Rolston, Bill. “The training ground: Ireland, conquest and decolonisation.”

Rolston, Bill. “The training ground: Ireland, conquest and decolonisation.” Race and Class 34.4 (1993): 13-24.

This essay was published in a special issue of Race and Class discussing the impact of Columbus. Rolston begins by noting Columbus’s 1492 voyage and Poyning’s Law of 1493, which decreed that the Irish Parliament could pass no law without the King’s permission. Rolston sets these two events up as turning points of “western European expansion and colonialism” (13). Rolston notes how Ireland would come to deeply experience the “new era of imperialism with its expropriation of territory, racism, and genocide” brought forth in the wake of Columbus’s ships (14). He begins by detailing the earlier instances of Irish experience of colonialism:

1. Christendom introduced in 400s AD, but since Ireland was never conquered by Rome, it remained peripheral to European development in both Church and State.
2. Norman colonization in 1169, but barely left their imprint “beyond the Pale.” Normans outside the Pale deeply integrated into Irish culture and life, and even Normans in the Pale operated more independently than in England (14).
3. 1366 – Statutes of Kilkenny: “enacted to attempt to impose segregation between the Norman colnoist and the native Irish clans” (15). According to Rolston, these were ineffective.
4. 1493 – Poyning’s Law forbidding the Irish Parliament to make laws without the King’s permission. Once again, according to Rolston, these were ineffective in achieving more control over Ireland.
5. 1570 – Plantation of Ulster – once again sought to impose segregation and remove Irish from their lands. But Planters continued to rent to Irish tenants. Though segregation failed again in this instance, the Irish experienced a new level of imperial control in the wake of “an emerging superpower who wanted no weak links in the imperial chain” (15).
   

Rolston then notes that both the Norman conquest and the Elizabethan one did share some premises, namely the rhetorical justifications for taking Irish land away from Irish people. Norman King Henry II gained permission from Hadrian IV (the only English Pope to that point in history) to conquer Ireland because the Irish Church was so independent of Rome. The Irish, in this view, were heathens. As part of that conquest Giraldus de Barri (Cambrensis aka Gerald of Wales) joined the conquest and wrote The History and Topography of Ireland. Rolston notes that because the book was written, at least in part, to justify the conquest, Cambrensis “accused the Irish of various vices, including laziness, treachery, blasphemy, idolatry, ignorance of Christian beliefs, incest, and cannibalism” (16). Remarkably, Rolston notes that the only props Cambrensis gives to the Irish is their capabilities at music:

“It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen” – Cambrensis in The History and Topography of Ireland

500 years later in the Elizabethan plantation era, these racist beliefs morphed from “reason for segregation; now it became the justification for genocide” (16).

Rolston quotes Michael Stevenson from the same special issue, who notes that these English racist tropes were used to justify techniques later used on indigenous peoples in Turtle Island, such as “the routine burning of crops and villages, the regular killing of women and children and the cutting off of heads, as well as the willingness to pay bounties for them” (Rolston 17). Rolston notes that not only the ideology and tactics were the same in Ireland & North America, they were also executed by the same people traveling between places to oversee both efforts. Just as the English apprenticed on colonization in Ireland, Rolston notes that the Irish apprenticed in surviving it.

While he notes that many collaborated to survive, Rolston focuses instead on Irish rebellion, focusing on their rebellion in British Caribbean colonies (since he claims that Irish rebellion on Ireland is more well known). Rolston works with Hilary Beckles crucial work in this area. He first distinguishes between the indentured servitude of Irish laborers (finite, though often extended and ending in 2nd class citizenship; never passing to children; sometimes voluntary, though often not due to kidnapping, prison sentences, and institutionalized efforts to de-Catholicize Ireland rounding up young people to send them to the West Indies (18). Rolston, through Beckles, notes a 1666 Irish rebellion on St. Kitts that evicted 800 English planters. 1667, the Irish there helped the French take Monsterrat from the English. In 1689, Irish revolted on St. Kitts, St. Christopher, Antigua, and Montserrat in support of ousted Catholic King James. Rolston notes that though the evidence is scanty, there was widespread planter belief that the Irish joined with Black slaves in slave rebellions. This caused administrators to enact penal laws on the Irish in the Caribbean, and to beg them to stop sending more Irish to their islands (they wanted Scots). English planters were supposedly relieved when the British followed the Spanish in replacing all white-skinned labor with Black-skinned slaves.

Rolston notes how this apprenticeship in surviving colonization produced keen examples of solidarity against oppression. He cites United Irishman Thomas McCabe who intervened to stop Belfast merchants from seeking to join the slave trade in the ways that Bristol and Liverpool had. He then describes Daniel O’Connell’s ardent fights against anti-Semitism, slavery, and capital punishment. Yet, the apprenticeship also yielded those on the other side of justice, like John Mitchel of the The Young Ireland movement, who moved to the U.S. after escaping Australia and joined the Confederate ideological cause in Richmond even as he worked to support the Fenian cause in Ireland. Rolston quotes how Arthur Griffith (founder of Sinn Féin) refuses to apologize for Mitchel’s racism in the preface to his 1913 edition of Mitchel’s Jail Journal, even calling those who do apologize for Mitchel’s views an “an inky tribe of small Irishmen.” Rolston cites Memmi and Fanon in declaring these men through their survival of colonization had taken on the “ideas of the colonizer” (21).

Rolston then contrasts Mitchel and Griffith’s views on Africans with those of American Black leaders on the situation in Ireland: Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey all lent their voice in solidarity to Irish struggles for rights and land. He closes by noting that both reactions to colonization are “part of the same legacy” (22), while noting that he hopes “Ireland could become a training ground once more, this time for decolonisation rather than colonisation” (23).

~ by timrdoc on February 14, 2024.