(This book, along with Bruce Lenman's "England's
Colonial Wars 1550-1688: Conflicts, Empire and
National Identity", makes an essential connection
between Great Britain's penetration of Ireland
and the New World. If I had the time and the
scholarly training, I would write a book on
Ireland's role in the "transition debate".)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (July, 2006)
David Dickson. _Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630-1830_.
History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora Series. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005. xvii + 726 pp. Maps, illustrations, tables,
notes, appendices, bibliography. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-299-21180-0.
Reviewed for [EMAIL PROTECTED] by James G. Patterson, Department
of History, Centenary College.
David Dickson's _Old World Colony_ is a masterful
account of the socio-economic and political
evolution of the south Munster region, defined by
the author as Counties Cork, Kerry and the
western half of Waterford, over a
two-hundred-year period. The era in question is
a very long eighteenth century beginning with the
first Elizabethan efforts to plant "New English"
Protestants in the region in the 1580s and
continuing to the eve of the Great Famine.
This sizable study is divided into three primary
sections. Part 1 describes the political
evolution of the south Munster region during the
formative period of active colonization dating
from the Desmond land confiscations of the 1580s
up to the establishment of the so-called
Protestant Ascendancy (1695-1709). Importantly,
Dickson identifies the radical transfer of land
that occurred between the 1580s and 1690s as a
colonial process, which in turn brought about a
dramatic economic transformation. After allowing
that his work is a regional study whose
conclusions do not necessarily apply to the rest
of the island, Dickson firmly concludes that "by
any definition the victors in the struggle for
control of south Munster were a colonial group"
and "economic power in the region (in terms of
ownership of land and control of wholesale trade)
passed largely into the hands of these migrant
families.... This group unquestionably
constituted a self-defined community with
demonstrably colonial characteristics" (p.
xii). The second phase of confiscations followed
the Nine Years' War, ending in 1601. Yet
contrary to the interpretations of many
historians of the period, Dickson finds that the
long-term impact of the confiscations on regional
Catholics was a "visceral antipathy to the New
English and a legacy of dispossession" (p.
12). He also describes the little-known process
by which the New English planters manipulated
their advantageous social and legal status to
"peacefully" occupy as much as one third of the
land by 1641. The highly complex events of the
Wars of Three Kingdoms (1641-52) resulted in the
notorious Cromwellian land settlement that
transferred ownership of as much as 50 percent of
the land in the region from Catholic Old English
and Old Irish to Protestant hands. The final act
was the defeat of the Irish Jacobites in
1692. With the passing of the sectarian-based
Penal Laws by the Irish Parliament between 1695
and 1709, Catholics in south Munster were
effectively barred from meaningful civic,
corporate and socio-cultural participation on
both the regional and national levels. By 1703,
only about a score of surviving Catholic
landowners remained in the entire region, and the
ensuing 130 years belonged to the
Anglo-Protestant landowning and mercantile elites.
The commercialization of the regional economy is
a further key theme presented in this section.
Here again, the decisive event was the arrival of
New English colonists. In effect, by 1641 a
highly commercialized market economy, featuring
the export of wool and live cattle to the west of
England, was firmly in place. Other aspects of
this transformation include the first efforts to
enclose land, the monetization of the regional
economy, and the rapid expansion of local market
fairs. Contemporaneously, the 1620s and 1630s
witnessed the departure of the first elements of
the eventually vast Irish diaspora, and by the
1650s the Irish were a real presence in places
like Montserrat and Barbados. It is, perhaps,
important to note that the majority of these
first emigrants to the New World were New English
planters. Alternatively, dislocated Catholics
were already departing to France and Spain, where
they rapidly became a fixture as soldiers, clergy, and merchants.
Perhaps of greatest interest for this particular
review, Dickson clearly delineates the impact of
the economic integration of the south Munster
region into the broader Atlantic world. The
initial phase of regional involvement in
trans-Atlantic trade consisted of the movement of
New World commodities, principally tobacco and
sugar, to Munster. In fact, by 1640 the port of
Kinsale in County Cork was the largest importer
of tobacco in Ireland. However, by 1664 Cork had
largely supplanted other regional ports, and, as
Dickson notes, by 1700 the city of Cork was "one
of the great port cities in the Atlantic World"
(p. 144). The key to Cork's rise to prominence
was its role in processing and then distributing
the produce of the south Munster region to the
wider Atlantic world. In turn, the form taken by
this trade was dictated by English Parliamentary
legislation. The Navigation Acts of 1663 and
1671 insured that Ireland could not trade
directly with English colonies or effectively
engage in the re-export of colonial goods, while
the Cattle Acts of 1665 and 1667 blocked the
previously lucrative sale of live cattle to
England. Ultimately, in 1699 the export of
woolen cloth was banned. Thus "shaped" by
English economic interest, south Munster
increasingly focused on the production of three
primary goods--salted beef, butter and woolen
yarn. The first two of these became great
trans-Atlantic commodities, in turn, dramatically
affecting the socio-economic evolution of the
entire region. Simply put, more and more land
was dedicated to pasturage for the cows on which
the trade depended, and less was available for
tillage. Hence, those able to capitalize on the
new market opportunities via the medium of cattle
rearing thrived, while others less fortunate were
increasingly marginalized.
The primacy of the Atlantic provisions trade to
the regional economy is strikingly confirmed by
statistical evidence. Already by 1680, south
Munster shipped some 80 percent of its pastoral
goods to the Caribbean, primarily in the form of
salted beef and butter, with the remainder going
to northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. In
the second decade of the eighteenth century,
French sugar islands swelled the pre-existing
trade to the English colonies. A resultant,
remarkable story is told: 50,000-80,000 of the
cattle raised each year in rural Munster was
moved to Cork City, where they were butchered,
barreled and placed on board ship. Transported,
sometimes after switching hands in France, across
the Atlantic, the beef was unloaded in places
such as Martinique and Jamaica, where it fed
planter and slave alike. Completing this cycle,
slave-produced sugar and tobacco made their way
back to Cork City and were distributed via market
fairs throughout the region. With noteworthy
clarity, then, Dickson confirms the centrality of
trans-Atlantic trade to the economic development
of south Munster. Yet, while the opportunities
created by participation in this trans-oceanic
trade brought tremendous wealth to planters and
merchants on both sides of the Atlantic, it also
helped shape the fate of tens of thousands of
Irish peasants. As Dickson observes, land values
in south Munster rose between five and six times
between 1690 and 1810, largely as a result of
"real changes in the agrarian economy and in the
market for the region's goods in the world outside" (p. 83).
The brief second section of _Old World Colony_
addresses the latent tensions which underlay the
period of the Protestant Ascendancy. Dickson
successfully, albeit indirectly, challenges the
still prevalent historiographical interpretation
that views the period as one of equipoise in
which the bulk of the regional population
accepted an _ancien regime_. The third and
concluding part of this work is, in terms of
political history, the most
groundbreaking. Here, the author argues
persuasively that the south Munster region, or at
least the City and County of Cork, was heavily
influenced by the phenomenon of Atlantic
revolutions. Dickson utilizes a broad range of
primary source material to establish the presence
of the United Irishmen in south Munster from
1793, when the society's first club was founded
in Cork City. Moreover, a number of pivotal
figures in the national movement were natives of
the region. Efforts to politicize the population
of south Munster dated from the early as 1790s
with the publication of the radical _Cork
Gazette_. Indeed, by 1796, Dickson shows that
the Republicans in Cork, unlike their Dublin
counterparts, turned their efforts to
politicizing the rural poor by distributing
propaganda that fed on pre-existing
socio-economic and sectarian grievances. The
United Irishmen successfully merged traditional
agrarian concerns, over issues like tithes, with
new radical concepts such as universal manhood
suffrage (p. 468). In reality, by the end of
1797, the region had a sizeable, well-organized,
and highly motivated cellular United Irish
military structure in place: "in the first
quarter of 1798, when there was both leadership
and optimism among Cork United Irishmen, the
movement did indeed represent a formidable
challenge" (p. 468). In summing up the political
status of south Munster during these key years,
Dickson affirms that "a robust revolutionary
movement had developed a military capability in
the course of 1797; the pivot was the Cork City
organization.... It is irrefutable that across
at least half of Munster there was a high level
of popular disaffection evident by the early
months of 1798.... We have seen that the
circulation of printed propaganda from Cork and
Dublin was most impressive and not by any means
confined to the urban Anglophone world" (p.
472). Pointedly, then, the region failed to rise
in May 1798, not because of an absence of popular
enthusiasm, but because of the success of the
government's preemptive disarmament campaign that
spring, a heavy regional military presence, and
the loss of vital leaders on the eve of the
rebellion. In fact, "five years later when news
of Robert Emmet's Rebellion broke a number of
leading United Irishmen in the city were detained
... there were grounds for suspicions" (p. 472).
Furthermore, Dickson offers an in-depth analysis
of the dramatic socio-economic transformations
that occurred in the region between 1770 and
1830. Underlying these alterations was a
demographic explosion on a scale unparalleled in
early modern western European history. From
mid-century, south Munster's population rose from
roughly a third of a million people to 1.1
million in 1831. Dickson attributes this rise
primarily to "a food supply that was reliable,"
the potato. Increasing social stratification
corresponded to population growth between the
1770s and the 1820s. This process rapidly
accelerated from the 1790s, and by 1800,
coinciding with an "increasingly complex class
structure," was an "exceptionally unequal
distribution of income" (p. 496). The winners
were large farmers producing for the market;
alternatively, the landless laborers and small
farmers were trapped in a classic example of the
economist's "price scissors," featuring rising
rents and stagnant or declining wages as well as
chronic underemployment. The uniquely Irish
phenomenon of multi-layered tenancies further
exacerbated the situation. In 1780, laborers
were already suffering real decline in wages. By
1830 most lived on an acre or less and had no
livestock except a pig, which was their only tie
to the market. Finally, the failure of earlier
industrial efforts, coupled with the absence of
coal deposits in the region, insured that no
substantial industrialization would occur in the
region after the 1820s. Thus, the overwhelmingly
Catholic, rural underclass, described by Dickson
as the true proletariat of pre-famine Cork, was
by 1830 dangerously underemployed, devoid of
alternative economic opportunity, living outside
of the market economy on less than 5 percent of
the region's land, and utterly reliant on a
single root crop for their existence. Moreover,
they constituted the absolute majority (over
60,000 of some 100,000 households in County Cork)
of south Munster's population. We know only to
well the looming implications of all
this. Dickson concludes the book with an
analysis of the means by which the Protestant
Ascendancy was undermined by 1830. Along with
the familiar story of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic
Emancipation movement, which ultimately succeeded
in 1829, Dickson identifies the increasing wealth
and status of Catholic merchants, professionals,
and big farmers as successfully challenging the
socio-political and cultural domination of the
Protestant landowning gentry.
_New World Colony_ is so finely nuanced and
meticulously researched that it effectively
raises the historiographical bar for Irish
regional history. Indeed, the study is mandatory
reading for historians of early modern and modern
Ireland. Those working on the Atlantic World
will also find the book to be of tremendous
utility, for David Dickson has firmly placed
south Munster in an Atlantic context.
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