History: Don Akenson's monumental and engaging trawl through history reads like Ireland's 'Blackadder'
It is difficult to categorise this book. It is a work of monumental proportions - 800 pages dealing with several thousand millenniums - and another volume of equal proportions to come next spring. Does this man ever sleep? It is a fast-moving, Candide-like, moral tale, full of the absurdities and the discontinuities of human life. Even the title is tongue-in-cheek, for most of the multitude who people these pages are anything but "civilised", whatever that is.
It is very cleverly structured in short bites, with snappy titles and human stories, which move backwards and forwards through generations of the same families and across continents. It reads like Ireland's Blackadder. Book I is entitled: "Downpatrick is the Butterfly capital of the universe". Christianity has taken over the myths and manufactured genealogies of Judaism, then jumps on the back of secular princes - and pretty unsavoury ones at that - to spread its spiritual empire. No point talking to the great unwashed. You had to go for the leaders. So Patrick the Briton bumbles along the Irish coast and arrives amidst a freak wave of butterflies alighting on Dichu's barn. A barn with butterflies is then the foundation church for Catholicism throughout the English-speaking world - Irish Catholicism later using the structures of the British Empire to missionise, as the book goes on to show.
So the scene is set for the rest of the book: the "professional rememberers" of Judaism, Christianity, Gaelic Ireland, Tudor England and the American frontier have excluded stories which do not fit in. It is these which Akenson tries to recover in a testament to the forgotten, the excluded, the wee people. In this he is deeply subversive of received wisdom.
Roman Christianity sinks Celtic Pelagian Christianity as too optimistic. St Malachy burns out the Patrician church. The Munster Old English Catholics forced west by Cromwell, "the man with the bad haircut", displace others already there. English adventurers behave brutally in Ireland. Irish adventurers, Catholic and Protestant alike, then brutalise "natives" elsewhere, becoming particularly adept as slave overseers in the West Indies and the American colonies. Famous Irish names are followed through the generations, the Nagles, Cotters, Burkes, Nugents and Savages making family fortunes from slaves and "recycled slave money". Above all, the Irish in the New World were "Whites". Catholic priests won't baptise mulattos in Montserrat, but the Church of England did. So the "black Irish" are Protestant. Ex-1798 rebels and Whiteboys, transported to New South Wales, did a pretty good job of abusing the Aborigines, particularly the women. And if only the Irish in the New World had respected all those milk-coffee-coloured children of slave-women that their slave-owner and overseer ancestors had fathered, they could lay claim to dozens of American "All-Stars", such as Willie Mays, Walter Payton and Mr Grady's great-grandson, Muhammad Ali.
In the untidiness of history, Catholics became Protestants, and Protestants became Catholics and some were both at once. Those undone in Ireland could re-make themselves out of it, prospering and protected in the very British system which later nationalism denounced.
Akenson dislikes myths and the pompous exclusivism which goes with them. Take the God's Frontiersman myth of Ulster-Scots emigration, depicted here as transferring "frontier-hatred of Irish Papists" to frontier hatred of the Amerindians, both alike deemed ignorant, bloodthirsty savages - which helps explain why both ended up on the Loyalist side with Britain in the American War of Independence and why the independent United States created an anti-Catholic penal code much more long-lasting than anything in the old world.
This is not history as we know it and Don Akenson has much to say that is critical of history as we know it. "Lazy historians" who claim that the famine did not need to happen. "Indeed it did not, for nothing is inevitable; but when the earth is so badly abused, it usually swallows its tormentors." He is particularly critical of how standard history ignores real heroes and heroines, who leave behind little or no documentation and he spares not the rod on some of the great men and events of the past. Why isn't Thomas Carlyle, with his anti-Irishness, on "the Geneva Convention's list of all-time racist assholes?" Why is the Ulster Scots-led Great Awakening not seen for "the great frontier Jesus Jumping" that it was? Why do we patronise the past and not accept that pragmatism was the biggest -ism directing people's lives. Did all those Irish soldiers really want to become wild geese with Sarsfield?
Typical is the half-page story, "Dates that Count". Here Don Akenson asks why in 20th-century Ireland were the dates that most people remembered from the past those of the "Big Wind" c.1840, rather than any political event. It was because the UK parliament brought in pensions for the over-70s, and since birth-registration records were so inaccurate, "every duffer fifty years of age or more went before the governmental commissioners and swore to events that verified their age as being at least seventy . . . The Big Wind indeed".
Don Akenson has a lengthy track-record in new approaches to history. He has already written extensively and seminally on everything that is touched upon in this book, so he has the pedigree and the intellect to withstand the criticism which will invariably come. The approach is probably too quirky for the po-faced, but will thrill most readers. It is great fun, terrifically written and down to earth: scholarship and the Irish diaspora as you have never seen them before.
Marianne Elliott is director of the Institute of Irish Studies and Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool. Her last book, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend, was published by Profile Books in 2003
An Irish History of Civilization, Volume I By Don Akenson Granta, 828pp. £30