Science Colonialism And Ireland

This pioneering and accessible study employs a theoretical framework for an understanding of the role of science in Ireland, refuting the assumption that science was an instrument of colonialism.

This brilliantly innovative synthesis of narrative and analysis illuminates how British colonialism shaped the formation and political cultures of what became Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I provides a somber and compelling comparative audit of the scale of recent conflict in Northern Ireland and explains its historical origins. Contrasting colonial and sectarianized accounts of modern Irish history, Brendan O'Leary shows that a judicious meld of these perspectives provides a properly political account of direct and indirect rule, and of administrative and settler colonialism. The British state incorporated Ulster and Ireland into a deeply unequal Union after four re-conquests over two centuries had successively defeated the Ulster Gaels, the Catholic Confederates, the Jacobites, and the United Irishmen—and their respective European allies. Founded as a union of Protestants in Great Britain and Ireland, rather than of the British and the Irish nations, the colonial and sectarian Union was infamously punctured in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. The subsequent mobilization of Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists, and two republican insurrections amid the cataclysm and aftermath of World War I, brought the now partly democratized Union to an unexpected end, aside from a shrunken rump of British authority, baptized as Northern Ireland. Home rule would be granted to those who had claimed not to want it, after having been refused to those who had ardently sought it. The failure of possible federal reconstructions of the Union and the fateful partition of the island are explained, and systematically compared with other British colonial partitions. Northern Ireland was invented, in accordance with British interests, to resolve the 'hereditary animosities' between the descendants of Irish natives and British settlers in Ireland. In the long run, the invention proved unfit for purpose. Indispensable for explaining contemporary institutions and mentalities, this volume clears the path for the intelligent reader determined to understand contemporary Northern Ireland.

Examines how contemporary relations between indigenous and Western nations are shaped by the dynamics of power, the politics of property, and the apologetics of law.

A major study of the cultural origins of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism in general.

Volume 3. After the ratification of the Good Friday Agreement in two referendums, for the first time in history political institutions throughout the island of Ireland rested upon the freely given assent of majorities of all the peoples on the island.0It marked, it was hoped, the full political decolonization of Ireland. Whether Ireland would reunify, or whether Northern Ireland remain in union with Great Britain now rested on the will of the people of Ireland, North and South respectively. This volume explains the making of this settlement, and the many failed initiatives that preceded it under British direct rule. Long-term structural and institutional changes and short-term political maneuvers are given their due in this lively but comprehensive assessment. The Anglo-Irish Agreement is identified as the political tipping point, itself partially the outcome of the hunger strikes of 1980-81 that had prevented the criminalization of republicanism. Until 2016 the prudent judgment seemed to be that the Good Friday Agreement had broadly worked, eventually enabling Sinn Fein and the DUP to share power, with intermittent attention from the sovereign governments. Cultural Catholics appeared content if not in love with the Union with Great Britain. But the decision to hold a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union has collaterally damaged and destabilized the Good Friday Agreement. That, in turn, has shaped the UK's tortured exit negotiations with the European Union.

In the late sixteenth century, the English started expanding westward, establishing control over parts of neighboring Ireland as well as exploring and later colonizing distant North America. Audrey Horning deftly examines the relationship between British colonization efforts in both locales, depicting their close interconnection as fields for colonial experimentation. Focusing on the Ulster Plantation in the north of Ireland and the Jamestown settlement in the Chesapeake, she challenges the notion that Ireland merely served as a testing ground for British expansion into North America. Horning instead analyzes the people, financial networks, and information that circulated through and connected English plantations on either side of the Atlantic. In addition, Horning explores English colonialism from the perspective of the Gaelic Irish and Algonquian societies and traces the political and material impact of contact. The focus on the material culture of both locales yields a textured specificity to the complex relationships between natives and newcomers while exposing the lack of a determining vision or organization in early English colonial projects.

Eight essays examine the experience and role of the Irish in the British empire during the 19th and 20th centuries, based on the understanding that, Ireland being less integrated, it differed from that of the other Celtic nations submerged in the United Kingdom. They discuss film, sport, India, the Irish military tradition, Irish unionists, Empire Day in Ireland from 1896 to 1962, Northern Irish businessmen, and Ulster resistance and loyalist rebellion. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book examines the native Irish experience of conquest and colonisation in Ulster in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Central to this argument is that the Ulster plantation bears more comparisons to European expansion throughout the Atlantic than (as some historians have argued) the early-modern state’s consolidation of control over its peripheral territories. Farrell also demonstrates that plantation Ulster did not see any significant attempt to transform the Irish culturally or economically in these years, notwithstanding the rhetoric of a ‘civilising mission’. Challenging recent scholarship on the integrative aspects of plantation society, he argues that this emphasis obscures the antagonism which characterised relations between native and newcomer until the eve of the 1641 rising. This book is of interest not only to students of early-modern Ireland but is also a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic history and indeed colonial studies in general.