Because the right owns all of the loudest megaphones.
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Simply too much to mention. But what I meant was, that the Empire was never a single thing. There were development colonies and exploitation colonies. At different periods there were different State and non-State actors - the East India Company, the New Zealand settlers, the American settlers (the American empire can be regarded as the successor to the British empire), different opinions of the Conservatives and the Liberals resulting in policy change depending on the government, colonies which were an embarrassment to the home government which did not have the resources to police them all (Palmerstonâs complaint about people expecting him to send gunboats when they ran into trouble). The British Empire was really only named as such quite late when Queen Victoria was titled âEmpress of Indiaâ.
Empires tend to be more or less loose at the peripheries; the Roman Empire was rather more monocultural than the British Empire but then it was a lot smaller. But the British Empire was particularly peripheral and in some ways very loose. India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were very different. My complaint is about trying to define a period of a couple of hundred years, from around 1750-1950, as being characterised by the âBritish Empireâ. In the past when there were relatively few historians, it was understandable, but nowadays when weâre flooded with them we can afford to take a much more detailed view.
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To be fair, Ireland wasnât in the peripheries, but nearly at the very center. As I said, Ireland did function as a lab for British colonialism, especially in the 19th century. This period of imperial consolidation began with Ireland and really began to unravel with Irish home rule after the Easter uprising. When Victoria took the crown, it was as Queen of GB and Ireland⌠So, there is that.
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Yes, and letâs not forget those pale-skins further up the latter, fomenting the kind of division exemplified by common Irish American deployment of this âIrish slavesâ canard.
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I assume thatâs from the Troubles in North Ireland?
(May the whores of the empire lay awake in their beds/ as soon as they count out the sins in their head)
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Actually, the popularity of whitening cremes and hair-straightening treatments in the early 20th century would indicate that African Americans were trying to whiten themselves, which proves how important âwhitenessâ is in America. Of course they never could be accepted into white society (unless they had enough Caucasian blood to truly pass for white), something the Irish never had to worry about.
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âA Chosen Exileâ: Black People Passing In White America (audio, via NPR) - though admittedly my first exposure to this was via Toni Morrison
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What makes these narratives so fascinating is probably how actually rare they were and how the ability to do so was reserved for a specific subset of African Americans. It also illustrates how meaningless the construction of race actually was/is.
Also, ALWAYS read Toni Morrison! Because national treasure and all!
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The most extreme example of the trouble Irish laborers faced in the 19th Century was from the 1970âs documentary, by Melvin James Kaminsky, Blazing Saddles
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Jim Goadâs âRedneck Manifestoâ has some good info on poor white social groups in America, and IIRC, sets up the wealth disparity in America as a class conflict rather than a racial conflict (wealthy folk get the little people to hate on other little people to keep the wealthy in power). Be prepared for his writing styleâGoad pulls no punches, ever. Itâs been ~20 years since I read that bookâŚand also IIRC, I heard about Goad through Jeff Koyenâs old zine âCrankâ, which still holds as one of my Favorite Zines and Favorite Zine Covers Evar:
And the phrase, âYour luck just ran out, Hipster!â has stuck with me ever since.
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âŚand how the bravest among us donât need no megaphone!
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I did my masterâs thesis on the American workplace and am of Irish descent. Had any of my great-greats been enslaved, Iâd have found out about it. They owed their souls to the company store, but they were most certainly not enslaved.
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A black man could come to the USA from Africa right now, he could be the descendant of ancient African royalty and his parents could be aristocrats.
And yet he would still be stopped by the police, followed by store security, or threatened by the Klan. Iâm sure even today a lot of white parents in suburbia would not want their daughters to date him.
And yet nobody in his family, going back generations, was ever a slave.
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Are we reading the same thread?
Iâve never seen so many people in an argument agreeing with each other before over never-made assertions!
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Just because you think dinosaurs practiced slavery, it doesnât mean that T-Rex didnât speak Gaelic!
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Whatâs the difference between an Irish Slave and an Irish Robot ?
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Thereâs no guilt like robotic Irish-Catholic guilt.
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I have had a quick look at what might have been your sources and I see a rather different argument; that Ireland in the 16-17th century was indeed the subject of a colonial experiment which was repeated in the Americas (with even more disastrous results for the native population) but that the potato famine was more of a complete foulup than a deliberate policy. The Irish golah actually had benefits; the emigrants went to more prosperous countries and many did well, but the population shrinkage in Ireland caused an increase in wages (as happened in England after the Black Death) and Irish working class prosperity closed on that of England.
This does tend to agree with my point about the myth of a consistent long term Imperial policy, which is the reductionist view that I thought you were applying to Irish history.
Niall Ferguson is not an historian I would generally want to be seen agreeing with, but his suggestion that Ireland become prosperous when, in effect, it ceased to be an inward looking theocracy, does have some traction where Iâm concerned. The Easter Rising didnât do Ireland a lot of good, though I guess on the Chinese view of history âit is far too soon to tell.â Nor did the appalling levels of political corruption in Ireland.
What? No, not even remotely. Thatâs wrong by orders of magnitude, even if we only consider the pre-revolutionary period. In North America they were hugely outnumbered by both African slaves and voluntary indentured servants (and the vast majority were English, anyways).
The point is that there wasnât anything different about the Irish compared to other European indentured servants, and it wasnât even comparable to the slavery of non-Europeans.
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