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23 - Ireland and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century
- from Part V - The Irish Abroad
- Edited by James Kelly, Dublin City University
- General editor Thomas Bartlett, University of Aberdeen
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- The Cambridge History of Ireland
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Servants of empire: the Irish in the Punjab, 1881–1921. By PATRICK O'LEARY. Pp 256. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2011. £65.
- Barry Crosbie
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- Irish Historical Studies / Volume 38 / Issue 151 / May 2013
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- 04 February 2015, pp. 539-540
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- May 2013
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Bibliography
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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6 - From Company to Crown rule
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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Summary
Introduction
From the late 1840s onward, a greater number of Irish Catholics began entering imperial service in India, due in part to the introduction of open-competitive examination in place of the old system of patronage. This influx served to balance the numbers of Irish Protestants who had passed through to India via Trinity College Dublin (TCD), the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The large number of successful Irish candidates who obtained employment in India at this time was aided considerably by Irish universities and colleges (including the non-denominational Queen’s College in Belfast, Cork and Galway established in 1845) who were quick to seize this opportunity, and subsequently tailored their curriculum to the specific requirements of the entrance examinations. In part, this drive mirrored a desire among the rising Irish middle classes to obtain careers in the Empire, but it also reflected a strong interest within Irish universities and colleges at the time to promote learning in oriental languages, Indian history, geography, zoology and the natural sciences. In turn, increased Irish numbers in the civil and medical services (including the subordinate colonial services) gave rise to various Irish knowledge communities and more sophisticated networks of intellectual exchange that contributed to the dissemination of antiquarian, ethnographical and medical knowledge throughout the British Empire.
The Indian Medical Service (IMS) was one of the principal scientific agencies in India in which many educated Irish people sought employment during the latter phase of the Company period and under Crown rule. Company surgeons and their successors provided a large proportion of the botanists, geologists and surveyors who travelled to India. It was partly because of their wide-ranging scientific interests that medical personnel played such a vital role in the European investigation of the Indian environment (including its topography, climate and disease). In comparison to other areas of scientific enquiry, medicine directly engaged with the social, cultural and material lives of Indian people. While recent studies of the history of colonial medicine in India have concentrated heavily on individual subject areas such as issues of tropical medicine, virtually none of these works have taken into account the wider importance of the medical traditions and practices in regions such as Scotland and Ireland, two of the principal areas of the British Empire where Company surgeons and colonial scientists in India had been born and educated.
Contents
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Abbreviations
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2 - The business of empire
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Summary
Introduction
By the early eighteenth century the British Empire was already proving to be a great resource for Irish commerce and military entrepreneurs in the Atlantic world – an important economic platform that was used to foster and expand Irish mercantile activity in the burgeoning East Indian trade later in the century. This chapter examines a series of business connections and commercial exchanges between Ireland and India that have so far been elided by historians of empire as well as being neglected within the broader historiography of Ireland. The chapter begins by examining Irish involvement in colonial trade in the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth century before demonstrating how such links expanded eastward in tandem with a rapidly growing Empire. Irish involvement in colonial trade and commerce in the East was ultimately bound up in the evolving structure and shifting responsibilities of the East India Company over the eighteenth century, a critical period which witnessed a fundamental transition in the Company’s organisational structure from trading power to imperial authority on the subcontinent. The gradual transformation of the Company’s administrative role and function in India was in part reflected in the nature of much Irish participation at a commercial and business level.
Initially, Irish merchants – much like their English, Scottish and Welsh counterparts – were subject to the same restrictions imposed upon private trade by the laws protecting the Company’s monopoly and exclusive right to trade in the East. This was mirrored in the relative number of private traders and free merchants from Ireland who attempted to establish legitimate business interests in the Indian Ocean region in defiance of the Company. However, as an increasingly militarised East India Company began extending the boundaries of its political sovereignty in the second half of the eighteenth century, acquiring more Indian territory and in doing so developing more sophisticated commercial links both inland and throughout the Indian Ocean region, it began drawing on Irish resources, personnel and experience as an important means of facilitating its new administrative and commercial responsibilities. As the Company evolved into a more complex organisation during this period, it was brought into increased contact with a whole host of communities outside of metropolitan London and centres of trade on the Indian subcontinent, particularly in Ireland where it became reliant upon a series of representative agents or business houses in Cork and Limerick to act on its behalf and to secure its particular commercial interests in a region. These agencies were established primarily because of the strategic and commercial significance of Ireland in facilitating long-distance trade, but also because of the need to protect the Company’s interests during a period of almost constant international conflict.
Irish Imperial Networks
- Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India
- Barry Crosbie
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This is an innovative study of the role of Ireland and the Irish in the British Empire which examines the intellectual, cultural and political interconnections between nineteenth-century British imperial, Irish and Indian history. Barry Crosbie argues that Ireland was a crucial sub-imperial centre for the British Empire in South Asia that provided a significant amount of the manpower, intellectual and financial capital that fuelled Britain's drive into Asia from the 1750s onwards. He shows the important role that Ireland played as a centre for recruitment for the armed forces, the medical and civil services and the many missionary and scientific bodies established in South Asia during the colonial period. In doing so, the book also reveals the important part that the Empire played in shaping Ireland's domestic institutions, family life and identity in equally significant ways.
3 - British overseas expansion, Ireland and the sinews of colonial power
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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Introduction
Since the 1780s, agrarian inequality had become a common feature of both Irish and Indian life. Lord Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 had served to entrench the power of zamindars or landlords in India against both the state and the peasantry in the expectation of securing fixed revenue to fund Britain’s imperial wars. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic War years witnessed a highpoint for landlords and the Ascendancy interest in Ireland too. Having long benefited from access to British and colonial markets in North America and the Caribbean, they consolidated their power and wealth in Ireland by the mid eighteenth century, imposing greater financial regulations on their estates at the expense of peasants and poor tenant farmers alike. Irish Catholics, on the other hand, long restricted from owning land, obtaining commissions in the army or entering the professions, and suffering from high wartime taxation, escalating food prices and a rapid growth of population, were increasingly driven into the hands of East India Company recruiting sergeants or ‘crimps’. As Britain expanded its commercial influence and political authority in South Asia during this period, Ireland came to be seen by contemporaries as being an integral part of this drive. This chapter examines the role of what I term the ‘subaltern Irish’ or Irish people of humble origins from poor or modest backgrounds who seized the opportunities afforded to them through imperial migration and made careers in the various British military and commercial ventures in India during this critical period when the sinews of colonial power in the East were strengthening.
From the mid 1750s poor Catholic families in the south and west of the country were targeted by old East Indian ‘hands’ (many with Irish connections) who were contracted by the Company to tap into the rich reserves of personnel at hand to shore up depleted Company regiments, which at the time were being decimated by exposure to the tropical Indian climate, disease and warfare. While several historians have ventured to explore the Irish in India, insufficient attention has been paid to the profound economic, demographic and political shifts within both Ireland and the Empire during the late eighteenth century that ultimately facilitated Irish imperial service. Rather than focusing narrowly on familiar representations of the Irish soldier abroad, this chapter attempts to locate Irish military service in India more robustly within contemporary imperial ideology and changing patterns of economic and political thought in Britain and Ireland. By foregrounding the centrality of Ireland to British imperial expansion in the East, this chapter aims to deepen an understanding of the multifaceted and essentially pluralised nature of the ‘British’ imperial experience by embedding the experiences of Irish people in the broader context of the shifting nature of the East India Company’s role in India. From this starting point, the chapter examines changing understandings of the value and importance of the Irish to Britain’s imperial project in nineteenth-century India, focusing on specific points in time when changes to that relationship became apparent.
1 - Introduction
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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The narrow, atavistic and reactionary section of the Ireland of to-day will, doubtless, sneer at us ‘Shawneens’ and ‘West-Britons,’ but at the time we regarded ourselves as Irish Europeans, cosmopolitans and citizens of the world, who hoped to find in a liberalised and democratised British empire, in which Ireland occupied her worthy place, a metier in which we could live satisfying lives, and perhaps contribute a share, great or small, to human progress and human civilisation.
Patrick Heffernan, a former Irish member of the Indian Medical Service, made these comments in 1958, almost ten years after the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, had unexpectedly announced to a Canadian reporter that Ireland was to leave the British Commonwealth of Nations and become a republic. Heffernan, who had been brought up on the outskirts of Cahir, Co. Tipperary and had received a Catholic education in Cork and Dublin, held the conviction that Ireland and Irish people (irrespective of religious creed or class) had played significant roles in the wider British imperial system. At a time when Éamon de Valera and the Fianna Fáil party had just returned to power following the Irish General Election in 1957, Heffernan’s comments had a particular resonance. His sense that an Irish Catholic background was not incompatible with British imperial service, and therefore did not diminish his Irishness, was not uncommon, even during the heyday of Irish nationalism in the 1950s.
Heffernan’s ‘cosmopolitans and citizens of the world’ emerged from the distinct cultural, economic and political conditions of nineteenth-century Ireland, yet were joined together with their English, Scottish and Welsh colleagues within the British Empire, a legitimate arena for work where they could improve the material condition of their own lives as well as contribute to the welfare of others. As one astute Indian civil servant, A. G. Haggard, a Sub-Divisional Officer in Buxar, commented in the late nineteenth century:
The Irish members [of the Indian Civil Service] have mostly known each other in Ireland, the Scotch in Scotland and the English in England. During their long preparatory studies and their subsequent training the whole body have met (Irish, English and Scotch) time after time; they have formed intimacies and friendships; have worked, resided, and travelled together; have been united in a common end and occupation; have given material assistance and shared in mutual rivalries.
Like Heffernan, Haggard emphasises shared collaborative experiences, popular beliefs and cultural mentalities which have nevertheless become somewhat obscured within Irish historiography over the past fifty years.
7 - Imperial crisis and the age of reform
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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Introduction
The historiographies of Ireland and India have long recognised parallels between the countries’ shared imperial pasts and their struggle for political freedom and national self-determination. As a consequence, scholars have been able to make significant progress in situating this nexus by exploring links between contemporary Irish and Indian elites and how Irish precedents influenced British policy-making in India and vice versa. While scholars have begun to explore the mutual calls for national self-determination and political freedom articulated by contemporary Irish and Indian elites, fewer studies have focused upon the complex social and cultural networks that bound both dependencies together and through which their development was shaped. In part, the paucity of studies in this area reflects much of the wider contemporary writing on Ireland and empire itself. For the most part, debates surrounding the nature of Ireland’s historical relationship with the Empire have remained largely centred upon the character of its constitutional and political ties with Britain.
This chapter examines how during the late nineteenth century increased economic decline both in the agricultural south and west of Ireland (though not in the north, where Ulster experienced rapid economic growth during the same period) and in India provided the impetus for a new generation of nationalists, philanthropists and humanitarians to move their ideologies beyond local predicaments and into the wider international domain. The rigorous imposition of free trade (from 1801 in Ireland and from 1834 in India) brought about a sharp decline in the demand for Irish and Indian commodities in British and European markets and with it increasing calls from early economic nationalists for the introduction of protective measures for home produce in both countries. Within this context, this chapter examines how an elaborate web of contact, dialogue and exchange was fashioned between the nationalist spokesmen of nineteenth-century Ireland and India who, from the 1870s, gradually became aware of each other’s calls for economic reform and national self-determination. Related to these concerns were the comparable moral and political issues raised in both countries at the time over the ownership of land and the administration of famine relief, both of which were used by these networks as tools in imperial politicking. Crucially, it was the position of certain Irish individuals within the power structures of the Empire itself and particularly within the echelons of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) that provided much of the initial impetus for these ideologies to spread and gather momentum.
Index
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8 - Conclusion
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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In its examination of the colonial connections that bound nineteenth-century Ireland and India together, this book has highlighted the central role played by Ireland and Irish people in the construction and expansion of the ‘Second British Empire’ during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. As an alternative to the existing historiography on the Irish diaspora that focuses almost exclusively on Irish settlement and migration to North America and Australasia, it has stressed the ubiquitous influence and distinctiveness of Irish presence in constructing and maintaining almost two centuries of British colonial rule in South Asia. Moreover, the persistence of Irish networks in India throughout this period has demonstrated just how important both Ireland and India were in the discourses and practice of modern British empire-building and ‘imperial globalisation’. By examining patterns of Irish migration, social communication and exchange, this study has brought into sharper focus the different coexisting layers of identities of Irish men and women during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a recognition of which challenges the dialectical formula that so often positions Irish nationalism and unionism as being irreconcilable under the Union. Once divided by religious and political considerations in Ireland, domiciled Irish men and women in India (Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians from varying social classes and economic backgrounds) were drawn together in a common imperial bond – a long-standing and multifaceted association that had important implications for the development of British and Irish identity alike.
In describing the multiplicity of Irish connections within the context of Britain’s Indian Empire, the book demonstrates how ‘imperial networks’ (and their resultant relationships) were always subject to constant change and flux – responding to both local and international events – and how they were used by their contemporaries (settlers, migrants and indigenous agents) as mechanisms for the exchange of a whole set of ideas, practices and goods during the colonial era. Moreover, approaches to the study of Ireland’s imperial past that facilitate such connections allow us to move beyond the old ‘coloniser–colonised’ debate to address the issue of whether Ireland or the varieties of Irishness of its imperial servants and settlers made a specific difference to the experience of empire. By focusing upon a cross-section of nineteenth-century Irish society in India (Irish elites and the less well connected alike) – and their resultant interconnections – we can reveal much about Ireland’s multidirectional involvement in the nineteenth-century British Empire.
Frontmatter
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Preface
- Barry Crosbie, Universidade de Macau
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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.
4 - From trade to dominion
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Following the conquest of Bengal and the assumption of the land-revenue management from the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, in 1765, the East India Company’s position as a trading organisation (albeit an increasingly militarised one) was fundamentally transformed. Hereafter, the Company began to recognise its shifting position as a South Asian territorial power. For the most part, political control in late-eighteenth-century India rested upon the Company’s ability to establish a comprehensive network of surveillance and control over the Indian countryside that was based on reports from well-informed Company residents and news-writers based at Indian courts, and intelligence units and spies attached to the Company’s army. Complementing this information network was the work of Company-appointed surveyors, botanists, zoologists and geologists whose task it was to amass a dense archive of geographical and scientific data in an attempt to provide the nascent colonial power with sufficient knowledge about the new lands they had conquered. Only through their efforts could the Company truly grasp the complexity of the Indian interior, and hence exert control over its manufactures, population, land and agriculture.
Central to achieving this aim was the role of nineteenth-century Irish scientific institutions and personnel in the process of colonial information-gathering, particularly in relation to surveying and geological exploration in India. Irish people, of both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds, played a critical role in transferring and adapting systems of knowledge and practice from Ireland’s ‘laboratory’ of colonial science to India. From the mid eighteenth century, scientific endeavour in Ireland had been closely bound up with the Irish Ascendancy and landed interest and was directly linked to contemporary British utilitarian ideas of good governance, national security and colonial expansion. In a reflection of the colonial relationship that existed between Irish Protestants and Catholics (under penal law Irish Catholics were barred from holding commissions in the government and army or owning land), many Irish scientific institutions were designed with a view to enhancing the power of landowners by facilitating the augmentation of tax revenues and the exploitation of Ireland’s natural resources. This was a process that involved a high level of collaboration between the military and various different strands of Irish society, albeit in very unequal ways. By the mid nineteenth century, Ireland was arguably the first (and perhaps oldest) of Britain’s ‘colonies’ to have been subjected to a thoroughly comprehensive scientific examination; its towns, villages, hills and mountains had all been surveyed and mapped, its minerals and natural resources identified and put to use in the name of industry and ‘improvement’. At the same time, through mass imperial migration, Ireland and Irish people (both Catholic and Protestant) were at the forefront of exporting these systems of scientific knowledge and practice to India where they were adopted and used, albeit in highly modified forms.
Acknowledgements
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5 - Religion, civil society and imperial authority
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Summary
Introduction
As the Whigs ascended to power and the battle for parliamentary reform raged in Britain during the 1830s and 1840s, the British Empire began to yield further opportunities for the rising Catholic Irish middle classes eager to join their more established Protestant counterparts in imperial service. Under the Whig government, Irish Catholic seminaries and religious institutions began to supply numerous Vicars Apostolic and clergy to attend to the spiritual requirements of the Empire’s ever-expanding Irish migrant communities. While Irish Protestants already figured prominently within the British Empire’s expanding network of missionary societies and church activity in Africa, Asia and the Pacific by the 1830s, Irish Catholic prelates, too, became deeply embedded in debates concerning religion, civil society and the exercise of imperial authority, especially in India. This chapter examines how during the second half of the nineteenth century, several Irish religious networks came to dominate the administration of Catholic communities in the south and west of India. It argues that following the establishment of a number of Catholic religious institutions in Ireland after Catholic emancipation in 1829, such as All Hallows College, Dublin, whose aim it was to supply the British Empire and North America with priests for its growing number of Catholic migrants, the particular strain of Catholicism practised in Ireland came to exert a notable degree of influence upon many aspects of colonial life in India. In the vicariate of Madras, for example, Propaganda Fide, the official Roman Catholic body responsible for overseeing Catholic missionary work overseas, appointed five successive Irish titular bishops, giving rise to a prolonged period of Irish dominance in the Madras vicariate spanning almost eighty years. Although given a mandate to administer the spiritual requirements of their Indian flock, existing communities of Indian Catholics did not always endorse the notions and practices translated to India by these developing Irish Catholic religious networks, particularly when in relation to the contentious issue of caste.Yet, this chapter also explores how Irish religious interaction with Indian society was not always negative. In addition to the close personal connections forged between Irish Catholic soldiers, military chaplains and Vicars Apostolic in the Presidency Towns of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, Irish prelates set about introducing reconstructed parochial systems in India – modelled along Irish lines – through the building of churches and other ecclesiastical structures, and promoted the education of (high- and low-caste) Indian and Eurasian children. Within these religious networks, Irish Catholic prelates accumulated substantial bases of revenue from soldiers’ wills, donations and monetary contributions. In turn, remittances conveyed through these religious networks also played important roles in reconstructing Catholic infrastructure in Ireland in the wake of emancipation through the education of siblings and building of churches, schools, hospitals and other ecclesiastical structures. Given the tight cultural bonds that existed between Irish Catholic soldiers and Irish military chaplains stationed within the walls of British garrison towns in India, invariably news, ideas and intelligence spread through these religious networks in equal measure.By the mid nineteenth century, the development of a new language of national politics had given rise to a sense of commonality between sections of the Irish Catholic and Indian Hindu populace. Around this time, the rudiments of a Catholic revolutionary nationalism began to be articulated by members of the Fenian movement in Ireland and North America, who were encouraged by British problems in the Crimea and especially in India during the 1850s. News of suspicion among East India Company officials toward its Irish soldiers’ Roman Catholicism quickly spread from military cantonments in Agra or Madras to Cork and Dublin where an expanding imperial press system brought regular news of the Empire onto the printed pages of the Cork Examiner and the Freeman’s Journal. During the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholic soldiers in India, often supported by influential Irish figures within the Indian Catholic Church’s hierarchy, played key roles in debates over the exercise of imperial authority and provided an important reference point for Britain in its attempts to understand and make sense of the indigenous cultures of South Asia.
Glossary
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IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870*
- BARRY CROSBIE
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- The Historical Journal / Volume 52 / Issue 4 / December 2009
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- 06 November 2009, pp. 963-987
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This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.