Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture by Stephen HoweReview by: Keith JefferyIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 128 (Nov., 2001), pp. 598-600Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30006989 .

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598 Irish Historical Studies

born in Dunedin of two emigrants from Barefield, County Clare, had refrained from public comment on the Anglo-Irish War until St Patrick's Day 1922, when he com- bined guarded approval of the treaty settlement with veneration of the 'martyrs' of 1916 and later victims who had been 'murdered by foreign troops' (p. 11). This apparent reflection on the army in which so many New Zealanders had fought during the Great War provoked accusations of disloyalty to the British Empire from the mayor of Auckland and an impressive range of journalists and politicians, leading to Liston's prosecution for sedition at the behest of William Ferguson Massey, New Zealand's most 'Orange' Prime Minister. Though discharged following professions of loyalty to New Zealand and the monarch, and production of a document indicating that by 'foreign troops' he had meant the 'Black and Tans', Liston was publicly humiliated and religious animosity inflamed. Sweetman succeeds in elucidating the embarrassing 'sectarian dimension' of New Zealand's history, ending with a rather moralistic peroration on the 'sad history of dis- possession and defeat' shared by Maoris and the Irish, which allegedly resulted in a combination of 'powerlessness' and 'stubborn resistance to imperialism' in both cases (p. 278). Students of comparative discrimination, please ponder.

DAVID FITZPATRICK Department of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin

IRELAND AND EMPIRE: COLONIAL LEGACIES IN IRISH HISTORY AND CULTURE. By Stephen Howe. Pp 334. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000. £25.

NEXT to the harbour in St John's, Newfoundland, is a plaque marking the alleged place where Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed in 1583 and (it states) 'founded England's overseas empire'. Some Newfoundlanders still today rejoice in the status of their homeland as 'England's oldest colony', yet this assertion would not go unchallenged among some students of Irish history and politics for whom Engels's observation that Ireland 'may be regarded as the first English colony' is so self-evident as to require no further elucidation. The apparently 'colonial' nature of Ireland's past, moreover, provides for many the crucial explanatory key to Ireland's modern,'post- colonial' predicament. By this interpretation, the 'unfinished business' of Northern Ireland is merely that of finally disengaging both the actual territory along with more intangible concerns (such as unionist mindsets) from the pervasive and pernicious remnants of the British Empire.

As his subtitle suggests, Stephen Howe has set out to explore the extent and test the validity of imperial, colonial and post-colonial interpretations of the Irish experience. He has essayed, he declares, 'a discourse about discourses' (p. 5). Although the dismaying phrase 'colonial discourse analysis' appears on the very first page, Howe eschews the kind of sloppy jargon-ridden writing that it usually presages. For the most part, in fact, he provides a lucid and acute analysis of the various debates about colonialism and Ireland.

After a useful extended discussion of definitions ('contexts and concepts') and a sketch of the historical evolution of the question, Howe adopts a broadly chrono- logical approach, from nineteenth-century Irish nationalist engagement with the 'colonial image' to contemporary Ulster unionism -'a colonial culture?' Along the way very few writers escape unscathed. Howe judges, indeed, that in the mass of recent writing devoted to the colonialism/anticolonialism model 'quantity is frankly not matched by quality', rarely moving beyond 'rather superficial sloganising' (p. 44).

Howe's fiercest observations are reserved for cultural theorists. Eminence (thank goodness) is no barrier to critical comment. Howe remarks on the 'relatively super-

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Reviews and short notices 599

ficial insertions of Ireland into wider arguments' by such as Edward Said, Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton (p. 107). Further on he notes the 'rather limited range' of Irish history revealed in Said's footnotes, though in a sort of backhanded compli- ment he concedes that 'Said's general historical reading has certainly been wider than that of most cultural theorists of colonialism' (p. 135). Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland (1955) is 'a deeply flawed work' (p. 122), and Luke Gibbons's con- tribution to the Field Day anthology (1991) is error-strewn (noted on p. 262 n. 21), though his argument that conceptions of Irishness in nineteenth-century nationalist thought were very diverse 'is nonetheless interesting and sometimes original' (p. 126). David Cairns and Shaun Richards, authors of Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture (1988), are charged with using, in typical cultural-theory fashion, 'a handful of canonical texts as supposed substantiation for claims about national trends in society and mentality' (p. 131). By the time he gets to Gerry Smyth (Decolonisation and criticism: the construction of Irish literature (1998)) Howe some- what wearily remarks on 'the usual failure to substantiate the colonial model by looking at any colonial or post-colonial country other than Ireland, or any non- Irish post-colonial writing beyond the narrow, stereotyped approved lineage of Fanon, Memmi, Nandy, Said, and the most famous of the current colonial discourse analysts' (p. 138).

It might be argued that literary and cultural theorists, with their sketchy historical knowledge, in any case based on what they might regard as fictive historical works, are altogether too easy targets for criticism. Howe's concentrated exploration of their work at least does them the honour of taking them seriously, even if it also pro- vides them with more justice than they probably deserve. But Howe's assiduous reading appears to have let him down in one area of historical scholarship, when he remarks that 'the virtual exclusion of Ireland' from analyses of imperialism 'has been replicated by almost all modern historians of the British Empire' (pp 74-5), followed by a list of works which excludes anything by C. A. Bayly, D. George Boyce (though his Decolonisation and the British Empire (1999) may be too recent to have been considered), John Gallagher, Keith Hancock or, most amazingly, Nicholas Mansergh, all of whom have embedded Ireland in their wider accounts of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The only work by Mansergh cited in Ireland and empire is The unresolved question (1991), which, while not neglecting the 'imperial dimension', concentrates principally on Irish political developments. But this reflects the overall tendency of Howe's book. As a whole it is about Ireland more than 'empire', British or any other.

Howe himself is not without imperfection.There is the occasional slip, all the more regrettable in one who is so quick to pounce on other writers' sloppiness and incon- sistency. He seems unproblematically able to use the contentious term 'mainland Britain' (for example on pp 214 and 272 n. 15), which itself suggests a colonialist mentality. Presumably the observation on p. 205 that 'the Republic's first Head of State was a Protestant' is meant to refer to Douglas Hyde. Sean T. O'Kelly (not a Protestant), however, actually held the distinction, though admitted the constitu- tional position was obscure until the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act in 1948. As Howe himself notes,'ambivalence and ambiguity resonate throughout the story' (p. 13). Clarity, however, is not well served by Howe's own use of the intolerable Harvard system of references. In a work which depends so extensively on a detailed discussion of literature, this system is especially obfuscatory. Such references as 'Alvin Jackson 1992, 1994, 1996a', 'Jones and Stallybrass 1992' (which is not in the bibliography), 'See my 1988b', and so on, combined with endnotes, make for a lot of flapping about from page to page, which irritates as well as inconveniences the reader, apart, of course, from adding obscurity to the text.

What a dreary exercise it must have been to plough through so much ill-expressed and often tendentious work. If the book occasionally reads like no more than an

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600 Irish Historical Studies

immensely detailed, descriptive bibliographical survey, for that alone we should be grateful. Howe has carefully counted, and even weighed, the angels on any number of theoretical pinheads. In identifying and delineating the debate(s), he has saved the rest of us a lot of painful and largely unrewarding labour. In addition, he has provided us with some witty scholarly entertainment along the way. What more could we ask?

KEITH JEFFERY

Department of Modern History, University of Ulster at Jordanstown

HISTORY AND MEMORY IN MODERN IRELAND. Edited by Ian McBride. Pp xi, 278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. £14.95.

THE clock of Irish historiography often appears to be running a bit slow, lagging a stroke behind contemporary research on the Continent and across the Atlantic. In recent years historians worldwide have been preoccupied with new explorations of collective memory, developing concepts of lieux de memoire and social memory as pioneering fields of historical inquiry. Yet, despite the commonly accepted notion that 'memory' plays a major role in the construction of Irish identities, historians of Ireland were not in the forefront of these developments.

Following on the tail of another recent collection of articles - Rebellion and remembrance in modern Ireland, edited by Laurence M. Geary (Dublin, 2001) -

History and memory in modern Ireland announces the arrival of memory studies to modern Irish history. It is not incidental that this collection (like its precursor) is a product of a conference held in the bicentennial year of the 1798 rebellion. Following the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the 1990s in Ireland constituted a commemorative decade, beginning with the tercentenary of the battle of the Boyne, then the bicentenary of the founding of the Society of United Irishmen, reaching new heights with the sesquicentenary of the Great Famine, which were matched (if not surpassed) during the bicentenary of 1798, and culminating with the bicentenary of the Act of Union. This intense commemorative schedule was, of course, peppered with the annual Orange anniversaries of the controversial 'march- ing season' in Ulster, not to mention Remembrance Sunday. Preparations are already under way for the anniversary of Robert Emmet's rebellion; and if after that it appears there will be a lull in commemorative fervour, perhaps till the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, we have already been treated to a preview of republi- can public remembrance and martyrology with the state funerals and reinterment in Glasnevin cemetery of Kevin Barry and his comrades. Since historians either actively participated in these celebrations or opted to abstain and criticise them, a more reflexive historiographical awareness would demand that the topic of com- memoration and memory no longer be neglected.

This book originated in the Eleventh Conference of Irish Historians in Britain, held in Durham in 1998. If my memory does not mislead me, the original twelve papers presented at the conference reflected an uncertainty and uneasiness with issues of memory, which indicated that this is indeed terra incognita for Irish his- torians. Consequently, six of the speakers were selected to submit articles to this collection, and their papers were substantially revised and in some cases written anew, and five entirely new contributions were commissioned (a model that could well be emulated in the publication of the proceedings of other theme-based con- ferences). 'Memory' is, of course, an elusive (and occasionally illusive) concept. Various facets and meanings of the term are considered by each contributor. Ian McBride's introductory chapter offers an excellent critical overview of current

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