Why is it important for this edited collection entitled Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives to be published now?
Ireland’s connection to transatlantic slavery is really poorly understood in Ireland. There is relatively little awareness that Irish enslavers profited across all of the major European slave economies, or that some of the richest enslavers in the eighteenth century were Irish. It conflicts with our sense of ourselves as victims of British colonialism, which is of course true, but hardly the full picture. But colonialism is not unidirectional, it is a process, and our book builds on the work of colleagues in other fields and of course the inestimable work of Nini Rodgers whose book Ireland, Slavery and Antislavery (2007) really enabled this entire field to grow and develop.
We have seen such changes in global attitudes to colonial legacies over the past two decades. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has made an enormous impact, and global movements for reparations like CARICOM have grown in visibility and reach in that time as well. The open critique of colonial legacies within the monarchies of Europe, the institutions of power in the Global North, and of course our own universities, all contributes to the resonance and relevance of the work we try to harness in the book.
What new understandings can we take from this book based on how Ireland interacted with slavery during this period?
The book really tries to widen what we think of when we think about Irish connections to the Greater Caribbean. So, rather than just look at the movement of capital, people, or goods, we wanted to look at shared intellectual legacies, architectural legacies, and so on. We also wanted to include work on Irish connections to the Dutch, French, and Danish empire to make the point that the Irish can be found across all colonial powers.
This a truly interdisciplinary take on the history of Ireland and slavery in the Caribbean. What do disciplines like architectural and landscape history add to our understanding of this period?
Our own research profiles are interdisciplinary and the book quite naturally became one that factored in perspectives from architectural historians, literary critics, as well as historians. If anything, we’d have liked it to have been even more interdisciplinary! There are over 40 illustrations in the book, and because so much of our collection depends on the visuals and our ability to interpret them we were really keen to get that aspect of the book right. MUP have done a terrific job with the book and while it is certainly expensive the level of illustration is actually quite exceptional for an academic book like this.
You can see how we try to do that even with our cover image of Kelly’s Pen, St Dorothy’s Parish, Jamaica – a painting of c. 1840 by Isaac Belisario. It captures the collapse of time and space between the islands of Jamaica and Ireland. A calm depiction of an industrious Irish plantation in Jamaica, Belisario’s idyllic rendering of an estate owned by a family from the west of Ireland but powered by the people they enslaved raises questions that the artist may not have himself intended.
To what extent can we really compare Ireland and the Caribbean during this time?
What Ireland does share with the Caribbean is a history of colonisation. Ireland was England’s first island colony, and the plantation(s) of Ireland shared many of the features of parallel and future colonial activity in the Caribbean. Terms such as ‘planter’ and ‘plantation’ first appeared in elite circles in the late sixteenth century in relation to Ireland, and were immediately applied elsewhere in the American colonies and the West Indies. Though ‘planters’ are synonymous with other territories, the whole concept is arguably Irish in its origin.
The Irish relationship with the Caribbean is particularly complex, in that the European home ground was sometimes a poorer environment. Both territories had to contend with plantation and with the sustained impact of absenteeism. Both also had to contend with the sustained impact of poverty, drawing ever more comparative comment from both the pro and anti- slavery lobbies while the legacy of Ireland’s devastating famine in 1845– 9 has tended to mask Ireland’s own involvement in creating tragic histories in other countries and on other islands.
The books refers to the idea of Ireland as “laboratory” for colonialism. What distinct features of the plantations in the Caribbean are taken from the Irish experience?
For the English, the colonisation of Ireland creates a template for the way islands in the Caribbean were subsequently planted – typically inwards from the seashore – and was very distinctly different from how other European powers went about it. We dig into all that in the book and in the introduction there is a lovely map of the plantation of the Inishowen peninsula by Chichester in 1609 sourced from our own map library here in Trinity that demonstrates that ‘system’ beautifully.
In the book you argue that “Irish people served many imperial masters and often to their own advantage”, can you speak specifically about how this played out in the Caribbean?
There are multiple Irish identities in the Caribbean, at all periods studied in the book. Irish-Caribbean identities stretched from indentured servants to enslavers, and they were also sometimes subversive players in British imperial contexts. As their Catholic identity was thought to negate any loyalty to Britain, they were employed as key diplomats and colonisers in the French, Spanish and Portuguese empires. Some of the people whose histories we reveal in the book simply adopted different identities whenever it suited them. This was common in the Caribbean, and scholars such as Silvia Marzagalli warn us in any case to be wary of ‘essentialising’ any merchant as ‘Dutch’, ‘English’ or ‘French’ when it is so obvious that they happily played with multiple identities and affiliations, depending on the nature of the economic transactions in which they were involved.
What ethical considerations come into play when editing a book like this?
We wanted to be very careful about language and designations. The recent trend in this field has been to designate what were formerly known as ‘planters’ or ‘adventurers’ as ‘enslavers’ in order to designate the means by which they gained their wealth – the absolute exploitation of other people. Likewise it has become more common to refer to the ‘enslaved’ rather than slave, in order to better identify responsibility and culpability. Where possible we followed these conventions with our authors but did not insist on them. Writing about slave economies is tricky, and rightly so, and we are conscious of our own linguistic limitations and also the fact that we present essays that are mostly written from the point of view of the cultures that enslaved on a mass scale.
As a country that sees itself very much through the lens of “colonised” what is the cultural significance of this research in terms of our baggage as slave-owners and the legacy that brings?
As scholars we feel that the very entrenched idea that Irish people were and continue to be victims of colonisation is one that needs to be confronted and critiqued. Not only should our vast diasporic community be characterised as part of the white settler empire, but our own role in colonising for profit in Africa, the Greater Caribbean, and India all deserve greater scrutiny. We can hold these two truths simultaneously: that we were colonised, and that we also colonised others that were further down a spectrum of race and class hierarchies. We can’t hold others to account for our colonisation without admitting the harm we did to others. It just isn’t acceptable to do that.
Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean Interdisciplinary Perspectives - Studies in Imperialism is published by Manchester University Press and edited by Finola O'Kane and Ciaran O'Neill