Capitalism and Irish studies

In the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, American historiography underwent a significant shift. Previously dominated by cultural and social history methodologies, a new wave of capitalist histories emerged. Unabashedly presentist in motivation, these works returned capitalism and class to the centre-ground of American history. Works such as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Walmart, Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune and Destin Jenkins’ Bonds of Inequality all raised serious questions not just about capitalism but also about adjacent issues of race, gender, religion, and the environment.¹ Simultaneously, with the increasing return of socialism to the mainstream of American life, works drawing on Marxist frameworks have also proliferated, such as Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit.² The blatant connections between capitalism and the climate crisis have only made the need for a serious understanding of the former more obvious.

At least in the United States, it is a good time to be studying capitalism.

Ireland suffered an arguably worse crash in 2008 than the United States (and indeed probably worse than most of the global North). And yet an Irish capitalist studies remains undiscovered. Within Irish history-writing, this is probably not too surprising. Conservatism – both methodological and subtly political – still predominates. Irish historians remain wedded to “the State,” both in the obvious methodological sense that it is the primary category of analysis, but also in the ways that, financially and professionally, many scholars are reliant on the state. In all the recent events of the Decade of Commemoration, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone discussing capitalism, even though it was always a central concern for key figures during the so-called Revolution, from the state-developmentalism and import-substitution industrialisation of Arthur Griffith to the overt anti-capitalism of Connolly, Larkin and Markievicz and the small-holders republic of de Valera. While it may not feature much as a claim in most Irish historiography, modern Irish history cannot be understood outside of the capitalist contexts in which it unfolded. Ireland was a key laboratory of capitalism from the early modern period onwards: from the Cromwellian plantations that remade patterns of landownership, to the construction of Ireland as a dependent market before and after the Act of Union to the obsessions with personal responsibility during the Famine and economic restructuring and social engineering after that. These had a profound effect on the economic and social class relations on the island.

While normally depicted via a blunt sectarianism – the trope of a capitalist Protestant north versus an agrarian Catholic south – the extractive nature of British capitalist interests in Ireland demanded an indigenous middleman or comprador system to facilitate the process. This was not unique to Ireland. It was (and remains) a core feature of colonial extraction. Where Ireland differs is in its historiography. To use an analogy from Marx, it rarely ventures into the hidden abode of production, “on whose threshold hangs the notice ‘no admittance except on business.’”³ Indeed, it is not at all a coincidence that when Marx wrote Capital in 1867 and sought to create a general theory of capitalism’s origins and development, Ireland was the only non-British space he discussed at length. There is no modern Ireland outside of capitalism.

Irish literary studies have certainly laid a better groundwork. With the turn towards postcolonial studies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, scholars such as Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons and Declan Kiberd began to think critically about where Ireland fits into broader systems of power and wealth. More recent works – Mary McGlynn’s Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, Deirdre Flynn and Ciara Murphy’s edited collection, Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, Sharae Deckard or Malcolm Sen’s work at the intersections of literary studies and ecology – have deepened and improved on the earlier wave of Irish postcolonial literary studies.⁴ And yet, by remaining so wedded to the high-cultural, this entire body of scholarship always runs the risk of walling itself off from the profane real world. Joe Cleary’s Outrageous Fortune is rare in its attempt to embed cultural studies into a genuinely materialist understanding of Irish capitalism and Ireland’s idiosyncratic place within the capitalist world-system.⁵

This special issue aims to lay the groundwork for future studies of Irish capitalism. Crossing over from historical studies to literary and cultural criticism, the articles contained here cover a large spread of Irish culture, society and religion from the early-modern period onwards. In all these papers, the determining role of capitalist social relations, capitalist ontologies and Ireland’s status in the capitalist world-system are emphasised. They also contain elements of a long overdue interrogation of the myriad facets of the middleman/comprador system which today routes itself through law, finance, housing, accountancy and politics.

Usually defined as a group that services foreign capital and its needs, one that includes state agencies; consultancy firms; and accountancy and legal advisory firms; the comprador system itself has a very particular and historical dimension in Ireland due to the country’s deep colonial past. Its nineteenth-century dynamics were given an institutional form when the Irish Free State was formally recognised in 1922. These continue to exert an inordinate influence on state policy and direction, having morphed themselves into a loose regulatory and tax avoidance logic. Elements of this system, both historical and contemporary, are teased out in a number of the following articles.

Opening the special issue, Michael Bailey’s article highlights the contribution of Irish Catholic exiles to Spain’s eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms, demonstrating how Hiberno-Spanish proyectistas and imperial administrators translated and promoted the emulation of British political economy. To do so, the article focuses on three Hiberno-Spanish imperial administrators – Bernardo Ward, Ricardo Wall, and Alejandro O’Reilly. In the 1760s, these three men reached the highest echelons of power in the Spanish Empire and collectively promoted a vision of the Spanish Empire that emulated London rather than Paris, making a direct impact on Spain’s liberalisation of colonial trade, the establishment of economic societies, free trade in grain, and state support for the expansion of plantation slavery, among other reforms.

Continuing with a global and comparative focus, Laura Tavalocci’s article, “Hardy Peasants, Passive Landlords: Translating Difference into Agrarian Capitalism,” explores how, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the British interpreted agrarian society in India and Ireland as different from that of Britain, and how these differences helped them reimagine liberalism. In particular, the colonial administrator and MP, Sir George Campbell, used these translations of difference to romanticise small farms for providing more social stability. Campbell intertwined masculinity and morality with both agricultural science and political economy, moderating the quest for profit and obsession with productivity which typically marks British liberalism. This idealisation and protection of the small farmer helped save agrarian capitalism from the rise of peasant unrest in India, Ireland, and Great Britain even though in the long term it helped to reiterate social and economic hierarchies.

Returning to Ireland itself, Sarah Roddy and Patrick Doyle examine how the Irish Catholic Church proved itself to be something of a magnet for wealth in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquiring money and property through bequests, donations, and returns on investment. Roddy and Doyle’s article examines the ways in which the archdiocese of Dublin during the episcopacy of Archbishop William Walsh utilised its wealth to shape the social, economic, and political development of Dublin city. By focusing on the way in which a defined set of property and capital transactions was managed and invested by the archdiocese, a complex story that analyses the infrastructure of charitable donations, investment, and infrastructure building is revealed. Ultimately, the way in which the Church used its money left a wider legacy than the buildings and practices associated with the faith, they helped to co-create a model of investor capitalism that shaped the city of Dublin in ways that remain hotly contested to this day.

Marta Cook’s paper engages Denise Ferreira da Silva’s analysis of post-Enlightenment concepts of ethical and economic value in relation to colonial and racial subjugation to argue that Ireland’s settler and comprador elites continuously constructed white “Irish” subjectivity as part of a global project of expropriation and extraction. By mythologising themselves as adjudicators of “Gaelic authenticity” and saviours of precious cultural “resources” threatened by colonial devastation, perpetrators thus engulf compliant subaltern subjects into the resulting transparent subjectivity in order to occupy the same positionality, concealing the structures and mechanisms of coloniality. Using this lens, Cook analyses the career of James Byrne (1868–1931) an itinerant musician “discovered” in Kilkenny in 1904. The article in turn establishes “traditional culture” as a pillar of transnational political economy, and thus a powerful site of generative refusal.

Moving more fully into the contemporary era, Patrick Brodie and Patrick Bresnihan’s co-written piece articulates the historical entanglement of Ireland’s contemporary big tech ecosystem with earlier forms of economic development and state-sanctioned polluting practices, particularly focusing on strategies for attracting multinational companies since the 1960s. The outsourcing of polluting multinational industries to Ireland’s rural regions has a long history, one tied into fault-lines of the country’s postcolonial condition and (post-) developmental economy in the 1970s and 1980s. Ireland’s position as a western European nation-state undoubtedly means that wealth accumulated via these industries merits complicity in the global supply chains sustaining “green” extractivism in the Global South. But rural Ireland also bears an uneven share of responsibility for these industries, whose destructive externalities are often imposed on these places through large-scale infrastructures. The article argues that these rural movements and their histories should be a starting point for a “just” transition attuned to anti-imperialist goals in Ireland.

Samantha Haddad’s paper uses discourse analysis of biracial Roses of Tralee (two in particular, Sinéad de Róiste and Tara Talbot) to examine how their participation and representation within the Rose of Tralee Festival, and Irish society more generally, reflects the way that racial capitalism interacts with gender within Ireland and the diaspora. Through discourse analysis we can see how biracial women are othered, tokenised, exoticised, and forgotten as a part of larger conversations of race and womanhood in Ireland and the diaspora. This paper uses frameworks of tourism, beauty pageants, race, and Irish womanhood to pursue its argument.

Finally, Aran Ward Sell’s article, ‘Post-catastrophic Irelands in Contemporary Fiction,” examines the relationship between neoliberal late capitalism and environmental destruction in contemporary Irish literary fiction. He focuses on the dystopian distant future portrayed in Danny Denton’s The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow (2018). This analysis draws upon theoretical frameworks of “weird” writing derived from both the “New Weird” movement and Mark Fisher’s distinction between “weird” and “eerie.” Ward Sell thus identifies in Denton’s post-catastrophic vision a fusion of “weird” and “eerie” elements, resulting in “a constant, moving, decentred commentary on both [of] the twin eerie behemoths, climate and capital.”

One of the genuinely positive aspects of the now-completed Decade of Commemorations has been the strong emphasis placed on gender and gender history. It is clear that, at least for most Irish Studies scholars, gender has become not just an accepted category of analysis, but a necessary one. Likewise, influenced in part by the murder of George Floyd and the world-wide protests that erupted in 2020, Irish scholars increasingly recognise the need to incorporate race into our work. Our central motivation for this special issue is for capitalism to also be recognised as a necessitous part of Irish Studies work. Indeed, bringing capitalism into the conceptual frameworks of Irish Studies would deepen our knowledge of gender and race in the Irish context. It has long been understood, internationally if not always in Ireland, that capitalism is productive of specific kinds of gender and sexual relations.⁶ This can cautiously be compared to the manner in which capitalism “produces” race. Indeed, in his seminal 1983 text Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson devoted extensive space to the role that Ireland played in the emergence of Racial Capitalism.⁷ Likewise, Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race – equal parts polemical and influential – has a heavy investment in early modern Ireland as a place that seeded ideas of race across the spaces of Atlantic capitalism.⁸ And yet this interest has never really been reciprocated by Irish historians, who have seemingly ignored any possibilities of incorporating Robinson or Allen’s insights into their own work.

The most important foci of Irish Studies – colonisation, racialisation, identity, gender, land-ownership and housing crises, republican ideologies, taciturn fathers, sectarian divides, Catholic codes of sexual respectability, marriage and inheritance, famines, migration, proletarianisation in the Diaspora, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, secularisation, tax evasion, the Celtic Tiger – are all, in one way or another, products of capitalism and of Ireland’s status within a fluid network of capitalist states.

Put bluntly, Irish Studies scholars need to start thinking about capitalism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Jenkins, Bonds of Inequality; Levy, Freaks of Fortune; and Moreton, To Serve God.

2. Moore, Capitalism; and Taylor, Race for Profit.

3. Marx, Capital, 279–80.

4. Deckard, “World-Ecology and Ireland,” 145–76; Flynn and Murphy, eds., Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing; McGlynn, Broken Irelands; and Sen, “Risk and Refuge,” 13–31.

5. Cleary, Outrageous Fortune.

6. See, for example: Chitty, Sexual Hegemony; Davis, Women, Race and Class; Federici, Caliban and the Witch; and Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation.

7. Robinson, Black Marxism.

8. Allen, Invention, I.