Preface

This book examines the historical interconnections between Ireland, India and the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a greatly overlooked subject in the scholarship of modern Irish, British imperial and South Asian history. Specifically, the book focuses on the role of imperial networks and how Irish people in India set about circulating their own ideas, practices and material goods across the Empire during the colonial period. Indeed, the geographical connections and networks linking different parts of the world traced in this book reflect my own personal journey and career path to date that has taken me back and forth across what was once the British Empire.

My earliest encounter with the Empire and its long, complex history began as a child growing up in County Wexford, an important site of Cromwellian conquest and English colonisation in Ireland during the late 1640s. It was in Wexford, where my parents’ house lay in close proximity to the walled, mysterious environs of ‘Cromwell’s Fort’, that I first became interested in the idea of colonialism and in developing an understanding of how Ireland’s past has been shaped by it. Later, as a student of history my studies took me to Cambridge, for so long one of the great intellectual centres of the Empire, where I learned to appreciate how colonial histories were seldom isolated, individual histories, but were in fact closely interwoven narratives whose common themes were replicated across different parts of the globe.