This chapter explores the high hopes for Irish commerce that were aroused by the American Revolution, and their complex interactions with British attempts to reform and consolidate the remnants of its mercantile empire following its American debacle. Irish campaigns for ‘free trade’ and ‘legislative independence’ were animated by the hope that the liberation of the Kingdom’s foreign trade would enable it to chart its own course in a more peaceful Europe. This vision clashed fundamentally with a rival, British reform agenda, embodied in William Pitt the Younger’s unsuccessful Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785, which balanced an extension of imperial trading privileges to Ireland with its closer integration into the British market. The rejection of Pitt’s proposals by the Irish parliament, after their heavy modification by British slaving and manufacturing interests, produced an unstable equilibrium, dominated by patronage and executive power, that was ripe for criticism by the more radical forces that would take up the fallen mantle of Irish ‘patriotism’ in the 1790s.

Chapter 5 recovers the peculiar significance of the Napoleonic Wars for the formation of nineteenth-century British orthodoxies concerning the government of Ireland’s rural interior. In the decade after 1801, Ireland's rising population and grain production became central to Irish, British and European debates over Irish government. The indispensability of Irish grain to the British war effort proved the glowing potential of a model of Union that rested on an agricultural Ireland supplying the needs of industrial Britain, and provided evidence for the resilience of the British Empire in the face of Napoleon's Continental System. Patriotic Irish objections to Ireland’s agrarian turn found an unlikely echo in the pages of an influential new journal of politics and political economy, The Edinburgh Review. Alongside the agrarian improver and travel writer Edward Wakefield, Robert Malthus advanced the radical claim that only a transformation of Irish land tenure and consumption habits, under the auspices of the Westminster parliament, could bring about the diffusion of British civilisation promised by the proponents of the Union.

Chapter 3 explores the consequences of the French Revolution's transformation of European politics through an Irish lens, linking the political thought of key Irish radicals to the emerging propaganda war between the rival empires of Britain and France. For Wolfe Tone and Arthur O’Connor, two key United Irish emissaries to France, French intervention in Irish politics presented an opportunity dismantle the Irish Kingdom’s sectarian property order and replace it with the peasant proprietorship being spread by French arms in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and northern Italy. Ireland’s poverty and instability was meanwhile held by a range of French and German observers to be a clear demonstration of the injustice and weakness of the British Empire, and the superiority of the French alternative. Following their defeat in 1798, key United Irish figures including O’Connor and William James MacNeven mounted powerful defences of Napoleonic empire. At least as far as its leaders were concerned, the 1798 rebellion was borne not of a radical repudiation of empire, but of an embrace of a French over a British variant.

Histories of Irish political thought in this period have adopted an overwhelmingly national focus. While they have frequently engaged with the transnational contexts, whether British, Atlantic or European, that have shaped traditions such as unionism, nationalism and republicanism, their ultimate purpose has been to better understand the principal actors in what remains an Irish story. 4 This focus on Irish national and confessional identities has tended to sideline other questions that we might usefully ask of texts produced in and around Ireland during this turbulent period. Where was Ireland located, by Irish and non-Irish contemporaries alike, within the broader political conjuncture of the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries? What can debates concerning Ireland can tell us about the evolution of British and European political thinking in the era of the American and French Revolutions, and of Britain’s rise to global commercial and colonial hegemony?

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

Chapter 6 traces the intellectual consequences of the unravelling of Ireland’s grain export boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For British political economists such as Malthus and James Ramsay McCulloch, the path towards Irish recovery could only lie through the assimilation of Ireland to what they took to be an English model of large-scale tenant farming and concentrated land ownership. For European thinkers, however, the parlous condition of the Irish countryside was proof not of Ireland’s divergence from, but its identity with, the monstrous and unsustainable condition of Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ social order. Their critiques were taken up in Britain by a new generation of liberal economists led by John Stuart Mill, and in Ireland by a group of Francophile nationalist intellectuals, Young Ireland. These thinkers re-cast the problem of Irish improvement anew, tying it not to the integration of Ireland into British or imperial markets, but on the creation of a stable class of peasant proprietors to match those that had been created in large parts of continental Europe through French, or French-inspired, land reforms.

A complex, triangular relationship existed between Ireland, Britain and France that structured eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over the vicissitudes of empire in Ireland. The significance of this relationship, I have suggested, was not reducible to the military threat France occasionally posed to British rule. It lay instead in the influence of Franco-British rivalry and emulation exerted over the political economy of empire, and in the manner this was interpreted by contemporaries in Ireland, Britain and Europe. The threat, and the example, of France inspired British and Irish efforts to reform and consolidate empire, alongside Irish attempts to escape from it. In Ireland, political thinkers across Europe saw not just a land of religious dissension and emergent ‘nationality’, but a vital case study in the workings of mercantile power politics, and in the consequences of the persistence of aristocratic inequality in an era of commercial growth and agrarian transformation. The government of Ireland was not, therefore, a narrowly Irish problem. It lay at a vital intersection between contemporary understandings of commerce, empire and international order.

Arguments for the 1801 Union of the British and Irish parliaments drew on the intellectual resources of the later British Enlightenment to implement a new system of economic and political regulation of Irish society. Proponents of Union articulated a renewed belief in the ability of commercial integration with Britain to act as a solvent to the confessional and ethnic tensions laid bare by the United Irish rising and attempted French invasions of 1796-8. The 'diffusion' of British capital to Ireland would give Ireland’s shattered Anglican aristocracy the opportunity to re-establish its political legitimacy, while forcing them to share power with a rising Catholic mercantile and professional class. The case for Union was interpreted in a broad European context of state competition and reform. The leading continental defender of British policy, the Prussian diplomat and publicist Friedrich von Gentz, hailed the legislative unification of the British Empire as a model for a necessary consolidation of the European states-system in the wake of French revolutionary violence.

Introduction

Since the 1990s, the concept of ‘globalization’ – usually understood as the increasing economic, social and cultural integration of world regions – has become a leitmotif for popular and scholarly narratives of global social change in modernity (Eckel, 2018). The history of global economic integration is commonly narrated as forming two great ‘waves’ in the later nineteenth and later twentieth centuries, interspersed by an era of ‘deglobalization’ characterized by two world wars and the formation of autarchic economic ‘blocs’ (Chase-Dunn et al, 2000; Bordo et al, 2003). Theorists working in a Marxian worldsystems tradition have similarly associated two eras of stable capitalist globalization with the presence of strong economic and military hegemons: the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth (Arrighi, 1994).

This model of globalization as a homogeneous absolute – something that is either present or absent, rising or falling – obscures more than it reveals. As Stefan Link has argued, arguments that claim similarities between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ era of globalization – and thereby imply that our present ‘deglobalization’ will terminate in a bloody conflagration on the scale of World War II – understate the extent to which ‘different periods of globalization have relied on distinctive political and institutional architectures’. What is required is a more granular account of the ‘politics of globalization’ – one capable of appreciating the variety of ‘structured engagement’ between polities of all kinds and ‘foreign trade and capital’ (Link, 2018: 347).

States and markets, George Lawson tells us in the present volume, have been mutually constituted. The broadening and deepening of global economic integration has been enabled by state action, just as states have been empowered – and constrained – by the expansion of markets to a global scale. Drawing on Chapter 5 by Julian Go, we might further observe that the structure of the global political field was transformed by decolonization after the mid-twentieth century. The ‘reglobalization’ of the world economy after 1945 occurred in connection with the elaboration of an international, as opposed to an inter-imperial, understanding of a legitimate global order. Taking the mutual constitution of states and markets seriously must mean, therefore, that we examine the interactions between the basic structures of the international system and those of the global economy.