IN her recently published diary of her first visit to Africa, in 1929, Margery Perham reported a conversation with seven degree-course men at the newly established college at Fort Hare. When, inevitably, talk got round to conditions in South Africa, they asked ‘terrible questions’. ‘Can England do nothing then?’ ‘But South Africa is the possession of England.’ ‘But the King! He is King of South Africa. What does he think? Will he do nothing?’

Colonies— an Attempt at a Typology

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the political, military, religious, social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and environmental history of early modern Ireland and situates these discussions in global and comparative contexts. The opening chapters focus on 'Politics' and 'Religion and War' and offer a chronological narrative, informed by the re-interpretation of new archives. The remaining chapters are more thematic, with chapters on 'Society', 'Culture', and 'Economy and Environment', and often respond to wider methodologies and historiographical debates. Interdisciplinary cross-pollination - between, on the one hand, history and, on the other, disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, geography, computer science, literature and gender and environmental studies - informs many of the chapters. The volume offers a range of new departures by a generation of scholars who explain in a refreshing and accessible manner how and why people acted as they did in the transformative and tumultuous years between 1550 and 1730.

The Cambridge History of Ireland

It has long become commonplace to observe that the act of union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament and established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, has since its enactment exerted a formative influence on Irish history and remained the dominant issue in Anglo-Irish relations. In view of this, it is surprising that so little notice has been afforded the development of unionist sentiment in Britain and Ireland in the century and a half to 1800, and that the origins of and background to the union have received such cursory attention. There is, of course, an obvious historical and historiographical reason for this. Generations of Irish nationalists, and all too frequently their historians, have perceived the union as a malign termination of the constitutional arrangement known grandly but misleadingly as Grattan’s parliament and, consequently, have been little interested in investigating or understanding its origins.

The origins of the act of union: an examination of unionist opinion in Britain and Ireland, 1650-1800

William Pitt’s 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at co-ordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neo-Mercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organise trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organise its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

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Free Trade and Empire in the Anglo-Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785

The conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653 created almost as many problems as it solved for the English government of the country. Not least of these was how, if at all, the majority Catholic population was to be won over to Protestantism. This article reassesses Cromwellian religious policy towards the Catholic laity and traces its evolution up to the end of the decade, taking account also of Catholic responses to official measures. It argues that the supposed leniency of government policy has been overstated and that Catholics who refused to conform to Protestantism in fact risked heavy penalties.

T. C. Barnard

Papers

Planters and policies in cromwellian ireland