Liberalism and Colonialism

In his essay on William Temple, Macaulay praised Oliver Cromwell’s harsh policy in Ireland, which would have become beneficial had it been continued. This included the justifiable emigration of English people to the island. In probably his most infamous passage, he then continued and claimed:

This passage has often been quoted as a particularly salient example of the murderous intentions of European colonialism. Regarding studies of Macaulay specifically, it has led, unsurprisingly, to his condemnation as a representative of unapologetic European extirpation of indigenous populations. For Robert Sullivan, this passage testifies to the influence of Macaulay’s ethics of civilizing and imperial slaughter, an influence still noticeable in the mid-twentieth century. According to Catherine Hall, Macaulay disowned racial distinctions when opposing slavery, but otherwise, he applied racial, ethnic, class, and gender hierarchies in his discussions of the British Empire in general, and Ireland in particular, in an attempt to justify his view of European, and specifically British, superiority. Sullivan correctly notes that Macaulay was a cultural chauvinist, not a racist. Yet he also emphasizes that Macaulay accepted the notion of cultural superiority of one race over another, which justified imperial violence, particularly against the Irish and the Indians.