympathetic attachment to his French mentor, Edgeworth promotes a rather circumscribed matrix of social mobility in which an intriguing admixture of meritocratic individualism and benevolent paternalism drive the mechanisms of social and commercial progress. As mentioned above, Saladin is eager to profit from the assistance, advice, and commercial opportunities provided by his “munificent” (250) benefactor yet unwilling to disregard social boundaries in order to do so. As Julia M.  Wright observes, Edgeworth’s socio-political vision is thus directly indebted to both Smith and Burke, as advocates of sensibility as an ameliorative yet stabilising socio-economic force.72 Notwithstanding this, I would question how firmly “Murad the Unlucky” adheres to Burke’s conception of the nation as founded upon custom, prejudice, and tradition. Exposed at an early age to the nefarious credos of an uneducated and unprincipled nursemaid, Murad surrenders to an irrational prejudice that is presented in terms of a medical condition: My nurse… with a look which I shall never forget … whispered … “Unlucky he was, and is, and ever will be”… This speech made a terrible impression upon me, young as I then was and every accident that happened to me afterwards confirmed my belief in my nurse’s prognostic.73

Rather than “prejudice render[ing] a man’s virtue his habit”74 as Burke famously asserts, Murad’s inherited prejudice latently feeds his proclivity to excessive modes of consumption. Clíona Ó Gallchoir argues that Edgeworth’s self-consciously gendered perspective made her wary of Burke’s paternalistic politics, but she also stipulates against invoking Edgeworth’s debt to Smithian moral and political economy without due regard to the fact that Edgeworth “uses this ‘commercial humanism’ to challenge the increasing insistence on a gendered division between public and private.”75 Certainly, Smith’s endorsement of a limited programme of domestic education for women in The Wealth of Nations must have agitated the erudite and expansive energies of Edgeworth. In “Murad the Unlucky,” Edgeworth “disrupt[s and] rejects the ‘safe’ acceptance of

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women’s place”76 via her depiction of the “richly apparelled” yet “violent tempered” Sultana who acts as the catalyst for much of the plot action. Financially dependent on her custom, the fates of Murad and Saladin are as beholden to the despotic whims of this wealthy female as to the dictates of prudence (241, 220). At the same time, while she wields power as a consumer of luxury goods, as a member of the Sultan’s seraglio she too remains limited in her agency. Indeed, the limited narrative agency afforded to the tale’s female characters may be said to reflect not only Edgeworth’s rejection of Burke’s imagining of the nation as “a rigidly conceived patriarchal family”77 but also her increasing anxiety regarding capitalism’s potential to narrow the domestic sphere even further. Significantly, though Smith repeatedly castigates the superficial consumption of such “pleasures of vanity and superiority” in The Wealth of Nations, he largely excludes women from a productive role in the economy.78 In contrast, “Murad the Unlucky” envisages a variegated marketplace where cross-cultural and cross-gendered interactions transverse the parameters of a consolidating British Empire. Indeed, it is via this interplay of commercial transactions, and not its referencing of Orientalist scholarship, that this tale offers its most profound imperial critique. For, within ostensibly terse and technical accounts regarding the sale of vases, dyes, clothes, cotton, and mirrors, Edgeworth embeds pregnant images and phrases that hint to the deeper modalities of such commercial exchange. Though the goods being exchanged are inescapably prosaic, the processes of transaction involve a vast array of heterogeneous characters, from rich merchants to female slaves, and Jewish lenders to the ladies of the grand seignior’s seraglio. These diverse yet infinitely contingent personal, cultural, and economic interactions result in a complex economy of identification. Shelley Saguaro argues that the “politics of commerce” established in this “little-known oriental tale may elucidate and reinforce speculations concerning Edgeworth’s colonial critique first suggested by the better-known and more intricate Castle Rackrent [1801].”79 Observing parallels between each tales’ focused “attention to exchange whether linguistic, cultural, or commercial,”80 she posits a direct link between the texts’ dynamics of exchange and their representations of identity and difference, which she regards as “the meaningful predication for exchange.”81 In an insightful analysis of Saladin’s response to the Jewish vendor who attempts to sell him plague-ridden items, she observes that “it is a gesture of mutuality that reveals the situation.” Pointing out that “it was trade and Irish manufacture which had been prohibited and ruined by English

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­ rotectionism,”82 Saguaro asserts that the tale “addresses the complexities p of power at a critical time in Ireland’s own history.”83 Interpreting Saladin’s refusal “of being made a Pasha or governor of a province […] as a parable for politics and commercial relations closer to home,”84 Saguaro concludes that Edgeworth does not see commerce “as an inevitable adjunct to conquest and capitalist imperialism,” but more in the sense of its derivation in “mutual merchandise.” 85 Others have rejected the notion that Saladin’s refusal of this post is a comment on “prudence” in capitalism and imperialism, arguing instead that Edgeworth employs the “language of commerce”86 to buttress a “hegemonic and exploitative” global commercial system.87 In truth, the tale’s diverse cast of characters often seems to reproduce contemporaneous racial hierarchies, with the Jewish vendor, Rachub, representing “the other against whom all characters within the story can be measured.”88 In her later novel Harrington (1817), even Edgeworth renounced the “illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated”89 in her former works. And yet, without minimising the tale’s anti-Semitic representation, it is in fact “prejudice and the propensity for stereotype that lead to Murad’s disastrous ‘contamination’” by Rachub’s merchandise.90 In responding to Rachub at face value, Murad confesses that he has allowed “the evidence of [his] senses” to predominate over his reflective faculties.91 On the other hand, because he “deliberately ignores his initial prejudice and mistrust,”92 Saladin is endowed with perspicacity of judgement and discernment: There was something mysterious in the manner of this Jew, and I did not like his countenance; but I considered that I ought not to be governed by caprice in my dealings, and that I ought not to neglect his offer merely because I took a dislike to the cut of his beard, the turn of his eye or the tone of his voice. (250)

Thus, while Rachub supplies the plot with an easily identifiable villain in his role as covetous and perfidious Jew, due attention to the multilateral processes of commercial exchange in “Murad the Unlucky” renders it apparent that the tale does not altogether sanction the anti-Semitic stereotype that it exploits. Indeed, there are some curious parallels between “Murad the Unlucky” and Edgeworth’s later staunchly philo-Semitic fiction, Harrington. Most significantly, both texts present the development of early prejudice in pathological terms. Susan Manly has established the

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influence of John Toland—an outspoken advocate of Jewish rights—upon Edgeworth’s “etiology”93 of anti-Semitism in Harrington. Interestingly, Edgeworth’s account of the origins of Murad’s prejudice in childhood also bears a striking resemblance to Toland’s explanation of prejudice in his Letters to Serena (1704): We are presently after our birth deliver’d to nurses, ignorant women of the meanest Vulgar, who infuse into us their errors with their milk, frightening us into quiet… What is thus invented at the beginning to keep children under government (a government that indeed makes ’em miserable slaves even after) is believ’d by them in good earnest when they grow older…94

Evidently, the cultural tolerance so earnestly expounded in Harrington is more deeply rooted in “Murad the Unlucky” than it first appears. Intriguingly, Murad’s final commercial encounter with Rachub, provides a most potent and provocative illustration of this fact: I replied, for I was vexed by the insolence of this Jewish dog, that I was not as he imagined, a beggar… but that I hoped he would not extort from me all the exorbitant interest which none but a Jew could exact. He smiled, and answered that, if a Turk loved opium better than money, that was no fault of his. (234)

Here, the stereotypically usurious Jew inflicts a rhetorical touché that exposes Murad’s own precariousness within his totalising taxonomy of identity. Moreover, caught in the volatile interface between these competing constructions of alterity, the projected Western reader must confront and reflect upon the joint centrality of both the “Jew” and the “Turk” in shaping the ethnocentric discourse of Anglo-protestant selfhood.95 Once again, Edgeworth invokes but ultimately relinquishes Burke’s concept of inherited prejudice. Instead, she seeks to refashion Smith’s concept of free commercial exchange into a model of global cultural interaction. In this tale, identity operates as a complex repertoire dependant on “mutuality and mercantilism.”96 Both rigorous in its mapping of geo-­ political topographies and sensitive in its documenting of the processes of commercial identification, “Murad the Unlucky” locates cultural meaning not in inheritance but in processes of exchange between individuals. Still, it is worth recalling that the tale’s final sentence, which informs its reader that “Murad died a martyr to the immoderate use of opium,”97 results in

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a somewhat anxious conclusion to this paean to commercial enterprise. The global-political commerce that the tale celebrates is once again undermined by a vivid reminder of excessive and unruly consumption. From the overly extravagant Sultana to the stereotypically avaricious Jew, Edgeworth acknowledges the potential for commercial, and by extension, imperial excesses to disturb the supposedly prudent and frugal operations of a mutually beneficial system of exchange. Such textual reverberations derange the text’s tight equilibrium and quietly yet insistently hint to the potential of alternative narratives and alternative subjectivities beyond imperialism and patriarchy. It is, perhaps, in this way that Edgeworth’s fiction can be seen to participate most fully in the syncretistic yet ambivalent discourse of Irish Orientalism.

Notes 1. Namely, Robert L.  Mack, ed., Oriental Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alan Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Raymond N. Mackenzie, ed., Persian Letters: With Related Texts (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2014). See also, Maria Edgeworth, Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales (London: Cassell, 1981). 2. Mackenzie, ed., Persian Letters: With Related Texts, 292. 3. Robert Irwin, ed., The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2003), 320. 4. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 11. 5. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 152. 6. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 42. 7. Joep Theodor Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 66. 8. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxv–xxvi. 9. Ibid., 141–42. 10. See Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004) and Julia M.  Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, 141. 12. See Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005) and Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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13. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxii. 14. Ibid., xxiii. 15. Ibid. 16. Ros Ballaster, “Narrative Transmigrations: The Oriental Tale and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-­ Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 79. 17. Maria Edgeworth, “Murad The Unlucky” in Oriental Tales, ed. Mack, 215. 18. Ballaster, “Narrative Transmigrations,” 77–78. 19. Robert L.  Mack, ed., Arabian Nights Entertainment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 73. 20. Mack, ed., Arabian Nights, 746. 21. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 372. 22. Richard Lovell Edgeworth to Maria Edgeworth 8 Nov 1779. The Papers of Maria Edgeworth, ms10166/7 f15, National Library of Ireland. 23. Ibid. 24. Kristyn Nicole Coppinger, “The Arabian Nights in British Romantic Children’s Literature” (PhD Thesis, Florida State University, 2006), 28. 25. Jing-Huey Hwang, “Orientalism in Pedagogy: Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky,’” Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities no. 28 (Jan 2010): 100. 26. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 374. 27. Mack, ed., Arabian Nights, 747. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 758. 30. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books I-III, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin, 1999), 110. 31. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) 203. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, 142. 35. Ibid., 117. 36. Ibid., xxiv. 37. For an overview of this unsuccessful campaign, see Iradj Amini, Napoleon and Persia: Franco-Persian Relations under the First Empire (Surrey: Curzon P, 1999) and Darrell Dykstra, “The French Occupation of Egypt” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. M.W.  Daly, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1113–38.

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38. John Antes, Observations on the Manners and Customs of Egyptians (London: Stockdale, 1800). Throughout “Murad the Unlucky,” Edgeworth refers to Antes as Antis. 39. François Baron de Tott, Memoirs of Baron De Tott, 2 vols. (London: Robinson, 1785). 40. de Tott, Memoirs, 1: 204–06, 1: 15–22. 41. Antes, Observations, 40. 42. Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, 272; de Tott, Memoirs, 1: 40–49. 43. Mack, ed., xlv. 44. Ibid., xlvi. 45. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 373. 46. Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, 276. As Mack points out, Edgeworth’s description of the French engineer’s “extraordinary” firework display for “the Grand Seignor’s birth-day” (244) recalls Baron de Tott’s account of the firework exhibition he staged for the very same event. See de Tott, Memoirs, 2: 85. 47. Dykstra, “French Occupation of Egypt,” 119. Said cites this military campaign as “the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use,” Orientalism, 80. 48. Dykstra, “French Occupation of Egypt,” 119. 49. Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales, 247. 50. The battle of the Nile took place in August 1798, producing a swift and decisive victory for Britain. 51. Antes, Observations, 12; de Tott, Memoirs, 1:vii. 52. Mack, ed., Oriental Tales, xliii. 53. Richardson, ed., Three Oriental Tales, 247. 54. Ibid., 332. 55. Lennon, Irish Orientalism, xxiv. 56. Ibid.,142. 57. Ibid., 115. 58. Ibid., xxvi. 59. Smith, Wealth of Nations, I–III, 392. 60. Ibid., 142. 61. Paul D. Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views on Consumption and Happiness,” Adam Smith Review 8 (2014): 277. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Smith, Wealth of Nations: Books I–III, 442. 65. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books IV-V, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin, 1999), 236. 66. Ibid., 247.

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67. Ibid., 529. 68. Ibid., 247. 69. Fraser Easton, “Cosmopolitan Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 111. For alternative readings of Smith’s colonial critique, see Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007) and Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 319–65. 70. Easton, “Cosmopolitan Economy”, 119, 115. 71. Ibid., 119. 72. Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India, and Nationalism, 53–80. 73. Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Susan Manly (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 218. 74. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dodsley, 1790), 130. 75. Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth, 34. 76. Ibid., 35. 77. Ibid., 24. 78. See Maureen Harkin, “Adam Smith on Women,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, eds. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli and Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 79. Shelley Saguaro, “Maria Edgeworth and the Politics of Commerce,” Moderna Sprak 92, no. 2 (1998): 147. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 158. 83. Ibid., 147. 84. Ibid., 157. 85. Ibid., 158. 86. Colleen Booker, “What’s Luck Got to Do With It?: Reading the East in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky,’” The Looking Glass: An Online Children’s Literature Journal 10, no. 1 (2006): par. 1. http://www.lib. latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/94/80. 87. Ibid., par. 15. 88. Sheila A. Spector, “The Other’s Other: The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction,” European Romantic Review 10, no. 3 (1999): 320; quoted in Booker, “Reading the East,” par. 4. 89. Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Manly, 67. 90. Saguaro, “Politics of Commerce,” 156.

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91. Ibid., 235. 92. Ibid., 157. 93. Edgeworth, Harrington, ed. Manly, 18. 94. John Toland, Letters to Serena (London: Lintot, 1704), 4. 95. As Benjamin Braude argues: “This linkage of the old and new enemy, the Jew and the Turk, was in fact to become commonplace from the sixteenth century onward,” “The Myth of the Sefardi Economic Superman,” in Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants, eds. Jeremy Alderman and Stephen Aron (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2001), 168. 96. Saguaro, “Politics of Commerce,” 157. 97. Edgeworth, “Murad the Unlucky,” 256.

CHAPTER 8

“A work purely local?”: Narratives of Empire in George Benn’s A History of the Town of Belfast Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

In 1877, “Belfast’s greatest historian,” George Benn (1801–1882), published his greatest work: A History of the Town of Belfast from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Eighteenth Century.1 Followed three years later by a supplementary volume, covering the period 1799–1810, and containing “biographies of many well-known families,” Benn’s much-praised “civic masterpiece” had been many years in the making.2 Born in Tandragee, Co. Armagh on 1 January 1801, Benn had settled with his family in Belfast in 1809, and had first dabbled in the town’s history as a gifted student in the collegiate department of the Belfast Academical Institution.3 Among the laurels bestowed upon him during his student years was the Institution’s 1819 faculty prize, awarded for his essay on the parish of Belfast. Four years later, in 1823, this evidently impressive essay provided the basis for Thanks are due to Sean Connolly and Raymond Gillespie for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. J. J. Wright (*) Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_8

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Benn’s first venture into print: The History of the Town of Belfast, with an Accurate Account of its Former and Present State.4 Published, as Benn himself later put it, “without my name,” this work appears to have been well-­ received: the editor of the Belfast News-Letter—pleased that his town had “found a native historian, competent to trace its rise and progress to the present state of improvement”—noted approvingly that its “historical materials are arranged in perspicuous order, and due references are made to the authorities on which the writer relies for his statement of facts.”5 Following this impressive early start, one might expect Benn to have gone on to participate prominently in the cultural life of Belfast, but this was not the case. Never particularly clubbable, he was involved in neither the Belfast Literary Society nor the Belfast Natural History Society, and following a sojourn in Downpatrick he moved, in the mid-1830s, to an estate his father had acquired in Glenravel, Co. Antrim.6 There, with his brother Edward, he was involved in brewing and distilling and, by the late 1860s, in taking advantage of the seams of iron-ore that had been discovered in the Glenravel region.7 But Benn’s story is not that of a promising scholar lost to commerce and industry. It appears to have been Edward Benn who undertook the bulk of the managerial duties relating to the Glenravel estate, and evidence of George’s ongoing antiquarian interests can be found in the sequence of articles he contributed to the first series of the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, which ran for nine volumes from 1853 to 1861, and in his correspondence with like-minded antiquarians and local historians.8 These included William Pinkerton, a fellow contributor to the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, who, in 1862, agreed to produce a history of Belfast for the publisher Marcus Ward. At the time of Pinkerton’s death, in 1871, this work remained incomplete, and his papers were passed on to Benn, who later explained that he “voluntarily undertook, before examining them, to publish those parts which related to Belfast, under the impression that such would merely require some connecting observations, and not entail any great amount of labour.” Such optimism quickly waned. Upon inspecting Pinkerton’s papers, Benn was forced to conclude that his initial plan was “impracticable.” He discovered that the papers were in many cases irrelevant and “in nearly all instances they were disjoined and unconnected,” and that “[t]he writing of the history was not even begun, nor any of it put in form except a few detached portions which Mr. Pinkerton most favoured.” Faced with this situation, Benn resolved to “write the history myself in my own way” and it was this decision that led ultimately to the publication in 1877 and 1880 of the two volumes of his

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History—a work that might be said to have come about by accident, but that nevertheless represented the culmination of Benn’s longstanding antiquarian and historical interests.9 Historians of Belfast have, needless to say, long been aware of the value of Benn’s work: “virtually every commentator on any aspect of Belfast’s history,” Patricia Craig has remarked, “has paid tribute to the invaluable and indefatigable Benn.”10 To suggest, however, that his work might be of interest to the historian of empire is to invite scepticism. An example, above all else, of “descriptive urban literature,” Benn’s History seems, at first glance, to be of limited interest beyond Belfast.11 Indeed, writing in 1878, his publisher went so far as to describe it as “a work purely local.”12 Yet there are good grounds for seeking the trace of empire in this ostensibly “local” work. Discussing the development of Irish urban history in the “long” eighteenth century, Rosemary Sweet has highlighted the engagement with empire of an earlier generation of writers, who sought to situate Ireland and Irish towns within a wider imperial context.13 These included Henry Joy, who confidently asserted in the preface of his Historical Collections Relative to the Town of Belfast, published in 1817, that his work “may be read with advantage in every province of the British Empire” and alluded to Belfast’s “growing importance in the scale of the empire.”14 A further impetus for approaching Benn’s History from the perspective of empire is, moreover, provided by a growing body of so-called “new imperial history” that has foregrounded the multiplicity of ways, in which empire was experienced “at home” in Britain, and the extent to which the fact of empire was reflected in British culture and cultural productions, including historical narratives.15 In her superlative recent study, Catherine Hall has sought to “unearth the racial and imperial thinking” underpinning Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England, and has argued that empire, although “scarcely mentioned,” provided “one of the fundamental but unstated assumptions” of a work that “inspired generations of public schoolboys, historians, politicians, lawmakers, and colonial administrators—the governing classes—as well as autodidacts.”16 There are, of course, few obvious parallels to be drawn between Benn, a provincial businessman and antiquarian, and Macaulay, a one-time colonial administrator and arguably “the most celebrated of English historians.”17 However, while it is not being suggested here that the two men and their histories bear close comparison, it is suggested that Benn, no less than Macaulay, is a writer in whose work narratives of empire can be found—for Belfast, the

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focus of Benn’s scholarly attentions, was a town that can be shown to have had multiple imperial connections. One way of illustrating the nature and extent of these connections, and of highlighting the ways in which empire could be encountered in Belfast, is by “touring” the town as Benn himself would have known it during the years of his youth and young manhood. We may begin with the Belfast Academical Institution, where Benn studied in the late 1810s. First opened in 1814, and incorporating a collegiate department in 1815, the Academical Institution was initially funded by public subscriptions. As such, it can be said to have reflected the cultural pretensions of Belfast’s middle classes.18 But it also reflected Belfast’s links to Britain’s colonies. Several subscriptions in support of the Institution were received from individuals, presumably with connections to Belfast, who were resident in Jamaica, and in 1814 it was suggested that a subscription be established among British and Irish expatriates in India. The proposer of this scheme, one A. J. Macan of Calcutta (Kolkata), predicted that “an appeal to Britons in India, and the Irish in particular” would net “from one thousand to three thousand pounds.” In the event, this proved to be a conservative estimate: the Academical Institution ultimately received close to £5,000 from subscribers, “zealous for the improvement of their native country,” in Madras (Chennai), Calcutta and “Hendee, or Rupack.”19 Funding aside, Belfast’s links with empire were reflected more directly in the composition of the Academical Institution’s student body, which is known, in the mid-1820s, to have included Jamaican students.20 In this, there was nothing unusual. That the children of West Indian planters were, in many instances, despatched to Britain for education is well known, and students from both the West Indies and India had earlier been accommodated in a longer-established Belfast school, the Belfast Academy.21 Thus, in his Incidents Recalled, published in Philadelphia in 1848, William Grimshaw, who had attended the Academy in the 1790s, noted “that, at this celebrated academy, were to be seen young lads of colour, sent, by their fathers, for education, both from the East and the West Indies.”22 The identities of these “young lads of colour”—in some instances, perhaps, the children of Irish West Indian sojourners and enslaved African women—are unknown, but they can be said to have embodied, in a very literal and visible way, Belfast’s imperial connections. When first opened in 1814, the Belfast Academical Institution sat in a largely undeveloped area, located on the south-western fringe of the town.

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In the years that followed the surrounding land was built upon, and on 1 November 1831, a second institution that serves to illustrate Belfast’s links to empire was opened on the northern side of the square surrounding the Academical Institution.23 This was the Belfast Museum, which had been constructed to house the collections of the Belfast Natural History Society.24 Later known as the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, this body had been established some ten years previously, in 1821, and its members had started to amass collections of plants, animals, fossils, shells, and ethnographic artefacts from an early point. In so doing, they looked outward, exploiting Belfast’s connections with the wider world, an approach made explicit in 1828 when a “circular letter” was prepared with the aim of “directing to this society, the attention of our countrymen abroad” and soliciting such individuals’ “co-operation in furtherance of our views, by sending such specimens connected with our pursuits, as occur in their respective places of abode.”25 By the time of the Belfast Museum’s opening in November 1831 materials had been received from locations as far-ranging as Antigua, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad, Demerara, Ascension Island, Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good Hope, India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Tahiti, China, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, and New Zealand.26 Housed and ordered in the Belfast Museum, the Natural History Society’s collections served to illustrate, by their very presence, the webs of personal connection linking Belfast to empire, while also offering an opportunity to encounter empire at first hand in Belfast. Whether or not Benn visited the museum and availed of this opportunity is unknown. He is, however, more than likely to have been aware of the Belfast Museum and its collections, for his brother Edward was involved in the Natural History Society. Indeed, Edward Benn’s donation to the Society of the “bones of the Irish Fossil Elk” was made known at a public meeting held in the Belfast Museum in October 1834—a meeting that also publicised the receipt of a “Skeleton of an Albatross,” which had been supplied by a Captain Boyce of the East India Company, and a collection of “500 insects from the East Indies,” forwarded by a Dr. Berwick of Calcutta.27 A short distance to the east of the Belfast Museum and the Academical Institution lay what was, in the early nineteenth century, one of Belfast’s best-known buildings, the White Linen Hall. Constructed in the early 1780s, this building served principally, though by no means exclusively, as a marketplace and forum for the organisation of the trade in finished linens.28 As such, it was central to the commercial life of Belfast, for in the

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early nineteenth century linen was, by some distance, the town’s most important export, outranking foodstuffs, soap, sacking, and other textile products, such as muslins and printed and white calicos.29 Significant here, however, is the fact that the linen trade appears, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to have been heavily orientated towards North America and Britain’s territories in the Caribbean. One contemporary directory records that during the period 1810–1818 some 4537 packages of linen, of an “average value” of around £65, were processed by Belfast factors, the bulk being “exported to America and the West Indies.” More broadly, the same source also records that as many as 25 of the 58 ships “belonging” to the town in 1792 had traded with the West Indies. Of the remaining 33, 8 traded with Liverpool, 8 with London, 4 with the “Streights,” 4 with America, and 1 with France and Holland, while 4 were “Coasters,” and the trading destination of the remaining 4 was given as “Miscellaneous.”30 Through its merchants and linen factors Belfast was thus intimately linked to the wider trading networks of the Atlantic World—networks in which the West Indies occupied a prominent place.31 Looking beyond commerce, the White Linen Hall is also of interest insofar as it housed the library of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge.32 Here, too, imperial encounters were possible, for the library was well stocked with “travels,” “voyages,” and the literature of empire. To give just a few examples, its 1819 catalogue includes “Barrington’s Voyage to Botany Bay,” “Cordiner’s Description of Ceylon,” “Dubois’ Manners and Customs of the People of India,” “Elphinstone’s … Account of the Kingdom of Caubul,” “Graham’s Letters from India,” “Jackson’s Travels in Africa,” “Percival’s Account of the Cape of Good Hope” and “Raffles’ History of Java,” alongside accounts of the voyages and explorations of George Anson, James Cook and Mungo Park, copies of the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, and a study of the British Empire’s “Wealth, Power and Resources.”33 How widely read these books were is moot, and it is perhaps worth bearing in mind the remarks of John Gamble, who visited Belfast in 1812 and passed “some hours every day” in the library—“solitary hours,” that led to him remark that “the bustling inhabitants of this great commercial town have little leisure … for reading.”34 But if the library appears to have been under-used, the presence of such books on its shelves nevertheless gestures to a degree of connection and engagement with what might be termed the culture of empire. That such books were considered to be worth acquiring is surely not insignificant, and alongside the artefacts and specimens displayed in the Belfast Museum they offered a means of

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obtaining information about empire, and of encountering a wider world, albeit from the comfort of an armchair. The Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge’s quarters in the White Linen Hall were to be found in the front of the building, facing on to Donegall Place, “a quiet street of private houses” favoured by the quality of the town.35 This group included, for a short spell in the late 1790s, Major General George Nugent, who was given command of government forces in the north of Ireland in the run up to the 1798 rebellion, and who occupied a house at the southern end of Donegall Place, on a corner overlooked by the White Linen Hall. Nugent went on to serve as governor of Jamaica during the period 1801–1806 and as commander-in-chief in India during the period 1811–1813, taking with him his wife, Maria Nugent née Skinner, who he had married in Belfast in November 1797. The daughter of Cortlandt Skinner, the sometime attorney-general of New Jersey, Maria Skinner was one of a sizeable loyalist diaspora that had fled from Britain’s thirteen American colonies during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the American War of Independence. Her sojourn in Belfast appears to have been brief, but her brother, also Cortlandt Skinner, made the town his home. By 1814, he occupied the position of “Head storekeeper to the Customhouse” and served as a magistrate, and his presence in Belfast serves neatly to illustrate the direct human connections linking the town to Britain’s colonies.36 At its northern end, Donegall Place met Castle Street, which ran on an east–west axis, and Hercules Street, which ran north–south. At the southern end of the latter could be found another building with connections to empire, the “magnificent house” inhabited by the wealthy merchant William Tennent.37 Colonial trade had played a part in Tennent’s rise to prominence, for earlier in his career he had been involved in the sugar trade as a manager in Belfast’s New Sugar House.38 In addition, two of his younger brothers spent time in the West Indies: in 1784 Robert Tennent had travelled out to Jamaica, where he is known to have been employed as a manager on a sugar plantation; and James Tennent travelled out to Grenada in the early 1790s.39 The location of Tennent’s home was highly appropriate, for the site had earlier been occupied by the house of Waddell Cunningham, a prominent merchant of the mid- to late eighteenth century, and yet another figure whose story foregrounds Belfast’s connections with empire.40 As a young man, Cunningham had traded in the West Indies and sojourned in New York, where he is known to have had some involvement in the trade of enslaved people. He later acquired a plantation

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in Dominica with his business partner, Thomas Greg, and in 1784 he attempted infamously—and unsuccessfully—to establish a slave-trading company in Belfast.41 Not far from Tennent’s property on Hercules Street lay the western entrance of Rosemary Street, on which could be found First Belfast Presbyterian Church. Here imperial connections of a somewhat different sort were on display. By the late 1810s, worshippers entering the church’s foyer were confronted with a sizeable memorial to Charles Hamilton, who had been the nephew of a former minister in the church, the Rev. James Mackay.42 Born in Belfast c. 1753, Hamilton was a noted Orientalist. He had joined the East India Company in 1776, was an early member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and in 1791, a year before his death from consumption, had published a translation of the Hedaya, a Persian text relating to Muslim law.43 Hamilton’s memorial had been arranged by his sisters, one of whom was the writer Elizabeth Hamilton, and neither of whom were actually resident in Belfast. Indeed, few in Belfast, if any, would have remembered Charles Hamilton at the time of his memorial’s installation, for his family appears to have left the town in the early 1760s.44 Nevertheless, Hamilton’s memorial, foregrounding as it did the imperial dimensions of his life, provides yet another illustration of Belfast’s connections with the wider worlds of empire and, indeed, of the ways in which empire could be encountered in the town. Worshippers glancing at the memorial upon entering First Belfast would have learned that Hamilton had been “Late in the service of The Honourable East India Company,” and that he was the “Translator of the Hedaya.”45 In this way, their attentions were directed, if only momentarily, to the world beyond Belfast. At times, though, the citizenry of Belfast was confronted even more directly with the world beyond. Rosemary Street, on which First Belfast Presbyterian Church was located, ran on to Waring Street, which terminated at Limekiln Dock, immediately to the south of which lay Merchants Quay, Chichester Quay, Hanover Quay, and Custom House Quay.46 Here at Belfast’s docks and quaysides, exports were loaded and the products of empire unloaded; and here, and in the surrounding streets, the peoples of empire could be encountered. Alongside numerous “very noisy & troublesome” prostitutes, the records of the Belfast Night Watch, which patrolled an increasingly unruly town in 1812 and 1816, document the presence in Belfast of sailors of both African and Asian origins, and in a well-publicised episode that occurred in September 1828 empire’s unsavoury realities

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were brought “home” directly when it was discovered that two ships that had arrived in the town from Bermuda were crewed by enslaved men.47 Brought before Belfast’s police magistrate, none other than Cortlandt Skinner, and a justice of the peace, William Clarke, the men were advised “that according to the laws of this country, any slave coming here is free as soon as he steps ashore.” Of the eleven enslaved men who appeared before the magistrates (a twelfth having failed to attend), all bar three declined the offer of freedom, citing their wish to return “to their families and friends.”48 Having travelled from the Academical Institution on the south-western edge of the town to the docks and quays of its eastern fringe, we may conclude our “tour” of the Belfast of Benn’s youth here. What the varied examples highlighted above serve to illustrate is the multifarious nature of Belfast’s connections with empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The town was bound to empire in a structural-economic sense as a consequence of its merchants’ participation in an Atlantic World economy in which the West Indies were central. Likewise, it was linked to empire socially, through individuals—some who were firmly rooted in Belfast and others who merely sojourned in the town or passed through it—whose lives and careers involved travel in the empire and time spent overseas, and engagements with empire were facilitated by cultural institutions, broadly defined. In its museum, Belfast possessed an institution that played an important role in making empire “known” and that may indeed be identified, in John M. MacKenzie’s words, as “a tool of empire.”49 Equally, its library offered the opportunity of exploring the ever-growing bodies of knowledge produced by the processes of imperial expansion. All of this serves to prompt two questions. First, how conscious of empire was George Benn? And secondly, to what extent (and in what ways) did his History engage with the facts of Belfast’s imperial connections? The first of these questions may be dealt with briefly, for it is readily apparent that Benn was, to at least some extent, imperially conscious. The “Reminiscences of Belfast,” that he published in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1855 provide a case in point. Like Henry Joy in his Historical Recollections of 1817, Benn sought, in his “Reminiscences,” to locate Belfast in a wider imperial context. “It has been stated,” he noted, “that there is no town in the empire which has extended so much, or has undergone such thorough changes in its outward progress, during the last forty or fifty years, as Belfast. Two or three great manufacturing places in England and Scotland can alone, for rapidity of growth, be put in

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competition with it.”50 Here, imperial consciousness can be seen intertwining with civic pride in a manner which suggests Benn’s engagement with the idea of empire. Added to this, evidence of Benn engaging with empire in a more direct sense can be found in the appearance of his name in a list of contributors to an Indian famine relief fund published in the Belfast News-­Letter in 1877, the year in which the first volume of his History was published.51 But what of that History? Can it be seen to reflect the wider imperial realities of which Benn was aware? An initial glance at the work would suggest not. In his preface to the first volume of the History, Benn stressed its limited scope and “local” focus in a passage which drew a sharp contrast between the work that he had completed and that Pinkerton had originally envisaged: If Mr. Pinkerton had lived to write what he appears to have contemplated, a publication of higher general historic value would possibly have been a result; but the history being with me confined to Belfast and its more immediate relations, my subject, of necessity, is more local and contracted.52

However, while Benn’s History is, in general terms, “confined to Belfast,” a closer inspection reveals a series of references to empire, with Benn seeking, as in his “Reminiscences” of 1852, to locate the town within a wider imperial context and, at various points, to stress its pre-eminence therein. These references are, in some instances, purely rhetorical. Discussing the French Revolution, for example, Benn remarked that it “was as enthusiastically applauded here as in any part of the empire,” while a reference to the Duke of York affair of 1809 prompted the observation that it had “agitated the politicians of Belfast, as it did those of almost every large town in the empire.”53 By contrast, an imperial reference is employed more purposefully in a discussion of mechanised linen-spinning, which had emerged, during the course of Benn’s lifetime, as “the very mainstay of the town.” “There are now (1876) about forty linen-spinning mills in Belfast and the immediate suburbs,” Benn observed: Yet this spinning trade, on which so much of the prosperity and advancement of the town depends, is not yet fifty years in existence, and it will require all the sagacity, prudence, and economy of those engaged in it to continue Belfast in the future, as it now probably is, the greatest centre of the linen-spinning trade in the Empire.54

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Leaving aside the hint of ambivalence concerning Belfast’s future, what is striking here is Benn’s attempt at what might be termed civic-imperial boosting. Where Henry Joy had, in 1817, noted Belfast’s “growing importance in the scale of the empire,” Benn, writing in the 1870s, believed he could make claims concerning its prominence—Belfast was “probably … the greatest centre of the linen-spinning trade in the Empire.”55 A comparable claim is to be found elsewhere in the first volume of the History, where Benn discusses the development of Belfast’s docks and notes that, in the years following the establishment of the town’s Ballast Board in the mid-1780s, “sweeping and effectual changes took place which are yearly continuing, and which are rapidly rendering the harbour and docks of Belfast among the most distinguished in the empire.”56 Similarly, in the shorter, second volume of the History, which covers the early years of the nineteenth century, Benn highlights Belfast’s embrace of technological innovation, noting that “Steam Navigation … was entered upon by the merchants of Belfast at a period as early as those of any maritime town in the empire,” and a more locally orientated assertion of Belfast’s commercial prominence can be found in his reference to the Associated Chambers of Commerce of Empire, which in 1879 had held its first ever Irish meeting in Belfast, “the commercial capital of the kingdom.”57 Benn’s History thus appears to reflect some awareness of empire, but caution is required here, for the extent to which his allusions to empire reflected an imperialist consciousness or a coherent engagement with the idea of empire is unclear. It is, for instance, notable that Benn’s overt references to empire are more concerned with Belfast itself than they are with empire; within the context of a narrative of commercial and economic progress, they serve principally to highlight Belfast’s growth and emergence as a prominent city. That being said, it is by no means implausible that Benn would have engaged consciously and enthusiastically with the idea of empire. Born on 1 January 1801, the day on which the Act of Union came into force, Benn’s politics were, by his own admission, unionist, and Ulster’s unionists are known to have identified with empire from an early point.58 Speaking in parliament in defence of the union in 1834, for instance, one of Benn’s Belfast contemporaries, the future colonial administrator Sir James Emerson Tennent, had noted his pride in being able to “legislate, not merely for the concerns of his own little island, but for the interests of the most opulent and powerful empire in the universe.”59 Viewed against this backdrop, it is possible to interpret Benn’s

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attempts to trumpet Belfast’s place within a wider imperial context as an expression of unionist-imperialist sentiment. But whatever their significance, what is perhaps most noteworthy about Benn’s direct references to empire is their limited extent: in a work that runs to close on 1000 pages across its two volumes, a handful of scattered asides do not amount to much. However, while it might be said that Benn’s History engages directly with empire in a limited and fragmentary manner, this is to tell only half of the story. As Hall has demonstrated in her study of Macaulay’s History of England, “racial and imperial thinking” can be subtly encoded, and further evidence of Benn’s consciousness of empire, and of Belfast’s imperial connections, can be found elsewhere in his History if we look beyond his overt references to empire and turn instead to his discussions of Belfast’s trade, its prominent families and its early development.60 As has already been noted, Belfast was connected to empire through the activities of its merchants, who traded extensively with North America and the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Overseas trade was, indeed, central to the development of the town and Benn highlights its importance in both the first and second volumes of the History.61 While the first volume contains a sustained discussion of Belfast’s trade in the year 1683—a discussion in which the number of ships trading with France (13), America (7), Spain (7), West India (4), Norway (2), Holland (2), and Prussia (1) is established, and lists of exports and imports are given—the second volume highlights the importance of Belfast’s trade with the West Indies and the former North American colonies in the early nineteenth century.62 “In 1809, and many years previously,” Benn notes, there was much direct trade with the West Indies. The largest ship we remember was the “Belfast,” about 300 tons register, belonging to the firm of Montgomery, Staples, & Co. Half-a-dozen West Indiamen would be at the quay at this time discharging their cargoes of sugar, rum, and molasses. But the most direct commerce was with the United States, as it still is.63

Clearly, Benn was aware of the importance of Belfast’s connections with the wider Atlantic World. What is striking, however, is his relative silence concerning the institution at the heart of the Atlantic World economy: slavery. The “sugar, rum, and molasses” imported by Belfast’s merchants were, of course, produced by enslaved labour and, as has already been demonstrated, Belfast had direct connections with slavery as a result of the

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a­ ctivities of such figures as Thomas Greg and Waddell Cunningham. That the town’s connections with slavery elicited no comment from Benn might be taken to suggest that he was unaware of them—were it not, that is, for the fact that there is evidence to the contrary. Included in the working papers that Benn received from Pinkerton is a booklet of extracts from the Belfast News-Letter. These include a notice from 1754 announcing that “A Black Negro man well qualified in labour and industry” was “to be disposed of,” along with the terse observation that “advertisements for the sale of Black slaves occasionally occur in the newspapers at this time.”64 Such advertisements are not discussed in the History. By contrast, reference is made to Waddell Cunningham’s attempt to establish a slave-trading company in Belfast in 1784, though Benn’s account of the episode is suggestively vague. Discussing the late eighteenth-century Belfast radical Thomas McCabe, he touches passingly on Cunningham’s initiative, noting: When … a meeting was held here to favour the introduction of the slave trade into Belfast, M‘Cabe used, in opposition to it, these memorable words, and which had the effect of diverting the unholy traffic for ever from the town: “May God wither the hand and consign the name to eternal infamy of him who first signs that document.”65

Noteworthy here, is the emphasis placed on the resistance the initiative provoked, and the fact that Cunningham, the originator of the scheme, is not identified. More broadly, the assertion that McCabe’s intervention “had the effect of diverting the unholy traffic for ever from the town,” while correct insofar as a slave-trading company was not established in the town, serves to suggest that the episode in question was an aberration and that slavery was not a part of Belfast’s history—or not, at any rate, a part worthy of attention. As such, Benn’s History here serves to simplify and obscure the more unsavoury realities of Belfast’s connections with the Atlantic World. In so doing, it might be said to reflect a broader phenomenon, recently identified by Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland, in which “strategies of euphemism and evasion originally adopted by the slave-owners” have been perpetuated in cultural productions, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in which those who owned enslaved people tend to appear not as “slave-owners,” but as “property” or “plantation” owners.66 Further examples of such evasion can be found in Benn’s treatment of Belfast’s more prominent families and personalities. Approximately a third

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of the second, shorter volume of the History is given over to what Benn describes, with a hint of pride, as “[a]n attempt—the first that has ever been made on a considerable scale—to put together a number of biographies or family histories of noted persons connected with the town, who lived at the end of the last or the beginning of the present century.”67 Numbered among these “noted persons” are Belfast-born lawyers, physicians, clergymen, literary figures and, invariably, merchants, whose potted biographies further illustrate Belfast’s connections with the West Indies. Discussing the Greg family, Benn notes that the Scottish born merchant John Greg (1693–1783), “had two sons; [and that] the younger one, John, went to the West Indies about the year 1765, and became a West India planter, and died without issue in 1795, leaving his West India property to his two eldest nephews, Thomas and Samuel.”68 Here, Greg is coyly identified as a “planter,” rather than a slave-owner, and the fact that the “property” his nephews inherited encompassed enslaved people is ignored. John Greg’s brother was Thomas Greg, a business partner of Waddell Cunningham, who also appears in Benn’s sequence of “family histories,” characterised as a “patriotic and enterprising citizen.”69 No mention, however, is made of Cunningham’s attempt to promote the trade in enslaved people in Belfast, or of the plantation he and Greg owned in Dominica.70 Leaving aside Greg and Cunningham, figures we have already encountered, Benn also makes reference to “William, the fourth son of John Galt Smith (primus) … a West India merchant,” without mentioning the plantations he is known to have owned in Suriname, and evasion of a slightly different stripe can be found in his treatment of the Jones family.71 Benn notes that the merchant Valentine Jones I (1711– 1805), was “engaged in commerce with the West Indies,” and that his son Valentine Jones II (1729–1808) “spent a great portion of his life in Barbadoes,” but ignores the Caribbean connections of Valentine Jones III, a military officer who served in the West Indies in the early nineteenth century as commissary general, in which capacity he participated in fraudulent dealing which led, in 1809, to him being confined in Newgate for a period of three years.72 Whether or not Benn consciously tried to obscure such details is unclear, and would indeed be difficult to establish. It is not, however, beyond the bounds of possibility that he sought to spare the blushes of the living descendants of the once prominent personalities whose lives he discussed, for he was well aware that his biographical sketches would “probably be the most attractive part of the work, if any part of it should prove

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attractive.”73 Indeed, it is highly suggestive that he expressed the hope that he would “at least get credit for due discretion in his remarks.”74 At the same time, it is also possible that it was the descendants of these individuals themselves who obscured the less palatable details of their ancestors’ pasts, for in researching the second volume of his History Benn relied, as one biographer has noted, “on local reminiscences and accounts of prominent families supplied by their living representatives.”75 But whatever might be said about the evasions and limitations of Benn’s biographical sketches, they nevertheless offer further evidence of his own awareness of Belfast’s connections with the wider world of empire, broadly defined, and bear out Alison Light’s observation that “[f]amily history makes direct and intimate links between the local history of places and national, even global, narratives.”76 Arguably, though, the best example of Benn’s linking of the local and imperial in this way is to be found not in the biographical sketches of the second volume of his History, but in a passage located in the first volume, where he touches on the histories of the Pottinger and Macartney families. Both families were involved in the development of Belfast at an early point, and both were later to produce well-known colonial administrators who spent time in China, and in Macartney’s case in numerous other colonial contexts, including India, Grenada and the Cape of Good Hope.77 “It is a singular fact,” Benn remarks, in a passage which neatly links the local and the imperial, “that two persons of Belfast origin, Lord Macartney and Sir Henry Pottinger, were concerned at different eras in establishing treaties with China, and in opening up a knowledge of that great empire.”78 Pottinger and Macartney aside, it is also in the first volume of the History that we find the most intriguing evidence of empire’s influence on Benn’s thinking. Although much of the volume is devoted to the development of Belfast in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the work begins with a ten-chapter “General History,” charting the emergence of the town. This opens with the arresting claim that “Belfast, as a town, has no ancient history”—a claim that is reasonable insofar as the architectural heritage of Belfast as Benn knew it was largely the product of the eighteenth century, but that is gainsaid by the pages that follow, tracing as they do the early references that are to be found to the existence of a castle, church, and ford over the River Lagan in “the situation of what is now Belfast.”79 “The Ford,” Benn notes, “or rather the Fearsat—which, under the name then given to it, runs through the modern town—was the scene of a battle in the year 666.” Likewise, he explains that a Castle was

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c­ onstructed in the area in the late twelfth century, possibly by “John De Curci of famous memory,” an Anglo-Norman aristocrat who arrived in Ireland in 1177; and that two churches, the “White Church” and the “Chapel of the Ford,” “were standing at or in what was to be our town so early as the year 1306, and it is probable, or rather it is certain, long before that remote era.”80 Notwithstanding these early references to Belfast, Benn dates the town’s “real beginning” to around 1611, in which year it was reported that “Bealfast is plotted out in a good forme, wherein are many famelyes of English, Scotch, and some Manksmen already inhabiting,” and sets its emergence against a backdrop of English expansion (i.e., Tudor reform and Stuart plantation) and the dispossession of the local branch of the Gaelic O’Neill dynasty, the O’Neills of Clandeboy.81 That the English were, at around the same time, beginning the process of empire-building in the Americas (Jamestown in Virginia being established in 1607), might suggest that we are dealing here with a quintessential story of colonial expansion. In actual fact, things were more complex: as is well known, English involvement in Ireland long pre-dated the early sixteenth century, and while there are certainly colonial connections to be traced in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—not least in the careers of figures such as Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh and Ralph Lane, who were active in both Ireland and the Americas—some contemporary sources suggest that Ireland was viewed, as Sean Connolly has put it, “as a problem of government … an unruly periphery, rather than as a theatre of colonial expansion.”82 But whatever might be said about the ways in which Ireland was viewed by the English in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, what is of interest here is the appearance of traces of imperial thinking in Benn’s account of Belfast’s development in the Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. These traces can be found, first, in two clear allusions made by Benn to the wider context of early-modern empire-building in the Atlantic World. He notes, for instance, that the statesman and scholar Sir Thomas Smith participated in a scheme, “foreign to all his previous pursuits,” to settle former O’Neill territory in Counties Antrim and Down during the reign of Elizabeth I, in order “to provide for Thomas, his natural son, who, instead of going with Drake to the Spanish main [sic] to seek for gold, thought he might find it nearer home in the unknown regions of Clannaboye and the Ards.”83 Likewise, he observes that Sir Arthur Chichester, who was granted lands in the Belfast region by James I in

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1603, and who played a prominent role in the development of Belfast and, more broadly, in the plantation of Ulster, wrote in 1610 “that he would rather labour with his hands in the Plantation of Ulster than dance or play in that of Virginia.”84 Brief as they are, such references nevertheless serve to situate events in Ulster in wider imperial contexts and, in so doing, feed into a broader “colonial” narrative developed by Benn in the early chapters of his “General History.” Overall, Benn’s story of the early development of Belfast is one of progress and advancement, of rudeness overcome by civilisation. Discussing the Anglo-Norman settlement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance, he notes that castles were constructed “and improvements, after the fashion of the day, spread over the country,” before going on to remark that “[t]his progressive civilisation received a rude check from the invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315.”85 What is noteworthy here is not the event that Benn refers to—Bruce’s invasion—but the language of improvement and civilisation that he employs. Elsewhere in the “General History,” he employs similar language, referring to the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign as a “comparatively rude age,” describing the O’Neills of Clandeboye “living in their old rude semi-warlike manner” and highlighting the positive developments that took place in the early years of the seventeenth century under Chichester—in many ways the hero of the story—who is presented not merely a planter but as an improver, who introduced livestock, encouraged building and oversaw the early development of Belfast.86 Perhaps most telling of all, however, is the summary Benn provides of his argument several chapters later in the History. “In the General History,” Benn helpfully reminds readers, “the era of the great queen [i.e., Elizabeth I] has been taken as the dividing line between a certain degree of barbarism and an incipient civilisation, so to that period must be assigned, not the reality, but the bare proposal for a town at Belfast.”87 In the context of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of barbarism and civilisation was, of course, common. Hall, for instance, has noted that Macaulay was “preoccupied” by “the binary of barbarism and civilisation” and that this underpinned his treatment, in his History of England, of seventeenth-century Ireland. Macaulay, she explains, saw seventeenth-­ century Ireland as a land populated by two groupings—“English settlers” and “the aboriginal peasantry”—that “were morally and politically sundered, living at widely different levels of civilisation.”88 However, in a century which saw frequent contact between Europeans and indigenous, non-western “others,” such thinking was not confined to interpretations

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of the past. The nineteenth century was, indeed, the century of the ­“civilizing mission,” which in the words of one scholar “became at an official British government level the moral legitimation of their acquisition of an Empire of massive proportions.”89 In Belfast, conceptions of civility and barbarity were in play at the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, as A. T. Harrison has demonstrated; the Northern Whig, a liberal newspaper, described India as a country of “[o]ne hundred and fifty millions of people, professing a mysterious faith, which an European can hardly comprehend; with habits of life nearly all of which are religious observances utterly repugnant to Western ideas.”90 Similarly, ideas concerning the comparative barbarism of non-European civilisations informed engagements with ethnographic artefacts displayed in the Belfast Museum in the late nineteenth century. Those items that had been gathered from overseas were displayed apart from Irish artefacts and were said, by one contemporary, to “throw light on the habits and mode of life of many savage and semi-­ civilized races.”91 For those familiar with such rhetoric, Benn’s invocation of pre-plantation rudeness and his utilisation of terms such as “civilisation” and “barbarism” must surely have carried weighty connotations. Indeed, it is small wonder, given Benn’s use of such resonant language, that one reader of the History concluded that “[t]he early records of Belfast read strangely like a chapter out of a New Zealand paper of a few years ago.”92 To put this another way, we might say that, as presented by Benn, Belfast’s “early records” read like a story of conquest, settlement and colonial development. “Local narrative is not required to enter upon general disputed topics,” Benn remarks, early in the first volume of his History, “but, by relating the events of a particular place, may so far let in side lights to assist in illustrating the deeds in progress on the greater stage of a nation’s history.”93 For nation, we could read empire. Ostensibly an exercise in  local history, Benn’s study of his native town can be shown, upon closer inspection, to reflect subtly the imperial realities that shaped Belfast’s development. If scattered and, at times, inchoate, Benn’s references to empire are all the more revealing for that, reflecting what Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose have characterised as the “‘everydayness’ or ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of empire in the British metropole.”94 It might, of course, be objected that Benn was an Irish writer and that his History was a history of an Irish town. Strictly speaking, this is true, but by the mid  nineteenth  century Belfast, with its industry and its links to empire, was the most British of Irish towns, and the narratives of empire encoded in Benn’s History

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illustrate the bifurcated nature of the Irish imperial experience. As is now well established, Ireland was both a part of the British Empire—that is, a colony—and a country that was linked, in various ways, to the development of that empire.95 For  the people of Ireland, Alvin Jackson has remarked, empire “provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration” and thus we find Benn depicting Belfast as a town produced by the processes of early-modern empire-building, a town whose merchants benefitted from trade with Britain’s colonies and a town that occupied a prominent position within the context of the nineteenth-­ century British Empire.96 Whatever else may be said of it, Benn’s history is not simply “a work purely local.”

Notes 1. Raymond Gillespie, Early Belfast: The Origins and Growth of an Ulster Town to 1750 (Belfast: Ulster Historic Foundation in association with Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, 2007), xiii. 2. George Benn, A History of the Town of Belfast from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Eighteenth Century and A History of the Town of Belfast from 1799 till 1810 Together with Some Incidental Notices on Local Topics and Biographies of Many Well-Known Families (London: Marcus Ward and Co., 1877 and 1880; repr. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008) (subsequent references will be given as Benn, Belfast, i or ii); Patricia Craig, “History of Belfast,” Irish Pages 4, no. 2 (2007): 159. 3. The overview of Benn’s life and career offered in this paragraph is based on Raymond Gillespie, “Benn, George (1801–1882),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Howard Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), v, 90. Additional accounts of Benn’s life and career can, however, be found in Fred Heatley, “The Benn Family of Belfast and Glenravel Part 1” and “The Benn Family of Belfast and Glenravel Part 2,” Ulster Local Studies 5, no. 2 (1980): 21–23 and 6, no. 1 (1980): 12–16; Séamas O.  Saothraí, “Two Ulster Historians,” Books Ireland 15 (July 1977): 131–32; and C.J. Woods, “Benn, George” in Dictionary of Irish Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002, eds. James McGuire and James Quinn, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), i, 450. 4. [George Benn], The History of the Town of Belfast, with an Accurate Account of its Former and Present State: to which are Added a Statistical Survey of the Parish of Belfast, and a Description of Some Remarkable Antiquities in its Neighbourhood (Belfast: A. MacKay Junr., 1823).

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5. Benn, Belfast, i, xi; Belfast News-Letter, 31 January 1823. 6. Belfast Literary Society 1801–1901: Historical Sketch with Memoirs of Some Distinguished Members (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson and Orr Ltd., The Linenhall Press, 1902); Arthur Deane, ed., The Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society: Centenary Volume 1821–1921: A Review of the Activities of the Society for 100 Years with Historical Notes, and Memoirs of Many Distinguished Members (Belfast: Published by the Society, 1924). For a discussion of the cultural life of Belfast in the early nineteenth century see Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, The “Natural Leaders” and Their World: Politics, Culture and Society in Belfast, c. 1801–1832 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), chapter 4. 7. Heatley, “The Benn Family … part 1,” 23. For the discovery and mining of iron-ore in the Glenravel area see Kevin J. O’Hagan, “The Iron Mines of Glenravel,” The Glynns: Journal of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society 8 (1980): 5–10 and Donal P. McCracken, “The Management of a Mid-­ Victorian Irish Iron-Ore Mine: Glenravel, County Antrim, 1866–1887,” Irish Economic and Social History 11 (1984): 60–72. 8. Benn’s contributions to the Ulster Journal of Archaeology included a series of four articles on “Local Tickets Issued in Ulster,” two articles presenting his personal “Reminiscences of Belfast” and discussions of topics as diverse as smoking-pipes, aqua-vitæ and Edward Bruce’s connections with Connor in County Antrim. See Ulster Journal of Archaeology First Series 2 (1854): 29–31 and 230–32; 3 (1855): 172–75 and 260–64; 4 (1856): 4–5 and 239–41; 5 (1857): 144–50 and 343–44; 6 (1858): 283–93; and 7 (1859): 40–45. 9. Benn, Belfast, i, xi–xii. 10. Craig, “History of Belfast,” 159. 11. Rosemary Sweet, “Provincial Culture and Urban Histories in England and Ireland During the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence and Divergence, eds. Peter Borsay and Lindsay Proudfoot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 223. 12. F.D.  Ward to George Benn, 7 March 1878, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (henceforth PRONI), D3113/6/87. 13. Sweet, “Provincial Culture,” 235. 14. Henry Joy, Historical Collections Relative to the Town of Belfast: From the Earliest Period to the Union with Great Britain (Belfast: George Berwick, 1817), iv and xv; Sweet, “Provincial Culture,” 235. 15. See, for a classic statement, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, eds. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–31. Dane Kennedy,

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“The Imperial History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 5–22 offers a useful overview, locating the “new imperial history” in the wider historiography relating to the British Empire. 16. Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), xv and xvi (see chapter 6, esp. 319– 29, for Hall’s reading of Macaulay’s History). 17. John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Reformation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 68. For Macaulay’s experience of imperial administration, see Hall, Macaulay, 205–38. 18. Wright, The “Natural Leaders,” 160 and 164. For standard histories of the Belfast Academical Institution see [Royal Belfast Academical Institution], Centenary Volume, 1810–1910 (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson and Orr, 1913) and John Jamieson, The History of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, 1810–1960 (Belfast: W. Mullan, 1959). 19. [Royal Belfast Academical Institution], Centenary Volume, 69–70, 196–99 and 200–2; Benn, History of the Town of Belfast, 120. Likewise, in 1819 Belfast’s Harp Society, which had run into financial difficulties several years previously, received funds from Ulstermen resident in India, and a committee was established to administer the so-called “India money.” See John Killen, A History of the Linen Hall Library, 1788–1988 (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1990), 49 and 186–87, and Roy Johnson with Declan Plummer, The Musical Life of Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 64. (I am grateful to Sean Connolly for bringing these references to my attention). 20. [Royal Belfast Academical Institution], Centenary Volume, 95. 21. Sarah E. Yeh, “‘A Sink of all Filthiness’: Gender, Family and Identity in the British Atlantic, 1688–1763,” The Historian 68, no. 1 (2006): 75. 22. William Grimshaw, Incidents Recalled: or Sketches from Memory (Philadelphia: Zieber and Co., 1848), 17. 23. For the morphology of Belfast in the early nineteenth century see Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A.  Royle, Belfast: Part 1, to 1840 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2003), 7 and maps 10 and 11. 24. This account of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society and its museum is based on Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, “‘A Depot for the Productions of the Four Quarters of the Globe’: Empire, Collecting and the Belfast Museum,” in Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire, eds. Diarmid A. Finnegan and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 143–66. 25. Minute Book of the Belfast Natural History Society, 1821–1850, entry for 24 May 1828, PRONI, D3263/A/B/1.

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26. Donation Book of the Belfast Natural History Society, 1821–1844, passim, PRONI, D3263/J/1. 27. Belfast News-Letter, 21 October 1834 (I am grateful to Raymond Gillespie for bringing this reference to my attention). Edward Benn appears to have become a member of the Belfast Natural History Society in March 1837 and in 1880, following his death, his personal collection of antiquities was donated to the Society by George Benn on the understanding that “the Society would furnish a suitable habitat for the collection.” Members List of the Belfast Natural History Society, 1821–1841, PRONI, D3263/ A/B/1; Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, for the Session 1880–81 (Belfast: Alexander Mayne, 1882), 1–2. Heatley, “The Benn Family … part 2,” 12. 28. These comments draw on Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, “‘The Donegalls’ Backside’: Donegall Place, the White Linen Hall and the Development of Space and Place in Nineteenth-Century Belfast,” in Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, eds. Georgina Laragy, Olwen Purdue and Jonathan Jeffrey Wright (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 61–83, in which the use and development of the building and its surrounding street-scape is discussed in more detail. But see also, for the background to the building’s construction, Brenda Collins, Trevor Parkhill and Peter Roebuck, “A White Linen Hall for Newry or Belfast?” Irish Economic and Social History 43 (2016): 1–12. 29. Benn, Belfast, ii, 121. 30. Thomas Bradshaw, Belfast General & Commercial Directory for 1819 … with a Directory and History of Lisburn (Belfast: Francis D. Finlay, 1819), xiii and xvii. 31. Literature relating to the Atlantic World is now extensive. For a historiographical and conceptual primer, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 32. See, for the history of this institution, Killen, Linen Hall Library. 33. Laws of the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge; With a General Catalogue of the Books, Maps, & c. to which is Subjoined, for the Greater Ease of Reference, a Classified Catalogue, Relating to Some Particular Subjects (Belfast: David Lyons, 1819), 19, 21, 31, 32, 36, 37, 42, 46, 61, 64, 59 and 82. 34. John Gamble, Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Breandán Mac Suibhne (Dublin: Field Day, in association with the Keogh Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2011), 268. 35. Bradshaw, Directory for 1819, xxxiv; Narcissus G. Batt, “Belfast Sixty Years Ago: Recollections of a Septuagenarian,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology Second Series 2, no. 2 (1896): 92; R.M. Young, “Old Times in Belfast,”

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The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Fifth Series 35, no. 4 (1905): 381. 36. Isaac Ward, “Belfast Castle, Donegall House, and Ormeau House, the Residences of the Donegall Family,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology Second Series 11, no. 3 (1905): 128; A.T.Q. Stewart, The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), 53 and 80–81; Amelia Murray MacGregor, History of the Clan Gregor from Public Records and Private Collections, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1898–1901), ii, 299; Peter B. Boyden, “Nugent [formerly Fennings], Sir George, first Baronet (1757–1849),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. Matthew and Harrison, xli, 255–56. 37. Gillespie and Royle, Belfast, map 11; Benn, Belfast, ii, 117. 38. Norman E. Gamble, “The Business Community and the Trade of Belfast, 1767–1800” (PhD Thesis, University of Dublin, 1978), 40. 39. Wright, The “Natural Leaders,” 19 and 29. 40. Benn, Belfast, ii, 117. 41. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1645–1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 146–47 and 157–58; Nini Rodgers, “Making History in Belfast: The Tale of Francis Joseph Bigger, Samuel Shannon Millin and Waddell Cunningham,” in From the United Irishmen to Twentieth-­Century Unionism: A Festschrift for A.T.Q. Stewart, ed. Sabine Wichert (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 29 and 32. 42. Historic Memorials of the First Presbyterian Church of Belfast: Prepared in Connection with the Centennial of its Present Meeting House (Belfast: Marcus Ward and Co., 1887), 1, 24 and 56; Benn, Belfast, i, 525–26; Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence and Other Unpublished Writings, second ed., 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurts, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819) i, 122–23; Alexander Gordon, “Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology Second Series 1, no. 1 (1894): 25 and 27. 43. Gordon Goodwin, revised by Philip Carter, “Hamilton, Charles (1752/3– 1792),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. Matthew and Harrison, xxiv, 773. 44. Gordon, “Elizabeth Hamilton,” 26–27. 45. Benger, Memoirs of … Elizabeth Hamilton, i, 123. 46. Gillespie and Royle, Belfast, map 11. 47. Belfast Night Watch Reports, 12 May 1812 to 19 May 1816, PRONI, D46/1A (pages 53, 189–91 and 301–2). For the Night Watch, see also Brian Griffin, Police and Crime in Belfast, 1800–1865: The Bulkies (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), 11–17.

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48. Belfast News-Letter, 5 September 1828. For the reportage of this episode at the national level see “Bermuda Slaves,” Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 2, no. 17 (Oct. 1828): 326–28. 49. John M.  MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 7; Wright, “‘A Depot,’” 154 and 166. 50. [George Benn], “Reminiscences of Belfast,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology First Series, 3 (1855): 260. 51. Benn contributed £10 to the fund. Belfast News-Letter, 18 September 1877. (I am grateful to Raymond Gillespie for bringing this reference to my attention). 52. Benn, Belfast, i, xiii. 53. Benn, Belfast, i, 641 and ii, 69–70. For the Duke of York affair, see Philip Harling, “The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of Wartime Patriotism,” The Historical Journal 39, no. 4 (1996): 963–84. 54. Benn, Belfast, i, 348. 55. Joy, Historical Collections, xv; Sweet, “Provincial Culture,” 235. 56. Benn, Belfast, i, 484. 57. Benn, Belfast, ii, 48 and 123. 58. Gillespie, “Benn, George,” 90. 59. Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, “‘The Belfast Chameleon:’ Ulster, Ceylon and the Imperial Life of Sir James Emerson Tennent,” Britain and the World 6, no. 2 (2013): 201–2 (201 for quote). See also, for this speech, John Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 136–37. 60. Hall, Macaulay, xv. 61. For modern accounts of Belfast’s trade in the mid- to late-eighteenth century see Gamble, “Business Community” and Gillespie, Early Belfast, 112– 19 and 156–60. 62. Benn, Belfast, i, 316–23. 63. Benn, Belfast, ii, 122. 64. News-Letter Notebook, PRONI, D3113/4/14: PRONI’s online catalogue attributes the compilation of this notebook to Pinkerton. See https://apps.proni.gov.uk/eCatNI_IE/ResultDetails.aspx (accessed 8/4/2019). 65. Benn, Belfast, i, 653. 66. Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland, “Introduction,” in Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, eds. Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–2 and 27 note 1. See also Hall, Macaulay, 320–23, where the telling absence of slavery in Macaulay’s History of England is discussed.

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67. Benn, Belfast, ii, 6. 68. Benn, Belfast, ii, 181. For Greg’s holdings in the West Indies see “Thomas Greg: Profiles and Legacies Summary” at Legacies of British Slaveownership https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10314 (accessed 3/4/2019) and Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 147. 69. Benn, Belfast, ii, 179–81 and 182. 70. “Thomas Greg: Profiles and Legacies Summary” at Legacies of British Slaveownership https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10314 (accessed 3/4/2019); Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-slavery, 147 and 158. 71. Benn, Belfast, ii, 195; “William Smith of Barbados: Profiles and Legacies Summary” at Legacies of British Slave-ownership https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ lbs/person/view/2146654619 (accessed 3/4/2019). 72. Benn, Belfast, ii, 183–87; Linde Lunney, “Jones Valentine,” in Dictionary of Irish Biography, eds. McGuire and Quinn, iv, 1044–46. 73. Benn, Belfast, ii, 6. 74. Benn, Belfast, ii, 143. 75. Gillespie, “Benn, George,” 90. 76. Alison Light, “Family History: History’s Poor Relation?” in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, eds. Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 179. 77. For Macartney’s career see Peter Roebuck, ed., Macartney of Lisanoure, 1737–1806: Essays in Biography (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1983). 78. Benn, Belfast, i, 260. 79. Benn, Belfast, i, 1 and 3; Gillespie, Early Belfast, xiii and xiv. 80. Benn, Belfast, i, 2, 3, 4 and 5. 81. Benn, Belfast, i, 16–95 (86 and 88 for quotes). 82. S.J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland, 1460–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 263. 83. Benn, Belfast, i, 24–25 (25 for quote). 84. Benn, Belfast, i, 78 and (for quote) 85. 85. Benn, Belfast, i, 5. 86. Benn, Belfast, i, 16, 61–62 and 86–88. 87. Benn, Belfast, i, 271. 88. Hall, Macaulay, 270–71 and 312–13. 89. Patricia Grimshaw, “Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 264. 90. A.T.  Harrison, ed., The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers (Belfast: Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, 1980), 150.

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91. Wright, ‘“A Depot,’” 161–62. 92. The Saturday Review of Politics and Literature, 1 December 1877, 688. 93. Benn, Belfast, i, 97. 94. Hall and Rose, “Introduction,” 23. 95. See, for instance, Kevin Kenny, “Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–4. 96. Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kenny, 123.

PART III

Resistance/Collusion

CHAPTER 9

The 1857 Indian Uprising in Irish Ballads: Voices of the Subaltern Raphaela Adjobimey

It’s of the bould Sepoys I’m going for to tell, Who turned on their tyrants and thrash’d them right well; Who hoisted their green flag o’er England’s old Jack, And laid all about them with whop, whop, whack, whack! (“The Bould Sepoys” ll. 1–4) Brave Erin’s sons, our gallant boys, When told of murder, blood and noise Enacted by the black Sepoys, Cried lead on to India. (“The Battle of Delhi” ll. 9–12)

It has long been acknowledged that the 1857 Uprising in India1 sparked fervid responses in Britain, but it is only in recent years that Irish reactions are being examined in their own right, even though Ireland’s human investment in India was considerable. In 1857, the Irish (Catholic and Protestant) accounted for 33% of recruits to the Indian Civil Service and for around half of the East India Company’s white soldiers, although the

R. Adjobimey (*) Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_9

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Irish only made up 20% of the United Kingdom’s population.2 It is therefore unsurprising that the “mutiny” aroused substantial interest ­ among the Irish public. Research has hitherto focused on unfolding Irish press reportage of 1857. In their respective articles Jill Bender, Jennifer Regan, Mark Doyle, Amy Martin, and R.J. Morris have all demonstrated how the developments in India were extensively reported on in Irish newspapers. While Bender, Doyle, and Morris explore both nationalist and unionist papers, and Regan and Martin direct their attention to nationalist ones, a consensus emerges that the conflict in India was integrated into the cultural and political discourse on Ireland’s situatedness within the British Empire.3 Historical events were not just processed in the news media, however. In order to arrive at a better understanding of Irish perspectives on the conflict in India, it is also important to consider artistic expressions of opinion that evolved from the literary imagination of nineteenth-century Ireland and in turn shaped it. Folklore sources in particular are valuable in this context, as an inspection of these gives us an insight into prevalent opinions beyond the circle of the educated elite. The explorative consultation of various materials relating to the Indian “mutiny” in Irish archives has led to the investigation of the genre of the ballad. The ballad had existed as a literary form for centuries in Britain and Ireland, having its roots in oral tradition. As industrialisation brought cheaper printing and increased literacy to the lower social classes, the most widespread form of ballad became the broadside, deriving its name from the paper format on which it was printed.4 By the early nineteenth century specialised ballad printers had emerged, increasing circulation.5 Hack writers were quick to take advantage, producing lyrics that commented sensationally on current social and political issues.6 Ballads that made it into print are a good indicator of the opinions circling among the “masses,” since ballad printers needed to cater to their audiences.7 Accordingly, Alan Bold and Colin Neilands have regarded the broadside as a precursor of the tabloid paper.8 In the broadside ballad the Irish thus discovered a medium through which they could express their politics in a creative, entertaining, and often subversive way. The analysis of these songs arguably enables a potentially valuable way of engaging with the voices of Ireland’s subalterns. A substantial number of ballads dealing with British imperial campaigns,9 including those in India, circulated in nineteenth-century Ireland, but these ballads are seldom contained in published anthologies.10 The

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collections at Belfast Central Library (BCL), the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Bod L), the National Library of Ireland (NLI), the National Library of Scotland (NLS), Pearse Street Library in Dublin (PSt L), the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), reveal, however, a significant number of “mutiny ballads.” The dialect and the content as well as the occasional specification of a printer, and the fact that many are held in Irish ballad collections created by Irishmen in the nineteenth century (e.g., the John Davis White Collection at TCD and the Patrick Joseph McCall collection at the NLI), attest to their Irish provenance.11 And yet, both Irish and British ballads have been largely neglected in Empire studies, finding hardly any mention in postcolonial assessments of the 1857 uprising. The notable exceptions are Robert J. Morris and Projit Bihari Mukharji. The former references the politically incendiary nature of Irish “mutiny ballads” of which contemporaries such as the Under-­ Secretary for Ireland, Colonel Thomas Larcom (1853–1869), were aware. Larcom feared the impact these ballads could have and ordered the magistrates in Portarlington to seize and destroy them.12 Projit Bihari Mukharji has explored a number of nineteenth-century Scottish and English ballads and a smaller group of Irish ones referring to the war in India. Mukharji convincingly argues that scrutinising these texts and recovering at least a partial insight into the attitudes of British subalterns towards imperial endeavours helps to destabilise the myth of the monolithic British imperial imagination.13 Focusing entirely on Irish ballads, and consulting a wide range of sources to obtain these, has allowed me to uncover further opinions existing within the United Kingdom and within Ireland itself, adding to the research initiated by Mukharji. In a letter sent from Dublin and dated 17 September 1857, a subordinate by the name of Lyons informed the Archbishop of Dublin (later Cardinal), Paul Cullen, who was visiting Rome at the time, about British endeavours to recruit further Irishmen for service in India and of the innovative counter-actions of Irish nationalists: Great efforts are being made to raise recruits in Ireland, but greater still are used to prevent people from enlisting. I have been told by one, likely to be well informed, that the Young Ireland Press is printing in great numbers, and circulating in every part of Ireland, and as fast as they can, copies of “The Saxon Shilling” […] In some places, the Co. Wexford particularly, it has been sung in the open streets.14

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Lyons’ observations regarding “The Saxon Shilling,” an anti-recruitment song, provide an insight into the transnational sympathies generated by the Indian war among cultural nationalists in Ireland. Furthermore, such sympathies, as his remarks make clear, could readily find their way into popular songs and ballads. In his essay “Adulteration and the Nation,” David Lloyd has investigated how the Young Irelanders, struggling against the political and cultural hegemony of Britain, attempted to forge a sense of a unified national identity through the production and distribution of their own stylised ballads which claimed a unified authentic Irish voice.15 They usually distanced themselves from what they considered to be an unsophisticated literary tradition because of the broadsides’ heterogeneous nature.16 The fact that the Young Irelanders nonetheless chose to distribute “The Saxon Shilling” in this format is testament to the trust they placed in its reach. Both Lyons’ observation and the fact that copies of “The Saxon Shilling” can be found in several archival collections today,17 indicate that the Young Irelanders were, indeed, successful in widely disseminating such ballads in broadside format. However, the heterogeneity of the ballads in circulation indicates that they did not have a monopoly over the production of ballads and could not dictate public taste and opinion. Opinions among “ordinary folk” were as diverse as they were in other social circles, and often more explicit in their message and tone. In all, some 17 ballads, which directly refer to the Indian rebellion of 1857, have come to light. While most of these have the events in India as their main focus, and mention such episodes as the siege of Delhi (“The Battle of Delhi”18 and “A New Song on the Battle of Delhi”19) or the massacre of Europeans at Cawnpore (“The Highlanders by the Well at Cawnpore”20), some, such as the “Ode to Orangeism,”21 only make a passing reference to the sepoy struggle, their focus being predominantly on internal Irish affairs. This is not to say that Irish politics are absent from the others, for indeed the vast majority of these, as will be shown, relate the events in India to Ireland and its politics. The tone varies between the comic and the elegiac. Assessments of the events range from sympathy for and admiration of the sepoys and their cause to the lamentation of Irish victims and condemnation of the rebels and sometimes, by extension, all Indians. In the ballad entitled “The Bould Sepoys,” from which the first of the epigraphs of this chapter is taken, we encounter an example of the former.22 According to the Trinity College Dublin library catalogue

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a­nnotations, this version of the ballad was printed around 1858. The innovative Hiberno-English orthography capturing regional pronunciation (“bould”) indicates a merging of English and Irish ballad traditions. The title, holding up the boldness of the sepoys for admiration, declares the political intent of the balladist at the outset. Colonial hubris regarding the longevity of empire is rudely shaken by the violence of the sepoys’ uprising: The tyrants felt sure that their rule was to last, The future they thought would run on like the past; But the slaves so long trampled leaped up in a crack, And they treated their masters to whop, whop, whack, whack! (ll. 9–12)

The use of the tyrant-slave dichotomy is significant. Not only does the term “tyrant” signify the arbitrariness and cruelty of the coloniser, but also the denotation of the sepoys as “slaves” carried powerful overtones in the contemporary climate of public opinion in the wake of abolition.23 The idea that the sepoys were slaves was therefore incompatible with the self-­ perception of the nation. The colonisers’ blind confidence in their power is shown to be one of the reasons for the rebellion and for the sepoys’ initial success. The tyrants are specified as English, seemingly eliding the involvement of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the Raj. In contrast to the brave sepoys, the English colonisers are presented as arrant cowards (ll. 13–14): “The Englishmen scamper’d up hills and down dales, / They saw the bould Sepoys were close at their tails” (ll. 13–14). This is a very different portrayal of Englishmen from the one we encounter in Tennyson’s “The Defence of Lucknow,” in which the Englishmen besieged in the city are celebrated for their indomitable spirit: Handful of men as we were, we were English in heart and in limb, Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure, Each of us fought as if hope for the garrison hung but on him; (ll. 46–48)24

In “The Bould Sepoys,” the punishment dealt out by the sepoys is retribution for years of ill-treatment: They bent and they bore for a hundred long years, Of Plunder, of Torture, of Blood, and of Tears;

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But they kept the account, and they’ve duly paid back, The weighty sum total in whop, whop, whack, whack! (ll. 5–8)

The Irish struggle against the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the British power over Ireland, its land, its laws, and its economy are all implied in the anti-imperial perspective: I’m sure the bould Sepoys will win back their own, They’ll place their old King on his glorious old Throne; And Ranters and Robbers will all get the Sack, So praise be to Heaven, and to whop, whop, whack, whack. (ll. 17–20)

The colonial enterprise is unequivocally depicted as hypocritical and unethical. A parallel afforded with Ireland emerges in the first stanza: “It’s of the bould Sepoys I’m going for to tell […] Who hoisted their green flag o’er England’s old Jack” (1, 3). While the green flag flown by the rebels in Delhi was that of the Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah II, the coincidence of its hue with the greenness associated with Ireland’s nationalist cause would hardly have been lost on its original audience.25 The sepoys are not merely localised rebels, but nationalist heroes fighting for their country’s freedom. They are even presented as role models for other oppressed peoples. This is highlighted in the “moral” provided by the final stanza which acts as a rallying cry to the Irish and to all oppressed peoples: Now Nations and Peoples woh [sic] wish to be free, Your course is as simple, as simple can be; Go sigh not, or cry not, alas or alack! But just turn on your tyrants with whop, whop, whack, whack! (22–25)

By implication, the Irish would be liberators not only of their own nation, but by example and precedent, of other colonised peoples. Two major functions of broadsides established by Colin Neilands, entertainment and propaganda, play a role in this ballad.26 The propagandistic and comical content is evident; its effectiveness, however, relies on the form of the ballad. The rapid tetrameters build up the tension, and hurry performer and listener alike through the six quatrains. The simple and regular rhyme scheme AABB, CCBB, and so on (which seems to be the most common

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rhyme scheme in Irish broadsides27) is conducive to memorisation. The repetitive rhyming of the last two lines of every quatrain and the repetition of the same onomatopoeic, alliterative words at the end of each fourth line, “whop, whop, whack, whack” serves both as a mnemonic and as an encouragement to the audience to join in. All of these features would have worked together to capture people’s attention during a singer’s street performance and to facilitate the audience’s participation. Two further poems in which the sepoys and their struggles are presented in a similar way are the “Indian War Song” and “The Absentee.” Though both of these were published in periodicals, and are not strictly ballads, they are nevertheless valuable in enabling us to compare the content and style of poetry circulating in the press with that of the broadside tradition. While the published periodical poetry is more literary and less polemical in language and form, and probably catered to a more educated readership, the political attitudes they display are very similar to those of the broadsides. It is more than likely that some interchange took place between these poetic forms. Poets publishing their works in the newspapers are likely to have encountered mutiny ballads and have been inspired by them. Once printed, such poems could find their way into the popular imagination and influence the creation and transmutation of broadside ballads. The “Indian War Song” which was published in the nationalist Belfast newspaper the Ulsterman on 30 October 1857 centres around the rebellion and describes the sepoys’ cause as a fight for independence. As in “The Bould Sepoys,” the sepoys are again seen as freedom fighters, trying to rid their nation of the yoke of their colonial oppressors, who wrongfully took their land: The foe must fly From glare of sun— Freedom will smile that day. God to Hindoos India gave— Freedom binds them to be brave In fight for fatherland; Thus lash’d, as one They stand in awful fray. (ll. 24–31)28

The uprising is seen as a national struggle—the rebels become by extension the people of India: “A people is—a people still” (l. 13). Claiming the high moral ground, they fight to regain the land divinely ordained to

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them. Silencing European perspectives on the mutiny, the narrator articulates their cause as a rational and legitimate one: “Hush, Ferugui29 in Hindoo’s land / ’Tis reason points the way” (ll. 17–18). It is noteworthy that the Muslim descendants of the Mughal conquerors are not mentioned here, as the Hindus were here seen as the original and rightful owners of the land, suggesting a parallel with the “authentic” Irish or Celts in nationalist thinking. The unnatural and immoral rule of the foreigner is crumbling: Ferugui must away— Nature and man against him stand, His reign is of the past. (ll. 45–47)

Criticisms of the exploitative nature of English rule in India had already been raised in the course of the previous decades. Disapproving voices regarding the unethical behaviour of the East India Company (its dishonourable business practices and institution of legislative practices which eroded the power of native rulers) and scepticism towards the appropriateness of the British East India Company’s rule over millions of people had been expressed inside and outside of Britain after Shah Alam II had granted the East India Company the right to raise taxes in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar in 1765 and had thus extended the Company’s governing role.30 Concerns regarding the corruption among British Company servants, or “nabobs” as they were sometimes referred to, were being widely debated by the 1770s31 and brought to a head by Edmund Burke in his campaign against Warren Hastings (1788–1795).32 Such sentiments were, moreover, explored and expanded by authors of “sensibility” such as Henry Mackenzie in The Man of Feeling (1771), William Cowper in The Task (1783–1784) and Eliza Fenwick in Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795).33 “The Absentee,” which was published in the Dublin weekly periodical The Celt on 3 October 1857, supplies further evidence of how the war in India captured the Irish imagination. The lyrics, which do not, in fact, focus on India, but highlight the evils of absenteeism, end with the following lines: But if the Indian wars go on—      And God wills it to be— We’ll have our own—and keep our own,    From every Absentee! (ll. 53–56)

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The Indian rebellion is deemed a potential watershed marking the waning of English power and thus paving the way for Irish freedom. Thus a connection is inferred between the situation in India and that in Ireland with regard to their mutual suffering. These ballads fit into a wider context of Irish anti-imperial literature as discussed by Julia Wright in her book Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. “Key anti-imperial Irish writers,” Wright notes, “identified India and Ireland as bound by sympathy because of their shared oppression—a sympathy that rhetorically puts morality, if not might on their side.”34 The ballads discussed thus far are representative of those which align the Indian cause with the nationalist agenda in Ireland, drawing upon the Enlightenment conception of sensibility. Apart from the sympathetic bond of mutual suffering, this conception, as Julia Wright has argued, offered “a basis upon which to argue for national merit—and hence the right to sovereignty”: Irish writing about India in the Romantic period and later the “East” in general reveals an ongoing concern with the colonized subject’s capacity for self-command and, by extension, the nation’s capacity for self-rule […]. Sensibility, in other words, lays the ethical foundation for political sovereignty and the morality of claiming that sovereignty.35

Sympathy was a volatile bond, however. In the case of the “anti-nabob polemic[s]” mentioned above, which emanated from the debates over the behaviour of Company employees, most of them had a “domestic dimension” and “direct[ed] public sympathy away from India and towards the established landed gentry, whose pre-eminence was challenged by the influx of East Indian super-wealth, part of a wider reaction against middle-­ class aspiration and the apparent triumph of trade over title.”36 The utilisation of events in India towards the discussion of domestic politics may perhaps explain the mutable nature of public opinion expressed in these ballads. “The Massacre of Five Catholic Clergymen by the Sepoys at Cawnpore,”37 which was printed by James Moore of Belfast around 1860, is an outpouring of rage and grief at the killings of several Irish Catholic missionaries during the rebellion. The rebels are termed “wretched,” “cursed mutineers” (l. 20, l. 49) and “demons” (l. 38), who inflicted “excruciating tortures” (l. 38) and “unhuman cruelties” (l. 56) on the “pure and holy clergymen” (l. 8). They are represented as evil, monstrous, inhuman, and frenzied creatures and not as noble, brave and

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organised champions of a just cause. The clergymen on the other hand are deemed martyrs (l. 6) who, having gone to India to “plant the seed” of their faith (l. 14), were led by the sepoys “like lambs unto a slaughter” (l. 24). The identification with the Irish priests overrides any earlier feelings of solidarity with the sepoys’ struggle. The circulation of such ballads confirms Andrew Rudd’s conclusion that domestic affairs distracted from or took priority over the spatially remote and culturally unfamiliar.38 The special role of the Catholic Church in Ireland needs to be considered here. The priests and the people were united in their struggle against discrimination and were therefore bonded more closely than in many other countries,39 and in the private sphere people felt for their fellow countrymen far away and commiserated with bereaved families at home. The focus on this episode rather than on the more infamous massacre of women and children at the Bibighar house in Cawnpore widely expatiated upon in the English and loyalist media is another reminder of the complexity of Irish perceptions of events in India. The presence and the plurality of these perceptions were felt across Irish society and should not be subsumed under mainstream British ones.40 At the same time it is axiomatic that diverse perceptions fed into and fed on contemporary discourse and that we not only find representations which differ from hegemonic British ones, but also encounter some which are close to them. The above ballad, in fact, illustrates how the perspectives could merge: in its choice of incident, it diverges from the mainstream English and loyalist representations, but the terminology used to describe the sepoys (e.g., “demons”) is a common one. Similar portrayals of the sepoys and the violence inflicted by them can be found in several more ballads. In “A Lamentation on the Massacre of Europeans in India,”41 the sensationalist account of the deaths of British and Irish men and women and the vilification of the sepoys is combined with a rallying cry to join the British army and fight against the Indians: Our Irish boys was [sic] called again to face the daring foe, But now we hear the savage Blacks has proved their overthrow.    

To India we will go, my boys,     To India we will go; To hunt those murdering Sepoys,     To India we will go.   […]

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Such butchering was never known and torturing of lives As those poor creatures in India got from the savage black Sepoys. May the Lord protect our country from every foreign foe May heaven save poor Irishmen from every case of woe, But such of them as lost their lives and slaughtered far away, May God have mercy on their souls, good Christians for them pray. (ll. 3–8, 34–42)

The participation of Irishmen in the British counter-insurgency is emphasised to demonstrate Ireland’s loyalty to the British crown. Rebel India here serves as an “absolute other,” which draws together the “relative others” within the United Kingdom. Internal political and religious differences are smoothed over: like other members of the Kingdom the Irish are shown fighting for their “Queen and country” (l. 16) against a common enemy and are called on to pray to God, not as Catholics or Protestants, but as Christians (ll. 41–42).42 The emphasis on the unifying effect of the Indian war on the United Kingdom is also present in “The Battle of Delhi,”43 quoted from in the second epigraph above. The focus is on the recapture of Delhi and the commemoration of the many lives lost in the process: Brave Erin’s sons, our gallant boys, When told of murder, blood and noise Enacted by the black Sepoys,      Cried lead on to India. Old England in her armour bright, With Scotland formost [sic] in the fight, When the three hosts as one unite,      Sepoys, look out in India. (ll. 9–16)

Victory in India is shown to depend on the united efforts of English, Scottish, and Irish soldiers. This is evidenced by the enumeration of fallen heroes from all these parts of the United Kingdom, among them Ulsterman, Brigadier-General John Nicholson.44 An appeal is made to the Irish audience to express their loyalty through an emotional display of sorrow over the loss of their fellow British and Irish countrymen: Now Erin weep for Nicholson, Your own, your gallant, dauntless son, Just as the battle it was won,   He lost his life in India. (ll. 49–52)

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Many more ballads in the archives celebrate the Irish contribution to the maintenance and defence of Britain and its Empire. The conflict in India was, however, not always instrumentalised as a unifying experience in Ireland. At times reference to the Indian rebels was made to insult opposing political factions. In “A New Song Called the Irish Sepoys”45 the speaker calls on the Orangemen to “keep down Popery” (l. 4) and describes their enemies as “These vile Papist tyrants and Irish Sepoys” (l. 6). Interestingly, the same expression was used in a nationalist ballad named “Ode to Orangeism.”46 In it the “Orange Rabble” is accused of “wreck and […] murder” (l. 9), its members, “all of the sepoy, and none of the man” (l. 12), are vilified as “Accurs’t Irish sepoys” (l. 13). The expression became a versatile insult, which was easily transposed from one side to the other across the nationalist and unionist divide. Despite such divisions, indignation was felt across the political spectrum at English failure to acknowledge the Irish support in the war effort. This is, for instance, expressed in “Poor Pat must Emigrate,”47 a ballad taken from the un-catalogued broadside collection of the NLI: Have we not bled for England’s Queen, where’er her foes were to be seen, Who the [sic] town of Delhi, will you please to tell me that? Have we not pursued that India Chief, and Nena Sahib, tha [sic] cursed thief, Who skivered [sic] babes and mothers, and left them to their fate. Then why should we be so oppressed in our own dear land St. Patrick blessed, The land from which we hope the best poor Pat must emigrate. (ll. 27–32)

The point of aggravation here is not merely the failure to acknowledge the Irish contribution to the defence of England’s Empire, but that this service has been repaid with the implementation of such high taxes and rents (l. 3) that many Irish families can no longer support themselves and see emigration as their only option. They hurl you out of house and home to beg and starve to death. What kind of treatment, boys, is that, to give poor honest Irish Pat … (ll. 12–13)

Even when emphasising Irish support against the sepoys in India, the English exploitation of the Irish is criticised. This accords with Rudd’s

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argument that the sympathy for the Indian colony expressed in nationalist discourse could be relegated to the background in the face of overwhelming domestic concerns. The “Tipperary Recruiting Song,”48 similar to “The Saxon Shilling” mentioned by Lyons in his letter quoted earlier, tries to discourage Irish men from enlisting in the British army: So never to ’list be in haste my boys, Or a glass of drugged whiskey to taste, my boys If to India you’ll go, ’tis to grief and to woe, And to rot and die like a beast my boys. (ll. 19–23)

The Irish must be wary of John Bull’s civility towards them, as it is motivated by England’s current need of more cannon fodder (ll. 41–45). Even in those ballads that struck a more politic tone, England’s lack of recognition of Irish support is clearly critiqued. In “The Four-Coloured Banner,”49 a ballad from the P. J. McCall collection of the NLI, India is mentioned as one of the many locations in which Irish soldiers have fought for England, but it is stressed that they have not received the respect due to them. Were Ireland a truly equal member of the union, it would be openly acknowledged as such. The inclusion of the Irish green (and not just the saltire of St. Patrick) on the Union Jack would symbolise and help to achieve this: Old England tells the world that Ireland’s part of her domain. And beneath her flag in war our boys are seen, Yet no man in this nation, has seen since his creation. The Union Jack of England with a stripe of Irish green. (ll. 9–16).

Although the immediate political context of “Welcome Home our Brave Brigade,”50 a ballad found in the un-catalogued broadside ballad collection of the NLI, is unclear, its critique of British treatment of Ireland is noteworthy, as it highlights how complaints voiced at the time of the Indian rebellion were part of a tradition of criticism of England’s perception and treatment of Ireland. “Great Britain” (l. 1) is accused of hypocrisy, promising “liberty” (l. 1) and thus “freedom of opinion,” (ll. 3–4)

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but nevertheless defaming those who dare to question its actions (l. 5–8). Ireland stands wrongfully accused of disloyalty (ll. 19–28). Assurance is given of the willingness of Irishmen to die in the defence of Britain: At length the ammunition out, each gallant brave defender Rushed madly with an Irish shout, “We’ll die but not surrender.” (ll. 29–30)

The promise not to surrender evokes the siege of Londonderry and places the ballad in an Ulster Protestant tradition. It simultaneously relates the Protestants’ defence of their ascendancy in Ireland to the tradition of the Irish Protestant defence of Britain. And yet, the ballad is not divisive in intention. It speaks for all Irishmen who have served England well. At the same time it illustrates the ambivalent nature of the Protestant Irish identity. Whatever their religious affiliation, they see themselves as Erin’s sons—they are as emphatically Irish as their Catholic national compatriots. The mutiny ballads are especially valuable as sources for the perspectives of Ireland’s subaltern. Their oral character renders them more ephemeral than other texts and makes it difficult to fix dates, authorship and the existence of further versions. But it is because of this very illusiveness and anonymity that their authors enjoyed a greater imaginative and political freedom and could employ a strongly critical and polemic tone. Heterogeneous in character and without respect for hierarchy, these were the products of a culturally hybridised colonised population, and remain a rich source of insight into popular opinion. The Irish saw India through the prism of their own experience. This becomes evident in the choice of thematic emphases, which clearly draws upon contemporary political debates on racism, religious sensitivity and discrimination, oppression and exploitation, land annexation and taxation. They perceived that the history of the colonial “other” had much in common with theirs and that the rebellion, which had shown the vulnerability of the imperial power, could serve as an inspiration for others. Thus, the rebellion was instrumentalised in the service of Irish agendas. At the same time an awareness of the wider imperial context grew, for the preoccupation with the colonial “other” led the people of Ireland to reflect on their own history and became, indeed, an identity-forming event for them. The intense engagement with the political events in India in 1857 pervaded all sections of Irish society. The acknowledgement of Irish views, particularly those circulating in the broadside ballads, exposes the reduc-

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tive nature of the widely propagated monolithic view of the British ones, which doubly conflates the discourse of the time, ignoring English dissenting voices and simultaneously denying the existence of specifically Irish ones.

Notes 1. There has been considerable debate on the terminology to be used in reference to the events of 1857. While “Indian mutiny” or “Sepoy mutiny” was the contemporary term used by the British, these terms have been contested by later scholars as they arguably depreciate the significance of the conflict, locating culpability with the “mutineers.” It has since been referred to as a “rebellion,” e.g. Biswamoy Pati, ed., The 1857 Rebellion (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); an “uprising,” e.g. Pramod K. Nayar, The Great Uprising: India, 1857 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007) and even a “war of independence,” e.g. Vinayak D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence in 1857 (Bombay: Phoenix, 1957, first published in 1909). I have used the terms rebellion, uprising and mutiny, all of which are in continued academic use, interchangeably, while retaining a critical sense of their implied perspectives. 2. See Scott B. Cook, “The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1914,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3 (1987): 507–29 at 510, and Sir Patrick Cadell, “Irish Soldiers in India,” Irish Sword 1, no. 2 (1950–1951): 76–79 at 79. 3. See Jill C. Bender, “Mutiny or Freedom? The 1857 Indian Mutiny and the Irish Press,” in Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857–1921, ed. Simon J. Potter (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 92–108; Jennifer M. Regan, “‘We Could Be of Service to Other Suffering People’: Representations of India in the Irish Nationalist Press, c. 1857–1887,” Victorian Periodicals Review 41, no. 1 (2008): 61–77; Mark Doyle, “The Sepoys of the Pound and Sandy Row: Empire and Identity in Mid-Victorian Belfast,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 6 (2010): 849– 67; Amy E.  Martin, “Representing the ‘Indian Revolution’ of 1857: Towards a Genealogy of Irish Internationalist Anticolonialism,” Field Day Review 8 (2012): 127–47; and Robert J.  Morris, “Bowld Irish Sepoy,” Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol 3: Global Perspectives, eds. Marina Carter and Crispin Bates (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2013), 98–119. My doctoral thesis, “Irish Perspectives on the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny,’” has complemented their work by examining papers from across the political spectrum, paying attention to their interactions with each other and with the British press (PhD Thesis, Queen’s

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University Belfast, 2013). Jill C. Bender’s more recent work The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) also highlights the relevance of Irish perspectives. For a specifically archival study of the correspondence of an Irish family relating to the mutiny, see also A.T. Harrison, ed., The Graham Indian Mutiny Papers (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1980). 4. See Alan N.  Bold, The Ballad (London: Methuen, 1979), 5–6; Colin W.  Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads in their Social and Historical Contexts,” 2 vols. (PhD Thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1986), i, 24. 5. John Moulden estimates the yearly number of ballad sheets printed in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century at about 5 million. John P. Moulden, “The Printed Ballad in Ireland: A Guide to the Popular Printing of Songs in Ireland, 1760–1920,” 4 vols. (PhD Thesis, National University of Ireland Galway, 2006), i, 256. 6. Bold, The Ballad, 66, 78. In his study on Irish ballads in which he establishes a corpus of 2459 ballads, which he found in Dublin and Belfast archives, Colin Neilands notes that 26.4% are of a historical-political nature, while religion and faith are, for instance, only broached in about 7.3% (Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” ii, 4). 7. Moulden, “The Printed Ballad,” i, 284–85. 8. See Bold, The Ballad, 82, and Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” i, 302. 9. Colin Neilands has, for instance, calculated that 21.6% of the political ballads in the 2459 corpus he compiled are concerned with external affairs, 41.4% of which deal with British campaigns. Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” i, 5. 10. Very few of the ballads I have found have also been published in popular anthologies such as: Colm O’Lochlainn, ed., Irish Street Ballads (Dublin: Three Candles, 1939) and More Irish Street Ballads (Dublin: Three Candles, 1968), James N. Healy, ed., The Mercier Book of Old Irish Street Ballads, 4 vols. (Cork: Mercier, 1967–1969), or Maureen Jolliffe, ed., The Third Book of Irish Ballads (Cork: Mercier, 1970). 11. As Moulden suggests the very fact that a song was “printed in Ireland […] has significance; it is evidence, at the least, of a printer’s belief that it would sell, that the song had resonance in Irish experience” (Moulden, “The Printed Ballad,” i, 24). 12. Morris, “Bowld Irish Sepoy,” 98. 13. See Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Ambiguous Imperialisms: British Subaltern Attitudes towards the ‘Indian War’ of 1857,” in Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857: Vol. 2: Britain and the Indian Uprising of 1857, eds. Andrea Major and Crispin Bates (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013), 110–33, and “Can the Subaltern Sing? The ‘Indian War’ in Nineteenth-Century British Broadsides,” in Revisiting

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1857: Myth, Memory, History, eds. Sharmistha Gooptu and Boria Majumdar (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2007), 92–120. The ballad collections consulted by Mukharji are those of the Bodleian Library and the National Library of Scotland. This explains his greater focus on Scottish and English ballads. See also Christopher Herbert, War of no Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Herbert, who has examined other literary and non-literary British nineteenth-century sources, similarly argues that the picture of a monolithic British landscape of imperial consent is a reductive one. 14. “Letter to Cardinal Cullen from Lyons of Dublin, 17 September 1857,” Archdiocese of Dublin: Cardinal Cullen Collection, File III, Section 339/5:10. 15. John Moulden has commented on the dearth of historiographical research, noting that, excepting the studies of Neilands and Georges-Denis Zimmermann, what has been produced thus far is largely the work of folklorists (Moulden, “The Printed Ballad,” ii, 496, 511). 16. David Lloyd, “Adulteration and the Nation,” in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, ed. David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 88–124 at 95–97. 17. Source: John Davis White Collection, Trinity College Dublin: OLS X-1– 531, no. 245; P.J.  McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, 8: 69; also included in a nineteenth-century broadsheet booklet of songs held in the McKean Collection at Queen’s University Belfast, O’Donnell ABC Song Book; Containing […] a Great Variety of Irish National Songs (Glasgow and London: Cameron & Ferguson, n.d.). 18. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, D. 19. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, D. 20. Dublin University Magazine 51 (February 1858), 209. 21. Ulsterman, 13 November 1857, 4. 22. Source: John Davis White Collection at Trinity College Dublin: OLS X-1– 532, no. 210. An excerpt from a version of this ballad has also been quoted by Christopher Bayly in a paper titled “Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780–1914,” delivered at Queen’s University Belfast and ­published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Sixth Series 10 (2000): 377–97 at 388. 23. James Lee Ray, “The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International War,” International Organization 43, no. 3 (1989): 405–39 at 409. 24. Alfred Tennyson, “The Defence of Lucknow,” in Ballads and other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1880, originally published in 1879), 99–111.

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25. The significance of the colour green as a symbol for the Irish nationalist struggle was ever-present in nineteenth-century Ireland and was often stressed in Irish ballads following the 1798 rebellion. One famous example of such a ballad is “The Wearing of the Green.” 26. Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” i, 110. 27. Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” ii, 9. 28. “Indian War Song,” Ulsterman, 30 October 1857, 4. 29. Ferugui/firinghee: a term used to refer to a European in India, which carried overtones of “hostility or disparagement.” Henry Yule and A.  C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1996). 30. Andrew Rudd, Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1 and 7. 31. Teltscher, Kate. “‘The Fearful Name of the Black Hole’: Fashioning an Imperial Myth,” in Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 30–51 at 43. 32. Rudd, Sympathy and India, 1–8. 33. Rudd, Sympathy and India, 34–37. 34. Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17. 35. Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism, 3 and 215. 36. Rudd, Sympathy and India, 34 and 36. 37. Source: John Davis White Collection, Trinity College Dublin: OLS X-1– 530, no. 43. Charles Harding Firth Collection (Firth b-c), Bodleian Library: B 26(423). Another version of this, entitled “The Massacre of Four Catholic Clergymen,” which is held in the Bodleian Library’s ballad collection, only names four of the priests, leaving out Rev. Thomas Power and is two stanzas shorter. This is probably an example of how ballads were changed to accommodate new pieces of information. Charles Harding Firth Collection (Firth b-c), Bodleian Library: c. 14(82). 38. Rudd, Sympathy and India, 2–3 and 165–68. 39. D.  George Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 15. 40. John Moulden has referred to this ballad in his thesis as evidence that it was not just the loyalist parties in Ireland which took an interest in the Indian rebellion (Moulden, “The Printed Ballad,” i, 171). 41. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, E-F. 42. The use of the term “good Christians,” which appears inclusive here, could, however, also be read as an exclusive one. Irish Protestants frequently used the term as a synonym for Protestantism, thereby excluding Catholics.

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43. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, D. 44. An extensive case study on the northern-Irish Protestant John Nicholson, who died at the siege of Delhi in September 1857 and was long commemorated as the “Hero of Delhi” in his hometown of Lisburn and beyond, is included in the introduction of my PhD thesis. See also Pramod Nayar’s chapter in this volume, pp. 191–212. 45. Source: Crawford Collection, National Library of Scotland: Crawford. EB.3720. 46. “Ode to Orangeism,” Ulsterman, 13 November 1857, 4. 47. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, P. 48. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, 4: 43. 49. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, 7: 131. 50. Source: P.J. McCall Collection of Irish Street Ballads, and Un-catalogued Broadside Collection, National Library of Ireland: LO 2151, W.

CHAPTER 10

Afghanistan, the Indian “Mutiny,” and the Bicultural Stereotype of John Nicholson Pramod K. Nayar

Literary constructions of imperial heroes such as General Gordon of Sudan or John Nicholson of India were bicultural. The Irish “hero of Delhi” during the 1857 “Mutinies,” John Nicholson, this chapter argues, was constructed as an imperial hero during the period 1869 to 1947 (the temporal bookends of this essay), when authors such as Charles Kelly (of the Indian Civil Service), J.  V. Williamson, Lionel Trotter, J.  C. Wood, Henry Newbolt, Ernest Gray and others portrayed his origins not just in English/Christian contexts but in a close alignment with native Indian codes and discourses of courage and martial skills. Taking a cue from Michael Silvestri who suggests that Nicholson’s soldierly qualities were recognised by the subcontinent’s martial races, the following discussion proposes that the imperial hero emerges within English literary and biographical discourse by co-opting into itself native affiliations with and interpretations of particular traits.1 In other words, it is only when the Afghans and the Sikhs produce a certain kind of imperial hero that Nicholson becomes one (Fig. 10.1).

P. K. Nayar (*) University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_10

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Fig. 10.1  Brigadier-General John Nicholson, Memorial Statue, Lisburn, Northern Ireland (Copyright, Alamy Stock Photo)

The Irish domination of the British military, Heather Streets notes, had often meant that the Irish outnumbered the English.2 The Irish presence in the imperial army—embodied in Nicholson, for all practical purposes— may be read as contributing to not only specific conceptualisations of the Irish, but also to the framework within which the Afghans or the Sikhs were understood. Within Ireland too, cities like Belfast had strong connections to the Empire, often oscillating in their attitudes towards the colonies in terms of their internal tensions of Catholicism and Protestantism.3 In later years, the Irish historiography of the Indian “Mutiny” itself would be varied, with some commentators such as John O’Leary suggesting “a subversive practice of reading for colonial subjects, one that implies the emergence of a larger internationalist anti-imperial critique.”4 Heather Streets’ argument that colonial constructions of races such as the Irish or those of the subcontinent were driven by “recruiting needs,” a colonial understanding of Indian society and the age’s conceptions of race thus enables us to see this alignment and comparison being put in place, one that was bolstered by literary-biographical accounts of

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figures like Nicholson.5 It may be therefore not too far-fetched a speculative leap to argue that Nicholson’s Irishness embodied in his physique and bearing was already a part of the white “martial race” discourse that circulated around the subcontinent. This Irish build then found a niche within the colonial “martial race” discourse as well, aligning Nicholson with native races such as the Afghans. The stereotype of the imperial hero thus is a bicultural or a creolised one: English as well as subcontinental. How much did the subcontinent, therefore, contribute to the character of this English-Irish hero? The Nicholson of the literature, this essay shows, fashions himself as an Afghan, a Sikh and as an English soldier by appropriating the stereotypical characters associated with each of these “types”: the wiliness of the Afghan, the valour of the Sikh and the sense of justice of the Englishman. Nicholson’s identity, as portrayed in these texts, is initially at stake in the moments of the convergence of political (English) and cultural (Afghani) forces in the Northwest provinces, but from this very convergence he fashions a self. John Nicholson joined the East India Company’s army in 1839. His first taste of a battle in the subcontinent was in the First Afghan War. At the siege of Ghazni (1842), to which we will return later in the chapter, Nicholson was furious at the English army’s surrender and being held as a captive. It was in the course of his work as District Commissioner in the politically unstable and uncontrollable areas of the Northwest Frontier Province that Nicholson acquired notoriety as a short-tempered officer. Besides the documented life in Trotter, Kaye and Roberts, much of the material around Nicholson depicts him as a mythic, larger-than-life figure, and the fiction this chapter examines, no doubt drew upon, and possibly amplified, these legends. For instance, when the “Mutiny” broke out, legend has it, the telegram sent to the border said simply, “Send Nicholson.” Nicholson, apocrypha has it, rode practically non-stop, day after day, from the border to Delhi, sleeping in his saddle on occasion in the summer heat of May. Leading the battle for Delhi, Nicholson was shot through his shoulder and eventually died outside the city gates in an army tent because he refused to die before Delhi was taken back. He is said to have got out of his deathbed to fire a final shot in the air when he saw the English army advance into the Red Fort, and then died. This essay focuses on the literary materials around John Nicholson, treating him, therefore as a literary character, whose exploits and adventures replicate, in fictional form, the verifiable life of the real-life Nicholson.

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Given the fact that the myth borrows and fictionalises from the historical commentaries of Kaye, Roberts and others, it is possible to argue that there is a intertextual archive around Nicholson.

The English Origins of John Nicholson and Restitutive Heroism Charles Kelly’s poem, Delhi and Other Poems (1872) describes Nicholson and his band of soldiers at Delhi as “Christian avengers.”6 J. C. Wood in his novel When Nicholson Kept the Border (1922) inventories “Christian gentlemen and high-souled pioneers who … made the British name respected and feared,” among whom, of course, is Nicholson.7 J.  V. Williamson’s poem “The Fallen Heroes of the Indian War” (1858) is a hagiography that explicitly invokes Christian heroism in order to describe the imperial soldiers: retribution is what they extract, martyrs are what they are.8 From a very early age, says Trotter in his 1897 biography, “seeds of Christian piety” were sown in Nicholson’s mind.9 Whether it is the defeat of Afghans in the pre-1857 years or the conquest of Delhi, Nicholson, like Neill and other “heroes” becomes identified with the Christian militarism that finds its origins in the Victorian age. In Gray’s novel we have Nicholson declare, after ordering the execution of an Afghani: “leave him to swing, that all who live in the hills may respect the word of Nikkal Seyn and the law of the great White Queen.”10 Nicholson stands in for the White Queen here, possessing the displaced authority of the Monarch herself. But alongside this expected posturing is the sense of emphasis on the word of the white man. The demand that his word be “respected” is part of Nicholson’s portrait across authors and texts. That Nicholson was a “man of his word,” and who never lies is part of the mythos that makes him a hero. Both novels and the poetry see the British soldier as the cornerstone of the imperial arch, and pay scant attention to, or are critical of, administrators and the bureaucratic machinery. In all these texts we see Nicholson cast as (i) imperial hero (ii) Christian and (iii) the military hero, and a mix, usually, of all three. Nicholson fits perfectly into the mould of the “man-on-the-spot” model that Kathryn Tidrick identified as a marker of nineteenth-century imperialism.11 The timely decisions, without awaiting either confirmation or even permission from distant controlling authorities—the Board of

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Control in London or even the government in India—were taken by the English magistrate or tax collector or, in the case of Nicholson, the District Commissioner. Through the novels and the biography we see Nicholson not waiting for orders, and at times, performing actions that did not sit very well with the authorities. Hence at one point Henry Lawrence the Governor of the Punjab province reprimands Nicholson: Fear and forbear with natives and Europeans, and you will be as distinguished as a civilian as you are as a soldier. Don’t think it is necessary to say all you think to every one. The world would be a mass of tumult if we all gave candid opinions of each other. I admire your sincerity as much as any man can do, but say this much as a general warning.12

Lawrence here chastises Nicholson for his fiery temper, but Nicholson’s instant justice system—he became notorious for his summary executions (without trial) of suspected mutineers on the route to Delhi during the period June–August 1857—remained unchanged. In both Wood’s and Gray’s novels we see the man-on-the-spot as being in an awkward position of having to take decisions that might not be ratified by the Board or higher authorities. This dilemma of the English soldier reaches its apotheosis in the novels, and in the biography, during the siege of Delhi of September 1857. General Wilson proves to be both inept and uncertain and his subordinate officer, Nicholson, threatens to first, supersede him and later, to shoot him. (Trotter here is citing these incidents from Frederick Roberts’, Forty-One Years in India and Neville Chamberlain’s, respectively.)13 With regard to the functioning of the man-on-the-spot, the novels and Trotter’s biography offer a justification for Nicholson’s violence and impatience.14 In the early twentieth century, novels depict the violence as necessitated by the inaction of those tasked with running the Empire who left “dirty work,” so to speak, to the man-on-the-spot. They point to the incompetence of the military and administrative superiors he was forced to work under on occasions. Thus in Gray’s novel we have Nicholson offering a summary of the disastrous Afghan war where, he says, “General Elphinstone, in command at Kabul, was an old man, and lost his head completely.”15 As a result of the decisions made by leaders like Elphinstone, suggests Nicholson in the novel, “the Pathans now think all feringhees are fair game.”16 Later in the novel, during the siege of Delhi, Wilson is ­uncertain of the next move, and “obstinately refused to discuss the mat-

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ter” of renewed attacks. He eventually gave in “with an ill grace,” says Gray.17 Nicholson in these portraits functions as a necessary corrective to the moderate administrators and soldiers. The man-on-the-spot is the true imperial hero because, through his acts of retributive violence and justice, he manages to salvage the pride of the Empire. Thus, Trotter comments on Nicholson’s threats against his commanding officer: There is no doubt that Nicholson would have carried out his purpose had Wilson hesitated any longer; nor can any sane man doubt that the circumstances of the moment would have amply justified the breach of military use and wont.18

This man-on-the-spot model of individual valour bestows considerable value upon the gratuitous and excessive violence of Nicholson’s career. Implicit in these narratives is a critique—Trotter’s biography is from 1897, Wood’s novel from 1922 and Gray’s from 1947, all written, therefore, in the period of a trembling imperial edifice—of the overgrown, tolerant and allegedly inefficient bureaucracy of the Empire. This is why Williamson, as early as 1858, in his biographical notes appended to the poem “The Fallen Heroes of the Indian War,” refers to Nicholson as “one of the main props of the tottering Empire of Britain in India.”19 Therefore, one could argue that the imperial hero is one who restores pride and glory to the edifice by not fitting into its bureaucratised machinery. “Restitutive heroism,” as one may think of this, is instrumental in the remaking of the British Empire.

The Subcontinental Origins of John Nicholson It is important to note that Gray makes Nicholson enunciate his name in the native fashion, “Nikkal Seyn”: “leave him to swing, that all who live in the hills may respect the word of Nikkal Seyn and the law of the great White Queen.”20 Referring to himself in the third person, with the name articulated exactly as the natives would, Nicholson nativises himself, but in the process also transforms himself into a sign. “Nikkal Seyn” rather than “Nicholson” then serves as a symbol, something larger than the individual, yet gathers into itself the moral weight and authority of the man it names. This contributes to the making of the stereotype because there is no necessity of a human person to be attached to the name Nikkal Seyn: it

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exceeds the individual and nativises the British officer. This instantiates the subcontinental origins of Nicholson. The single unifying symbol, in the literature around the events that unifies Afghanistan 1842–1857 with Delhi 1857 is Nicholson. While Nicholson becomes, in the writings on the Delhi siege, the “face” of the battle for Delhi, it is a face formed out of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier, where Afghanistan itself is cast as a colonial stereotype of faceless, rampaging crowds and blood-thirsty tribes. The charismatic (white) face of valour projected by the British is possible because it is located within a grammar of militarism whose other lexical units include the faceless Afghans. In Trotter, Wood, Gray, Charles Allen, the Northwest frontier figures prominently as a troubled space. I propose that Nicholson-as-icon occupies the space of the Northwest frontier well before he comes to Delhi. The Northwest frontier becomes a celebrity space through Nicholson’s actions, just as Nicholson is known as the man who “kept the border” (the title of Wood’s novel) or, as the subtitle of Charles Allen’s book puts it, “the men who made the Northwest Frontier.”21 I further argue that the Northwest region of the subcontinent projected as the space of resistance and rebellion plays an important role in the fictional constructions of Nicholson as an icon. I adapt W. J. T. Mitchell’s reading of “Occupy” to suggest that Nicholson occupies the space of the Northwest knowing it is the space of resistance and rebellion. Thus, Nicholson is as much the “face” of the Northwest frontier as the Northwest is of Nicholson. Mitchell says of “occupatio”: it is “taking the initiative in a space where one knows in advance that there will be resistance and counterarguments.”22 First portraying the Northwest as a lawless, unstable and extremely violent space, the authors then go on to demonstrate the wiliness and guile of its inhabitants. Nicholson comes to occupy this space, well aware of the fact that it is pre-owned by numerous tribes. His occupancy of the space meets resistance and entails violent action on the part of both Afghanis and himself, and this pacification of the violent Northwest Frontier is what prepares the face of Nicholson as a fearsome warrior. To phrase it differently, the literature around Nicholson shows him fashioning a self from within the adverse circumstances that caused him to be imprisoned, possibly tortured, definitely humiliated but always alive to the possibility of being a hero. When the historian John William Kaye, like the novelists and biographers to follow, also highlights the incident in Afghanistan where Nicholson drove the raiding enemies away “at the

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point of the bayonet before he would listen to the order given him to make his Company lay down their arms,” he initiates a process whereby Nicholson-the-incipient hero exhibits considerable racial pride in a hopeless context, and through the disobedience of a direct order.23 Nicholson emerges out of this crucible rather than out of the British public school or the East India Company’s military training. The Northwest frontier is a character in the life of Nicholson. The material reality of the Northwest frontier disappears behind the cultural meanings coalescing around Nicholson. We need to see Afghanistan as the space from which this face emerges. Nicholson-the-hero enables the making of a grammar of militarism that cuts across Afghans, Sikhs and the British soldiery. “Occupatio” is therefore the occupation of a space where the new grammar is being crafted by natives and the British alike. The instant recognisability of Nicholson across classes, ranks, races and communities marks the occupation, symbolic but no less powerful for all that, of subcontinental spaces by a co-­ produced icon. The grammar of militarism consists of specific cultural-discursive units to which I now turn.

Trauma, Grief, Hatred In the discursive construction of Nicholson, the first strand is that of trauma. The Northwest Frontier is, in these narratives, the space of trauma, grief and hatred, which produces the resilient, tough and uncompromising “face” of Nicholson. Linda Colley has persuasively argued that captivity was “an integral part of Britain’s overseas experience.”24 Captive bodies, she writes, “mark out the changing boundaries over time of Britain’s imperial aggression.”25 It could also be argued, following Colley, that the nature of Britain’s imperial aggression was in many ways determined by the awareness of such captive, maimed and injured British bodies in the colonies, through the voluminous documentation of British sufferings during various wars in India. I have elsewhere proposed that these captivity narratives not only constructed a precarious British citizenry, they also enabled the construction of a resurgent and resilient British soldier in the colony.26 I turn first to two prominent aspects of the stereotype of Nicholson as a violent warrior. First, his actions in Afghanistan—against the Pathan Pulwar Khan, Brahmins, tribes—and in Delhi in the Trotter, Kelly,

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Williamson and Wood narratives, are represented as attempts to work through a personal trauma, all of which is traceable to his Afghanistan period. Second, these actions are also implicitly, an upright Britisher’s militant-­military response to the horrors perpetrated by Afghanis and later the Indian mutineers. Nicholson’s legend begins to be formed with the surrender of English troops at Ghazni in the 1842 campaigns. Besieged in a house with his commanding officer and a couple of others, Nicholson battles dozens of Afghanis. Even when his officer orders surrender, Nicholson battles on till finally “tears of grief and rage stood in his honest eyes as he flung his own sword at the feet of his captors.”27 This incident would become the stuff of legend, and is incorporated into Wood’s novel while a passing reference is made in Gray’s.28 The subsequent imprisonment at the hands of the Afghans is reminiscent of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta from the earlier era.29 The second incident, also in Afghanistan, involved Nicholson’s younger brother, Alexander. Alexander is killed in an ambush by Afghanis and, by sheer chance, it is Nicholson who discovers his brother’s mutilated body (Trotter 43–44). Alexander is one of the many British “beardless lads” who entered the Afghan ravines alone and were “often stricken down, and their dead bodies savagely mutilated,” as Wood’s novel described it.30 Nicholson’s hatred of the Afghanis is ignited by such incidents, according to the texts. Having decided that the Afghanis were treacherous, perfidious people, Nicholson’s treatment of them escalates into unbridled violence. Wood speaks of how “against some of the smaller tribes he had hurled himself with almost terrible velocity, followed them into their villages, hanged or flogged the principal offenders, burned their houses, and taught the tribesmen a stern lesson that would remain for many years.”31 Later, describing his defeat of the Afghan Pulwar Khan, J. C. Wood comments: “Nicholson’s hard captivity after the surrender at Ghuznee and his previous experience with Afghans had given him a hatred of the race.”32 Through the novel it is implied that Nicholson’s brutal campaign against the Afghanis is the result of the trauma suffered, both by Nicholson and his brother, at their hands. It is from the precarious life he has had to lead in Afghanistan that Nicholson-the-warrior emerges in these texts. Afghanistan, then, is the space of individual and collective trauma. The space is foundational and prior to the politics that informs Nicholson-the-­ warrior, whose aim then is to pacify this space of trauma and barbarism. It is in this space that he stages his battles, his valour and his cruelty. What is

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interesting is that the novels show Nicholson as offering a counter-­ occupation: taking charge of spaces occupied by the Afridis or the Pasthuns so as to offer a better regime. The face that begins to be portrayed here will be carried to Delhi well before he himself arrives there, as the novels tell us. The Afghan novels written after the “Mutiny” seem to expand on the space of trauma and grief as well. Charles Kelly’s 1872 poem, set in Delhi in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, functions as a horror tale, just as the Afghani novels of the twentieth century would focus on the excessive cruelties of the tribes of the Northwest Frontier. Kelly refers to the “marble palaces of hell” with “children’s wailings,” “golden tresses steeped in blood” and dead children.33 Williamson describes the “orgies of the worst abuse” and “treason … lust and murder overspread the land.”34 Trotter’s biography cites the “dreadful massacres which capped the prolonged sufferings previously endured by Wheeler’s luckless garrison [at Cawnpore].”35 Writing about the events of the Mutiny in Delhi, Wood describes “thousands of Indian soldiers, stained with the blood of murdered officers and massacred women and children” as Delhi streets were “thronged with furious and fanatical rebels” where “hideous deeds” had been perpetrated by the natives.36 A continuum of violence and of British trauma links 1840s Afghanistan with 1857 India. It is notable that in both cases the actions of Nicholson are positioned as just retribution for excessive native actions, but also as his personal attempts to work through the individual trauma of Afghanistan. While Trotter does not dwell on Nicholson’s bloody march to Delhi during which he summarily depopulated entire villages of its men, his fierce ideological position encapsulated in the phrase “no mercy” is tracked back to his hatred emerging from the Afghan days. Likewise, the expertise he gains in Afghanistan is put to good use on the march to Delhi in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny. Nicholson’s violence therefore is directly linked to the treachery, violence and betrayal by the natives. The only twist to this stereotype of the avenging English warrior is to foreground the sense of honour and justice of the Empire that supposedly drives Nicholson. As perhaps an attempt to mitigate the unspeakable violence of Nicholson’s actions in Afghanistan and Delhi, Wood, Kelly, Trotter and others explicitly invoke English codes of conduct—that all this was done to teach the natives a lesson and to protect the Empire.

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Paternal Militarism Nicholson, in what approximates to standard colonialist discourse, behaves as the benevolent and fair patriarch to Afghanis and the other natives: “the people of that district knew that the white chief who ruled them with a rod of iron was sure to protect them from the greed and tyranny of their own countrymen.”37 Nicholson’s career in the Sindh region begins with the task of protecting the people from their (native) rulers: “[His] first duty would be to protect the people from the oppression of the kardars, or revenue officers.”38 After a short period, says Trotter The village people found in him an upright judge and a powerful protector in time of need. The troops refrained from their usual excesses at the mere bidding of one who seemed to them more like a demigod than a man.39

Wood’s novel echoes Trotter’s biography: “His [Nicholson’s] main duties were to cultivate the good offices of the Governors, protect the people from oppressive exactions.”40 Nicholson’s single-minded pursuit of violence as a mode of enforcing peace and ensuring justice with little regard to the due process of (British) law is recast as paternal militarism that then transforms him from a psychopath to protector. The imperial hero is one whose relationship with the subject races is one of paternalism. Nicholson’s systematic, if brutal, reprisals of plundering tribes and quarrelsome chieftains in the Bannu, Sindh and other regions of Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) energises this paternalist relationship with the people of the region (hence my term paternal militarism). It is in the adulation of the just Nicholson, the law-enforcer Nicholson and the tough-but-fair Nicholson that the stereotype congeals. The standard descriptor used in all biographies and novels around Nicholson is one coined by the natives about their Lord Protector: “his hoofbeats are to be heard from Attock to the Khaiber.” By showcasing the necessity of Nicholson’s violence—all the texts foreground the violent tribes of the NWFP and later of the mutineers—the discourse of heroism alleviates any suspicion that Nicholson’s actions might simply be that of a man addicted to violence. His violence, therefore, becomes an iteration with a difference, or even an extension, of

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native violence: Nicholson is just like all native warriors, his violence an amplified British imperial version of and response to the native one.

Reversion to Primitivism The accounts of native actions in the Mutiny novels resonate with the literature of horror (a subgenre of the sensationalist writings of the age), as Christopher Herbert points out.41 Victorian readers, notes Herbert, were shocked at the British collapse into primitive savagery—as though they had reverted to an earlier state of civilisation. But even this relapse into primitive savagery, whether in Nicholson or Neill, was part of the military continuum. By the 1820s every British soldier spent nearly half or even two-thirds of his career in imperial postings, sometimes serving 15–20 years overseas without a break.42 A Quartermaster General noted the effect such an extended stay overseas, in the colonies, had on the average British soldier: “It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, under the very best discipline, to prevent the soldiers acquiring directly, or through their wives, a certain degree of locality.”43 One significant mode of “going native” was the acquisition of and location in a native martial subjecthood. The mutineers in Wood’s novel “marched … waving their weapons with triumphant glee and shrieking out their wild battle-cries.”44 Their enthusiasm is at the “highest pitch” and they work at “frenzied haste” to fortify the Delhi fort against the inevitable British attack.45 Wood’s account paints the natives as a scurrying army, disorganised and driven by passion rather than discipline, but obviously approximating to savage tribal warriors. The reversion to primitivism among British soldiers in the novels is of two kinds: possession/madness and heightened retributive violence. If, as noted above, the violence of Nicholson’s reprisals from Afghanistan to Delhi is projected as a version of the native one then his propensity for violence is presented as an iteration of the barbarity of the native. The very first account of Nicholson’s military experience highlights the savagery of the natives. This is the account from the Ghazni siege: “Crawford and John Nicholson, aided by two companies of Sepoys, fought on for their lives in a building set on fire by savages thirsting for infidel blood.”46 The image of maniacal soldiers “thirsting,” vampire-like, for British blood fits perfectly into the discourse of primitivism that haunts much Mutiny writing from Britain. Trotter in an attempt to show us a different face of Nicholson describes his tenderness towards the wife of an English prisoner

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in Afghanistan and then adds: “the tenderness which, seven years later, blazed out into almost savage fury at the sufferings inflicted on English women and children by the Delhi Princes and the fiendish Rajah of Bithur.”47 Thus, Trotter moves from a tender and caring Nicholson of Afghanistan to the murdering marauder of Delhi, but suggesting that this change of character was driven by the sight of massacred English women. Trotter suggests that threatened or violated British femininity drives the man towards savagery. English violence then is restorative and retributive. It restores, in the case of Nicholson, order in the NWFP in the face of violent tribes and the balance of power back into British hands after the events of the “Mutiny,” and avenges the excesses of the natives against the white people. Christopher Herbert writing about Victorian responses to 1857 argues that the events of the year produced a “profoundly traumatic cultural crisis.”48 For Herbert this cultural crisis was the discovery that “they [the British] were despised by their supposedly grateful imperial subjects.”49 It was also the discovery that the English were as capable of horrifying violence as the “sepoys” resulting in what Herbert calls “an alarming disorganization of national personality” and which included a “catastrophic reversion to the primitive” of the so-called civilised British.50 Herbert’s reading of Mutiny texts suggests that the primitive violence unleashed by the natives signalled, for the Victorians, the truth that “the primitive could never be exorcized or transcended at all … they would always carry within themselves as their natural heritage the more or less successfully repressed impulse of a relapse into bestiality and savagery.”51 While this “innatism”— a form of thinking about human improvement prevalent during the nineteenth century according to historical geographer Alan Lester—might explain native savagery, there does not seem to be an adequate explanation for the Briton’s equally savage response.52 The stereotype of the avenging imperial hero is a way of explaining away the actions of Nicholson or Neill. In the discrepant geography of the Empire, even the civilised English gentleman lapses into primitivism because primitivism is the dominant discourse (and practice) of these other places, the colonies. If paternalist militarism enables Nicholson to fit into the local scheme of rulers-and-ruled, then the savagery of Nicholson suggests a degree of adaptability to local contexts and conditions. That is, the savagery on the part of Nicholson is not a character aberration or personality trait. Rather,

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it is the adaptation of the Englishman to local needs, roles and conditions. If, as Parama Roy has argued (1998), the British colonial’s chief trait is to be able to blend into native contexts, to “pass,” then Nicholson passes off as a native at least in his deeds of violence.53 Nicholson’s violence therefore is also bicultural. It is the ability to disguise himself (as the “Green Mullah” in Wood’s novel wherein he fools English and Afghans alike) and comport himself as a violent native warrior that marks Nicholson’s creolisation. The bicultural stereotype of the violent Nicholson rides on what Edmund Burke in his 1788 speech at the impeachment of Warren Hastings, termed “geographical morality”: deeds unacceptable in the British Isles become perfectly acceptable in the colonies.54 But this geographical morality has another foundation: in the outposts of the Empire, moral codes might have to be drawn from the native cultures. Nicholson, in a sense, has “gone native.” Nicholson seeks to preserve the coherence of the British and imperialist culture in which he is embedded and from which he derives his identity, suggest the novels, but for which he needs to assimilate a degree and scale of violence not mandated by British law. Discrepant geography is the geography of a creolisation where European identity and its pride in its purity, chivalry, valour and enterprise are muted and modified in such representations where the European is a spectacle, a hybrid and a source of savagery. Implicit in this trope of the Englishman’s reversion is a critique of the project of improvement as well. Trotter, Williamson, Kelly and Gray by glorifying Nicholson’s savagery suggest that it is really the only acceptable register in which to address the savage races of the subcontinent because races that are innately bestial cannot be improved. In other words, the glorification of British violence, especially in the decades of India’s anti-colonial struggles, might be read as (i) a code for the rejection of benevolent paternalism and (ii) a plea for a more strident English militarism in the face of a crumbling Empire. The novels therefore shy away from critiquing British violence. Written in the wake of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) which, according to one critic, “performs a perversion of the West’s ideal-image of itself as the true seat of civilization and light—a perversion which offers a certain critical leverage for interrupting the perpetuation of this self-image”—the literature associated with Nicholson resolutely stays within the imperialist paradigm.55

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Co-optation and Cultural Iconicity In this concluding section I argue that it is the co-optation by natives that enables the literary-biographical construction of Nicholson as an imperial hero. This co-optation produces first a cultural iconicity and second, following from the first, a martial continuum that is occupied simultaneously by Nicholson and the native martial races, the Afghans and the Sikhs. Nicholson’s iconicity stems from his co-optation by the natives which then spills over into his iconisation by the whites, and vice versa. “Icon” is here delinked from its religious contexts and used in the sense defined by Vicki Goldberg: I take secular icons to be representations that inspire some degree of awe— perhaps mixed with dread, compassion, or aspiration—and that stand for an epoch or a system of beliefs. Although photographs easily acquire symbolic significance, they are not merely symbolic, they do not merely allude to something outside themselves … for photographs intensely and specifically represent their subjects. But the images I think of as icons almost instantly acquired symbolic overtones and larger frames of reference that endowed them with national or even worldwide significance. They concentrate the hopes and fears of millions and provide an instant and effortless connection to some deeply meaningful moment in history. They seem to summarise such complex phenomena as the powers of the human spirit or of universal destruction.56

Nicholson comes to represent something larger than an Englishman, official of the East India Company or soldier. He becomes symbolic of invincibility and the very pillar of the Empire. By definition iterable across contexts, the iconicity here is generated around Nicholson’s martial prowess. It is the iterability of his martial prowess across races that contributes to Nicholson’s iconicity. His battles against individual Afghans and Sikhs, against the tribes of the Northwest frontier, against the Kashmiris are already part of the icon before he battles the mutineers in Delhi. The Sikhs speak of his conquest of the Afghans. The Afghans remember how he fought the Sikhs. The Kashmiris sing praises of his exploits against both Sikhs and Afghans. By the time he comes to Delhi at the head of the Moveable Column, Nicholson is known by all natives for his actions across numerous castes, communities and regions. Everybody in the army, says Trotter (citing Frederick Roberts) both English and Indian, “had been

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completely overcome by his wonderful personality … each man … recognized that the man whom the wild people of the frontier had deified … was one who had proved beyond all doubt capable of grappling with the crisis” (287–88, emphasis added). This is the iterability of the icon: the man the frontier worshipped is now in Delhi, already a hero, already the demon avenger. Thus it is this iconicity that generates the martial continuum in various contexts through its recognisable iteration. Further, this iconicity, co-produced by the natives, is the result of two discourses in friction. The first discourse is of the native anger at their losses at the hands of Nicholson, and his excessive violence. The second discourse is of the native recognition of both, a kindred martial soul and a greater warrior. The first discourse instils resentment and sense of humiliation, the second improvises on the first when the insulted and resentful grudgingly concede Nicholson’s courage as being similar to their own and perhaps marginally greater. In Gray’s novel Nicholson fights the burly Sikh Hansraj Bhandari, and defeats him (he has, the novel indicates, defeated the Sikh regularly, in each of their friendly encounters). The fight re-establishes the white man’s physical superiority over the native.57 Nicholson taunts him by asking him “dost wish to avenge thy last defeat?”58 Later Nicholson fights a lion, beating the animal almost to death with his unloaded musket.59 “We would follow him into hell,” the Sikhs say.60 The Sikhs we are told, “sobbing like children” swear undying loyalty to the man who is invincible.61 In Wood’s novel, the massive Pathan Pulwar Khan, beaten by Nicholson, becomes the white man’s loyal follower.62 When Nicholson leads the men into battle we are told, “they followed without a moment’s hesitation.”63 In another description of the battle Wood tells us: He [Nicholson] seemed to lead a charmed life, for amidst a tempest of flying bullets he passed unscathed. Fighting on either side of him were Brian Trevone and Mahmud Khan, while a few yards behind Pulwar Khan, followed by a score of Khuttuks, swept like a wild beast upon the enemy.64

Just as Nicholson is hit, Pulwar Khan, who “strove to get in front of Nicholson” (347), is shot through his head and he symbolically “fell at Nicholson’s feet.”65 In Gray’s account of the battles Harbans Bhandari and Nicholson are projected as similar in their ferocity in killing the enemy.66 It is to be noted that Nicholson and the native soldiers seem alike in their ferocity and thirst for blood with neither Wood nor Gray really

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­ istinguishing between the two. Thus, we can discern a martial contind uum on which the two races of warriors, one coloniser and the other colonised, are situated and where each seems to draw upon the other. In Gray’s novel, Nicholson tells the Sikhs that he is one of them, gesturing at his own localisation and native provenance.67 In Wood, Nicholson had rubbed Pulwar Khan’s face in his own spittle when the latter, as a calculated insult to the white man, had spat on the ground.68 After he has been thus “taught a lesson,” Pulwar Khan’s “rage and astonishment were so great that he felt he was unable to utter a word” and then finally says, “By Allah … Sahib Nikalsain, you are a man.”69 First resentful of his defeat and humiliation, Pulwar Khan later becomes Nicholson’s admirer. In Henry Newbolt’s poem “The Ballad of John Nicholson,” Nicholson humbles a Rajput king, Mehtab Singh, forcing the man to walk out of the tent carrying his own shoes, as punishment for having worn them in the presence of English officers.70 Newbolt writes:           When Mehtab Singh rode from the gate           His chin was on his breast:           The captains said, “When the strong command           Obedience is best.”71

The courage to insult a native king or a tribal leader, unmindful of the consequences, ironically, is what positions the white man alongside the king and the leader: for being fearless and convinced of his actions. The native rulers, resentful of the white man’s actions, recognise in him their leader. Thus, contributing to Nicholson’s cultural iterability and legibility in the subcontinent is the attempt (as represented in the literature) by numerous native races to identify themselves with him, to demonstrate how he is one of their kind just as they have assimilated him as their god. Hence Michael Silvestri is accurate in his reading when he argues that the native “martial races” (a category invented by the colonial discourses but which the Sikhs had accepted for themselves) responded and idolised Nicholson for these attributes.72 When Nicholson subdues the wily Afghan and the proud Sikh he also wins their loyalty and their admiration for life. Thus Wood writes of the humiliation of and subsequent admiration by the Afghan leader of Nicholson:

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Strong, fierce, and unscrupulous as he was, he had been awed by the silent force and dominant moral ascendancy of this strange personality, and John Nicholson had bound him [Pulwar Khan] to the cause of Britain with even stronger fetters than links of steel.73

In the battle for Delhi Nicholson strides through the streets peppered by continuous firing from both sides, “unhurt and unheeding, as if death itself could not stand against him.” And so his men follow him: “in a few minutes the leading stormers were in the ditch with Nicholson, planting their ladders.”74 The unquestioned loyalty is as much to a brand or an icon as it is to the man. Eventually such hero worship resulted in the making of a cult, the Nikkalseynis. In Wood’s novel we encounter a scene where some “fakirs” approach Nicholson’s tent: They were a score of the quaintest looking individuals one could meet, even in India where strange individuals abound. Some were naked, save for a waist-cloth, and plastered with white ash. Others again bore what seemed to be caste-marks of paint drawn on their faces. One wild-looking freak appeared to be their leader, and as he knelt and pressed his hoof-marks on the ground a low crooning song arose from the crowd…75

The leader then claims: “He is our great Guru, and we will serve him, and no other.”76 In Gray’s novel three full pages are devoted to the doings of the Nikkalseynis, as they try to run away with Nicholson’s boot with the ostensible aim, in the words of their leader, of building “an altar around it, where all the world can come to wonder and to pray.”77 Trotter’s biography cites various letters recording that, after Nicholson’s death, some of the cult followers committed suicide, others converted to Christianity.78 In a Punjabi ballad, there are references to Sikh and Afghani soldiers mourning at his death, and how the Nikkalseynis promise that their children will “lisp thy name.”79 * * * Nicholson as a bicultural stereotype finds its origins in this deification by the native martial races which in turn fed into the British cultural imaginary. A psychotic warrior (in fact Gray does say that in his final charge

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Nicholson was “rash and impetuous” and therefore miscalculated the manoeuvre), manages to acquire the loyalty of the natives and become a demigod.80 Nicholson’s “charmed life” and invincibility that has become a part of local legend go hand in hand with the martial continuum he occupies with the native races, the Sikhs and the Pathans. Each segment of the colonised population identifies him as the man who conquered another race or region. It is in the moment of extreme trauma and displacement in Afghanistan that the precarity of the English self emerges—and in response to which Nicholson, according to the texts, fashions himself as an avenging warrior. Captured, tortured and perhaps acutely aware of being a “foreigner” in a land that has never taken kindly to foreigners, Nicholson begins to fashion himself along certain lines that would eventually cohere into the Nikkal Seyn of local cultural myths. With the multiplicity of available alliances— Afghans and English, Sikhs and English, Kashmiris and English in the peculiar colonial circumstances of mid nineteenth-century subcontinent— the Nicholson of the novels and poetry is a creolised figure, occupying multiple spaces within the contact zone, not reducible to any.81 It is also significant that the Irish soldier of the East India Company comes to his iconic status by being a part of a discrepant geography of Empire where proud imperialists lapse into the precise same savagery as the natives they had long dismissed.

Notes 1. Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 92. 2. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 168. 3. Mark Doyle, “The Sepoys of the Pound and Sandy Row: Empire and Identity in Mid-Victorian Belfast,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 6 (2010): 849–67. Much work, however, remains to be done in terms of examining how contexts and backgrounds of various classes of Irishmen informed the participation in their mobilities within the British Empire’s echelons. For instance, writing about the Irish presence in the Indian Civil Services in the late nineteenth century, Scott Cook says: The social origins of Irishmen recruited into the Indian Civil Service— Protestants, Catholics, lower middle class, professional men, landed

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­entry, Anglo-Irish, Celtic, urban and rural—at once mirrored the g diversity of Ireland and confirmed the hold the Irish elite still exerted over positions of prestige and leadership, even those located beyond Ireland’s shores. (Scott B.  Cook, “The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1914,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3 (1987): 507–29 at 508) 4. Amy E. Martin, “Representing the ‘Indian Revolution’ of 1857: Towards a Genealogy of Irish Internationalist Anticolonialism,” Field Day Review 8 (2012): 126–47 at 129. 5. Streets, Martial Races, 3. 6. Charles Arthur Kelly, Delhi and Other Poems (London: Longman, Green, 1872). 7. J. Claverdon Wood, When Nicholson Kept the Border: A Tale of the Mutiny Days (London: The Boys Own Paper, 1922), 51. 8. John Vaughan Williamson, Fallen Heroes of the Indian War: A Poem (London: SH Lindley, 1858). 9. Lionel Trotter, The Life of John Nicholson: Soldier and Administrator, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1898), 4. 10. Ernest Gray, Nikkal Seyn: A Tale of John Nicholson, Hero of Delhi, Saviour of India (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1947), 46. 11. Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990). 12. Cited in Trotter, Life, 127–28. 13. Trotter, Life, 283 and 300. The Roberts account occurs in Frederick Roberts, Forty-one Years in India (London and New  York: Macmillan, 1898), 118. 14. Silvestri, Ireland, 107; Rudranghsu Mukherjee, “‘Satan Let Loose Upon the Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 92–116. 15. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 51. 16. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 51. 17. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 227. 18. Trotter, Life, 283. 19. Williamson, Fallen, 59. 20. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 46. 21. Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier (London: Abacus, 2008). 22. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2012): 8–32 at 10. 23. John William Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers, Vol. III (London: Strahan & Co., 1869), 304.

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24. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor, 2002), 3. 25. Colley, Captives, 12. 26. Pramod K.  Nayar, “Introduction,” in English Siege and Prison Writings: From the “Black Hole” to the “Mutiny”, ed. Pramod K. Nayar (New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2017), 1–10. 27. Trotter, Life, 28. Wood uses the exact same words in his novel. See Wood, Nicholson, 57. 28. Trotter, Life, 51. 29. Trotter, Life, 28–30. 30. Wood, Nicholson, 49–50. 31. Wood, Nicholson, 117. 32. Wood, Nicholson, 158. 33. Kelly, Delhi, 28–29. 34. Williamson, Fallen, 16. 35. Trotter, Life, 257. 36. Wood, Nicholson, 317. 37. Trotter, Life, 185. 38. Trotter, Life, 69. 39. Trotter, Life, 71. 40. Trotter, Life, 57. 41. Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 26–28. 42. Colley, Captives, 313. 43. Cited in Colley, Captives, 313. 44. Wood, Nicholson, 317. 45. Wood, Nicholson, 317. 46. Trotter, Life, 25. 47. Trotter, Life, 136. 48. Herbert, War, 7. 49. Herbert, War, 17. 50. Herbert, War, 24 and 28. 51. Herbert, War, 28. 52. Alan Lester, “Humanism, Race and the Colonial Frontier,” Transactions of British Geographers New Series 37, no. 1 (2012): 132–48. 53. Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 54. The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: John Nimmo, 1887), unpaginated. https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/ econ/ugcm/3ll3/burke/Works09.pdf.

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55. Tony C.  Brown, “Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 1 (2000): 14–28 at 15. 56. Cornelia Brink, “Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps,” History & Memory 12, no. 1 (2000): 135–50 at 136–37. 57. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 79–81. 58. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 79. 59. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 104–06. 60. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 149–50. 61. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 191. 62. Wood, Nicholson, 249. 63. Wood, Nicholson, 326. 64. Wood, Nicholson, 345. 65. Wood, Nicholson, 347, 348. 66. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 218–21. 67. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 191. 68. Wood, Nicholson, 151–52. 69. Wood, Nicholson, 152, emphasis in original. 70. This incident is also cited in Roberts, Forty-one, 75. 71. Cited in Silvestri, Ireland, 94. 72. Silvestri, Ireland, 92. 73. Wood, Nicholson, 249. 74. Trotter, Life, 289. 75. Wood, Nicholson, 249–50. 76. Wood, Nicholson, 250. 77. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 156–58 and 157. 78. Trotter, Life, 314–15. 79. Trotter, Life, 321–23. 80. Gray, Nikkal Seyn, 233. 81. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). In the “contact zone” as theorised by Mary Louise Pratt—spaces where cultures meet and clash, although these cultures may very well be in unequal power relations with each other—Nicholson is constituted by the co-presence of these various discourses and themes, whose provenance is at once England and India.

CHAPTER 11

Violent Resistance: The Irish Revolution and India Kate O’Malley

This chapter will look at the impact that the violence of the Irish revolutionary period had on Indian nationalists in the mid-twentieth century. While Gandhi famously advocated pacifism, Indian opposition to British rule was not exclusively non-violent; many physical force nationalists used the Irish (violent) model as their blueprint. Moreover, while there are many instances of Irish nationalism having an impact on Indian politics from the mid-nineteenth century on,1 there are also Irish parallels in the later appropriation of constitutional nationalism by many leading Indian figures—Nehru, Patel and Menon for example—and in the manner in which these one-time revolutionaries “matured” into world statesmen.2 The two episodes that are looked at in this chapter, namely the Chittagong Uprising of 1930 and the wartime activities of Subhas Chandra Bose, offer examples of Indian physical force nationalism that are relatively little-­ known outside of India. I propose that this is because their violent nature cuts against an accepted historical narrative of the Gandhian non-violent struggle against the Raj. As will, however, become clear, these important events illustrate the influence of an appropriated memory of the 1916 Easter Rising—an appropriated memory that helped shape both the K. O’Malley (*) Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_11

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actions of Indian insurgents and the British Indian administration’s reactions. It is perhaps appropriate to preface this discussion, which necessarily focuses on physical force nationalism, with some more general reflections on the positions occupied by Ireland and India within the British Empire, for the Indian-Irish narrative is not merely an anti-imperial one. In modern times, Irish and Indian people both undermined and sustained the British imperial system, with many more Irish sustaining it than Scottish or Welsh during the British Raj era.3 The significance of the period 1916– 1919, insofar as Anglo-Irish relations and the eruption of violence is concerned, is well known, but it is rare that Ireland is considered against the wider backdrop of British decolonisation, the seeds of which were sown in the inter-war period. Many historians of the British Empire have, indeed, excluded Ireland from their narratives—it is too messy perhaps, and up until relatively recently carried too much contemporary political baggage.4 Seen in the broader context of twentieth-century decolonisation, however, any sense of Irish exceptionalism evaporates, for violence against colonial rule in the twentieth century was common. This caveat does not detract from the fascinating case studies looked at here, which illustrate clearly the impact the violent turn in the Irish nationalist movement had in India. These are curious and unexpected instances where the Irish ideology of the use of force and its accompanying sagas, crossed oceans and found an audience in waiting. In India, 1919 was as much of a turning point for nationalism as 1916 was in Ireland. In March 1919 the Government of India passed the Rowlatt Act, effectively an extension of emergency powers legislation that had been introduced during the First World War. It was used in the post-­ war period to tackle what was increasingly termed “revolutionary terrorism” or “anarchism.” The following month, in April 1919, India suffered the gruesome Amritsar Massacre, during which a significant part was played by a loyal Irish servant of the Crown, Governor of the Punjab Michael O’Dwyer. A gathering at a public garden in Jallianwala Bagh of unarmed men, women and children, was fired upon by the local military commander Brig-Gen Reginald Dyer and his men, and up to 1000 were shot dead. Dyer’s only regrets were that his ammunition ran out, and that the narrow lanes had prevented his bringing an armoured car. Dealing with the growing unrest in India was, for Dyer, no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd but one of producing a moral effect. The rationale for use of violence on the part of colonial administrators as seen

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here, did not deviate much from the reasons put forward by radical nationalists for resorting to violence later on; they were moral, honourable and they chose to lead by example. Events in Amritsar brought in their wake the successful non-cooperation movement and saw the emergence of Gandhi as a force in Indian politics. O’Dwyer’s support of Dyer’s action was forthright. A Catholic from Tipperary, O’Dwyer had been serving in India since 1885. Following the Phoenix Park murders in 1882 he said he was ashamed of being an Irishman, and later in the wake of 1916  confessed that he was disturbed to hear of “the terrible events that had been going on in Ireland since the Easter Day rebellion.”5 He was instilled with contempt for terrorism and violent crime, whether in Ireland or India. His support of General Dyer’s actions in the Punjab was, however, to result in his own violent end. He retired to England in 1920 and was assassinated at Claxton Hall London in 1940 by Udham Singh, who as a teenager had been in Jallianwala Bagh on that fateful day. While the British authorities appear initially to have perceived these events in Ireland and India in 1916 and 1919 as hitches in the imperial sphere, they were clearly crucial moments on the peripheries. Despite appearances to the contrary, the British Empire had reached its zenith in 1919, and the Easter Rising and Amritsar massacre were existential threats to its survival. With the benefit of hindsight, they were events which prefaced and beckoned the unavoidable course of the demise of the British Empire. Given that most Indians’ interactions with Irish people would have been solely as colonial administrators, one might ask how it was that the nationalist elite came to know of Ireland and, more particularly, of Irish nationalism? Paradoxically, it was the networks of empire that facilitated the radicalisation of Indians in the first half of the twentieth century and enabled nationalist cross-fertilisation.6 Young Indian students were able to undertake their studies at British and Irish universities, where they engaged with European history and read of Garibaldi, Mazzini and the French Revolution. One such student was Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1907, while studying at Cambridge, the emergence of Sinn Féin as a political force in Ireland caught Nehru’s attention and he wrote home to his father, Motilal, asking: Have you heard of the [sic] Sinn Féin in Ireland? … it is a most interesting movement and resembles very closely the so-called extremist movements in India. Their policy is not to beg for favours but to wrest them. They do not want to fight England by arms but to ignore her, boycott her and quietly

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assume the administration of Irish affairs… this movement is causing consternation. They say that if its policy is adopted by the bulk of the country, English rule will be a thing of the past.7

It is significant to note that what Nehru is relating here are aspects of Arthur Griffith’s “counter-state” policy; as we shall see in due course, Griffith’s thinking had a further impact on India. What is significant at this point, however, is that Nehru maintained an avid interest in Irish affairs throughout his career, and detailed writings on the development of the Irish situation throughout the 1920s and 1930s may be found in his “Glimpses of World History,” first published in 1934, and he wrote also of the 1916 Rising. Crucially he was attuned to the concepts of violence, blood sacrifice and defeat, noting that The Easter week Rising… by its very failure attracted, for was that not true courage which mocked at almost certain failure and proclaimed to the world that no physical might could crush the invincible spirit of a nation.8

The British authorities gradually became concerned about the activities of Indian students while abroad, and their concerns grew in urgency during the First World War as the activities of the revolutionary Ghadr movement in the United States, Canada and the Punjab became apparent.9 Moreover, the period following the war saw anti-British revolutions not just in Ireland and India, but also in Egypt and Iraq. This unrest exacerbated anti-­colonial discontent, and was clearly fuelled by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.10 In short, there seemed to be much to inspire Indians on their path to independence at this time, and many movements which one might think had more resonance to the average Indian than the Irish independence movement could have had. Nevertheless, Indian nationalists exhibited a sustained interest in the Irish freedom struggle. There are many reasons why this was so: the Indian nationalist elite spoke English; many of them were educated in Britain, bringing them in closer touch with Ireland; and coverage in the British national press of developments in Ireland had a lasting impact on them. Equally, the existence in London and other centres of Irish and Indian migrant minority communities presented radicals from both  sides with plenty of opportunities to interact and exchange ideas. The two migrant communities liaising at the very heart of Empire in particular, providing a

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ready ear to each other’s grievances, were closely monitored by the British Intelligence services.11 The Bengalis involved in what is popularly called the Chittagong Uprising of 1930, had not been to Ireland and, more than likely, had never met an Irishman who was not sustaining the Raj. They may well have read the work of Irish writer and theosophist James Cousins, who wrote a series of articles in May 1916 eulogising the leaders of the Easter Rising and as a result had to step down as literary editor of Annie Besant’s Indian Home Rule newspaper New India.12 Although limited contemporary coverage of the Easter Rising in India may have escaped the strict censorship laws of the time, fourteen years later the Rising nonetheless played a significant part in determining the course that the Chittagong insurgents chose to take. More specifically, Dan Breen’s version of the 1916 Rising, which he was not involved in, played a significant part in shaping events in Chittagong. In the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising, administrators in India initially thought that events in Dublin, the quick snuffing out of an attempted insurrection, would prove effectual in deterring would-be revolutionaries in India. By the 1920s the Government of India was preoccupied with the first phase of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, and believed that, to a large extent, they had put Bengali terrorism behind them with the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1924–1925.13 Bengali nationalism was distinct. It sought to adopt Western methods to reform Indian systems and was devoted to finding a balance between East and West. Gandhi preferred to use religion to further nationalism and recycled Hindu myths in order to bring along with him the rural masses. His version of swaraj was rigidly ascetic and considered puritanical by many Bengalis.14 A wave of revolutionary activity was gaining momentum in the late 1920s as Bengalis turned to East Bengal and Burma as an alternative site of re-organising. Unsurprisingly, as in Ireland, where many activists had earlier become disillusioned by Home Rule, in Bengal more radical groups were emerging throughout the 1920s in reaction to the popular Gandhian non-violent methods increasingly being adopted by Indian National Congress as a whole. Tired of what they perceived as the Congress Old Guard’s talk and inaction, younger, frustrated Bengali nationalists were galvanised by the death of well-known Indian nationalist Jatin Das by hunger strike in 1929. Interestingly, Das was perhaps less motivated by the Gandhian form of hunger strike than by that of Terence MacSwiney. Gandhi had in fact criticised the Mayor of Cork’s “fast to death” method, and saw it as an

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i­nstrument of war and not a non-violent form of self-purification. The Das family in Calcutta were particularly moved when a telegram arrived from the MacSwiney family passing on their condolences on Jatin’s death.15 At a formal meeting in Calcutta that year a splinter group declared itself vehemently opposed to the Gandhian technique of non-violence and expressed a preference for what they termed “the Irish technique of resistance.” There were around 100 insurgents in total and Surja Sen adopted the mantle of leadership. Like Pearse, Sen was a schoolmaster and so was known popularly as Masterda. In all a group of only five rebels had knowledge of the full Chittagong plan, which prompts an obvious comparison with Ireland where the Military Committee of the IRB kept plans for the Easter Rising secretive. By contrast, however, the Chittagong rebels were a much younger group than the Irishmen they sought to emulate: leaving aside the main leaders, most of the rebels were teenagers.16 Sen’s immersion in Irish history was apparent in the Chittagong nationalists’ recruiting literature, which called on the youth of Bengal to “read and learn the history of Pearse—the gem of young Ireland and to find how noble his sacrifice was.” In the lead up to the Armoury Raid, camps were set up in suburban areas where youths were trained in guerrilla tactics, and pamphlets titled “Indian Republican Army” were handed out in  local schools in a bid to try and recruit more teenagers. These pamphlets contained long quotations from Pearse, and verses of his poetry. British officials were, it seems, aware of some of these plans, or at least had managed to infiltrate some of the groups’ meetings, as in November a police report was submitted stating that At a recent meeting in Calcutta it was declared that their intention was to bring a rebellion in a particular district… even if they sustain the attack for an hour and die fighting as the Irish rebels did in the Easter Rising in Dublin, they consider it will have a tremendous moral effect… and have decided to organise Chittagong and Barisal districts for rebellion.17

Such reports raise the question as to whether or not the British took them on board, or perhaps more to the point, took them seriously? There are a few factors here that should be borne in mind that tell us a little about the uniqueness of the Chittagong Uprising and how, without their own immersion in the myths surrounding Easter week as a driving force, it might not have happened. Traditionally Bengali acts of “revolutionary terrorism” were on a small scale and centred around the assassinations of

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leading British officials. Something along the lines of an organised revolt was not thought to be the preferred tactic of Bengali nationalists. British racial stereotypes came into play also. Radical Bengalis who in the wake of the partition in 1905 joined either the Anushilan Samiti or Jugantar parties were at the time called “Gentlemanly terrorists” by the British, who were unconvinced of their militant capabilities. Unlike Ghurkhas or Punjabis, Bengalis were deemed “passive” and “effeminate” by the British. Such stereotypes were turned on their head by Bengali revolutionaries in the post 1905 period, much to the administration’s surprise. While on the point of race, it should be pointed out that Irish “Caucasian-ness” was not perceived as a problem or a contradiction by Indians waging their war against the British Government (which as we know included many an Irishman). According to Ashis Nandy, Ireland signified for Indians a Western nation whose culture was “non-dominant” and whose people despite their race were “a co-victim of British imperialism.”18 Moving back to Chittagong, one historian of the uprising, Manini Chatterjee, has stated that those involved had acquired a pastiche of information on different phases and leaders of the Irish freedom movement, and had read histories of the Fenian James Fintan Lalor as well as, crucially, Dan Breen’s My Fight For Irish Freedom. But in addition to these texts, early biographies of de Valera and Collins were found at the house of one of the insurgents, Ganesh Ghosh, the day after the raids (detailed below) began. The most important of these books was, however, Breen’s, and the Chittagong rebels relied completely on his account of the Easter Rising.19 It became, in effect, their manual, read over, time and time again and employed as a model for their own Uprising. This is of interest given that Breen was not involved in the Rising. There was, in effect, a two-­ layered appropriation of the memory of 1916 at play in Chittagong in 1930: Breen’s version of events, and the Indians activists’ own appropriation of it. Another obvious if not unusual homage to 1916 is the fact that the Chittagong Uprising was even timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Irish 1916 Rising, even though Easter meant little to the non-­ Christian revolutionaries. The Uprising was an elaborately planned attack in which the insurgents managed to occupy major colonial sites, including the Armoury and the telegraph office in Chittagong, for over four days. It began on the evening of 18 April, when Sen and a large group of his men (and women, Kalpana Datta, later went on to become a prominent Communist Party of India member) launched an attack on the Armoury. A communique issued by

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the Government of Bengal on 19 April 1930 and printed in The Statesman the following day gives a flavour of events: The Government regrets to have to announce that the railway and police armouries at Chittagong were attacked on the night of 18th-19th April by a body of insurgents, estimated at about 100, and were gutted. Details are not yet fully known. Telegraphic communications were interfered with but are being restored. A train was also derailed on the night of April 18, about 40 miles from Chittagong, and the railway line was blocked, but transshipment is being effected. It is not yet known whether this derailment was a mere coincidence, or part of the insurgents’ scheme.20

It was a particularly frustrating episode for a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Charles Tegart, who was then Calcutta Police Commissioner and was notorious for his sternness, and notable for having evaded several assassination attempts. The Chittagong rebels, however, also encountered set-backs and catastrophes like their Irish counterparts had in 1916.21 They had immense success in seizing many arms, but seizing ammunition was something that was overlooked. Another part of the plan was to attack the European Club, and take any officers they encountered there as hostages. This is where their homage to Easter week backfired; the Club was in darkness and empty as it was Good Friday. Nonetheless Sen did get to re-enact Pearse’s famous moments on the steps of the GPO when at the Armoury, and in the midst of his group of rebels, the Union Jack flag was pulled down and burned and the national flag of India hoisted in its place. He then read the Indian Republican Army Proclamation. It has been argued that Breen, Pearse, Lalor and de Valera reflected “disjointed fragments of a freedom struggle thousands of miles away in Ireland, but taken together they offered an ideology as well as a blueprint for action”; however, this underplays just how focused Sen and his men were on the events of Easter week itself.22 The most tangible evidence of just how much of an influence the Rising had on the Chittagong rebels was their Proclamation, which, if not an exact word for word copy, was similar in sentiment to the Irish Proclamation of 1916. Perhaps one significant difference between the Chittagong Uprising and the Easter Rising was that Sen and his men were aware of the outcome in advance. They knew they would be enacting Easter 1916 down to its final unfulfilled end and embarked on what they termed as “a death programme,” something the Irish leaders had not necessarily signed up to.

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Those involved in Chittagong had to come to terms in advance with their inevitable violent ends, but they believed that if even some of them managed to declare a free Chittagong, not even a free Bengal or a free India, and if they tried to defend that freedom, however short-lived, with their lives, they would set an unprecedented example in Indian history, or at the very least would demoralise British authorities in the process. With their 1916 inspired “death programme” they had developed a tactic of modern political violence in its purest and most brutal form. The aftermath of the Uprising was particularly frustrating for British officials, as for almost three years many of the leaders evaded police detection. Those that were arrested were sentenced to life and deported to the Andaman Islands, so a British re-enactment of the 1916 executions did not occur. Sen, however, who spent three years on the run, was eventually arrested and hung in 1934. Despite police reports indicating that something like an Irish-style Rising might be on the cards for Chittagong, it was only in its aftermath that the authorities became aware of just how influential 1916 had been on the insurgents. In raid after raid on the rebels’ houses books on the Irish movement were unearthed. Pearse and Lalor quotes were even found in the pockets of one of the insurgents that had been killed. During interrogations, it became clear that Sen’s group had in fact simulated Breen’s account of the Rising and in October 1930 the importation of My Fight for Irish Freedom was prohibited, and as a precautionary measure Irish newspapers were also stopped altogether.23 After the Uprising the British authorities in turn looked to Ireland as a source of inspiration in an attempt to regain control over the province. But it was their own management of events after 1916 that was scrutinised, and as a result it was decided to call on the services of Sir John Anderson. The former Under-Secretary of State in Ireland became the Governor of Bengal in 1932. British observers believed that Anderson was uniquely equipped to deal with terrorism and violence in Bengal due to his experience in Ireland. General Neville Macready, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland during Anderson’s time, was reluctant to congratulate him on his Bengal appointment, however, writing “I fear it may prove a dirty job, not unlike our penance in Ireland.” During his tenure in Bengal, Anderson reflected on his time in Ireland. As Michael Silvestri has observed, upon his arrival the Government of Bengal began to investigate whether legislation from the period of the “Anglo-Irish War” might serve as a possible solution for the “terrorist menace” in Bengal and Anderson himself made

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frequent reference to his Irish experience while he served as Governor of Bengal.24 In one significant way, however, Anderson had learned from his Irish experience; despite internal pressure, he was vehemently opposed to the use of violent reprisals in Bengal, arguing that in Ireland “reprisals were what was publicly remembered, not the outrages that provoked them.”25 In the memorialised history of the freedom movement in Bengal, the Chittagong Armoury Raid still holds pride of place, dozens of books have been written on it and about half a dozen films have been made on it. The most recent of which was in Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey (2010), in which there are scenes depicting the study of Irish history by the Chittagong rebels. A discussion of Bengali revolutionary terrorism would be incomplete without addressing the life of Subhas Bose. With an airport and streets named in his honour, the iconography of Bose has, in recent years, overshadowed even that of his one-time rival, Gandhi. Communists and Hindu nationalists equally claim him for themselves. In death he is revered more enthusiastically than in life, as the writer Patrick French wryly pointed out, with many people still believing that Bose did not die in an air crash in 1945, but is alive and well and waiting for an appropriate moment to reappear, like Elvis Presley and Lord Lucan.26 Subhas Chandra Bose represents the lesser-known story of the radical, aggressive and revolutionary road to Indian independence. His is a story that is the antithesis of the world-­ renowned Gandhi inspired non-violent struggle against the Raj. Moreover, having died unexpectedly and relatively young, he is seen as the one leader of India’s freedom movement who dared to fight the British with the sword yet was not implicated in the creation of Pakistan and the partition of his country. In drawing attention to some of these factors one cannot help but acknowledge echoes of the death of Michael Collins, someone who Bose himself admired greatly during his own lifetime.27 In the same way Ireland has suffered the longstanding Collins versus de Valera split, Bose left in his wake an Indian people with even more vehement divided loyalties, Gandhiji or Netaji? Born in Cuttack, Bengal, in 1897, Subhas Chandra Bose was a prominent leader of the Indian independence movement and a physical force nationalist. In 1919, at his father’s insistence, Bose travelled to England and sat the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS) examinations. He came fourth but refused to join the ICS, instead returning to India in 1921, where he worked under Chittaranjan Das (a founder of the Swaraj Party) in the Calcutta Corporation. Bose was arrested as a suspected terrorist and

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was in and out of prison throughout the 1920s. After his release in September 1930 he was elected Mayor of Calcutta. He then, between 1933 and 1936, became a roving ambassador for Indian independence in Europe. He visited Ireland and struck up lifelong friendship with many Irish nationalists including Maud Gonne and de Valera but also less well-­ known activists like the Woods family of Morehampton Road.28 The focus here, however, is on his wartime activities and the last days of his life, a period which reveals just how significant a role Irish revolutionary violence had on this thought process. In 1939 India was still a colony and the British Governor-General, Lord Linlithgow, infamously brought India into the war without consulting a single Indian politician. This was the straw that broke Indian nationalists’ back, provoking the final “Quit India” campaign—the last of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns. It was clear that India would have to be granted independence after the war. After the outbreak of the Second World War, with the age-old theory of the enemy’s difficulty being an opportunity and the Irish 1916 Rising clearly in mind, Bose decided to embark on an elaborate mission. He would set up an Indian government in exile which would embark on a propaganda campaign and instigate uprisings in India. With the Axis powers’ help, by allowing captured Indian soldiers to align themselves with his newly styled Indian National Army (INA) he would eventually invade the country and dismantle the Raj once and for all. He first based himself in Germany for two years, but received little support from the German government who only put up with his presence in exchange for its propaganda value. During this time he also tried his hand with the Italians and paid visits to Mussolini. With still no success, it appears that frustration got the better of him: he is said to have taken up alcohol, cigarettes and beef for the first time.29 Eventually Bose was transported to the Far East via submarine where he found Japanese General Tojo more accommodating and was helped in recruiting an INA from Indian prisoners of war there. This was no small group of disgruntled deserters formed after the fall of Singapore; estimates suggest INA recruits numbered as many as 43,000.30 There was a famous women’s division and the INA saw extensive action, especially in the Battles of Imphal and Kohima. After the war many troops were repatriated, and some faced trial for treason during the famous Red Fort Trials. During the trials there were public protests and a mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy and parts of the Army, providing a further nail in the coffin of British rule in India.

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And what of Ireland? Throughout his life Ireland had been a significant influence on Bose. In 1935 he noted: So many of my countrymen go to London but do not care to go to Dublin where one can see in the flesh and blood some of the men and women who have made and are making history. In my part of India—Bengal—there is hardly an educated family where books about the Irish heroes are not read and if I may say so, devoured. Nowadays it is becoming more difficult to get books on Ireland because the government think that the Irish revolutionaries will open the eyes of the Indian people.31

He had read of Ireland’s fight for freedom as a teenager in Bengal. He had experienced for himself the fruits of the Irish struggle when he had visited Dublin in 1936. He had met with and learned from those who had participated in that fight and were then in government. He also exchanged ideas with more militant Irish republicans and developed friendships that remained intact until his death. The BBC Monitoring Service recorded five broadcast messages from Bose in the Far East to Ireland in late 1943 and early 1944. He had much to say about Ireland’s influence on his thinking at this time: Of all the freedom movements we Indians have studied closely and from which we have received inspiration, there is perhaps none that can equal the Irish struggle for independence. The Irish nation has had the same oppressors and exploiters as ourselves. It has had the same experience of ruthlessness, brutality and hypocrisy as we have had… In 1916 Irish Republicans set up their provisional government on the eve of the Easter Rebellion. In 1943 India’s freedom fighters set up their provisional government before launching their struggle for liberty. There was so much in common between us that it is natural that there should be a deep bond of affinity and comradeship between the Irish nation and ourselves.32

Bose had died doing what he had always threatened to do, fighting the British with the sword, despite and against the wishes of his many pacifist contemporaries, most notably Gandhi. And it is to Gandhi I want to move to briefly before concluding, in order to provide an obvious counter weight to these illustrations of violence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Gandhi’s non-violent methods were criticised, at the time and since, for the violence they invoked: non-­ cooperation was an invitation to the colonial power to use its violence in a

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most immediate way, by inflicting injuries on the bodies of the agitators. Gandhi’s last mass movement, the Quit India movement, was in fact not “Gandhian” at all. It was, in fact, a most violent uprising that historian Ben Zachariah tells us was suppressed under cover of wartime censorship with an unparalleled brutality by the government, and that demonstrated that non-violent resistance only worked when it was performed before the eyes of the world and before a government that feared being discredited in public more than being defeated in war. For his part Gandhi knew he was no longer able to control the movement.33 The Indian political scientist Sumantra Bose, speaking in Dublin in 2016, spoke about the “quasi-official historical narrative of the Indian independence movement as being purely non-violent.” Over the years, he has noted, government and media have propagated a version of history, an over simplification of events, that had gained immense traction, especially in the West. But it was a myth; violence and non-violence were employed in parallel and complemented each other. His grand-uncle, Subhas Bose, he told us, did not want to supplant the non-violence movement but to bolster it, as he knew others couldn’t or wouldn’t.34 But something not in dispute is that, unlike the rebels of Chittagong and his rival Bose, Gandhi did not think that Ireland was a good point of reference for India, and denounced Sinn Féin early in the 1920s after their adoption of physical force. One possible reason for this is his earlier approval of another Irish nationalist’s strategy: Arthur Griffith’s “counter-state.” Gandhi had apparently told Fenner Brockway that he had found Griffith’s writings, especially “The Resurrection of Hungary” which related Hungary’s passive resistance to Austrian rule and its radical programme of self-reliance, immensely valuable when planning his non-cooperation campaigns. Surely if true, Griffith’s unintentional impact on Indian politics was just as powerful as that of Pearce’s or Breen’s? Perhaps it lacked the theatrics, and is overlooked for that reason. Griffith and Gandhi were drawn together unexpectedly in a commemoration row in 1969 when the Fianna Fáil government had a postal stamp struck to honour the centenary of the birth of Gandhi. Anne Dolan was correct in asking the awkward question: why was there none for the only Irish man who could ever have influenced him?35 Who is remembered most and why in the collective memory of any society, are simple enough questions. They cannot, however, be given simple answers. But it is curious that Gandhi’s non-violence is what was remembered most by independent India after its violent emergence onto the world stage. The partition of India was one of the bloodiest and most

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shocking events in the twentieth century. The estimated number of casualties runs from as little as two hundred thousand to one million, but there is little disputing the fact that its aftermath saw one of the largest, swiftest and most violent population transfers in history. However, until very recently in Indian historiography there was an all too simple separation between “partition” and “violence,” whereas for survivors partition was violence. Gandhi was not implicated in the partition of his country which no doubt has helped his commemorative cause. By way of conclusion, having looked at the lesser-known story at least in the West, of the role of violence in the Indian independence movement and of the more than cursory role that the Irish revolution had in encouraging this resort to violence, it is interesting to note that as the decolonisation process picked up pace in the mid twentieth century, there are examples of the Irish revolution having influenced anti-colonialist movements elsewhere. Egyptian and Gold Coast/Ghanaian nationalist elites, Saad Zaghloul and Kwame Nkrumah cited Ireland as a source of inspiration. Likewise, Egyptian and Irish activists established contact on the environs of the Paris Peace Conference, and later colleagues of Gamal Nasser spoke of his  having studied Irish history, and Algerian nationalists struggling under French rule in the 1950s approached Irish representatives at the United Nations in New York.36 The latter were particularly keen to learn about the negotiations which led to the Truce of 1921. Elsewhere in Australasia, the Irish minister in Australia, Thomas J. Kiernan met Ali Sastroamidjojo (later on Indonesian Prime Minister) in the 1940s. It appears that in Indonesia there is further evidence that the sole agency for disseminating Ireland’s revolutionary story was Dan Breen’s My Fight For Irish Freedom. After reading it Indonesian insurgents were looking for further information on guerrilla warfare suitable for use in Indonesia against Dutch forces. The Indonesian Foreign Minister Ahmed Soebarjo also told Kiernan in 1951 that Ireland had been an inspiration to his people in achieving their independence.37 India, however, was the country most intrigued by the Irish story. Many of the leading figures of India’s nationalist movement had looked to Ireland for inspiration in the years after the 1916 Rising. That such a small county so close to the centre of the British Empire was successful in reaping freedom from their common enemy greatly ignited Indian nationalists’ imaginations. In the decades after 1916, the Irish Rising and revolutionary period more generally acquired a “cult” following in the wider imperial sphere, and various appropriations of the memory of 1916 had a more significant impact on the decolonisation process

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than has been acknowledged by historians of Empire. Thus far however, few have displayed a sense of the far-reaching effects that the violence that erupted on the streets of Dublin had on India, decades later and thousands of miles away.

Notes 1. See for example Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. See Kate O’Malley, “Ireland and India: Post-independence Diplomacy,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 22 (2011): 145–62. 3. For further reading on this aspect of Irish involvement in India see Scott B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993) and Keith Jeffery, ed., An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 4. There are few mentions of Ireland in many core texts on British decolonisation. When it is referenced it relates to general concerns in the wake of the Easter Rising or later, in relation to the development of “dominion status.” Often Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War is presented by British historians of Empire as proof that Commonwealth membership was compatible with such autonomy and/or that countries had, in the post-war world, the freedom to leave the organisation should they wish. See references to Ireland in, for example, Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) or John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5. Michael O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), 9. 6. See Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, eds., South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 (London: Continuum, 2012). 7. Jawaharlal Nehru to Motilal Nehru, 12 September 1907, cited in Dorothy Norman, Nehru: The First Sixty Years. Volume I (New York: John Day Company, 1965), 12. See also Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru. A Biography. Volume I: 1889–1947 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 22. 8. Arpita Sen, “The Proscription of an Irish Text and the Chittagong Rising of 1930,” Indian Historical Review 34, no. 2 (2007): 97–121. 9. For more on this see Richard J.  Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence (London, Frank Cass, 1995).

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10. D. Ghosh and D. Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 270. 11. See Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) for more on Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) an agency of the British Intelligence Services which monitored Indian nationalist and revolutionary activities outside India. 12. Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 51. 13. Ghosh and Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire, 284. 14. Mihir Bose, Raj, Secrets, Revolution: A Life of Subhas Chandra Bose (London: Grice Chapman, 2004), 49. 15. O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 96. 16. Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 45–55 and passim. 17. Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 11. 18. Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 43. 19. Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 48–63. 20. Chatterjee, Do and Die, 70. 21. Those involved in the Rising encountered logistical problems both before and during Easter week. For a thorough treatment of the 1916 Rising see, Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 22. Chatterjee, Do and Die, 56–57. 23. Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 118. 24. Silvestri, Ireland and India, 70–72. 25. Ibid., 72. 26. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Penguin, 1998), 202. On 14 May 1999 the Indian Government entrusted Justice (retd.) M.  K. Mukherjee of the Supreme Court with an in-depth inquiry into the disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. 27. Bose and Collins also have something in common in death. Controversy has surrounded Michael Collins’ death with historians deliberating over whether he was murdered or if his shooting was an accident. For contrasting views see John M. Feehan, The Shooting of Michael Collins: Murder or Accident? (Cork: Mercier Press, 1981) and Meda Ryan, The Day Michael Collins was Shot (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989). 28. For more on these connections see O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, chapter 3. 29. French, Liberty or Death, 204.

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30. Ibid., 205. French puts the number of voluntary INA recruits in the Far East at 10,000, other perhaps more accurate estimates go so far as to suggest 40,000; see Leonard A. Gordan, Brothers Against the Raj. A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Rupa and Company: Calcutta, 1997), 498. 31. Bose to Woods, 21 Dec. 1935, reproduced in Netaji: Collected Works: Letters, Articles, Speeches and Statements, 1933–1937, eds. Sisir Kumer Bose and Sugata Bose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 125. 32. The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), Records of the Dominions Office (DO), 35/2059. 33. See Ben Zachariah, “Gandhi, Non-Violence and Indian Independence,” History Review 69 (March 2011): 30–35. 34. Sumantra Bose, “Why Do National Self-Determination Movements Embrace Armed Struggle?,” paper delivered to the “Globalising the Rising: 1916  in International Context” conference, University College Dublin, 5 September 1916. 35. Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 113. 36. Kate O’Malley, “Ireland and Egypt: Anti-Imperialism at Bay,” in The Irish Revolution 1919–21: A Global History, eds. Tommy Graham and Brian Hanley (Dublin: History Publications, 2019). 37. Ronan Fanning, Michael Kennedy et al., eds., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Vol. X: 1951–1957 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2016), 60, 573–74.

PART IV

Networking

CHAPTER 12

Stateless and Destitute: The O’Rourke Family of Saint-Domingue, Nantes and Wexford, 1788–1805 Orla Power

We are most familiar with the stories of the men who participated in the sugar and slave trades of the eighteenth century. Their lives and times are frequently captured in contemporary business correspondence that sustained the commercial networks of exploitation and brutality that typified the age. The story of the O’Rourke family however, reveals some aspects of the lived experiences of the women and children who were also an integral part of that world but who were, in most cases, silent participants. Although Marie, Françoise and Renée O’Rourke benefitted from their association with the sugar trade, their fate was ultimately one of tragedy and destitution. A fate that would almost certainly have been different had they been born male. As described by the girls’ Uncle Patrick: “It was your age, your gender and your circumstances that forced you to return to your parents’ home in Ireland…”1 The extraordinary story of this family reveals the complexity of the Irish relationship with both the British and French Empires at the close of the eighteenth century. It is a story framed by the spectre of the slave trade, together with the violence and bloodshed experienced as Saint-Domingue O. Power (*) NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_12

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ultimately became Haiti. Active participants in the French sugar economy, the brothers Patrick and Edmund O’Rourke established themselves as merchant-planters in Les Cayes, a thriving settlement on the southern coast of Saint-Domingue. As the 1780s wore on however, nothing could have prepared them or their families for the utter devastation that lay ahead. By the early 1790s, Saint-Domingue was in turmoil and the world as they knew it had ceased to exist. Edmond O’Rourke and his wife Marie were both dead, leaving four children to fend for themselves in exile. In a time of flux throughout the Atlantic region, the O’Rourke family suffered dearly. Nini Rogers has written extensively about Irish individuals who played an active part in the French and British slave trades.2 Other studies have highlighted the role of Irish Catholic slave traders and sugar planters with autonomy and agency who established themselves as entrepreneurs within the realms of multiple European empires.3 From a commercial perspective, these Irish individuals were often supported by dynamic kinship networks that supplied information and finance to meet the challenges of overseas trade.4 Accordingly, historians have come to appreciate the importance of adopting a transnational approach to the study of eighteenth-­century Irish communities overseas, particularly in the West Indies where the fringes of empires tended to overlap.5 Ultimately, when we consider these transnational and transimperial relationships from an Atlantic perspective, we can move beyond the rigid boundaries of nation and empire towards a better understanding of the essence of personal experience—what Bernard Bailyn describes as “submerged” transnational connections.6 In this way, the O’Rourke correspondence reflects the lived realities of the family as they came to terms with their new circumstances and attempted to navigate unfamiliar imperial landscapes. The letters create a delicate web of association that link Saint-Domingue, Maryland, Dublin, Wexford, Nantes and London. As a result, they trace the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the O’Rourke family’s fortunes and reveal the family’s experiences in exile as reluctant émigrés—stateless and destitute. The Haitian Revolution changed the nature of the sugar and slave economy, along with the patterns of trade that had developed throughout the Atlantic World over the previous 300 years. A bloody massacre that erupted in the north of the island in the summer of 1791 introduced a 13-year period of destruction that devastated the French plantation colony and wiped out thousands of lives. It also resulted in the mass ­migration

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of over 30,000 men, women and children from the island. Some returned to their native France, others went to North America, London, Jamaica and Cuba and, in this case, Ireland. By the late 1780s, Saint-­Domingue had a population of around half a million people. Of this figure, four hundred thousand were slaves. 40,000 were white—rich and poor, artisans, tradespeople, physicians, officials and planters. In addition, there were 30,000 free people of colour who often occupied the ranks of the middle classes. At this time, Saint-Domingue produced almost half of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas and the sale of its produce represented about 40 per cent of French overseas trade. About twice the land mass of Jamaica, it produced three times as much sugar. As such, it was a colony of tremendous strategic and economic importance to France which is why, no doubt, the O’Rourke brothers made it their home.7 Patrick and Edward’s father hailed from Co. Leitrim and married into the Roche family of Ross in Co. Wexford. The Roche family were merchants who were well established in Nantes trading circles. Indeed, two of Edward and Patrick’s maternal uncles were based in the French port in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1770, having resided there for a time, Patrick and Edward received their French papers of naturalisation and made the voyage to Saint-Domingue. Once established on the island, Patrick married Miss Devezeau de Rencougue, a woman of noble extraction, whose family arrived at Saint-Domingue in the late seventeenth century.8 Together they managed two plantations on the southern peninsula. The first was at Nippes, near the town of Miragoane. The second was a large plantation near the River Froide in Léogâne, a village located forty kilometres west of Port-au-Prince. This plantation boasted an elaborate and costly irrigation system, together with a large dam to facilitate an effective and highly complex irrigation system that supplied the plantation via one hundred small streams. Contemporary sources suggest that this estate was among the finest in the south of the island.9 Meanwhile, Edward O’Rourke married Marie Roche, who was also from Wexford. Together they purchased a parcel of land in Torbeck, in the parish of Acul which was adjacent to Les Cayes, the port from which the O’Rourke brothers conducted their overseas trading. Within a few years, Edmund had five children— Louis, Patrick, Marie, Françoise and Renée. As such, by the early 1780s, the brothers had joined the ranks of the elite planter class of Saint-Domingue.10 The family suffered a great loss when Edward died in 1783 at the age of 46. This left his wife Marie alone with five children under five and a

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plantation business to manage, in this she appears to have excelled. Sadly, early in 1788 disaster struck yet again with the death of Louis, Marie’s eldest son who was aged just nine. During this time, Marie was in the process of selling her plantation and buying a new one. Before the year was out however, Marie herself succumbed to illness and died leaving three girls and one boy all under the age of ten. Unfortunately, she had failed to sell her original plantation. As a result, the four children inherited an estate that was quite lucrative but was also heavily indebted. Their Uncle Patrick, who had been made guardian to the children on the death of his brother, was anxious to arrange Marie’s affairs in order to ensure her children would be well taken care of into the future.11 It was commonplace for Creole children to travel to Europe for their education. Indeed, it was considered a rite of passage. Following the death of their mother, all four children were sent to Nantes. As was customary, their parents’ West Indian agents in France were tasked with arranging accommodation and schools while in France. Although heavily mortgaged, the O’Rourke’s family plantation continued to earn them a considerable profit. From their mother’s estate, Uncle Patrick forwarded nine thousand livres tournois to his agent in Nantes, Mr Montaudoin, to cover bed, board and tuition for his nephew and nieces.12 Despite their tragic circumstances, Edmund’s children were well provided for and seemed destined to return to their plantation in Léogâne and the island of their birth once their time in Nantes came to an end. Arriving early in 1789, the orphaned children were witness to the social and political upheaval unleashed by the Fall of the Bastille and the subsequent period of unrest in France. From a colonial perspective, the creation of a French National Assembly in July 1789 served to overturn the ancien régime in Saint-Domingue as well as in France. Although the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity served as a foundation upon which the new republic would be formed; it was never intended to extend these principles of the Enlightenment to the colonial slave population. This inherent contradiction quickly undermined the authority of local French government on the island. Soon, its political institutions, civic structures and commercial enterprise all came under threat. The fact that the ranks of the local militia were dominated by the island’s plantocracy ensured the status quo of white supremacy, at least in the initial few months. In time however, factions and political squabbles served to divide and distract the white population, and social tensions mounted. Whether conservatives, radicals, royalists or republicans, many had no doubt that slavery was to remain.

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But, a sizeable population of the island’s free people of colour began to demand equal rights. Talk of murder and intimidation became increasingly common. Meanwhile, the National Assembly in France offered no leadership whatsoever, particularly on the question of colour. In August 1791, a disorganised spate of looting, burning and killing erupted in the Northern Province. Within a month, 1000 plantations had been destroyed. French troops attempted to intervene in December 1791 but were unsuccessful. Spain also sent a force across the border from Santo Domingo to occupy the north of the island but to no avail. British squadrons were despatched with a view to suppressing the revolution and ultimately annexing the lucrative sugar island. However, British occupation of the western province lasted only five years, violence and disease wiping out some 15,000 men. Meanwhile, the non-whites of the island slowly started to organise themselves as Toussaint Louverture began his rise to power.13 The violence and destruction at the island had a detrimental impact on the entire French sugar trade. Even though the O’Rourke’s plantation in Torbeck had not been directly affected by the first wave of hostilities, harvesting and processing sugarcane at the island had become extremely difficult. Shipments of sugar to France were compromised. As a result, the O’Rourke children’s revenue stream began to dwindle. After several months of this situation, their uncle’s agents Mr Montaudoin made the decision to end their contract with the family. This had the immediate effect of causing the children to be homeless.14 At this point the children were aged between eight and eleven and found themselves in a country where they had no relatives to look after them. As a result, Patrick was forced to hastily arrange an alternative for them. In a letter to a government official, Patrick described how his relatives were treated: “These children were here until last year when their correspondent from this town heard of the disaster on Saint-Domingue. He had already advanced a significant amount of money towards their account and suffered some large losses…he refused to extend them any more credit against their colonial property.” The fact that the children were forced to return to Ireland troubled Patrick greatly, “…the new law that the colonial landowners are subjected to states that their residence must be in France. This concerns me as these unfortunate children may not be entitled to claim what is theirs.”15 Given that he too had fallen on hard times, Patrick felt he was in no position to take them under his wing. His own children were in need of his assistance and he did not know when he would be in a position to

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return to Saint-Domingue and to his plantations. The Roches in Wexford, the children’s mother’s family were contacted in desperation and the O’Rourke orphans were welcomed with open arms. In Wexford, the Roches appear to have also fallen on hard times. Given that their main business was in the French trade, recent upheavals were likely to have disrupted this. While there is no doubt that their grandchildren were more than welcome to stay for a while, there remained the awkward question of who would pay for their upkeep. Having four extra mouths to feed and minds to educate was an understandably daunting request. Patrick assuaged their concerns by making assurances that he would send regular funds from France once he re-established a revenue stream. The orphans’ stay in Wexford was considered by all concerned to be a temporary measure, a safe place for them to wait until the difficulties in Saint-Domingue were resolved and they could return to school in Nantes. Of course, their Wexford “sojourn” as they called it soon began to feel like a more permanent arrangement and the children began to ask to be sent to live with their uncle.16 Once the children were settled in Wexford however, Uncle Patrick’s correspondence with the Roche family seems to have ceased almost immediately. Soon, his four Creole charges began to place a considerable strain on their Irish family’s finances. By the following February, when the children’s long promised funds had still failed to materialise, the orphans’ uncle Edmund Roche became involved in the matter. He sent several increasingly terse letters to Patrick in Nantes but received no reply. Writing in exasperation, Edmund remarked “I know that was impossible for you to send me remittances by direct ships but it would have been possible by indirect ships. The son of Robin from Nantes is here and he receives a permanent line of credit via the ships of neutral countries.”17 Understandably, Edmund Roche found it difficult to believe that an international merchant planter, who had married into wealth and nobility, a man with two large and profitable sugar plantations on the most productive island in the Caribbean, was, in fact, broke.18 When the slave uprisings began in Saint-Domingue, Patrick and his family returned to Nantes for safety. As time wore on however, it soon became clear that the violence and upheaval on the island had no end in sight. Furthermore, this disruption had a tremendous impact on the services ancillary to the sugar trade—provisioning, chandlery and finance were areas devastated by the difficulties on that island. Distracted by the revolutionary concerns of the nascent republic, many commentators

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appeared concerned with the absence of a united French strategy to deal with the crisis. Accordingly, Patrick and his family chose to relocate to Baltimore, Maryland which was a location renowned for its Irish community and tolerance of Catholics. This was also a port with which Patrick and Edmund appear to have traded from their base at Les Cayes.19 As tensions mounted in Saint-Domingue, ports with commercial and familial ties to the island attracted plantation owners like Patrick in huge numbers. In the United States, Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans were locations where those fleeing the mounting hostilities could watch and wait until a resolution to the crisis could be found. Jamaica and Cuba also welcomed this group of islanders. Initially charitable donations were given to the refugees, eventually some federal funds were released.20 Overall, several thousand settlers made America their home as they waited for news of their French plantations. Following friends and kinsmen, refugees from Saint-Domingue could be found in ports all along America’s Atlantic coast and the Lower Mississippi region.21 Those with closer connections to the British Empire found themselves in London where they joined the hordes of émigrés fleeing the revolution in that country. As the O’Rourke children had discovered, from April 1793, any persons who were not residing in France, one of its colonies, or in a neutral country were considered to be anti-republican traitors, their lands were forfeited and their crime against France punishable by death.22 By 1795, it had become apparent that the commercial interests in Saint-Domingue reached far beyond the French empire. In spite of stringent French protectionist trading laws, a number of international banks and British merchant houses had invested heavily in the island. As a result, these financial institutions were very keen to protect the assets of the planters to whom they had extended credit. In order to do this, they came to play a major role in influencing Prime Minister Pitt’s foreign policy towards the region which resulted in his ultimate decision to send troops to that island in 1793. Following a convincing petition by the exiled planters of London who had significant claims on Saint-Domingue, Pitt sent troops to the island at vast expense to the British taxpayer. In addition, he opted to establish British rule on the island in an effort to wrest power from the republicans. Over the following five years, several thousand troops were lost and millions of pounds sterling were wasted as British forces failed to gain control of the island.23 Meanwhile in Wexford, the children craved any news from their home in Saint-Domingue. Given the new French laws against émigrés, together

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with the uncertainty about their estate, they found themselves utterly stateless in a foreign country. What is remarkable is the degree to which they continued to hope and pray that they could return to Saint-Domingue. In fact, the alternative was almost unthinkable. Their identity and sense of self was entirely bound to the future their parents had carefully planned for them in Saint-Domingue. In a letter to their Uncle Patrick, Uncle Edmund was equally sanguine: Following that which I have learned from the most informed people in London, the plantation of your nephew and nieces, together with all of those in Les Cayes and parts of the south are the most intact of all the colony… Whether Saint-Domingue becomes French or English, I have no doubt that your property and that of your nephew and nieces will be returned. Everyone agrees with this…24

By 1796, the children had been in Wexford for four years and had yet to receive a subsistence from their Uncle Patrick. As a result, Uncle Edmund was forced to become the primary breadwinner for the family. He took his responsibility seriously but found that he could not make ends meet. As a result, Edmund did what one of his nieces described as “the most difficult thing” and joined the recently established local yeomanry force in Wexford.25 He was now a reserve member of the British forces in Ireland. This ensured that he received a wage and could support his extended family. Indeed all four children, who were now in their mid-teens, were contributing to the household finances in any way that they could. Using the skills that they had acquired in preparation for their anticipated lives as planters’ wives, the girls gave piano lessons and made dresses. As was routine for female wages of the time, these pursuits provided little more than a meagre revenue stream.26 In contrast, Edward, their brother, had embarked on a more viable career path. As was common for younger sons of this class, he decided to join the military. With a number of well-connected relatives in the British and Austrian armies, he had found an unidentified sponsor to pay for his commission. In this respect, it is fascinating that as an Irish-French Creole boy who was now living in Ireland, opted to join Walsh’s Regiment of Foot with a view to supporting the British war effort against the rebellious islanders in Saint-Domingue. Joining the regiment at in 1792, he was to travel to his home island with other Creoles of Irish descent.27 Writing to his uncle in Baltimore, Edward wrote, “you will be without doubt

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a­ stonished to learn that I am close to you. By the time this letter gets to you I will be in the Bahamas…I am a lieutenant and I also have hope to advance three or four ranks…”28 He was commissioned in Waterford on 1 October 1794 and by November 1796 he was bound for the West Indies.29 The months in Ireland became years and Marie, Françoise and Renée approached adulthood. As time wore on, Uncle Edmond became increasingly concerned about their prospects. Edward was an educated male with relatives in European armies and with an uncle in America and would always have prospects. In contrast, it was difficult to imagine what would become of the girls. Their Uncle Edmund worried for their future, “how will these young girls marry if they are to be dressmakers? Their poverty will be obvious…”30 Uncle Patrick saw things differently however. In an attempt to assuage their fears he declared: “You have talents and one must find a way to use them, otherwise false obstacles will hold you back. This [situation] will not lead to your ruination, it will make you appear far more interesting and even more respectable…”31 As young women of their class, their options were limited. In fact, their identity and their future depended on them returning to their plantation on Saint-Domingue, marrying a man suited to their social standing and becoming members of the plantocracy into which they were born. As far as they were concerned, there were no alternatives to that particular life-­ course. There is a sense in the letters that they wrote to their Uncle Patrick that once order had been restored at Saint-Domingue they could get their lives back on track. Indeed, Uncle Edmund describes how one of the girls had the audacity to turn down a marriage proposal “from a rich suitor.”32 This reveals an element of choice, a lack of fear or concern about their prospects and, of course, an enduring expectation that all would be well in the end. Without a dowry however, the sisters would find it difficult to find other suitors. Even the convent required a dowry. As unmarried, educated women they could possibly go into teaching.33 Ultimately, without a father or a husband the O’Rourke sisters would find their early adulthood as émigrés tremendously challenging. The sisters had experienced many difficulties in Ireland up to this point and the rebellion in Wexford early in the summer of 1798 brought their time there to an end.34 Although the girls only mention the Wexford Rebellion in passing, it is clear that the violence that they witnessed was troubling. Having an uncle in the yeomanry and a brother in the British service was likely to have made them targets. As a result, the sisters were encouraged to flee to safety in Dublin and later to London.35 Once there, they began to rub shoulders

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with planters, merchants and politicians all of whom had interests in Saint-­ Domingue. A thriving and remarkably diverse French émigré community existed in London at that time. This influence can be appreciated in the girls’ letters to their Uncle Patrick which reflect their increasing political awareness and a growing engagement with events in Saint-Domingue. Marie, Françoise and Renée followed the progress of the British Forces at the French island very closely, “The news from Saint-Domingue continues to nourish our hopes of a favourable outcome…”36 It is clear from their correspondence that the girls’ initial adventure to London was filled with excitement. In Ireland they had felt out of place— orphans who had fallen from a previous life of grandeur, they felt as though they were the objects of pity.37 In London however, the girls were surrounded by people who had experienced similar lives and losses as they had. Although they had little money of their own, they found that the émigré community there supported them. Soon, the sisters were working as milliners, “…friends have come to our assistance and now we make straw hats which are extremely fashionable at the moment.” As with the dressmaking in Wexford, this line of work did not pay very well and Edward took it upon himself to sustain his sisters with his military wages. “He is a great support to us here even though he is so young. We have had moments where he has had the strength to support us in times of trouble…”38 As the regional revolts in Saint-Domingue became increasingly widespread, Marie O’Rourke came to hear of how her family’s land in Torbeck was under threat. Her letters to her Uncle Patrick reveal that she was becoming impatient with his lack of action on the matter and concerned about the lack of information he had for them. Writing in 1798, Patrick revealed to his Marie that the decree of 1793 which had made her and her sisters stateless, “made exceptions which cover my situation…at least I will be able to hold on to my properties.”39 Unfortunately, this was not the case for the O’Rourke children whose status was entirely unclear. While acknowledging this fact, Uncle Patrick could do little to help the girls who were victims of an unfortunate situation. The girls were not the traitorous émigrés so despised by the French Revolutionaries and yet they were being treated as such. As Marie explained to her uncle, “We do not fit any of the categories which is disappointing… my friends here can only help me by advising me.”40 Uncle Patrick in Baltimore continued to serve as the O’Rourke sisters’ lifeline well after their move to London. Despite several plans to visit his plantations, his declining health and local tensions at the island meant that

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he did not set foot there until 1799. In the meantime, he did his utmost to maintain his niece’s optimism and to sustain their patience with a frustrating situation. “So my dear children, it’s just a question of surviving until I am in a stronger position and then you can come with me.” He continued: “I force myself to believe that the means I will use to achieve this will succeed but if by misfortune it turns out to be otherwise … you will have to rely on the products of your industry…” Although Patrick described himself as “destitute” and empathised with his nieces in Ireland, his definition of poverty, by today’s standards at least, is not compelling: “For the past five years that I’ve been here, I’ve had not even a domestic to serve me.”41 In some respects, Uncle Patrick’s decision to go to Baltimore allowed him to enjoy a frugal yet respectable lifestyle within a supportive community of refugees and émigrés who shared a common past. Because he spoke English, Patrick found himself working long hours in a local counting house. This provided him with a “small subsistence” but with little hope of progression.42 In Ireland, Edward O’Rourke’s career opportunities were fairly limited which is why he became a military man. In contrast, Patrick’s son Alexander earned a living as an apprentice in a legal firm while his son James worked as an apprentice in a counting house. The women of the family were also contributing. Patrick’s daughters and his wife made clothing and embroidery, in spite of being of noble extraction. In response to Uncle Edmund’s lament that his nieces were working for a living, a pursuit that was almost unheard of amongst their peers in Ireland, Patrick appears to have been unmoved. He remarked, “Emigrants from grander backgrounds must do the same here in America.”43 In Saint-Domingue, the power struggles between various factions made the situation relating to plantation ownership extremely volatile. Rumours circulated in London about the extent of sharp practices relating to the requisitioning and sale of unoccupied lands. In a letter to her Uncle Patrick, Marie remarked with concern, “It has been said to me here that there are strong fears that property will be seized if the owners are not there to claim it…” Accordingly, one piece of advice the sisters received while in London was to urgently find a trustworthy individual at the island who could represent their interests in person. Frustrated by his lack of progress, Marie O’Rourke instructed her Uncle Patrick, “If your plan, my dear uncle, does not take you to Saint-Domingue, I think you should give your power of attorney to someone else…”44

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The O’Rourke correspondence does not reveal if Miss O’Rourke’s request to her uncle was executed. The British forces withdrew unexpectedly from Saint-Domingue in September 1798, leaving the island to the French forces and a divided cohort of revolutionaries. Initially, it appeared that stability had returned to the island. Writing to her Uncle Patrick in April 1799, Marie described how “letters that have recently arrived here say that things have taken a turn for the better, that Toussaint Louverture still welcomes whites and they are allowed without exception to return to their property.”45 Later that month, she wrote to her uncle again and was clearly optimistic in her expectations “The news from Saint-Domingue continues to nourish our hopes of a favourable outcome. Toussaint conducts himself perfectly with the whites which is what they are saying here…”46 For several months, her hopes remained buoyant: “It has also been said that the absentee landlords can return now to claim their properties as long as they have certificates of residence from neutral countries…” Although the O’Rourke sisters were not in possession of such a certificate, they knew their Uncle Patrick could obtain one. “I imagine that you have this good news already and perhaps are preparing for your voyage…” As always, thoughts of her home in Torbeck were at the forefront of her mind, “it will be easy for Mr de Ronseray to let you know how our plantation is. I hear from different people that he is still there…”47 Early in 1800, their Uncle Patrick finally made a visit to his long-­ departed home. Patrick’s next letter to his nieces was dated 28 April 1802. In it he describes how eyewitness accounts of the area where his niece’s plantation was located reported that the entire quarter had been devastated. In what must have been a galling remark for his nieces, he expresses relief that his plantation at Nippes was saved “which is great for us all.”48 Initially, Patrick had the good fortune to find his plantation at Léogâne was intact and functioning—albeit under the management of a person of colour who was unknown to him. Landowners who could not produce a requisition order for their property were disenfranchised, “I was not pleased about my plantation in Léogâne which is still requisitioned and there is little I can do about it.” Patrick had better luck with his second plantation at Nippes for which he held the requisite paperwork, “the larger works of this plantation had been saved along with the majority of slaves and a few of the animals. Although the sugarcane was almost entirely destroyed, I had nevertheless some hope that I could at least take a basic subsistence from the place for me and my family.” It had been hoped that,

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following the withdrawal of the British, the arrival of the French forces to the island would have stabilised the situation for the foreseeable future. This was not to be however, and the peace that Patrick had experienced was shattered within a short period of time. “Alas my hope was not long lasting and at the moment that I was least expecting it, things changed entirely due to a widespread insurrection of the kind that the colony is now worse off than ever.” He continued, “it is on the verge of total destruction… the provinces of the north and west have already been destroyed and the southern part will follow suit shortly…”49 Patrick’s description of the besieged Saint-Domingue made it abundantly clear to his nieces that their hopes and dreams of return could no longer be sustained. His experience of violence at his previously tranquil plantation disturbed him greatly: I was on my plantation suspecting nothing when the fires started all over…I hid my religious artefacts with care in case they would inspire an angry reaction…I then asked to be taken to the village to avoid being massacred like all the other unfortunates who were killed when they were least expecting it.

“With the arrival of the French here, it was hoped that all the obstacles would be removed and that the land owners would be allowed to return to their properties. Instead the difficulties have multiplied…” Although Toussaint had extended the hand of friendship to white planters, Patrick had been advised by friends in positions of influence that “Toussaint’s gesture is nothing more than lies and illusion…” Patrick continued to set the scene, “By the last letter I received from Mr Smith on the 10th of August, he told me he was concerned about your plantation… I have just learned that this brave man was recently massacred on his own plantation by his own slaves…now the lines of communication by land with Les Cayes have been entirely cut.” In one final blow, Patrick revealed the reality of the girls’ situation: “The miserable state in which your plantation is in, together with the way things are progressing, you will not be able to draw any subsistence from there…” In spite of these tales of murder and bloodshed, Patrick attempted to reassure his nieces, “these times are particularly bloody, especially right now. Nevertheless I am going to do all I can, you can depend of me that your interests will suffer as little as possible.”50 As an attempt to soften the stark truth of it all, Patrick continued, “but if my plantation is saved you will share with my

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family all the resources that it will provide…” Patrick’s visit to the island had been in vain and he remained destitute. Although he found himself out of harm’s way in Baltimore, when writing to his nieces he ruefully admitted that he was relying on his wife’s family in France to support him. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Patrick continued to trust that one day he would recover his West Indian property, “All my hope is based on the generosity of my brother-in-law and I hope that I will not be thwarted in my attempt…”51 At this point, it must have been evident that Patrick was overly optimistic and possibly deluded if he believed he could ever make a life for himself on the island that would soon become Haiti. The O’Rourke sisters never responded to Patrick’s letter from Port-au-­ Prince. In his final letter to his nieces, he apologised for upsetting them with his news from Saint-Domingue. In spite of everything, Patrick continued that “I do not want to give up hope because I still have the smallest hope that I can be useful to you.” If his friend Mr Smith were still alive he could have perhaps helped the sisters too but overall, the landowners who had presented themselves at the island and who had attempted to reclaim their property “were frustrated in their attempts to claim ownership and did not get very far.”52 In fact, many had been murdered. Quite sensibly, young Edward O’Rourke does not appear to have ever returned to recover his family’s plantation in Torbeck. With the ratification of the Haitian constitution in May 1805, the permanent abolition of slavery was reaffirmed, and white settlers were no longer welcomed. All Haitians were made equal and were also given an inalienable right to land ownership. With this, the émigré’s dream of return was roundly crushed. Patrick was never to hear from his nieces again. Speaking of the girls’ “obstinate silence” and what he presumed to be their “indifference” to him, Patrick failed to realise what his news meant for the sisters on a practical level. While we do not know their precise circumstances, all three sisters, Marie, Françoise and Renée died within months of the Haitian declaration of independence. All three were buried in St Pancras cemetery in London between November 1805 and August 1806. The lives that they had imagined for themselves were no more. Stateless, destitute and without dowries, their past was meaningless, and their future had ended before it ever began. The experiences of Irish sugar planters, slave owners and merchants are an essential part of Ireland’s imperial history. Just as important are the experiences of the women who served to sustain this world. Although they were benefactors of the contemporary Atlantic economy, Marie, Françoise

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and Renée O’Rourke were victims too. In spite of their class, education, family network and their personal connections, these women found themselves unmarried, penniless and stateless. Had they remained in Nantes or if they had joined their uncle in Baltimore, their lives may have taken a more favourable turn. As women of their social standing, few options were open to them. Indeed, their fortunes were always intended to be tied to those of the men in their lives. These kinds of imperial stories relating to Irish women appear to be few and far between. However, if we continue to adopt an Atlantic perspective and a transimperial approach to the ways in which we engage with our material, it is likely that further stories relating to the “inner life” of empire will eventually emerge.

Notes 1. Archives Départmentales de la Gironde, Fond de Gabriel Debien, 73 J, 70, “Papiers O’ Rourke” Patrick O’Rourke Baltimore to Marie O’Rourke, Wexford, 27 February 1798. The O’Rourke correspondence was originally held in the Archives Départementales du Loiret, Orléans, in the “Collection Herbuisson.” In the 1930s, Gabriel Débien transcribed the letters for his own research. The repository in Orléans was later destroyed by German bombers in 1940. Débien’s handwritten copies of the letters can now be found in the Archives Départmentales de la Gironde, Bordeaux. The author has translated these from French, any errors are hers alone. 2. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 3. See for example Thomas M.  Truxes, “Ireland, New  York and the Eighteenth-­Century World,” American Journal of Irish Studies 8 (2011): 9–40; Orla Power, “Irish Planters, Atlantic Merchants: The Development of St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1750–1766” (PhD Thesis, NUI Galway, 2011). 4. L.M. Cullen, Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants at Home and Abroad, 1600–1988 (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2012); L.M. Cullen, “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 113–49. 5. See Thomas M.  Truxes, “Transnational Trade in the Wartime North Atlantic: The Voyage of the Snow Recovery,” Business History Review 79, no. 4 (2005): 751–80; Niall Whelehan, ed., Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (London: Routledge, 2014). 6. Bernard Bailyn, “Reflections on Some Major Themes,” in Soundings in Atlantic History, Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830,

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eds. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3. See also Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 244–68; Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue, 1750–1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic” (PhD Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2004), 1–5. 8. Gabriel Débien, “Refugies de Saint-Domingue aux Etats-Unis,” Revue de la Sociéte Haïtienne d’Histoire, January 1950: 11–45 at 12. 9. 9 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description de la partie française de Saint-­ Domingue, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1796–1797), ii, 681; see also Ministère des Finances, État détaillé des liquidations opérées à l’époque du 1er janvier 1828, 6 vols., i, 84–85. 10. The brothers were often referred to as Patrick and Edmund Roche O’Rourke. In some French sources, Edmund is also referred to as Roche O’Rourke “de Bressay.” This appears to be an approximation “de Breffni,” see National Library of Ireland (Genealogical Office), Pedigree of O’Rourke of Drumahair, Co. Leitrim and Nantes, France, 1476–1770. GO Ms 165, pp. 111–14; Pedigree of Roche of Clonlough, Co. Wexford and Ross, Co. Wexford and Nantes, 1160–1755, GO Ms 162, pp. 94–96.; Draft pedigree of Edmond Roche O’Rourke and Patrick Roche O’Rourke of Nantes, France, 1770. GO Ms 87, p. 125. 11. Debien, “Réfugiés,” 15. 12. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Nippes, 29 April 1790. 13. Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–23. 14. This was a strategy employed by a number of agents in Nantes, it meant that they could seek further governmental assistance as they continued to maintain children such as the O’Rourkes. See Marcel Grandiere, “Les réfugiés et les déportés des Antilles à Nantes sous La Révolution,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 33–34 (1977): 3–171 at 25. 15. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Nantes to Minister Mouge, location unknown, 8 October 1792. 16. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edward Roche, Dublin to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 24 February 1793. 17. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edmund Roche, Ross to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 15 April 1794. 18. See “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edmund Roche Kilkenny to Patrick O’Rourke, Nantes, 17 February 1793; Edward Roche, Dublin to Patrick O’Rourke,

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Baltimore, 24 February 1793; Edward Roche, Dublin,  to Patrick O’Rourke, Nantes, 23 July 1793; Edmund Roche, Ross to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 15 April 1794. 19. Some of Patrick’s correspondence is addressed to “Plunkett and Stewart, Baltimore.” The Plunketts had a plantation near to the O’Rourke estate in Torbeck. Plunkett and Stewart of Baltimore were infamous slave traders during this era; see Jacques de Cauna, “La diaspora des colons de Saint-­ Domingue et le monde créole: le cas de la Jamaique,” Revue Francaise d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 81 (1994): 333–59 at 352. 20. Baltimore initially received the greatest number of refugees from Saint-­ Domingue. Many remained where they made first landfall, unable to afford an onward journey. The city of Baltimore required some $600 per week to meet the most basic needs of its new inhabitants. Eventually, Maryland received a paltry $2,000 of Federal Aid from George Washington’s government. It did not go far and the refugees were forced to rely on private charitable donations; see Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), 84–90; Meadows, “The Planters of Saint Domingue,” 106. 21. See Natalie Dessens, From Saint Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007), and Carl Brasseux and Glen R.  Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-­Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809, trans. David Cheramie (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992). 22. Kristy Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (London: Palgrave, 1999) xiv. 23. Carl Ludwig Lokke “London Merchant Interest in the Saint Domingue Plantations of the Emigres 1793–1798,” American Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1938): 795–802 at 796. 24. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edward Roche, Waterford to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 8 November 1796. 25. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 11 September 1798 and Edmund Roche, Waterford to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 27 October 1798. 26. Olwen Hufton, “Women Without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” in Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood, eds. Jan Bremmer and Lourens van den Bosch (London: Routledge, 1995), 122–51 at 129. 27. Mrs Morgan John O’Connell, The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade: Old Irish Life at Home and Abroad, 1745–1833, 2 vols. (London: K.  Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892), ii, 178–88. 28. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edward O’Rourke, Waterford to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 18 November 1796. 29. See also Mrs. O’Connell, The Last Colonel, 113.

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30. “Papier O’Rourke,” Edward Roche, Wexford to Patrick O’Rourke in Baltimore, 8 November 1796. 31. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Nieces O’Rourke, Wexford, 27 February 1798. 32. Edmund Roche to Patrick O’Rourke, 27 October 1798. 33. Hufton, “Women Without Men,” 141. 34. Although the sisters referred to the violence in a letter dated 30 July 1798, Débien did not transcribe this in detail. 35. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Edmund Roche, Waterford to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 27 October 1798. 36. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Miss O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 2 April 1799. 37. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Miss O’Rourke, Rosemount to Uncle Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 20 July 1797. 38. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 2 April 1799. 39. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Nieces O’Rourke, Wexford, 27 February 1798. 40. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 11 September 1798. 41. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to O’Rourke sisters London, 27 February 1798. 42. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Nieces O’Rourke, London, 28 April 1803. 43. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Edmund Roche, Wexford, 18 April 1797. 44. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 11 September 1798. 45. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 2 April 1799. 46. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 30 April, 1799. 47. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Marie O’Rourke, London to Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore, 20 May 1800. 48. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Marie O’Rourke, London, 28 April 1802. 49. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Port-au-Prince to Marie O’Rourke, 2 December 1802. 50. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Port-au-Prince to Marie O’Rourke, London, 2 December 1802. 51. “Papiers O’Rourke,” Patrick O’Rourke, Baltimore to Nieces O’Rourke, London, 28 April 1803. 52. “Papiers O’Rourke,” ibid.

CHAPTER 13

An Irish Surgeon in Barbados and Demerara: Vexation, Misery and Opportunity Jennifer McLaren

Introduction In 1802, John Crawford wrote from his new home in the United States to fellow Irishman Hugh McCalmont in Demerara, eager for news from the Caribbean in the wake of the revolution in St. Domingo. The times in your part of the world are so critical… We are in truth on the brink of the same precipice and every thing clearly evinces that our precipitation must be near at hand… the whole power of France would not reduce St. Domingo. It will never be reduced. The cultivators of the soil will be the Lords of it, not only there but in every spot on the Globe. It has been always so, and it must always be so.1

Crawford’s letter betrays the palpable fear felt by many Europeans and Americans that slave rebellion might spread from St. Domingo (modern-­ day Haiti) to other slave societies. He urged his friend to prepare for the end of white control, which he believed “must be drawing fast to a period.”2 Crawford was accustomed to the turbulence of the revolutionary era in the Caribbean, having spent two decades there, first as surgeon J. McLaren (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_13

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Fig. 13.1  The late John Crawford MD RWGM of Masons in Maryland. Engraved agreeably to a resolution of Cassia Lodge, No.45, as a tribute in personal regard and of respect for the many virtues that adorn his character, 1814. (Source: Julia E.  Wilson, “Dr. John Crawford, 1746–1813.” Bulletin of the School of Medicine University of Maryland 25 (1950): 121. Reproduced with permission from the University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library. https://archive.org/details/bulletinofuniver2525/page/120)

in charge of the Barbados Naval Hospital during wartime and then as Chief Surgeon of the Dutch colony of Demerara (Fig. 13.1). Following the “trace”3 of John Crawford’s Caribbean career provides insight into the Irish experience of empire and into the British Empire itself. As a medical doctor employed by the British administration, Crawford occupied military and administrative spaces in the Caribbean. His reflections on managing medical services in Barbados while Britain was at war with France, and then in Demerara, hint at the reality of life on the ground in the revolutionary Caribbean. This chapter documents not only Crawford’s efforts to forge a professional course through life but also the moments when his life seemed to career out of control and when contingency impinged upon his plans.4 Such moments were eloquently evoked

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by his lament that “vexation, disappointment, I may say misery was my portion, with very little interruption so long as I remained in the island.”5 Crawford pioneered two charitable institutions in Barbados and was a keen participant in the transatlantic “republic of medicine,” a far-flung community of men who corresponded with one another about medicine, philanthropy, current events and politics.6 In order to survive in an unfamiliar environment and in striving for career success, Crawford built networks within the overlapping systems of life in the Caribbean—British imperial spaces, the mercantile community, Atlantic networks and with other imperial powers in the region. His Irish network was only one of a number of interlocking cultural spaces he inhabited during his Caribbean life. His world was mapped by the movement of people, ideas and goods through a series of interconnecting nodes linking the Caribbean to Dublin, Belfast and London, and to the wider Atlantic world beyond. Crawford managed the turbulence of the revolutionary era by reaching beyond the boundaries of the empire to nurture transnational connections, however fleeting. For example, in Holland he advanced plans to found and operate a Physic Garden in the Dutch Caribbean. By developing personal connections across imperial borders and carving out individual opportunities for himself, Crawford replicated the behaviour of Irishmen in other parts of the empire who also walked the “fine line of political allegiance.”7 Viewing the empire through the lens of this Irishman’s life—a man without strong metropolitan ties to London, or even to Dublin—provides British imperial historiography with a “de-centred” account of the Empire and reveals links beyond the metropole and periphery connection. Rather than risk overstating the power of the empire, as accounts which focus on “metropole and periphery” tend to do, Crawford’s career suggests that the effects of the British empire in places like the Caribbean were always in flux.8 Through Crawford, we see the interconnectedness of European powers at ground level, and the shifting allegiances at play in the revolutionary Caribbean.9 Scholarship on Ireland and the Caribbean is accumulating but to date has been dominated by the early-modern period and largely focused on mercantile connections. Nini Rodgers brought Irish and Caribbean connections firmly into focus in her 2007 monograph Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, which examined the roles of slavery and abolition in Irish history—a field which had hitherto been “quite astonishingly neglected.”10 In assembling the “transatlantic jigsaw puzzle,” Rodgers demonstrated that Irish engagement with the empire, at least in the realm of slavery, was

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deeper than previously acknowledged in Irish historiography.11 Recent scholarship on Ireland and the Caribbean covering the period of Crawford’s sojourn includes Craig Bailey’s study of the social networks of Irish professional and mercantile sojourners, Mark Quintanilla on Irish lawyer Michael Keane in St. Vincent, and Orla Power’s work on the Irish community at Saint Croix in the Danish Caribbean. Bailey explored the (predominantly London-based) support systems, which aided the sojourns of the sons of mercantile and legal families in the British Caribbean.12 Quintanilla’s study of Keane, who became Attorney-General of St. Vincent, provides fascinating details of his personal and business relationships, and the networks he constructed to assist ambitious business partners, family, and associates. Quintanilla concluded that the Irish experience of empire was a complicated one.13 Power’s work too, highlights the complexity of the Irish experience of empire (in this case, Danish); although members of the Irish community at Saint Croix had much in common, they were by no means a homogenous group.14 Power is one of a number of scholars who have sought out Irish experiences in the Caribbean in regions beyond British control, a historiographical field which is also growing, particularly in relation to the Spanish Caribbean.15 A number of short biographies of John Crawford appeared early in the twentieth century, but the most detailed account of his life appears in Amanda Moniz’s monograph From Empire to Humanity.16 Moniz placed Crawford within the context of medical and philanthropic networks across the Atlantic. As a “repeated migrant” who travelled repeatedly between sites around the Atlantic world, Crawford helped to spread unfamiliar causes around the British empire, the United States and the Caribbean and was thus crucial to the endurance of the Atlantic community of medical men interested in charity.17 Moniz examined a number of charitable movements, including the humane society for the rescue and resuscitation of drowning victims, and the dispensary movement, both of which attracted Crawford. This chapter draws primarily upon unpublished memoirs of Crawford’s career set out in his “Memorials” to the British Commissioners of the Treasury and to Lieutenant-General Mathew at the end of his Caribbean career.18 There is no single Crawford archive, but it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct his career from the scattered sources that survive. In addition to his “Memorials,” Crawford published on his medical discoveries, and a small collection of his personal letters are extant.19 These documents illuminate the travails of his career in some detail, and something of his

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motivations—he was an ambitious, learned man with a scientific bent, a joiner of clubs and societies. His letter-writing style was candid, revealing flashes of emotion and personality, but as with most biographical subjects, the man himself is somewhat elusive. Crawford was born in 1746 in Ballytromery, County Antrim, Ulster, into a staunchly Presbyterian family.20 His father Thomas was the minister at Crumlin for almost six decades; his paternal grandfather and great-­ grandfather had also been ministers, as had a maternal uncle. Of Thomas’ four sons, the eldest (William) became a minister, while the others (John, Adair and Alexander) all became medical doctors.21 The norm for medical students in the eighteenth century was to attend lectures at a university (often in the Classics), but not usually to attain a degree.22 After completing undergraduate studies, Crawford took up a post with the East India Company.23 His first appointment as a surgeon was in 1769; but in order to secure that appointment, he would have already served at least one voyage as a surgeon’s mate.24 Crawford’s first documented journey as ship’s surgeon was aboard the Earl of Middlesex, which took three voyages between March 1769 and May 1771 to Bencoolen (an EIC Post in Sumatra) and China, and included a visit to St. Lucia in the Caribbean.25 On his return to London in 1772, Crawford published a pamphlet documenting his discoveries regarding liver disease.26 Next, he travelled to Bombay on the Marquis of Rockingham, from April 1772 to September 1773.27 Finally, he was listed as surgeon on the Mount Stewart for its journey to Bengal between February 1778 and January 1780, but it is unlikely that he was actually on board.28 Instead, in early 1778 he married Irish woman Mary O’Donnell, and they set out for Barbados.29 Their first child, Eliza, was born in 1780, followed by a son, Thomas.30

Barbados When the Crawfords arrived in the late 1770s, Barbados was of prime strategic importance for Britain. France entered the American revolutionary war in 1778, and in response, Britain’s strategy for victory shifted southward in the Caribbean and Barbados became a major staging post for the Royal Navy’s battles against France.31 Crawford, who was already in Barbados, was appointed surgeon to the newly established hospital there, as the island was inundated with new (often ill) troops.32 We do not know Crawford’s motivation for travelling to Barbados in the first place, but not

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long after his arrival he was swept up in the requirements of the British military and his career remained on a war footing for many years. Crawford’s job proved trying—the principal problems were overcrowding and rum. Crawford consistently complained that facilities were inadequate and supplies were short. Ill-discipline amongst the patients exacerbated these problems. During the hospital’s first summer, Crawford had to accommodate 898 men in a space equipped for 100: they were distributed amongst a number of houses very badly calculated for their reception, and as we had cradles for only one hundred, the rest were obliged to lie on floors, and were generally so close together that there was scarcely room left to pass betwixt any two of them.33

Admiral Rodney’s Physician of the Fleet, Gilbert Blane, visited the Barbados Hospital in 1780. He attributed the high mortality rate there (which was higher than any other hospital Blane visited, except for Jamaica) to overcrowding. As the fleet was “so much greater than had ever been known here before, there was not suitable accommodation for such numbers as it was necessary to send on shore.”34 Even after Crawford and his colleagues brought a semblance of order to the hospital, conditions remained wretched. Supplies of food, candles and bedding were entirely inadequate and the shortages were exacerbated by patients selling their bedsheets and hospital utensils in order to buy rum.35 Crawford informed Admiral Parker that rum “often frustrates our best endeavours.”36 A month later, he complained to the Colonel in charge of the Barbados Garrison that the 200 men currently in the hospital were “guilty of every kind of irregularity”: drinking excessively, “wandering about the Town in the middle of the Day,” and deserting due to being given too much liberty. Crawford requested a guard for the hospital.37 A few months later still, he suggested that a wall around the hospital might solve the problem and submitted a plan for its construction to Admiral Rodney, then the officer in charge of the Leeward Islands station.38 Worse was to come however, when the “great hurricane” of 1780 devastated much of Bridgetown.39 Hardly a building remained. According to the governor, The strongest colours could not paint…the miseries of the inhabitants; on the one hand, the ground covered with the mangled bodies of their friends and relations, on the others, reputable families wandering though the ruins,

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seeking for food and shelter: in short, imagination can form but a faint idea of the horrors of this dreadful scene.40

Government House was destroyed, fortifications were ruined, most churches and sugar mills were damaged, and an estimated 4500 people were killed.41 According to physician Blane, one of the buildings of the hospital was “entirely demolished by the impetuosity of the sea, which, having risen to a great height, dashed a ship against it, and twenty-three seamen were buried in the ruins.”42 In the aftermath of the hurricane, Crawford was finally able to secure a larger house capable of accommodating 400 patients. Perhaps to Crawford’s disappointment, however, the Navy decided that there was now no need to erect a permanent hospital structure.43 From early on in his tenure, Crawford was determined to institute his own scheme to improve his patients’ diet. As surgeon and agent for the hospital, he was responsible for procurement as well as medical care. In an exchange with Admiral Parker in 1780, he argued that “the scheme of diet appointed by the commissioners of sick and hurt appeared to me very ill calculated for the climate we were in,” so he removed half a pound of meat from the patients’ rations, and substituted it with “milk, chocolate, sugar, and an additional quantity of bread.”44 Unfortunately for Crawford, Parker suspected that these dietary changes were part of a ruse for Crawford to favour particular contractors, rather than for medical reasons. According to Crawford, “from that moment [Parker’s] confidence in me was compleatly [sic] alienated.”45 In fact, Crawford consistently extolled throughout his career the health benefits of dietary changes, as well as changes to dress and abstinence from alcohol. Crawford took a leave of absence in 1782 owing to his ill-health. Unfortunately, his wife died during the voyage back to Britain from Barbados, leaving Crawford with two infant children. How they spent the next four years is unknown, but when Crawford returned to Barbados in 1786 to resume his position at the hospital, he was an enthusiastic instigator of two medical charities: the Barbados Humane Society and the Barbados General Dispensary.46 Crawford’s younger brother Adair, also a medical doctor, was involved in both movements in London. During the period of Crawford’s leave of absence from Barbados (1782–1786), Adair was serving as a physician to the Aldersgate General Dispensary in London, and as a Royal Humane Society medical assistant.47 It seems likely, then, that Crawford spent at least some of his time away from Barbados in

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London, observing his brother’s involvement with these two medical charities, and perhaps even working with the charities himself. The dispensary movement originated in mainland Europe in the seventeenth century but took hold in Britain during the 1770s after the establishment of the General Dispensary in Aldersgate Street in 1770, where Adair Crawford worked. Dispensary charities provided free outpatient care for the labouring poor and treated different types of maladies from those treated in hospitals. While laymen dominated hospitals, medical men established and operated the London dispensaries.48 Dispensaries were funded by members’ subscriptions: members could refer a certain number of patients based on their subscription level and patients required a referral to receive treatment. Humane societies originated in Amsterdam in 1767 and spread around Europe and the Anglophone world over the succeeding decades.49 The movement sought “to restore such as have in an instant been numbered amongst the dead, by some dreadful disaster, or by some sudden impulse of phrensy.”50 In addition to people drowning, the RHS’ beneficiaries included those apparently dead from hanging, noxious vapours, freezing and other causes of sudden death.51 The RHS offered rewards to people who retrieved victims and followed the society’s resuscitation procedures. The rescuers were also required to fetch the society’s medical assistants (such as Adair Crawford) to the scene to oversee the resuscitations. The Barbados Dispensary was one of the first such organisations outside Britain; but it was short-lived.52 A subscription was opened in July 1786 to raise funds for the Dispensary, and in April the following year a house in Old Church Yard, Bridgetown, was purchased for its operations.53 The Barbadoes Mercury reported that Governor Parry “and his lady, with a considerable number of other ladies and gentlemen liberally contributed,” and concluded that “Be the effects and the duration of this charity what they may, the public spirit and Humanity which actuated the founders of it, do them much honour.”54 The minutes of a July 1787 meeting of the Dispensary’s committee reveal Crawford’s central role: he made a number of suggestions (all accepted) regarding the scope and operation of the Dispensary, including the “acquisition” of a woman to act as the Dispensary’s midwife.55 After his proposal to establish a humane society was accepted by the Dispensary committee, Crawford wrote to the RHS in London, requesting that they share with him “the kind of apparatus which you employ with the plans of your Institution,” and proposing an ongoing

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c­orrespondence between the RHS and the fledgling Barbados group.56 He reported that “we have lately established a Dispensary here, which promises to meet with extensive patronage,” and that the governors intended to add to the dispensary by establishing a humane society “endeavouring to restore to life, those apparently dead by drowning.”57 Crawford was pleased to share the encouraging response from London with his colleagues in Barbados. The resuscitation apparatus was unpacked at the meeting, and was “found to be a very handsome present” for which the members were “very much obliged…on principles of benevolence and humanity.”58 By its second anniversary in October 1788, the Dispensary had admitted 227 patients, of whom 159 were released as cured.59 Sometime after this second anniversary, however, the Dispensary ceased to exist, beset by financial difficulties and undermined by political conflict within the colony.60 The Barbados Humane Society folded along with the Dispensary.61 Medical charities such as the dispensary and humane society movements were at the forefront of philanthropy’s expanding reach in the late eighteenth century.62 Most medical officers who attended the poor at dispensaries did so for free, although they did receive payment in other, less direct ways. Association with a dispensary could raise a medical officer’s profile and provide him with opportunities for public advancement, extending his social networks and patient list. These institutions also served as a public testament to the benevolence, civility and patriotism of the local elites who subscribed to the charities.63 It is worth noting that John Crawford’s medical career spanned the period during which modern notions of medicine and the profession were under construction. When Crawford first undertook his studies, most doctors did not have a medical degree, and there was no “disciplinary coherence” within medicine.64 Rather, medical practitioners operated within a public sphere of discourse and a “republic of letters” which knew few disciplinary boundaries. Medical men were marked by their identities as scholars and gentlemen, and by the values and ideologies they shared.65 Within this milieu, pro bono medical service at charitable institutions conferred significant social and symbolic capital in that it enacted the practitioner’s commitment to the values of benevolence and civic responsibility which underpinned the culture of gentility.66 Over time, hospitals and dispensaries came to be seen as not just benevolent organisations, but also as spaces for the production of knowledge and patients came to be seen as objects of medical knowledge. Crawford would have seen in the ­dispensary

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and humane society the opportunity to increase scientific knowledge and to generate social capital as he sought to move beyond his role as the Naval Hospital surgeon, not to mention the opportunity to advance himself within Barbadian society.

Demerara In January 1789 Crawford arranged two months’ leave of absence from his position in Barbados “in order to arrange some private affairs at Demerary.”67 Within a year, he left Barbados for the booming colony of Demerara, to take up his new appointment there as Chief Surgeon.68 In so doing, he followed a well-established migration route from Barbados and Antigua to the relatively uncultivated frontier on the north coast of the South American mainland. Crawford travelled with Hugh McCalmont, a young Irishman from Antrim who had begun working for Crawford two years earlier in Barbados.69 McCalmont went on to become one of the wealthiest planters in the British Caribbean, and the two men remained lifelong friends and correspondents. Demerara was a transnational space: It was administered by Dutch officials, but a majority of the white population was British.70 The Dutch administrators of the colony had long encouraged foreign capital and entrepreneurs with free land grants and generous tax exemptions. In fact, the exodus of British capital, planters and enslaved workers decades earlier in the 1740s had been of great concern to the British Governor of Barbados.71 The Dutch administration was at times unwilling or unable to attend to the needs of Demerara and neighbouring Essequibo, and as a result, the residents effectively governed themselves. Planters fostered connections with foreigners, and organised imports and exports, and even defence according to their own design. As Bram Hoonhout has argued, moving beyond imperial boundaries was relatively easy in “under-­ governed” colonies such as Demerara and Essequibo and was far more beneficial to planters than staying within the official framework.72 British residents served in the local governing bodies, and were permitted to vote for the council.73 Some, like Crawford, held positions of responsibility in managing public institutions. The fact that an Irishman was charged with overseeing medical care of Dutch military men is indicative of the transnational nature of Demerara at the time. Medical life was less hectic in Demerara than it had been in Barbados. Crawford took up private practice in addition to his duties at the hospital

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and barracks and expended considerable energy lobbying the Dutch Governor-General to improve conditions. In his view, the hospital and military barracks should be relocated; he argued that the hospital was “inadequate and injurious,” and had long been a “source of disease”; and that the military barracks were “in a wretched condition,” located as they were “in the midst of a town bounded by two canals” which were never sufficiently flushed by the tide.74 In April 1794, in “a very bad state of health,” Crawford obtained leave from his post and travelled to Holland to recuperate.75 He was in Holland when the Dutch Republic collapsed and was centralised as the Batavian Republic, a satellite of the French Republic. Britain sought to capitalise on the situation and attempted to officially occupy Dutch territories in the Caribbean.76 In Demerara, Britain’s proposal to take the colony into “protective custody” against France was declined by the local Dutch Council; but the Dutch governor (a monarchist) secretly sided with the British and fled the colony on a British ship—effectively leaving the colony to Britain.77 These “imperious circumstances of the times,” as Crawford called them, detained him in Holland longer than intended, but he kept busy.78 He obtained a Doctor of Medicine degree from Leiden University (possibly a simple matter of paperwork), consulted with a botany professor on plans he was developing for a Physic Garden in Essequibo, and lobbied the Dutch Council for West India affairs on the “disadvantages to which the troops were exposed in that part of the world, and the means…most practicable for obviating them.”79 After reading the terms of the capitulation of Demerara to Britain, Crawford wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury in London, pressing his case to continue as Chief Surgeon in the colony, and informing them of his plans for the Physic Garden. He reported that while in Holland, he had discussed with the Dutch authorities his plan to appropriate a few acres of government land for the garden, which he proposed should be worked by government-owned enslaved Africans. He wished to “collect from the natives every plant ascertained to possess medical properties, which should be cultivated for public use,” and reported that he had arranged for samples from the garden to be sent to Leiden for study.80 The Dutch had approved the plan (according to Crawford) and he had been on the brink of appointment as “Physician General of the Colonies of Demerary and Essequibo, and to have had the Superintendence of this important institution.”81 Crawford concluded with an offer to pass on “most chearfully” all the

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“information & knowledge of these countries acquired during a course of nearly thiry years, and an intimate acquaintance with the colonies.”82 Crawford also sent a lengthy document to Lieutenant-General Mathew that he explained was an “abstract” of his “intended publication which… refers to the means of preventing the formidable train of maladies to which Europeans are so liable in hot climates.”83 The abstract canvassed Crawford’s views on diet, dress and the consumption of alcohol: “I have shewn [sic] that the Europeans who are the most abstemious experience disease in the least degree.”84 He believed Europeans should wear lighter clothing in hot weather, acknowledging that his suggestion might hurt British hatters and clothiers, but arguing that “it would serve our cotton manufactures, and at Dunstable, Hats, might be made which would effectually serve to guard the head against the dangers of the Sun.” Crawford described how he had adapted a straw hat by covering it in glazed white linen, and that his example was “followed by many others, and they are now very common both in Barbadoes and Demerary.”85 As to the military men stationed in the Caribbean, Crawford believed they required more employment, and religious instruction, which he believed would help restrain the sexual activity of soldiers and thus prevent its “deleterious effects” on their health.86 He reiterated his long-held conviction that location was crucial to health in the Caribbean, lamenting that knowledge of how to preserve health by proper location was neglected.87 The contents of Crawford’s letter were never published, although aspects of it appeared in a periodical he later founded in Baltimore, the Observer and Repertory of Original and Selected Essays in Verse and Prose on Topics of Polite Literature, and then more formally in the Baltimore Medical and Physical Recorder.88 The latter stages of Crawford’s Caribbean career reveal much about him Crawford: his love of learning, his desire to communicate his expertise and to put into practice the knowledge he had spent decades acquiring. He was accustomed to moving in non-British circles and appeared to have every intention of settling within the Dutch Caribbean world until the vagaries of the revolutionary era intervened. The Physic Garden never eventuated, and the British Treasury declined to re-appoint Crawford to his position in Demerara. When he quit Demerara for Baltimore in 1796, Crawford’s “imperial” life came to an end. With financial assistance from his late wife’s brother, he settled in the new United States with his two children. He worked in private medical practice in Baltimore, and as a consulting physician to the

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Board of Health and the City Hospital. He assisted in establishing the Baltimore Dispensary, and other organisations including the Maryland Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge and the Bible Society of Baltimore. He was a founding member and Chairman of the Medical Faculty of Baltimore and a lecturer in medicine and natural science.89 When Crawford died in 1813, he was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons in Maryland, a position he held between 1801 and 1805 and again from 1807. Despite these activities and his high profile in the city, Crawford lamented towards the end of his life that “although I have held situations highly lucrative, the disposition of my mind has not led me to profit by them.”90 His estate was virtually worthless—except for his extensive collection of books on scientific and medical subjects, which formed the corpus of the fledgling University of Maryland’s Medical library.

Conclusion What, then, does the Caribbean career of John Crawford reveal of the Irish experience of empire? Rather than living the “British” life that he might have expected when he embarked upon his medical career, Crawford in fact lived a transnational life. He lived in British imperial spaces on board EIC ships and in the Caribbean, but he also moved within the Dutch world, and his intellectual connections stretched further afield around the Atlantic world. He made connections across imperial borders, such as they were, to carve out opportunities for himself. His day-to-day life was set against a backdrop of intense interimperial rivalry, when islands changed hands between France, Spain, Holland and Britain with alarming frequency. Crawford’s career also illuminates the operation of the British empire during the revolutionary era. British imperial power may have been in the process of becoming hegemonic in the Caribbean, but this was by no means assured during Crawford’s time. In order to manage this uncertainty, Crawford cultivated connections within and beyond the empire, taking advantage of opportunities in Demerara and Essequibo, and reaching as far as the Dutch metropole in doing so. The Irish experience of empire in this case involved more than simply engaging with the structures of the British empire. Engaging with the empire in the eighteenth-century Caribbean necessitated engaging with slavery, the “overarching milieu” of society there.91 Crawford’s archive is virtually silent on the question of slavery, aside from his comments to McCalmont set out at the opening of this chapter, and

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some personal asides in other letters. Crawford would have had domestic enslaved people in his household, and he would have relied upon the labour of enslaved men and women, as well as free coloured workers in the Naval Hospital. No mention of such quotidian aspects of slavery appears in his letters or memoirs, but a vignette in a letter to McCalmont from Baltimore is revealing. Crawford was pleased to hear the news that a mutual acquaintance in Demerara was planning to marry his “housekeeper,” presumably an African or Creole coloured woman, and retire to Europe. “To live in this Country [the United States] as he did when I was with you [in Demerara] is altogether inadmissible. For obvious reasons our state of society could not countenance it.” Crawford approved of the marriage plan as “the interests of his numerous issue demand it.”92 This comment reveals the practice of European men living with African women, and the fact that it was not necessarily unusual for these couples to marry and live in Europe—and indeed Crawford approved of this, particularly for the sake of the couple’s children. There is nothing to suggest that Crawford was engaged in such a relationship himself, although it would have been entirely unremarkable if he had been. This chapter opened with one of the other few references to slavery in Crawford’s archive—his warning to McCalmont about the inevitability (in his view) of slave rebellion. Crawford also wrote to President Jefferson, imploring him to put an end to slavery, lest the United States too, might succumb to slave rebellion. It seems that Crawford’s support for emancipation was not derived solely from the desire to promote human welfare.93 Perhaps understandably, his emancipationist tendencies reflected his desire to avoid the “evil day” of slave rebellion first hand, as well as to share with enslaved people the “liberties” that the people of the new United States had fought for so “gloriously.”94 But what of Crawford’s ties with Ireland? As far as it is possible to detect from the archive, his connection with his homeland manifested in his ongoing connections with Irish associates. Hugh McCalmont remained a lifelong friend and patron, and Crawford’s letters from Baltimore refer often to mutual Irish friends in Demerara, London and Ireland. Brief references to Crawford’s family also suggest that he corresponded with at least some of his brothers in Ireland. Clearly, he maintained a keen interest in events in Ireland. His younger brother Alexander was implicated with the United Irishmen and was arrested in 1797, although his role in the 1798 rebellion is unclear.95 Comments about “the storm” in Ireland in 1798 are scattered throughout Crawford’s letters to McCalmont—he

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seemed to support the rebel cause, but he never quite said so unambiguously, at least to McCalmont. He wrote that the “storm has been long brewing,” which “now pervaded the whole land,” and that he was “firmly persuaded it must end in its complete emancipation, I sincerely hope from every species of foreign influence.”96 He concluded somewhat cryptically that “this is an age which promises the completion of the happy work, and I trust the most sanguine will have their hopes realised in due time.”97 Given Crawford’s enthusiastic support for the “glorious” American revolutionaries (as he put it in a letter to President Thomas Jefferson), he was perhaps applauding the Irish rebels’ attempts to escape British influence.98 As with thousands of other Irish men, the British empire did provide Crawford with his initial career opportunity and he was dependent upon British imperial structures, at least in the early stages of his career. He most likely travelled to Scotland for his education at Glasgow University and, in order to pursue a career as an EIC ship’s surgeon, he had to present himself to the Royal College of Surgeons in London to prove his qualifications.99 His introduction to the world of scientific and medical discovery was on board EIC vessels traversing the British imperial world. In Barbados, he was firmly ensconced within the empire as he managed the Royal Navy’s hospital there. In his charitable endeavours too, Crawford drew upon the support and resources of the London-based RHS and the London Dispensary in establishing outposts in the Caribbean. Crawford’s inner life was not limited by the boundaries of the British empire, rather it was dominated by his participation in the transnational community of correspondents in the “republic of medicine.” A feature of the medical community that Crawford entered by virtue of his education and his service on EIC ships was the professional imperative to correspond with colleagues, by means of personal letters and publications. These medical men prized the “literary and learned” correspondence they exchanged; they thrived on discussions about the latest empirical knowledge, treatments, theories about diseases and management of patients. Being citizens of this world was fundamental to their professional self-image.100 This community of correspondents was a significant intellectual space within which Crawford moved. He supplemented his correspondence by acquiring an extensive library—and a concomitant debt to the London bookseller George Kearsley. The tension between this expansive and intellectually fulfilling space, and the grinding nature of Crawford’s daily work within the military and medical spaces of Barbados and Demerara, explains the sense of frustration which overlaid his letters to the British Commissioners

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of the Treasury and to Lieutenant-General Mathew at the end of his years in the Caribbean. For Crawford, the empire provided a career and opened up opportunities to join a wider network of correspondents, which ultimately facilitated him leaving the empire altogether.

Notes 1. John Crawford, Baltimore to Hugh McCalmont, Demerary, 21 April 1802, Maryland Historical Society (henceforth MHS) MS1246. The emphasis is Crawford’s. 2. John Crawford, Baltimore to Hugh McCalmont, Demerary, 18 February 1802, MHS MS1246. 3. Miles Ogborn, “Editorial: Atlantic Geographies,” Social and Cultural Geography 6 (2005): 382–83; David Lambert, “Reflections on the Concept of Imperial Biographies: The British Case,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft 40 (2014): 30. 4. David Lambert and Alan Lester, “Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects,” in Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 22–23. 5. John Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew on the means of preventing the method of treating and origins of the Diseases most prevalent and which prove most destructive to the Natives of Cold Climates visiting or residing in Warm Countries by John Crawford, M.D.,” MHS, Box 130, Manuscript Collections of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland (MS 3000), 110–11. 6. Amanda Moniz, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6. 7. Thomas M. Truxes, “Introduction: A Connected Irish World,” in Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War, ed. Thomas M.  Truxes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 20. 8. Antoinette Burton, “Getting Outside of the Global: Repositioning British Imperialism in World History,” in Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 279. 9. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global: Introduction,” in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 295–96.

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10. Stephen Howe, “Minding the Gaps: New Directions in the Study of Ireland and Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 (2009): 142. 11. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. 12. Craig Bailey, “Metropole and Colony: Irish Networks and Patronage in the Eighteenth-Century Empire,” Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 23 (2005): 161–81; Craig Bailey, “The Nesbitts of London and Their Networks,” in Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, eds. David Dickson, Jan Parmentier and Jane Ohlmeyer (Gent: Academia Press, 2007), 231–49; Craig Bailey, Irish London: Middle-Class Migration in the Global Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 13. Mark Quintanilla, “‘From a Dear and Worthy Land’: Michael Keane and the Irish in the Eighteenth-Century Irish West Indies,” New Hibernia Review 13 (2009): 60. 14. Orla Power, “Beyond Kinship: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Community at Saint Croix, Danish West Indies,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 5 (2007): 207–14; Orla Power, “Irish Planters, Atlantic Merchants: The Development of St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1750– 1766,” (PhD Thesis, National University of Ireland, 2011); Orla Power, “Friend, Foe or Family? Catholic Creoles, French Huguenots, Scottish Dissenters: Aspects of the Irish Diaspora at St. Croix, Danish West Indies, c.1760,” in Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, ed. Niall Whelehan (New York: Routledge, 2015), 30. 15. Examples include: Gera Burton, Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Francisco Manzano and Richard Robert Madden (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Gera Burton, “Liberty’s Call: Richard Robert Madden’s Voice in the Anti-Slavery Movement,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 5, no. 3 (2007): 199; José Shane Brownrigg-Gleeson, “‘Turbulent and Intriguing Spirits’: Irish Traders and Agents on Spain’s Northern American Borderlands, 1763–1803,” in Power Strategies: Spain and Ireland 1600–1825, ed. Óscar Recio Morales (Valencia: Albatros, 2012), 311–26. 16. Henry Fletcher Powell, Tercentenary History of Maryland, 4 vols. (Baltimore: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1925), iv, 16–17; Julia E. Wilson, “Dr John Crawford, 1746–1813,” Bulletin of the School of Medicine University of Maryland 25 (1940): 116–32; Raymond N. Doetsch, “John Crawford and His Contribution to the Doctrine of Contagium Vivum,” Bacteriological Reviews 28, no. 1 (1964): 87–96; Linde Lunney, “Crawford, John,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, eds. James Maguire and

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James Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Moniz, From Empire to Humanity. 17. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity, 9. 18. John Crawford, “Memorial of John Crawford, MD, Chief Surgeon of the Colony of Demerary to the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty’s Treasury, 1795,” Wellcome Trust, WMS/Amer.98; Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew.” 19. A collection of correspondence is held by the Maryland Historical Society. I am grateful to Dr Amanda Moniz for providing me with her transcriptions of these letters. 20. Lunney, “Crawford, John.” Alexander Gordon, “Crawford, William (1739/40–1800), Minister of the Presbyterian General Synod of Ulster,” rev. I.R. McBride, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 18 February 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6645. John Crawford’s mother was Anne Crawford, nee Mackay. 21. Gordon, “Crawford, William.” 22. William N.  Boog Watson, “Two British Naval Surgeons of the French Wars,” Medical History 13, no. 3 (1969): 213; Michael Brown, “Medicine, Reform and the ‘End’ of Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” English Historical Review 124 (2009): 1367; Historians—including Linde Lunney in the Dictionary of Irish Biography and Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-­Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178—have maintained that John Crawford studied at Trinity College Dublin, although I have not been able to verify this. Crawford’s brothers all studied in Glasgow, so it is possible that he also studied there. Linde Lunney, “Crawford, Adair,” Dictionary of Irish Biography; C.J. Woods, “Crawford, Alexander,” Dictionary of Irish Biography. 23. Hereinafter the “EIC.” 24. The HEIC regulations stipulated that before being appointed as a surgeon on one of the Company’s ships, it was necessary to have “performed one voyage in the Company’s service, as surgeon’s mate, or acted twelve months in that situation in his Majesty’s service in a hot climate”: Charles Hardy and Horatio Hardy, A Register of Ships Employed in the Service of the Honourable East India Company From the Year 1760 to 1810 (London: W. Heseltine, 1811), appendix 118. 25. Hardy, Register of Ships, 38. John Crawford, An Essay on the Nature, Cause and Cure of a Disease Incident to the Liver (London: George Kearsley, 1772), 1. 26. “A Catalogue of New Books: Natural History, Medicine, Mathematics,” Scots Magazine 34 (April 1772): 205. 27. Hardy, Register of Ships, 55.

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28. Ibid., 76. 29. Lunney, “Crawford, John.” Mary O’Donnell was from Trough on the border of Counties Clare and Limerick. According to Crawford, he was appointed to the Barbados Naval Hospital in 1778 “from the commencement of the War with France, when she joined America.” It seems most likely that he was already in Barbados when the appointment was made: Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew,” 2. 30. Eliza was probably born in London on 28 June 1780, although I have been unable to verify this birthplace or date. See Dorothy Mackay Quynn, “Maximilian and Eliza Godefroy,” Maryland Historical Magazine 52, no. 1 (1957): 3. 31. Cori Convertito, “Mending the Sick and Wounded: The Development of Naval Hospitals in the West Indies, 1740–1800,” Canadian Journal of History 51, no. 3 (2016): 526. 32. Letter Rear Admiral Barrington, to Admiralty, 13 July 1778, ADM 1/310, UK National Archives, cited in Convertito, “Mending the Sick and Wounded,” 527. The Office of the Commissioners of the Sick and Wounded Seamen, known as the “Sick and Hurt Board,” appointed ships’ surgeons and assistants, arranged for equipment and supplies and supervised the furnishing of hospitals and hospital ships. 33. Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew,” 103. 34. Gilbert Blane, Observations on the Diseases of Seamen (London: Joseph Cooper, 1789), 191–92. 35. Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew,” 124. 36. Ibid., 107. 37. Ibid., 111. 38. Ibid., 124. 39. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 93. 40. Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 93. 41. Ibid. 42. Blane, Observations, 41. 43. Letter Sick and Hurt Board to the Admiralty, 10 December 1781 (ADM 98/14) cited in Coriann Convertito, “The Health of British Seamen in the West Indies, 1770–1806” (PhD Thesis, University of Exeter, 2011), 229. 44. Crawford, “A Letter Addressed to Lieutenant General Mathew,” 109. 45. Ibid. 46. Amanda Moniz, “‘Labours in the Cause of Humanity in Every Part of the Globe’: Transatlantic Philanthropic Collaboration and the Cosmopolitan

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Ideal, 1760–1815,” (PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 2008), 87. It is unclear whether Crawford’s children returned to Barbados with him. 47. Hereinafter, “RHS.” 48. Moniz, “Labours in the Cause of Humanity,” 77–78. 49. Ibid., 22. 50. Luke Davidson, “Raising Up Humanity: A Cultural History of Resuscitation and the Royal Humane Society of London, 1774–1808” (PhD Thesis, University of York, 2001), 44. 51. Moniz, “Labours in the Cause of Humanity,” 75. 52. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity, 114. The Barbados HS was the third in Anglophone America. 53. N.  Darnell Davis, “Notes on the History of the Jews in Barbados,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 18 (1909): 146; Barbados Mercury, 21 July 1787, 1, British Library, EAP1086/1/3/1/1, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP1086–1–3–1–1. 54. Davis, “Notes on the History of the Jews in Barbados,” 146. 55. Barbados Mercury, 21 July 1787, 1, British Library, EAP1086/1/3/1/1, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP1086–1–3–1–1. 56. Letter to Dr Hawes, 1 August 1786, in Reports of the Humane Society; Instituted in the year 1774 for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, for the years 1785 and 1786 (London: Printed for the Society, 1787), 170. 57. Ibid. 58. Barbados Mercury, 21 July 1787, 1, British Library, EAP1086/1/3/1/1, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP1086–1–3–1–1. 59. Barbados Mercury, 21 October 1788, 3, British Library, EAP1086/1/4/10/5, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/ EAP1086–1–4–10–5. 60. Moniz, “Labours in the Cause of Humanity,” 84. 61. The RHS in London responded to Crawford’s 1786 letter and provided the gift of an RHS apparatus. In 1787, Crawford wrote to the RHS, thanking them for the gift but reporting that “we have hitherto had no cases which required our medical aid in this way.” Moniz, “Labours in the Cause of Humanity,” 87. 62. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity, 6; Brown, “Medicine, Reform and the ‘End’ of Charity,” 1362. 63. Brown, “Medicine, Reform and the ‘End’ of Charity,” 1362. 64. Ibid., 1367–68. Boog Watson, “Two British Naval Surgeons,” 213. 65. Brown, “Medicine, Reform and the ‘End’ of Charity,” 1368. 66. Ibid. 67. Letter from John Crawford, 28 January 1789, Wellcome Trust, MS. 8401.

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68. Crawford, “Memorial to the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty’s Treasury.” 69. Francis J. Bigger, The Magees of Belfast and Dublin (Belfast: W & G Baird, 1916), 32. 70. Kenneth Morgan, “Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations in the Atlantic World, 1688–1783,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, eds. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V.  Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 129; Morgan does not mention Irish residents, but presumably “British” incorporates Irish. 71. Gert Oostindie, “‘British Capital, Industry and Perseverance’ versus Dutch ‘Old School’? The Dutch Atlantic and the Takeover of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo, 1715–1850,” Low Countries Historical Review 127, no. 4 (2012): 36; Bram Hoonhout, “Smuggling for Survival: Self-­ Organized, Cross-Imperial Colony Building in Essequibo and Demerara, 1746–1796,” in Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800, eds. Cátia Antunes and Amélia Polónia (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 218. 72. Hoonhout, “Smuggling for Survival,” 213. 73. Oostindie, “British Capital, Industry and Perseverance,” 43. 74. Crawford, “Memorial to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury,” 1. 75. Holland at this time was variously known as the Dutch Republic, the States General of the United Netherlands, or the United Provinces. 76. Oostindie, “British Capital, Industry and Perseverance,” 46; Bruce Collins, War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain 1790–1830 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 97. 77. The colony remained under British control until 1802, when it was returned to the Dutch by the Treaty of Amiens; Oostindie, “British Capital, Industry and Perseverance,” 45. 78. Crawford, “Memorial to the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty’s Treasury,” 4. 79. Ibid., 1. 80. Ibid., 4. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 5. 83. Ibid., 3. 84. Ibid., 20. 85. Ibid., 74–75. 86. Ibid., 92. 87. Ibid., 103. 88. Doetsch, “Doctrine of Contagium Vivum,” 89, 92–93. The Observer articles were entitled “Remarks on Quarantine Suggested by Dr.

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Caldwell’s Oration,” and “Dr. Crawford’s Theory and an Application of it to the Treatment of Disease,” and were published in 1806–1807. The 1809 article was entitled “Observations on the Seats and Causes of Disease.” Crawford argued in these articles that insects and their larvae were most likely a cause of infectious disease, but this theory was rejected by his contemporaries, who adhered to the view that most diseases were spread through vapours or gases, rather than organisms as Crawford maintained; Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 179. 89. Doetsch, “Doctrine of Contagium Vivum,” 88–89. 90. John Crawford to Thomas Jefferson, 17 December 1811, Founders Online, United States National Archives, accessed 9 February 2018.  http:// founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03–04–02–0260. 91. Jesse Cromwell, “More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans-Imperial Caribbean and its Sinew Populations,” History Compass 12, no. 10 (2014): 771. 92. John Crawford, Baltimore to Hugh McCalmont, Demerara, 19 December 1798, MHS MS1246. 93. Zoë Laidlaw, “Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 750. 94. John Crawford, Baltimore to Thomas Jefferson, 18 October 1803, National Archives (US) Founders Online, accessed 9 February 2018. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01–41–02–0410. 95. Woods, “Crawford, Alexander.” 96. John Crawford, Baltimore to Hugh McCalmont, Demerary, 19 December 1798, MHS MS1246. 97. Ibid. 98. John Crawford, Baltimore to Thomas Jefferson, 18 October 1803, National Archives (US) Founders Online, accessed 9 February 2018. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01–41–02–0410. 99. Hardy, Register of Ships, Appendix, 119. 100. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity, 51.

CHAPTER 14

“Colouring the map red”: Lady Hariot Dufferin and the Imperial Networks of the Dufferin Fund Sarah Hunter

Introduction In an article entitled “A Lady of Mercy: The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava,” E. St John Hart outlined the ways in which the Dufferin Fund had “in the most subtle manner aided the work of Empire.” As his source, Hart referenced a map drawn by T.  A. Pope of the Indian Survey Department which detailed, in striking red marks, the location of female-­ only wards, hospitals and medical dispensaries established by the Dufferin Fund in India. Hart argued that the map directly symbolised “one of the most noble and praiseworthy examples of our efforts in the direction of ‘colouring the map red.’”1 Pope’s map symbolised a subtle attempt to extend the boundaries of colonial control into female spaces, at least cartographically. But who were the colonisers in Hart’s representation; who exactly was Hart referring to in using the possessive in “our efforts”? Established by the Irish vicereine Lady Dufferin under direction from Queen Victoria, the Dufferin Fund was symbiotically linked with the S. Hunter (*) Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_14

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c­ olonial project, and, though maintaining its independence as a privately funded charity, the philanthropic and political interests of the British government in India and the Dufferin Fund appear closely allied. With a civil service that never exceeded 1200, the British government in India relied upon networks of European missionaries, philanthropists, scientists and doctors to contribute, consciously or unconsciously, in extending Western ideals and expanding an imperial sphere of influence into India’s many provinces. A study of these networks has provided fruitful understanding of not only the mechanism of empires, but of why and how individuals engaged with empire.2 Barry Crosbie and Christopher Shepard have explored the networks of Irish administrators, geographers, doctors and scientists who, having trained in Ireland, practised their professions within, and for the expansion of, the British Empire.3 The reasons why and how an Irish vicereine contributed to the expansion of Western medical ideas and, simultaneously, colonial power in India throughout her network of hospitals and dispensaries is explored in this chapter. Much of the literature on colonial power positions Western medicine as a “tool of empire,” an apparatus of power which worked actively and passively to secure the dominance of Western cultural ideals.4 Ideas concerning Western health and healthcare were recognised not solely as a mechanism to westernise colonial subjects but as a means to identify and manage colonial bodies. Medicine became one of the initiatives through which the British government in India could control the social and physical body of its subject, a phenomenon Anil Kumar has termed “imperialism in action.”5 As David Arnold has put it, medicine allowed the imperial government “an unprecedented right over the health and over the bodies of its subjects.”6 Through statistical records and data generated by medical interventions and the bureaucratic arm of the medical service, the British began to compile a wider picture of who they were governing, both politically and physically.7 Indeed, Ishita Pande goes one step further in applying the rhetoric of imperial structure to medicine. Using Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality as a framework, Pande argued that medicine acted as “the administrator” in achieving a healthy colonial society, bodily, morally and politically. Western medicine defined an “other”—an unhealthy, colonial population—and provided a means through which the “other” could become a healthy, actively engaged participant of empire.8 In practice, while the British government in India theoretically supported the dual role played by Western doctors in empire, it was ­ambivalent

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towards directly providing for, or even financially contributing to, medical healthcare for the general Indian populace. This was in spite of high-profile reformers such as Florence Nightingale pleading with Viceroy Lord Dufferin for a dedicated public medical service. Recognising resistance, Nightingale appealed directly to such imperialists’ moral and political dispositions by arguing that such a service in India would act as a step towards bringing “a higher civilisation into India”; this she argued was not only a “noble task,” but one that would be central in “creating India anew.”9 By the 1880s, however, the government in India had handed much responsibility for healthcare to municipal boards, which were funded through local taxation. Discrepancies between municipalities and lack of specific care for Indian women, who it was thought could not be seen by male physicians, led to missionary and charitable organisations filling this gap. How then did the Dufferin Fund, set up as a non-sectarian, non-­ governmental organisation by an Irishwoman, become so entrenched in the imperial milieu that it was thought to contribute to “colouring the map red,” especially in an age when government no longer identified medicine as a financially viable mechanism of empire? In order to achieve its aims, the Dufferin Fund utilised, and was used by, imperial networks. This situation was orchestrated by Lady Dufferin, a woman who navigated her life from a provincial upbringing in Ireland to vicereine of India. It was in her role as vicereine and founder of the Dufferin Fund that she carefully balanced philanthropic ambitions with political allegiances, in order to extend Western healthcare and medical education to Indian women, a demographic who—it was argued—had not been touched by empire. Maneesha Lal, Seán Lang and Daniel Roberts have all recognised the quango status of the Dufferin Fund.10 This chapter will expand upon these discussions to demonstrate the political power-play acted out by the Dufferin Fund and the extent of the imperial networks required to administer the vicereine’s personal and political ambitions. The underlying objectives for aiding Indian women were questionable; was paternal imperialism or political gain of greater importance to those associated with the Dufferin Fund than a sense of social responsibility symbolic of the age? Or were the Dufferin Fund’s imperial benefactors simply responding to a vicereine’s call? Regardless of motive, as this chapter will show, imperial networks were seen as imperative in extending Western healthcare and medical education to women in India; any resultant colonial expansion or “colouring the map red” was arguably considered a consequence of the cause.

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Lady Hariot Dufferin: Philanthropic Opportunist and Imperial Agent Lady Hariot Dufferin, daughter of Archibald Rowan-Hamilton and Catherine Anne Caldwell, was born on 5 February 1843, in Killyleagh Castle, Co. Down, Ireland. Thought to be the oldest inhabited castle in Ireland, Killyleagh Castle had been home to the Hamiltons from the 1600s, when the family moved from the Scottish lowlands during the Ulster plantation.11 The Hamiltons were not just landed gentry, somewhat conflicting revolutionary politics and imperial allegiance also ran through Lady Hariot’s veins. Her great-grandfather was the United Irishman Archibald Rowan-Hamilton, while her grandfather and father were military captains. Hariot’s identity, though, was informed more by the gendered norms of the age than by any national allegiance. She was a member of and financially contributed to a number of local charitable organisations in Co. Down before and during her marriage. Little more is known of Lady Hariot’s early life, bar the death of her father at the age of 41 when Lady Hariot was 17 and her youngest sibling Mary just 1 year old. It is obvious that Lady Hariot’s provincial upbringing was worlds away from her future life, though her position as the eldest of seven children may have been a training ground for developing her diplomacy and leadership skills. In 1863, at the age of 19, Lady Hariot married her distant cousin, Frederick Temple-Blackwood. Lord Dufferin was also of Irish landed gentry stock, his family seat at Clandeboye being just 20 miles from Killyleagh Castle. Dufferin added Hariot’s surname Hamilton to his title shortly before the wedding. The marriage was thought to ease the long-running hostility between the families, a move that set the scene for both Frederick and Hariot’s diplomatic futures.12 Described as a sympathetic landlord, who raised finances for poor tenants, Dufferin nevertheless was not content with country living. His sights were firmly set on imperial service, an opportunity open to him as a member of the Irish landowning class.13 Lord Dufferin began his career as a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, a connection that would prove integral to Lady Dufferin’s future charitable work. His first diplomatic post was to Syria in 1860 and his career ambitions meant he had experience in the War Office, as Under-Secretary for India and as Governor-General of Canada before his appointment as Viceroy to India. Lady Dufferin’s imperial training began in Canada, where she broke the mould of what was expected from a Governor-General’s wife. With her husband, she visited every

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Canadian province, a feat not undertaken by any previous Governor-­ General or his wife. In Canada, Lady Dufferin developed her political astuteness, attending House of Commons debates and reporting on parliamentary affairs to Lord Dufferin, who, as Governor-General, was forbidden from attending. From 1879 to 1884, the Dufferins lived in Russia and Turkey.14 When Lord Dufferin was appointed Viceroy to India in 1884, it was not only he who was overjoyed at being given an appointment he long coveted. Queen Victoria saw an opportunity to commission the wife of one of her favourite former lords-in-waiting to investigate whether “something could be done for the women in India.”15 By bestowing such responsibility upon a vicereine, the Queen was ensuring that any resultant programme would gain support both in India and in Britain. Calls for female medical intervention in India began in the 1880s. In 1881, Dr Elizabeth Garnett Anderson published a letter in The Times calling specifically for “Medical Women for India.”16 A year later, the proposal had garnered attention from medical and political networks. On 28 November 1882, a meeting of the Medical Society of London featured speeches from Edward Balfour, retired Surgeon-General of the Madras Medical Service; two Members of Parliament; a Mr Fawcett; Sir George Campbell, former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal; and female physicians, including Dr Frances Hoggan, Dr Garnett Anderson and Dr Elizabeth Blackwell.17 In India, Dr Edith Pechey actively campaigned for the government to provide medical aid to women. In a letter dated 31 January 1885, Pechey directly appealed to both the humanitarian and expansionist interests of imperial rule by asking that the Governor of Bombay instigate a female healthcare system “not only [as] a humane but a politic act.”18 Pechey’s astute application failed to mobilise the Government of Bombay. Twenty-five days later, a reply was received from J. M. Cunningham who, while recognising the need for a female healthcare system, argued that responsibility lay within the philanthropic domain: The Government of India already does far more than any Government in the world, (I believe) in the way of providing medical attendance for the public, and it should rather endeavour to curtail its action in this matter than to extend it. The Government should provide medical attendance for its own servants. All beyond that should be left, as far as possible, to private enterprise and private charity.19

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The first organisational efforts to establish a female medical service were initiated in 1882. The Medical Women for India Fund was set up in Bombay by an American businessman, George Kittredge, and Sorabji Bengali, a Parsee actively involved in educational and social reforms. Although regionally focused, the fund built hospitals through generous donations from Indian businessmen, campaigned for Indian women to attend university and brought female doctors from Britain to practice in India. The recruitment calls for medical women were infused with imperial rhetoric. As Rosemary Fitzgerald has shown, language similar to that used to promote imperial expansion was used by advocates of female healthcare to garner attention to their case. “[T]he alleviation of Indian women’s medical misery,” Fitzgerald has noted, “was portrayed as one of the most laudable acts of female imperial philanthropy.” Bearing “the white women’s burden,” the nurse “like a soldier […] obeys the call of duty.”20 Lady Dufferin was not immune to the calls of philanthropy and imperial duty. She had financially supported schools near her home in Ireland while her diplomatic life to date had revolved around accompanying and supporting her husband, something she perhaps did to a greater extent than any diplomatic wife before her.21 As the Viceroy’s wife, it was inevitable that Lady Dufferin would amalgamate philanthropy and imperial loyalty in order to establish her fund. As Antoinette Burton has shown, Western women at times used imperial structures for personal aims, and Lady Dufferin’s access to imperial networks allowed for the establishment and success of her fund.22 The question remains though, why did the government in India became so involved in a vicereine’s fund? Cunningham’s dismissive reply to Pechey, outlined above, illustrates that the government undoubtedly understood that there was a need to provide Western medical care to Indian women, though was unwilling to fulfil that need itself. However, one issue brought concern for female health to the government’s attention: an orientalist interpretation of purdah. Believing Indian women lived restricted lives in seclusion, missionary and philanthropic organisations, together with the government, claimed there was a need to raise the profile of and rescue Indian women from their mysterious existence in the zenanas. As Janika Nair has observed of Europeans’ conceptions of zenanas, “By its very unknowability, it was a seat of sedition and intrigue, as much as it was a site of ambiguous sexuality.”23 As the image of the constrained purdah woman was used by missionary organisations as a recruitment tool, the portrayal of inaccessible zenanas and the mysterious women who lived inside began

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to concern the government. As Geraldine Forbes has succinctly noted, “colonial authorities were obsessed with the unpenetrated and impenetrable zenana” and “the closed zenana became a demonised space, inhabited by those who engaged in intrigue that might flare into rebellion.”24 Queen Victoria was aware of the self-containment of this interior space before she commissioned Lady Dufferin “to do something for the women of India” and the government too, wishing to control and manage the domestic sphere, saw a need to interact with purdah women. Indian women had long been “recast [into] desired roles” by men who utilised the law, education and philanthropy to justify their means.25 British and Indian reformers proscribed female infanticide, as baby girls were valued less than boys in some Indian communities, and sati, the self-­sacrificing of widows on their husband’s funeral pyres, and raised both the age of consent and child marriage from 10 to 12. However, these reforms were implemented in such a way that they perpetuated a male-centric reforming attitude, rather than providing any sense of self-actualisation for the women themselves. The reformers recast women as subjects to be saved from the perils of male desire, from birth, through marriage to death. Furthermore, in the face of rising feminism, the British official in India was able to solidify his masculinity through controlling and supposedly protecting the Indian female body. Indeed, the fact that Viceroy Dufferin, as president of the Dufferin Fund, retained a budget for health despite financial cuts in other areas suggests that even he as Viceroy was not immune to the symbolism derived from involvement in female healthcare, and foregrounds the importance placed upon the Dufferin Fund, both socially and politically, by the government in India.26 Interested in the zenana through fear of the unknown, colonial administrators saw the Dufferin Fund as an avenue through which to access purdah women neutrally. The Fund acted as a cloak of imperial ambition, power and control. Lady Dufferin began working on the concept for her programme en route to India. On the initial sea voyage, she noted in her diary a useful conversation with an unnamed medical missionary. Her zeal for charitable activity continued almost as soon as she disembarked. During her third day in India, after visiting a hospital for sick animals, she continued to Dr Edith Pechey’s dispensary in Bombay.27 During her first year in India, Lady Dufferin travelled widely, gathering information from various sources about the medical treatment available to Indian women, and the restrictions which life in purdah placed upon the provision of medical care.28 In a letter to Lady Dufferin, describing traditional midwifery practices, a Dr

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E.  Butler wrote, “In numerous instances ‘national customs’ and ‘native prejudices’ are quite incompatible with and antagonistic to Western medicine and surgical practices. We may respect, but cannot give way to tradition.”29 Taking such opinions into consideration, alongside advice from a surgeon with the Indian Medical Service named Benjamin Franklin, Lady Dufferin utilised her position as vicereine and ambitiously decided to implement a secular, national organisation. It was thought that a non-­ religious organisation, that respected native beliefs and customs, would gain better access to zenanas and benefactors, while a national movement was needed to gain the greatest amount of financial and administrative support. In August 1885, Lady Dufferin published the prospectus and proposed constitution of The National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, which would become known, after the name of its financial arm, the Dufferin Fund. Lady Dufferin had three main objectives for her fund: Western medical tuition, medical relief and the supply of trained female nurses and midwives.30 Lady Dufferin recognised the superstructure needed for such an ambitious programme and took full advantage of the imperial administrative skeleton already established within India to establish her organisation.

The Dufferin Fund and Its Imperial Networks The organisational structure of the Fund was to reflect the imperial configurations of power and hierarchy. Queen Victoria was duly elected Supreme Patron of the Dufferin Fund, while the Prince and Princess of Wales became vice-patrons.31 The Viceroy and Vicereine of India were to act as presidents during their tenure and the Governors and Lieutenant-­ Governors of Indian provinces, together with their wives, were to act as vice-patrons within India. Reflecting monetary donations, members of the public could also buy positions of “Life Councillors, Life Members or Ordinary Members.” Three former Viceroys and their wives, Lord and Lady Northbrooke, Lord and Lady Lyton and the Marquis and Marchioness of Ripon, alongside Lord Randolph Churchill, Secretary of State for India; and the wife of a former Secretary of State, the Marchioness of Salisbury, were among the original benefactors of the Fund. Lady Dufferin also utilised her connections within the Irish peerage to attract the Viscountess Strangford to become a vice-patron. A branch of the Fund was set up in the UK, with a corresponding Central Committee in India, and provincial branches in the provinces of Bengal, Berar, Bombay, Burma,

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Madras, Mysore, the North-West Provinces and Oudh and Punjab. The Central Committee was made up of two members of the Viceroy’s Council “aided by the ablest officials and non-officials who can be secured.”32 Thus, from the start, the Dufferin Fund utilised and was embedded in the imperial paradigm and the imperial configuration would be reflected in the network of Dufferin hospitals and dispensaries established throughout India. There was a duality to this organisational structure, for it was not just for the benefit of the Fund that Lady Dufferin decided to mirror the skeletal structure of the imperial administration. In doing so, as Narin Hassan has noted, the Fund, “reinstated and upheld notions of India as relying upon imperial control.”33 Whether Lady Dufferin herself consciously organised her fund with this intent in mind is questionable. However, the supply of a nationwide healthcare for Indian women by an Irish vicereine cements Hassan’s argument. The Fund also attracted the support of Indian princes. The Bombay Gazette wrote in 1888 of the “impressive list of contributions from the chiefs and princes of western India, and from other wealthy representatives of the native races.”34 The Second Report of the Madras Branch, dating to December 1887, shows that of the 12 vice-patrons and patronesses, 8 were Indian: the Maharajahs of Mysore, Travancore and Vizianagaram; the Prince and Princess of Arcot, the Hon. Mr Justice Muttusami Aiyar, C. I. E.; the Hon. Mir Humayun Jah Bahadur, C. I. E. and H. H. The Nawab Khair-un-Nissa Begum Sahiba of the Carnatic.35 Barbara Ramusack has argued that “British [and Mysore darbar] officials might have been promoting Western medicine to legitimate and extend the power of the British colonial government and the princely state over their respective subjects […].”36 Lady Dufferin recognised a need to attract funding from Indian princes, not just to ensure the financial health of her fund. Encouraging Indian princes to support the Fund, it was hoped, would convey an element of appreciation, which would quell any perceived tremblings of rebellion and secure the loyalty of Indian princes. In a special appeal dated 1890, Lady Dufferin called upon the charity of England, not only “because we see how great a stimulus to the work in India some substantial mark of England’s interest and sympathy would give,” but because British donations would serve to “acknowledge and approve” the contributions made by Indian princes.37 It is hardly surprising that a philanthropic organisation established by a vicereine under the direction of a British monarch should have been based on the structures of imperial rule in India. In answering the Queen’s call,

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Lady Dufferin and her organisation were working within and acting out imperial authority, legitimacy and structures. From the start, Dufferin doctors were employed by the Fund on the same regulations as government officials.38 Even those Dufferin doctors who were stationed in princely states, where the Indian Medical Service did not extend, were subjected to regular inspections by the Surgeon-General in India. The Government of India were to “supervise, guide and control the employés of the Association,” provided the arrangement did not explicitly equate financial responsibility on the part of the government for the pay and pension of the Dufferin doctors. The Fund also made sure its benefactors understood that Dufferin doctors were “in no respect Government servants.”39 Much to the dissatisfaction of a number of female doctors, those employed by the Dufferin Fund were to “act in harmony with, and, where necessary, in subordination to, the Medical Officers of the Government.”40 It was not just at a benefactor and operational level that the government had an influence over the Fund. At an administrative level, too, imperial networks were firmly intertwined with the organisation. A letter from the Government of Bombay to the Home Department dated 22 September 1896 cemented the official connection between the quasi-­ official Dufferin Fund and the colonial government in India. The letter informed its reader: “The Countess of Dufferin Fund is now as good as an incorporated fund.”41 In subtle ways, the Dufferin Fund availed of and benefitted from imperial connections. Meetings of the Central Committee were held in Government House, Calcutta during the winter months, and at the Viceregal Lodge in Simla during the summer months.42 The Fund also received free printing from the Government of Bombay and, by 1896, was granted “a larger pigeon hole in the Medical Department of India.”43 By 1898, the Viceroy Lord Elgin, speaking as president of the Dufferin Fund, noted: “[w]e may congratulate ourselves, we have done good service to Government, which I hope will not be forgotten.”44 A year later, the Fund was awarded the permanent administrative services of A.  P. Dobson of the Revenue Department. Previously, Dobson had aided the Fund during his free time for a small stipend from the Fund, though by 1897 the Fund’s administrative load had grown so significantly that Elgin felt the need to comment that “the work of the Honorary Secretary’s office has become that of a department.” Thus, upon applying for financial contribution towards the pay of a permanent secretary, the Honorary Secretary of the Fund, E.  H. Fenn, appealed to the government under political duress. “The Association,” Fenn wrote, “is undoubtedly saving

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the State considerable expense in administering to the need of so large a number of women.”45 Although the Dufferin Fund asked the government for financial aid, they were careful to ask for help towards a specific project, as it was felt further endowment might mean the Fund’s “independence might be doubted.”46 This conveys public perception of the Fund as a government endeavour. The desire to preserve the non-governmental status of the Fund is interesting, considering Seán Lang’s observation that the Dufferin Fund was established for political as much as philanthropic reasons at a time when the legitimacy of the crown in India was thought to have been diminished by such endeavours as the Ilbert Bill.47 Government itself may have been the reason why the Fund remained independent, while financial contribution was the impetus. The gender of the patient, as well as the imperial position of the organisation’s founder, drew the government to the Dufferin Fund. In 1907, the Dufferin Fund again asked the government directly for financial aid rather than relying on the contribution of its benefactors. From 1900 to 1907, the Fund had shared office space in the secretariat buildings in Calcutta with the Victoria Memorial Scholarship and the Indian Nursing Association. Upon having to vacate the premises in 1907, the Dufferin Fund asked the government to pay their rent elsewhere, “considering the semi-official character of these three concerns and the vast and valuable services they are rendering to the public all over India.”48 The government agreed. However, a year later in 1908, when asked for a financial endowment of Rs. 50,000 towards the pay for Dufferin doctors, the government refused, deciding instead to match the income of the Central Committee of the Fund.49 Although the government in India had been made aware of a need for a national female healthcare system through the Dufferin Fund and had publicly supported it, financial caution still informed government policy, leading the government to devolve financial responsibility for the health of Indian women to charitable donation. Support for the health of the female body extended only to expressions of concern, conveying government sympathy but not committing the government to huge financial outlay. The establishment of a medical organisation by a vicereine allowed the government to be associated with the scheme, though relinquished their civic and financial responsibility for providing medical aid to women in India. This arrangement suited Lady Dufferin. She had established her association as a secular, non-­governmental organisation and strategically used imperial networks to ensure the viability of an all-Indian initiative.

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Conclusion: The Dufferin Fund and the Impact of Medical Aid for Women in India The Dufferin Fund was successful in extending Western medical care to women in India. The number of women relieved in its hospitals and dispensaries rose from 100,000 in 1888 to 2,046,000 in 1907.50 As Pope’s map shows, Dufferin hospitals and dispensaries were established throughout India and were a testament to the imperial networks at the centre of the Fund. Furthermore, the Fund was instrumental in implementing medical and social change by educating women in India and empowering them to administer medicine. As a lasting legacy, the Dufferin Fund also convinced future vicereines, non-governmental organisations and missionary bodies that Indian women were in need of Western healthcare. The government in India, too, became convinced of the need to provide for female healthcare, and the Women’s Medical Service was established in 1913. Praise for the Dufferin Fund was noted in the Indian press. The editor of the Indian Medical Gazette wrote, “We wish it every success.”51 The Hindoo Patriot added that Indian women held a “deep debt of gratitude” to the Dufferin Fund, describing it as a “noble institution” and stating that it was “remarkably successful.”52 Despite these successes, upon Lord and Lady Dufferin’s return to Ireland in 1888, the Dufferin Fund struggled to maintain its mission without its founders’ leadership. Successive vicereines struggled to mobilise the benefactors Lady Dufferin had attracted. Indeed, Lady Dufferin’s success inspired future vicereines to create their own legacy by establishing philanthropic funds in their own names, rather than act as the Dufferin Fund’s patron during their tenure in India. Furthermore, provincial branches became less active as the support of Lieutenant-Governors and their wives as vice-patrons waned following Lady Dufferin’s departure. However, the Fund remained in operation, with Lady Dufferin playing an active part from Italy and France, where Lord Dufferin was posted as ambassador, and finally, upon his retirement, from Clandeboye. Despite the absence of a well-positioned philanthropically invested successor following Lady Dufferin’s departure, the Fund continued to be informed by its imperial foundations. Reflecting on the Fund’s achievements in 1935, Lord Willingdon wrote that by 1914 the Government of India was “an integral part of the Dufferin Fund.”53 The Dufferin Fund was undeniably intertwined with colonial control.

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It is arguably the case that the Dufferin Fund was of greater importance, for the government at least, as an instrument in the reinforcement of colonial rule in India, than as a means of providing healthcare to Indian women. Political leaders and prestigious social figures, holding important positions as benefactors and supporters, were aware of the political and social benefits of association with the organisation. The Fund was to strengthen the British reputation in India, especially in an unstable political environment in which a nationalist agenda was emerging. The Constitution of the Fund itself explicitly noted that the organisation was “to draw closer together the bonds which should unite all the subjects of our beloved Queen-Empress and her Imperial dominion.”7 In a letter from Queen Mary to Lady Dufferin dated 1 March 1935, congratulating Lady Dufferin on the 50th anniversary of the Fund, the Queen admired the longevity of the Fund which “may perhaps play a not unimportant part in binding together British and Indian interests in the years that are to come.”54 Benefactors too had their own agendas. Pamphlets distributed in Britain listed the names of major contributors such as the Marchioness of Salisbury, Baroness Burdett Coutts and the Marquis of Ripon: Prospective benefactors were thus shown that donation could mean sharing an association with these prestigious individuals.55 Furthermore, it was noted that “all donations received […] will be duly acknowledged in The Times.”56 Major Indian contributors often placed stipulations upon their donations, such as naming a hospital or dispensary, allowing entry only of a certain caste of women into a Dufferin ward they sponsored, or providing education scholarships for solely upper caste Indian women. The Dufferin Fund had evolved from a social colonial project to a highly politicised forum to reinforce colonial superiority, imperial loyalties and personal prestige. It is questionable then whether, considering the political environment in which the Dufferin Fund was formed, many people genuinely responded to the cry of the promotional pamphlet—“Do you hear them weeping, oh my brothers?”—or simply used the cause of the Fund and the nature of its organisation and administration in order to fulfil their own political or personal aims.57 The Fund was not without its critics. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, somewhat generalising, argued in 1899 that the Dufferin Fund “was based upon the fiction that purdanashin ladies here are not allowed by their husbands to be treated by male doctors” and noted that 15 years after the foundation of the Dufferin Fund, “the fiction remains undiscovered.”

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This prompted the author to accuse “the rulers” of having “no actual knowledge of the condition of the people.”58 By the opening decades of the twentieth century, this apparent falsehood had not penetrated paternalistic portrayals of zenana life; the narrative of the maternal European character “rescuing” the naïve, constrained purdah women still dominated. There was “no doubt,” the Amrita Bazar Patrika wrote in August 1912, that “the ultimate guiding principle” for directing “prospective Florence Nightingales” to India was a “grandmotherly solicitude for the suffering women of India.”59 Regardless of the political or personal objectives of associating with the Dufferin Fund, imperial networks were imperative to supply medical aid to Indian women. Mirroring E. St. John Hart’s analysis of the Dufferin map, Lady Dufferin recognised not only the imperial connection but the symbolic resonance of her Fund: she remarked in 1935 that “a small seed sown by Her late Majesty Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1884 has grown into a tree with branches spreading over many parts of India.”9 Women’s bodies have provided a feasible and fruitful site of investigation into the role of women in colonial society. While the female voice is often missing from the colonial archive, the female body is found in medical organisational and missionary records.60 However, paternalism is ever evident here; power played out through discussing the female body in terms of control and submission. It was no different for the Dufferin Fund, an organisation that saw the provision of medicine to women as an opportunity to “colour the map red.” Ultimately, the Dufferin Fund reflected a need to control a greater proportion of the Indian female population. The Dufferin Fund became a forum through which women could successfully carry out their roles as agents of empire into a sphere where men could not gain access, while male colonial officials could reap the rewards of association with the Fund. The success of colonial expansion depended in some part on the success of the Dufferin Fund. The Dufferin Fund was emblematic of its age and circumstance—an organisation that succeeded because of its link to imperial structures and consequently contributed to the consolidation of imperial power over the lives of women in India.

Notes 1. E. St. John Hart, [Great Thoughts]—A Lady of Mercy: The Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, D1071/J/G/8/1, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter cited as PRONI).

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2. Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, “Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism, eds. Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–23. 3. Barry Crosbie, “Ireland, Colonial Science and the Geographical Construction of British Rule in India, c. 1820–1870,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009): 963–87; and Christopher Shepard, “‘I Have a Notion of Going Off to India’: Colonel Alexander Porter and Irish Recruitment to the Indian Medical Service, 1855–96,” Irish Economic and Social History 41 (2014): 36–52. 4. Headrick first expressed medicine as a tool of empire in Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire, Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Ian Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire in India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 150. 5. Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835– 1911 (London: Sage, 1998), 101. 6. David Arnold, “Introduction,” in Imperial Medicine, ed. Arnold, 18. 7. U.  Kalpagan, Rule by Numbers: Governmentality in Colonial India (London: Lexington Books, 2014), 230–36. 8. Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 1–2. 9. Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale (London: Macmillan, 1914), 1. Florence Nightingale continued to petition government to improve medical provision. In a letter to Lord Dufferin, Nightingale argued that health within the army could only be maintained if public standards of health were improved. Letter from Florence Nightingale to Lord Dufferin, 27 February 1889, PRONI, D2892/4/12/8. 10. Maneesha Lal, “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885–1888,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 6, no. 1 (1994): 29–66; Seán Lang, “Colonial Compassion and Political Calculation: The Countess of Dufferin and her Fund,” in Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India, ed. Poonam Bala (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012), 81–96; and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, “‘Merely Birds of Passage’: Lady Hariot Dufferin’s Travel Writings and Medical Work in India, 1884–1888,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 443–57. 11. The Hamiltons of Killyleagh, three volumes of a typescript history of the family compiled by Hans Rowan Hamilton, 20th c., Mss. 9958–9960, National Library of Ireland.

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12. Ibid. 13. Andrew Gailey, The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (London: John Murray, 2015). 14. Ibid. 15. Lal, “The Politics of Gender and Medicine,” 33–34. 16. The Times, 13 October 1881. 17. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Berkeley: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 112. 18. Letter From Miss E.  Pechey, M.D., in charge of the Jaffer Suleman Charitable Dispensary for Women and Children, Bombay, To His Excellency the Governor of Bombay, 31 January 1885, Provision for the medical wants of the women of India, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, June 1885, File No. 10, National Archives of India (hereafter cited as NAI). 19. Letter from the Government of Bombay, 25 February 1885, Provision for the medical wants of the women of India, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, June 1885, File Nos. 9–11, NAI. 20. Rosemary Fitzgerald, “‘Making and Moulding the Nursing of the Indian Empire’: Recasting Nurses in Colonial India,” in Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia, eds. Avril A. Powell and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 85–187. 21. For more on the lives of British officials’ wives in India see Margaret Martyn, Married to the Raj (London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 1992). 22. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Berkeley: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 23. Janika Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 226. 24. Geraldine Forbes, “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: Patterns of Control,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 517–24. 25. Ibid. 26. Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 193. 27. Ten printed journals by Hariot, Lady Dufferin in India 1884–1888, PRONI, D1071/J/C/1/8.

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28. Correspondence: letter to Lady Dufferin with memoranda regarding obstetric malpractice in Bengal, PRONI, D1071/J/G/3/2/1–3. 29. Correspondence: Letter to Lady Dufferin from Dr E.  Butler, Bengal, PRONI, D1071/J/G/3/2/3. 30. Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Narin Hassan, Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge and Colonial Mobility (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 82. 34. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, 16. 35. Second Report of the Madras Branch, 1 January 1887–31 December 1887, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/4. 36. Barbara Ramusack, “Women’s Hospitals and Midwives in Mysore,” in India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, eds. Waltraud Ernst and Biswanoy Pati (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 187. 37. Addresses, Speeches, Memoranda: Special Appeal by the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, 1 January 1880–31 December 1890, PRONI, D1071/J/G/6/7. 38. Letter from H. Copper to Mr Redmond, 4 March 1887, Minutes of proceedings of central committee beginning 21 December, ending 24 January 1887, PRONI, D1071/J/G/1A/1. 39. Third Annual Report of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, January 1888, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/1/1. 40. Ibid. 41. Letter from J.  De C.  Atkins, I.C.S., Secretary to the Government of Bombay, General Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 September 1896, Supply from the Government Medical Stores of medicine, etc. required for the Lady Dufferin Hospitals, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, November 1896, File Nos 186–8, NAI. 42. Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1. 43. Letter from J.  De C.  Atkins, I.C.S., Secretary to the Government of Bombay, General Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 September 1896, Supply from the Government Medical Stores of medicine, etc. required for the Lady Dufferin Hospitals, Home Department, Medical Proceedings, November 1896, File Nos 186–8, NAI. 44. Appointment of Mr. A. P. Dobson, a clerk in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture, in the Office of the Central Committee of the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, on a salary of Rs. 250–10–300 a month, to be paid by

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Government, Home Department Medical Proceedings, August 1899, File Nos 22–4, NAI. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Lang, “Colonial Compassion and Political Calculation,” 81–96. The Ilbert Bill allowed for Indian judges to try Europeans. 48. Grant of Rs. 1,000 towards the house-rent for the cold weather of 1907– 1908 in Calcutta of the offices of the Central Committee of the Dufferin Fund, the Victoria Memorial Scholarship Fund, and Lady Minto’s Indian Nursing Association, Home Department Medical Proceedings, September 1907, File Nos 28–9, NAI. 49. Annual Grant of Rs. 50,000  in aid of the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, Home Department Medical Proceedings, September 1908, File No. 54, NAI. 50. Ibid. 51. Indian Medical Gazette, 15 January 1886, quoted in Harrison, Public Health in British India, 92. 52. Hindoo Patriot, 13 February 1888, quoted in Harrison, Public Health in British India, 92. 53. Fifty-first annual report of the National Association for Supplying Medical Aid by Women to the Women of India for the Year 1935, including the Twenty-­Second Annual Report of the Women’s Medical Service for India, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4B/2/26. 54. Fifty Years’ retrospect, India 1885–1935, PRONI, D1071/J/G/7A/8. 55. Accounts: ledger detailing income and expenditure, UK Branch, PRONI, D1071/J/G/2/4. 56. Constitution, PRONI, D1071/J/G/4A/1. 57. Addresses, Speeches, Memoranda: Special Appeal by the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, 1 January 1880–31 December 1890, PRONI, D1071/J/G/6/7. 58. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 March 1899. 59. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 August 1912. 60. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Bodies, Empires and World Histories,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 4–5.

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Index1

A Absenteeism, 178 Act of Union (1801), 2, 27, 153 Adjobimey, Raphaela, 6, 8 Afghanistan, 191–209 Afghan war, 195 Aitken, William, 70, 74n68 Allen, Charles, 197, 210n21 Allewaert, Monique, 68, 73n50 America (North), 2, 6, 11, 19, 20, 28, 67, 148, 154, 235 See also Canada; Nova Scotia American War of Independence, 6, 8, 149 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 285, 286 Amritsar Massacre, 214, 215 Anderson, Dr Elizabeth Garrett, 277 Anderson, Sir John, 221, 222 Anson, George, 148 Antes, John, 127, 130, 139n38

Antigua, 22, 147, 260 Anti-Semitism, 136 Arabian Nights, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 126, 138n31 Arnold, David, 274, 287n6 Ascension Island, 147 Australia, 6, 43, 58, 69, 70, 226 See also New South Wales B Bailey, Craig, 254, 267n12 Bailyn, Bernard, 80, 96n32, 234, 247n6 Balfour, Edward, 277 Balfour, Eleanor, see Cole, Eleanor Ballads, 8, 171–185, 208 Ballaster, Ros, 123, 124, 128, 138n16, 138n21

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 D. S. Roberts, J. J. Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6

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316 

INDEX

Baltimore, 10, 11, 83, 88, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246, 247, 249n19, 249n20, 262, 264 Bannister, Jerry, 20, 32n14 Barbados, 11, 22, 99n113, 156, 251–266 Barr, Colin, 24, 25, 33n29 Barrington, George, 61, 72n16 Barthes, Roland, 64, 73n35 Bartram, John, 68 Belfast Belfast Academical Institution, 143, 146, 147 Belfast Central Library, 173 Belfast Literary Society, 144 Belfast Museum, 147, 148, 160 Belfast Natural History Society, 144, 147, 164n27 Belfast News-Letter, 83, 144, 152, 155, 164n27, 166n48, 166n51 Bender, Jill C., 172, 186n3 Bengali, Sorabji, 219, 278 Bengalis, 217, 218, 222 Benn, Edward, 144, 147, 164n27 Benn, George, 7, 8, 143–161 Bennett, Samuel, 61, 72n18 Berkeley, George, 7, 111, 119n17 Besant, Annie, 217 Bidlake, John, 63, 72n27 Bindman, David, 64, 73n38 Birch, Gavin, 57, 71n2 Blackmur, R. P., 70, 74n66 Blackwell, Dr Elizabeth, 277 Blane, Gilbert, 256, 257, 269n34 Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen), 5, 37, 44, 45, 49–52 Bodleian Library, Oxford, 173 Boer War, 37, 44, 45, 53, 54n4 Bold, Alan, 172, 186n6 Bombay, 255, 278–280, 288n18 Bombay Gazette, 281

Bose, Subhas Chandra, 9, 213, 222–225, 228n26, 228n27 Bose, Sumantra, 225, 229n34 Breen, Dan, 217, 219–221, 226 Bric, Maurice, 77 British East Africa, 5, 37–53 Bruce, Edward, 159, 162n8 Burke, Bishop Edmund, 22, 23 Burke, Edmund (politician), 7, 178, 204 Burkitt, Roland, 49, 55n35 Burma, 217, 280 Byrne, Patrick, 91 Byrsan colony, 106, 109, 110 C Calcutta, 115, 199, 218, 282, 283, 290n48 Calcutta Gazette, 115 Camden, Lord, 105, 108, 113, 114, 119n11 Campbell, Sir George, 277 Canada, 23, 216, 276, 277 Cape of Good Hope, 147, 148, 157 Carey, Mathew, 77–79, 84–89, 91–93, 95n19, 99n111 Carey, Peter, 69, 70, 74n63 Caribbean, 10, 11, 22, 64, 67, 148, 156, 238, 251–255, 261–263, 265, 266 Catholic Emancipation, 2, 26 Catholics, 5, 18, 20, 22–30, 40, 61, 77, 92, 112, 115, 181, 184, 188n42, 209n3, 239 in Nova Scotia, 23, 25 Ceylon, 147 Charitable Irish Society, 18, 20, 26–28, 30 Chatterjee, Manini, 219, 228n16 Chichester, Sir Arthur, 158 China, 6, 57–71, 114, 147, 157, 255

 INDEX 

Chittagong Uprising (1930), 213, 217 Cholmondeley, Hugh, see Delamere, Baron Churchill, Lord Randolph, 280 Churchill, Winston, 42, 54n8 Clayton, Robert, 7, 111–114, 119n17, 120n18 Cole, Berkeley, 5, 37, 39, 45, 46, 48–52, 56n48 Cole, Eleanor (née Balfour), 49, 55n35, 55n36 Cole, Florence, see Delamere, Lady Florence Cole, Galbraith, 5, 37, 39, 43–49, 55n25, 55n31 Cole, John, 46, 49, 52, 55n23, 55n35 Cole family, 5, 37 Colley, Linda, 198, 211n24 Collins, David, 59, 60, 66, 68, 72n13, 74n57 Collins, Michael, 222, 228n27 Condon, William, 28, 29 Connecticut Journal, 89, 90 Connolly, Sean, 158, 167n82 Cook, Captain James, 64, 148 Cousins, James, 217 Cowper, William, 178 Craig, Patricia, 145 Crampton, John, 28, 29 Cranworth, Bertram, 43, 45, 46, 54n14 Crawford, Adair, 258 Crawford, John, 11, 251–266 Crimean War, 28, 29 Crosbie, Barry, 10, 14n16, 274, 287n3 Cuba, 68, 235, 239 Cullen, Msgr Paul, 24, 25, 173 Cunningham, J. M., 277, 278 Cunningham, Waddell, 149, 155, 156 Cuthbertson, Brian, 27, 33n33, 34n54

317

D Datta, Kalpana, 219 De Valera, Eamon, 219, 220, 222, 223 Declaratory Act, 2 Defoe, Daniel, 64 Delamere, Baron, 41 Delamere, Lady Florence (née Cole), 42, 54n14 Delamere, Lord, 41, 54n14 Delhi, siege of, 9, 174, 189n44, 195 Demerara, 11, 22, 147, 251–266 Dinesen, Isak, see Blixen, Karen Dobson, A. P., 282, 289n44 Dolan, Anne, 225, 229n35 Dominica, 22, 147, 150, 156 Donoghue, John, 75, 76, 94n1 Douglas, Aileen, 115 Doyle, David Noel, 77, 95n13 Doyle, Laurence O’Connor, 27 Doyle, Mark, 172, 209n3 Draper, Nicholas, 155, 166n66 Dublin, 2, 24, 40, 46, 78, 81, 85, 104, 108, 109, 173, 178, 186n6, 187n14, 217, 218, 224, 225, 227, 234, 241, 253 Dublin Morning Post, 80, 81 Dufferin, Lady Hariot, 11, 273–286 Dufferin, Lord, 1, 275–277 Dufferin Fund, 11, 273–286 Dunlap, John, 84, 91 Dunlap, William, 91 Dutch Caribbean, 253 See also Demerara Dyer, Reginald, 214, 215 Dykstra, Darrell, 129, 139n47 E Easter Rising, 213, 217–220, 227n4 East India Company, 8, 11, 108, 132, 147, 150, 171, 178, 193, 198, 205, 209, 255

318 

INDEX

Easton, Fraser, 132, 133 Edgeworth, Maria, 7, 121–137 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 124, 138n22 Egypt, 106, 127, 129, 216 Elgin, Viceroy Lord, 282 Elizabeth I, 158, 159 Enlightenment, 7, 11, 107, 122, 124, 127–131, 179, 236 Enlightenment Orientalism, 126 Enniskillen, 5, 37–53 Essequibo, 11, 260, 261, 263 F Falconer, Delia, 70, 74n67 Famine, 4, 5, 19, 45, 49, 106, 108, 109, 152 Famine, Bengal, 108 Famine, Irish, 19, 109 Faulkner’s Evening Post, 77 Fay, Terence, 23, 33n30 Fenn, E. H., 282 Fenwick, Eliza, 178 Finch Hatton, Denys, 45, 48–50, 55n32 First World War, 37, 214, 216 Fitzgerald, Rosemary, 278, 288n20 Flinders, Matthew, 59, 61, 62, 69, 72n20 Florence Cole, 39 Florence Court, 37–39, 41, 44, 46, 49 Forbes, Geraldine, 279, 288n24 Foster, Roy, 5 Foucault, Michel, 274 France, 10, 46, 47, 127, 130, 148, 154, 235–239, 246, 251, 252, 255, 261, 263, 269n29, 284 Franklin, Benjamin (American), 91, 92 Franklin, Benjamin (surgeon), 280 Fraser, Bishop William, 23–25 Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 77 Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), 82

French, Patrick, 222, 228n26 French Revolution, 2, 10, 117, 152, 215, 236 G Gamble, John, 148, 164n34 Gandhi, 9, 213, 215, 217, 222–226 General Evening Post, 90 Gilbert, Humphrey, 158 Gladwin, Francis, 115 Goldberg, Vicki, 205 Gonne, Maud, 223 Goodman, Kevis, 70, 74n69 Gourley Shanty Riot, 29 Gray, Ernest, 191, 194–197, 199, 204, 206–208, 210n10 Nikkal Seyn, 194, 196 Greg, Thomas, 150, 155, 156 Griffith, Arthur, 216, 225 Grimshaw, William, 146, 163n22 H Haiti, 234, 246, 251 Haitian Revolution, 10, 234 Halifax Catholic, 28, 29 Halifax-Irish, 18–21, 23, 24, 26–30 Hall, Catherine, 145, 155, 159, 160, 166n66 Hamilton, Charles, 150 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 150 Hamiltons (of Killyleagh), 287n11 Handler, Jerome, 76, 99n113 Hannah, Donald, 51 Harrison, A. T., 160 Harvey, D. C., 21, 30n2 Hassan, Narin, 281, 289n33 Hastings, Warren, 178, 204 Henderson, Andrew, 65, 69 Herbert, Christopher, 187n13, 202, 203, 211n41 Hoffman, Michael, 76, 94n4

 INDEX 

Hoggan, Frances, 277 Holland, 148, 154, 253, 261, 263, 271n75 Home Rule, Indian, 217 Home Rule, Irish, 46, 53 Hoonhout, Bram, 260 Howe, Joseph, 26–30, 32n15 Howe, Stephen, 3, 12n8, 267n10 Hughes, Robert, 59, 67, 69, 70, 72n11 Hunter, John, 61, 62, 69 Hunter, Sarah, 11 Huxley, Elspeth, 5, 37, 42, 43, 52 I Ilbert Bill, 283, 290n47 Indentured servants, 76, 78–80, 83, 85, 88–90, 92, 93, 94n7, 94n11, 97n51, 99n113 India Adjobimey, 8 Indian Mutiny, 160, 185n1 Nayar, 9 O’Malley, 9 Roberts, 205 women in, 275, 277, 283–286 Indian independence, 10, 222, 223, 225, 226 Indian Medical Service, 280, 282 Irish Catholics, 5, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24–26, 30, 61, 179, 234 Irish convicts, 6, 58–62, 64, 65, 68, 69 Italy, 284 J Jackson, Alvin, 2, 12n4, 12n5, 19, 31n10, 161, 168n96 Jamaica, 22, 146, 147, 149, 235, 239, 256 John Davis White Collection, 173

319

Johnston[e], Charles, 7, 103–118 Jones, James, 22 Jordan, Don, 76 Joy, Henry, 145, 151, 153, 162n14 K Kavanagh, Laurence, 26 Kaye, John William, 193, 194, 197, 210n23 Keane, Michael, 254 Kelly, Charles, 191, 194, 198, 200, 204 Kelly, James, 77 Keneally, Thomas, 69, 74n62 Kenny, Edward, 21 Kenny, John, 61, 72n17 Kenny, Kevin, 3, 12n6 Kenya, 5, 37, 41, 43, 46, 50–53 Kerrigan, John, 66, 73n48 Kiernan, Thomas J., 226 King, Philip Gidley, 61, 62 Kittredge, George, 278 Kolkata, see Calcutta Kumar, Anil, 287n5 L Lal, Maneesha, 275, 287n10, 288n15 Lalor, James Fintan, 219–221 Lamb, Jonathan, 57, 63–66, 71n3, 73n32 Lane, Ralph, 158 Lang, Seán, 275, 283, 290n47 Lawrence, Henry, 195 Lawrenson, Sonja, 7, 11 Le Marchant, John Gaspard, 28 Leerssen, Joep, 122, 137n7 Lennon, Joseph, 7, 121, 122, 126, 131, 137n5 Lester, Alan, 203, 211n52, 266n4, 287n2 Linlithgow, Lord, 223

320 

INDEX

Lloyd, David, 174, 187n16 Loughnan, John, 23, 24 Louverture, Toussaint, 237, 244 Lowry, Donal, 46 Lucan, Lord, 222 Lucian, 116, 117 Ludlow, Peter, 5, 34n45 Lugard, Lord, 38 Lyton, Lord and Lady, 280 M Macartney, Lord, 157 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 145, 154, 159 Mack, Robert L., 127–130, 138n19, 139n46 Mackenzie, Henry, 178 MacKenzie, John M., 151, 166n49 Macready, Neville, 221 MacSwiney, Terence, 217, 218 Madras, 40, 281 Manly, Susan, 135, 140n88 Mannion, Patrick, 19 Marshall, P. J., 103 Martin, Amy E., 172, 210n4 Martin, John, 76 Mathew, Lieutenant-General, 254, 262, 266, 266n5 Mauritius, 147 McCabe, Thomas, 155 McCalmont, Hugh, 251, 260, 263–265 McClelland, Keith, 155, 166n66 McCormack, Mike, 75, 76, 80, 93, 94n2 McCormick, Ted, 76 McGowan, Mark G., 18, 19, 31n7, 31n9 McLaren, Jennifer, 11 McNeill, J. R., 68, 73n51 Melville, Herman, 63

Menon, V. P., 213 Migration, 4, 18–20, 76–78, 86, 105, 115, 118, 234, 260 Irish, 4, 19, 20, 77, 85, 86 Miller, Kerby, 77 Mitchell, W. J. T., 197, 210n22 Molyneux, William, 2, 13n10 Moniz, Amanda, 254, 266n6, 269n46 Montaigne, Michel de, 67 Montgomery Martin, Robert, 57–60, 67, 68, 71n1 Moore, James, 179 Moore, Thomas, 122, 131 Morgan, Hiram, 3, 12n7 Morning Chronicle, 86 Morris, Robert J., 172, 173 Mueller, Paul, 132, 139n61 Mukharji, Projit Bihari, 173, 187n13 Murphy, Sharon, 122 Murphy, Terrence, 32n26, 34n50, 35n60 Murray, Archbishop Daniel, 24 Mussolini, 223 Mysore, 281 N Nair, Janika, 278, 288n23 Nairobi, 5, 37–53 Nandy, Ashis, 219, 228n18 Nantes, 233–247 Napoleon, 129 National Library of Ireland (NLI), 138n22, 173, 182, 183, 187n17, 287n11 National Library of Scotland (NLS), 173, 187n13 Nayar, Pramod K., 9, 211n26 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 213, 215, 216, 227n7 Neilands, Colin, 172, 176, 186n6, 186n9, 187n15

 INDEX 

Newbolt, Henry, 191, 207 Newfoundland, 19–22, 32n16 New-Hampshire Gazette, 90 New India, 217 Newman, Simon, 83, 91, 97n46, 97n58, 99n113 New South Wales, 6, 57, 147 New Zealand, 43, 147, 160 Nicholson, Alexander, 199 Nicholson, John, 9, 181, 189n44, 191–209 Nightingale, Florence, 275, 286, 287n9 Nkrumah, Kwame, 226 North, Michael, 38 Northbrooke, Lord and Lady, 280 Northern Whig, 160 Norwich Packet, 90 Nova Scotia, 17–30 Nugent, Major General George, 149 Nugent, Maria, see Skinner, Maria O O’Connell, Daniel, 3, 27 O’Donnell, Mary, 255, 269n29 O’Dwyer, Michael, 214, 215, 227n5 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona, 133 O’Leary, John, 192 O’Malley, Kate, 9, 229n36 O’Neill dynasty, 158 Orangeism, 174, 182 Orientalism, Irish, 7, 121–123, 126, 131, 137 See also Enlightenment Orientalism O’Rourke family, 10, 233–247 Owenson, Sydney, 122, 131 P Pande, Ishita, 274, 287n8 Park, Mungo, 148

321

Parker, Admiral, 256, 257 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 213 Patrick Joseph McCall collection, 173 Patten, Eve, 5 Pearse Street Library, Dublin, 173 Pearse, Patrick, 218, 220, 221 Pechey, Dr Edith, 277–279 Penal Laws, 61, 78 Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97n58 Pennsylvania Gazette, 81, 84–87, 89, 97n48, 97n58 Pennsylvania Journal, 81 Pennsylvania Packet, 81, 82, 84–87, 97n45, 97n48 Petty, William, 76 Philadelphia Directory, 87 Pinkerton, William, 144, 152, 155, 166n64 Pitt, William, 239 Pottinger, Sir Henry, 157 Powell, Martyn, 6 Power, Orla, 10, 254 Powys, Llewellyn, 5, 44, 45 Pratt, Charles, see Camden, Lord Presley, Elvis, 222 Protestant, 26 Protestant Ascendancy, 50, 77 Protestants, 18, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 40, 77, 114, 115, 181, 184, 188n42, 209n3 Punch, Terrence M., 19, 24, 32n24 Punjab, 195, 215, 216, 281 Q Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), 173, 186n3, 186n4, 187n17, 187n22 Quigley, Killian, 6, 73n40 Quintanilla, Mark, 254, 267n13, 267n14

322 

INDEX

R Raleigh, Walter, 158 Ramusack, Barbara, 281, 289n36 Reilly, Matthew C., 76, 99n113 Rhodesia, 5, 46 Richardson, Alan, 129, 131 Ripon, Marquis of, 280, 285 Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv, 7, 120n27, 275 Roberts, Frederick, 195, 205 Roberts, Lord, 40 Roberts, Neil, 68, 74n54 Robertson, Allen, 32n23 Roche family, 235, 238 Rodgers, Nini, 165n41, 247n2, 253, 267n11 Rodney, Admiral, 256 Rose, Sonya, 160 Rothschild, Emma, 10, 14n17 Rowan-Hamilton, Archibald, 276 Royal Irish Academy (RIA), 173 Rudd, Andrew, 180, 182, 188n30 S Saguaro, Shelley, 134, 135 Said, Edward, 7, 122, 137n6, 139n47 Saint-Domingue, 10, 233–247, 249n20 St. James’s Chronicle, 90 St. John Hart, E., 273, 286, 286n1 Salem Gazette, 90 Salinger, Sharon, 80, 82, 96n26 Salisbury, Marchioness of, 280, 285 Sampson, William, 91 Sarvakar, Vinayak Damodar, 10 Schlenther, Boyd, 114, 120n23 Scotland, 18, 22, 23, 90, 151, 175, 265 Scott, Sir Walter, 104, 119n3, 119n5 Scurvy, 57, 59, 63–65

Second World War, 2, 9, 49, 223, 227n4 Sen, Surya, 9 Sensibility, 7, 40, 53, 103–118, 118n2, 133, 178, 179 Sepoys, 8, 174–177, 180, 182, 185n1, 202, 203 Shepard, Christopher, 274 Sierra Leone, 147 Silvestri, Michael, 13n8, 14n15, 191, 207, 209n1, 221 Skinner, Cortlandt, 149, 151 Skinner, Maria, 149 Slavery, 6, 75, 154, 155, 236, 246, 253, 263, 264 Irish in America, 75–93 Smith, Adam, 7, 125, 131–134, 136, 138n30, 139n65 South Carolina Gazette, 86, 90 Spain, 115, 154, 237, 263 Spivak, Gayatri, 60, 72n9 Stack, Liam, 75 Strangford, Viscountess, 280 Streets, Heather, 192, 209n2 Sugar and sugar trade, 149, 233–235, 237, 238 Sweet, Rosemary, 145, 162n11 T Tahiti, 147 Tegart, Charles, 220 Temple-Blackwood, Frederick, 1, 276 Ten, Robert, 149 Tennent, James, 149, 150 Tennent, Sir James Emerson, 153 Tennent, William, 149 Tennyson, Alfred, 175 Tidrick, Kathryn, 194, 210n11 Tobin, Anne, 24 Tobin, James, 21, 24 Tobin, Michael, 30

 INDEX 

Toland, John, 136, 141n94 Tott, François Baron de, 127–130, 139n46 Trinidad, 22, 147 Trinity College Dublin, 104, 108, 173, 174, 220, 268n22 Trotter, Lionel, 191, 193–205, 208, 210n9, 210n13 Turkey, 123, 127 U Ulster, 5, 18, 31n6, 37, 46, 53, 153, 159, 184, 255, 276 Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 144, 151, 162n8 Ulsterman, 177, 181 Updike, John, 70, 74n65 V Van Diemen’s Land, 147 Vance, Michael, 18, 19, 31n7, 31n9 Victoria, Queen, 1, 17, 273, 276, 277, 279, 280, 286 Volunteer Evening Post, 77–85, 89 Volunteers Journal, 78, 86 W Wahrman, Dror, 118

323

Waldstreicher, David, 79, 91, 92, 95n20 Wales, 18, 40, 175, 280 Walsh, Bishop William, 25, 27, 34n48 Walsh, Michael, 76 Walsh, Robert, 81 Watkin Tench, 60 West Indies, 18, 21, 22, 146, 148, 149, 151, 154, 156, 234, 241 White, Francis, 87 White Linen Hall, 147–149 Williamson, John Vaughan, 191, 194, 196, 199, 200, 204, 210n8 Willingdon, Lord, 284 Wilson, Woodrow, 216 Wood, J. C., 161n3, 191, 194–197, 199–202, 204, 206–208 Wright, Jonathan Jeffrey, 7, 8, 163n24, 164n28, 166n59 Wright, Julia M., 13n8, 122, 133, 140n72, 179, 188n34 Y Young Irelanders, 174 Z Zachariah, Ben, 225 Zaghloul, Saad, 226 Zenana, 11, 278–280, 286