Those seeking to explain why the Spanish and the English proved more prepared than other Europeans to colonise the Americas allude to what JH Elliott has termed the “proto-colonial pasts” of each country. This phrase implies that Ireland, to which the English crown had asserted title since the Norman offensive of the 12th century, was, like Andalusia, a testing ground for the colonisation that was to be played out in the New World.
It would appear from the jacket illustration chosen by the archaeologist Audrey Horning for Ireland in the Virginian Sea that she sympathises with this view since she considers that the Elizabethan adventurer Ralph Lane "saw himself" in the depiction of the Norman knight John de Courcy leading the "intended conquest of Ulster".
However, Horning’s apparent enthusiasm to trace such links gives way to ambivalence when she ponders whether it is correct to say that Ireland was colonised by England at any time. Doubt has been raised in her mind by English medieval objects unearthed here that suggest to her that English people had been long familiar with Ireland, its inhabitants and its resource potential. Thus she disregards the opinion of historians that the English remained profoundly ignorant of Ireland even after 1541, when the country had been proclaimed a kingdom of the English crown.
Had she heeded such opinion Horning would have better understood why English commentators of Elizabeth’s reign expected their readers to be easily persuaded that all inhabitants of Ireland, including those of English descent, were depraved degenerates who might be made civil and Christian only through a process of colonisation.
She dismisses such arguments as Renaissance tropes and so fails to appreciate that English experience with colonisation in Ireland did have an intellectual impact on analogous undertakings in America if only to the extent that the literature rationalising plantations there was more persuasive and coherent than that which justified ventures in America. Moreover, the arguments of the Elizabethans frequently drew upon those expounded by Gerald of Wales to legitimise the Norman conquest of the 12th century, which explains why the exploits of John de Courcy would be considered pertinent to the 1601 assault on Ulster.
Two chapters in Ireland in the Virginian Sea treating the background to colonisation in Ireland are followed by two chapters comparing the English experience of establishing plantations in the Chesapeake area of North America and in the province of Ulster during the first half of the 17th century.
Horning takes credit for hers being the first “detailed comparative consideration of early modern colonialism in both lands that gives equal weight to both regions”, and she identifies sufficient English individuals and families with connections to plantations in both Virginia and Ireland to sustain her claim that there were “greater commonalities and manifold inter-linkages between the establishment and development of colonial societies in Virginia and in Ireland than was the case in the 16th century”.
Then, no sooner has she identified a series of topics on which to base a rigorous comparative investigation than she recoils from the effort and provides academic reasons why such a subject lacks legitimacy. Among these are her claim that “few in England were inspired to gamble their money in Ireland”, which, “unlike the New World, was . . . well surveyed and explored”; her denial that plantation in Ulster was “a process of cultural extermination”; and her assertion that England’s involvement with Ireland was “a rather small field of endeavour compared to the expansion of British interests into the Caribbean, and the stabilisation and growth of colonial societies in the Chesapeake, New England and Canada”.
Horning reveals a political explanation for her volte face: she discovered, when teaching archaeology in Belfast, that the term “colony” has become a partisan word favoured in the nationalist community and resented by unionists who “would not self-identify as colonists”.
Thus she parts company with those who would trace a “direct link between plantation and the Troubles of the late 20th century”, and whose application of the “testing-ground theory” in a wider context makes it appear that “the expansion of the British into Ireland” was “just a dress rehearsal for the real thing – the founding of the United States of America”.
Horning deprecates, but does not identify, the authors of such ideas that have disturbed communal harmony in Belfast, and she advocates using archaeology to study the plantation experience from the perspectives of nonelite participants, and to uncover evidence of cross-cultural interactions and the “mutual accommodations” sometimes negotiated between settlers and natives.
To exemplify what might be done for Ulster she describes extensive archaeological investigations into Virginia’s colonial past, from the major excavation at Jamestown Fort to excavations of tradesmen’s houses and of English settlements that endured the Virginia “massacre” of 1622.
Horning believes the Jamestown excavation relevant as it shows how English settlers interacted readily with Native Americans and permitted some to reside within the fort. Other Virginian excavations suggest that even when English settlers lived at a distance from their recent assailants following the 1622 “massacre”, they continued to trade with them, and that native communities persisted in the midst of English areas of settlement until the 1640s.
This interpretation of what transpired in Virginia satisfies Horning that English people of modest circumstances commingled with those who were at an enormous cultural remove from themselves. This convinces her that relations between natives and newcomers in Ulster must have been altogether more relaxed given her conviction that the cultural difference between the inhabitants of England and Ireland was never great.
She calls for further excavations on Ulster plantation sites, hoping, presumably, that proof of friendly interactions would add to “the contemporary value” of her study. Meanwhile, Horning avers that excavations of buildings in Ireland have already supplied evidence of “the material influence of Gaelic society on plantation-era Ireland”. And she believes planters also welcomed Irish servants and tenants.
Had she paused to contemplate recent work by historians on plantation in Ireland and Virginia, Horning would have found that they too have been impressed by cross-cultural interactions, even if they do not presume that most such contact was necessarily friendly.
Regarding Ulster, historians show that Irish natives were regularly employed by planters as tenants, servants and wet nurses, and that some attended Protestant services, married settlers and even tried to pass themselves as newcomers.
Historians prove cautious, however, in presuming that such apparent conformity means the Irish population had become reconciled to the changes forced on them. They note that many holding tenancies on plantation estates, sometimes against official regulations, featured prominently in the 1641 insurgency and that some perpetrated notorious atrocities.
Atrocity is unlikely to feature in the reconciliation-friendly version of Ireland’s past that Audrey Horning aspires to authenticate with archaeological evidence. She attempts valiantly in this book to discredit or ignore aspects of that past that do not serve the reconciliation agenda. Among these are the well-attested fact that large areas of Ireland were colonised during the 16th and 17th centuries to make them conform to a model of civility defined by authorities in Britain; that the plantation in Ulster was thought through more systematically than any other British colonial project of the period; that plantations in Ireland attracted far more British settlers over the 17th century than any other colony; that each plantation effort in Ireland was accompanied by investigations of natural resources and property ownership more scientific than in any other British plantation site; and that successive British governments spent more on defending their interests in Ireland during that century than on all their other Atlantic possessions combined.
It is only when such factors are taken into account that we will better understand the “colonialism in the British Atlantic” that the author set out to elucidate before being overtaken by scruples over what her study “means in the present – and where it may lead in the future”.
Nicholas Canny’s most recent book is ‘The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World’
