Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty

By Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano

Looking at America through the Irish prism and employing a comparative approach, leading and emerging scholars of early American and Atlantic history interrogate anew the relationship between imperial reform and revolution in Ireland and America, offering fascinating insights into the imperial whole of which both places were a part. Revolution would eventually stem from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of imperial crisis wrought by reform, only to ultimately create two expanding empires in the nineteenth century in which the Irish would play critical roles.

Contributors Rachel Banke, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy * T. H. Breen, University of Vermont * Trevor Burnard, University of Hull * Nicholas Canny, National University of Ireland, Galway * Christa Dierksheide, University of Virginia * Matthew P. Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia * Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University * Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire * Robert G. Ingram, Ohio University * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello * Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813946023

Book preview

Ireland and America

The Revolutionary Age

Francis D. Cogliano and Patrick Griffin, Editors

Ireland and America

Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty

Edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Griffin, Patrick, editor. | Cogliano, Francis D., editor.

Title: Ireland and America : empire, revolution, and sovereignty / edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano.

Description: [Charlottesville, Virginia] : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020036221 (print) | LCCN 2020036222 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946016 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946023 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Irish—America—History—18th century. | Imperialism. | Revolutions. | Ireland—Relations—America. | America—Relations—Ireland. | Great Britain—Colonies—History—18th century. | Ireland—History—18th century. | Ireland—History—Rebellion of 1798. | United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783.

Classification: LCC DA948.A2 I73 2021 (print) | LCC DA948.A2 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/24150709033—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036221

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036222

Cover art: The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom, James Barry, etching and engraving with traces of aquatint in black on wove paper, 1776 / ca. 1779 (Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame. Gift of William and Nancy Pressly in honor of the Stent Family, 2015); background (Flas100 / Shutterstock)

For Mary Hope and for Mimi

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ireland and America: Empire and Revolution

Part I. Ireland and America

How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500–1900

Nicholas Canny

The American Revolution and the Uses and Abuses of Ireland

Gordon S. Wood

Empire and Resistance: Reflections on the American and Irish Revolutions

T. H. Breen

The Path Not Taken: American Independence and the Irish Counterpoint

Eliga Gould

Peasants, Soldiers, and Revolutionaries: Interpreting Irish Manpower in the Age of Revolutions

Matthew P. Dziennik

Dominant Minorities: Irish and Jamaican White Protestants in the British Empire in the 1780s

Trevor Burnard

Part II. Empire and Revolution

An Empire of Tracts: Mapping Landscapes of Property in the British Atlantic World

S. Max Edelson

The Reformation in the Age of Jefferson

Robert G. Ingram

The Ideology of Imperial Reform: Enlightened Absolutism and the American Colonies

Rachel Banke

A Comparison of the Responses of the Loyal British Colonies to the American Revolution

Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy

The Strange Afterlife of the Declaration of Independence: The State of Franklin, 1784–c. 1789

Jessica Choppin Roney

The Contract for America

Annette Gordon-Reed

Becoming Co-Imperialists: Anglo-Americans and the First Opium War

Christa Dierksheide

Epilogue: Imperial Peoples: America, Ireland, and the Making of the Modern World

Peter S. Onuf

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The conference that led to this volume was the work of many good people. The International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello provided the lion’s share of support. Whitney Pippin moved mountains to get all the work done. Financial help for the conference also came from the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. Lisa Caulfield and John Dee kindly hosted us as Kylemore Abbey. Kevin Whelan offered us access to O’Connell House in Dublin. Dan Carey and Martha O’Shaughnessy were perfect hosts at the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

This volume would not have been possible without the following people: Lisa Gallagher, Catherine Wilsdon, Beth Bland, and Johnny Nelson.

Thanks to Tom Bartlett and Peter Thompson, who served as referees and who were kind enough to reveal their identities to us.

We were guided by a great number of Irish scholars who participated in the conference. What they had to offer was instrumental in sharpening the many themes these essays discuss. Thanks to our good friends Ciaran Brady, Dan Carey, Patrick Geoghegan, and Jane Ohlmeyer. A few Americanists who also took part in the conference helped immensely, especially Joyce Chaplin, Harry Dickinson, Alison Games, and John McCusker.

Finally, one of the participants passed away between the conference and the appearance of this volume. Jan Lewis was a dear friend to many people in the volume. She is missed by all of us.

Ireland and America

Introduction

Ireland and America

Empire and Revolution

In 1776, as the American colonies were breaking away from Britain, an Irish artist living in London named James Barry made an engraving he would entitle The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. Born a Catholic in Cork, Barry suggested that by this time, the ideal of liberty was dying in Britain in much the same way it had once flourished and then withered in the classical world. In the image, which adorns the cover of this book, his characters meet to lament the passing; yet, they point off to the distance, across the water, where liberty is having a rebirth. The only one seemingly left out of this hopeful picture is the man with shackles around his ankles, Barry’s famous patron and fellow Irishman Edmund Burke. The chains symbolize the distinctive bind Barry and Burke contended with within empire. Burke and Barry were part of the British Atlantic world, one that included America, but they stood apart from it at the same time. Ireland and America for them were bound together in the British Empire; yet, as Irish provincials, even though well-ensconced in Britain, Barry and Burke experienced the tensions that it engendered in ways distinct from their fellow subjects in the colonies on the other side of the ocean.¹

In the spring of 2017 we invited a group of historians to Ireland to discuss empire, revolution, and the connections and disjunctions Barry presents us with. The group consisted of leading scholars, mainly specialists in early America and Atlantic history, though we had a number of Irish specialists in our midst to guide the discussions and inform our deliberations. These people represented some of the finest scholars of their respective generations. All were asked to consider what they study through the prism of Ireland, America, empire, and revolution. What they discovered was that the comparative angle in light of all the fine work done on imperial, new British, American, and Atlantic history offers a telling look at each place. It provides insights about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic, about the relationship between imperial reform and revolution, and about the powerful role empire played in shaping all of these dynamics. For better and for worse, Ireland and America were places shaped by revolution and empire, just as both nations would shape empire and revolution. To appreciate this fact is to retell familiar stories in a more compelling fashion.

The subject of Ireland and America, empire and revolution would almost seem tailor-made for demonstrating the virtues of comparative, systemic, and entangled history. In the past historians have gleaned meaningful insights into the political, economic, social, and cultural life of each place, as well as the empire, in the early modern period by juxtaposing one with the other. Ireland, we have learned, served as a first stab at empire in America, a jumping-off point, and cultural understandings of the Irish colored how the English saw Indians in America.² The later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century story of Irish-American imperial connections centers on how people, in this case Irish migrants, driven abroad by the extension of imperial power to Ireland, opted to settle in places like Pennsylvania. This chapter of the peopling of British North America is part of an older story of Irish-American transatlantic connections.³ Later, Irish colonial nationalists influenced how Americans envisioned empire in the eighteenth century, and we know that much of the ideological content of American resistance to empire drew from the Irish in the years after the Seven Years’ War. Both, now part of the same imperial system, found themselves in similar straits.⁴ Finally, we have understood for a long time that the American struggle against empire inspired the Irish later to try to follow the same course, and how the failure of such emulation led to a new movement of republican-minded Irish to a republican America.⁵

The essays in this collection have no bones to pick with these older formulations. However, they do suggest more compelling connections and entanglements, subtler also than these, however fascinating they remain. They also demonstrate meaningful disjunctions. The way the imperial state was formed in Ireland and then in America reveals differences between the places, even if they were under the same imperial system. The first difference stemmed from status. Think here of old tried and true dichotomies, such as kingdom / colony or plantation / colony. Even if Ireland functioned as an English colony, it enjoyed the constitutional status of a kingdom. The American colonies, as plantations, did not.⁶ The second was rooted in differences or lines between people. For Ireland the salient dividing line was between confession; in America, race. Although confessional differences existed in colonial North America, these were not as powerful as race, nor did sectarian divisions shape American politics and culture as they did in Ireland. Access to power in each, then, was determined by different categories. A third difference stemmed from the first two. In Ireland the dominant group was a minority; in America it was a majority. Of course, differences did not wipe away some critical features the two shared. The imperial center thrived through the exploitation of each distinctive arrangement. So too did local elites. Many could enrich themselves with the spoils of empire. And the British usually offered enough tokens of status to ensure that local elites, whether minorities or majorities, were able to rule over their subject peoples.⁷

Of course, Ireland and America had a great deal more in common. Both were situated within the same imperial structure. Both were treated as colonies from time to time. Both also became cultural provinces of Britain. Some basic congruities thus existed. Nonetheless, a basic incongruity emerges when we study them under the imperial umbrella. We know that the conquest and planation of Ireland in the early modern period led to extraordinary suffering. But virgin soil epidemics, disease outbreaks that undermined Native American resistance to European settlement, did not strike Ireland. Blunt demography, and its political implications, made for dramatically different experiences of empire.⁸

During the imperial crises in the later eighteenth century, linkages between Ireland and America—both actual and imagined—became more pronounced. These played on congruities and incongruities. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, imperial reformers tried to remake the relationship between each of these peripheries and the center, leading to tensions centering on home rule and rule at home in each place. Events led people on both sides of the Atlantic, enticingly, to look for similarities. The Irish past for Americans offered comparative handholds as they struggled with an imperial vision that the British proffered as reform, one rooted in parliamentary supremacy. The same went for the Irish. The common and entangled plight of Ireland and America within empire led to probing explorations of the past. Sometimes people would fasten on similarities between Ireland and America; at other times, differences.⁹ Soon enough provincial elites confronted profound dilemmas. Now reawakened to their provincial status, elites wanted to push back against metropolitan demands. But how far could they go in doing so? Could they control their societies, could they keep the ghosts of imperial state formation that had defined their societies distinctively at bay? For British North Americans, confident in their control of their society and as a dominant majority, independence from empire could be imagined. They could secure the riches and status of their continent and the Atlantic, they reckoned, outside of empire. For the Irish, Protestant patriots that is, independence was unthinkable. They were a dominant minority. Therefore, the blunt proportions of demography—the most important difference between the two places—determined that they would diverge. Ireland would be plunged into the abyss after another catalytic event, in this case the French Revolution, and after another round of reform. By this time, the minority could no longer manage the society effectively.¹⁰

Revolutionary tumult stemmed from this moment of imperial crisis wrought by reform, especially from the ways the Irish and Americans looked to each other to make sense of crisis. Empire and revolution, therefore, were inextricably interlinked. Revolutionary experience for Americans was defined not only by attempts to gain liberation from empire but also by attempts to impose the order lost through the dissolution of imperial sovereignty. This sort of calculation would also determine the shape of the revolutionary settlement in each place. In America, an independent republic would be won, but race would still be the dividing line. In Ireland, it became clear that subjugating a majority was a difficult thing. The Union, the imperial answer for Ireland after the tumultuous revolutionary period, represented a lowest common denominator: something unsettling to nearly all, infuriating to some, but ultimately the least best option, perhaps even without Catholic Emancipation, given the imperial incongruities that defined Irish life and the revolutionary violence that had visited the kingdom.¹¹

As the United States and Ireland under the Union entered new national eras, the basic imperatives that stirred imperial state formation earlier on still pertained. Space and people had to be managed and governed in an insecure and competitive world. Power still mattered. And so, after a revolutionary interlude, Americans crafted a new republican empire designed to address some of the imperfections of the older British model and to deal with the potential anxieties of the dominant majority. And the British Empire retooled itself in light of what had happened to its American empire, and this was the model used to address the problem of Ireland’s subjected majority.¹²

Although the links between Ireland and America in terms of sovereignty were broken after the age of revolution, the Irish themselves remained the bridge builders between the two places. They served as the foot soldiers in Britain’s empire and in America’s.¹³ They were given status in both. Their participation in America’s empire could give the Irish standing as members of the dominant group there, because of how the salient dividing lines in each place differed. Stifled by confession in Ireland, the Irish were empowered by race in America. In the British case, they could only participate in empire, gaining access to its riches and status, in so far as they were willing to forget their traumatic past, and as Catholicism with time was no longer deemed beyond the pale of subjecthood.¹⁴

The outlines of the new empires the Irish inhabited, both in a British world and in an American world, were eerily similar. Although one was under a Crown and the other was a republican regime, both empires the Irish inhabited still had to address the basic incongruities between power and liberty and how these were complicated by a democratic ethos, unleashed by the age of revolution.¹⁵ Empires now had to harness and mobilize peoples in new ways. These empires would prove more durable than their predecessors. Officials in both places would embrace the mantle of imperial civilizers, ironically employing the Irish to do so, binding them to both in the process. The irony here is that the struggles involving America, Ireland, and Britain over questions of empire ultimately created two empires, in which the Irish would play similar critical roles. That Ireland would, of course, eventually break from British empire does not diminish the power of the imperial parallels and connections that defined the Green Atlantic through much of the nineteenth century.

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The essays in this collection speak to the study of comparative continuities across time within a broad system. They point to the many ways that Ireland and America were and are linked together. They cover some tried and true themes that prove fascinating to explore in new ways. Most visibly, the experiences of people in both places paralleled each other, or better yet followed or preceded one another. In this volume, Ireland still acts as a laboratory for what would be tried in America. And a revolutionary America still serves as a precursor for radicalism and revolt in Ireland. The essays do not challenge these formulations. Instead, they move a bit beyond them by comparing, entangling, and disentangling shared histories, in the process offering novel interpretations of each place and of empire.

The scholars here found more. With the notable exception of Nicholas Canny, none primarily work as Irish historians. All, besides Robert G. Ingram, work on American history, even Canny. Moreover, all were trained in the United States, and nearly all had already written seminal works focused on American historical questions. No doubt, some of the historians in the volume juxtapose Ireland with America to tell us something new about empire. Others use Ireland as a prompt of sorts to reconsider the conventional American narrative from unconventional perspectives. Many of these essays, understandably, explore outliers. The Irish case encourages this sort of exploration. Maybe it even forces Americanists to explore what lies outside the normal purview; it makes us see what we think we know well in new ways.

As Eliga Gould suggests, Ireland serves as a telling counterpoint to the American story. It does so because of symmetries and asymmetries. Comparative history, of course, lends itself to this sort of work. The tangled and connected juxtaposition of the two places makes us think anew about predominant categories of analysis, about what we would normally consider to be critical questions, and about the seemingly normative nature of the history we often take for granted.¹⁶ The knotted nature of difference and similarity between Ireland and America proves the starting point for each of the essays. Indeed, as the contributors demonstrate, it is the relationship between convergence and divergence, and symmetries and asymmetries, all bound up in the experience under empire, that determined the contours of Irish and American history. It is these sorts of connections and entanglements that make the comparative study of both so rewarding and so sobering.

In the first section of this collection, Ireland and America, the contributors make direct comparisons between two places an ocean apart. At the most basic level, juxtaposing one experience with the other begets a comparative history that encourages us to grapple with one in light of the other. But the two places were conjoined as well. They were also tied together by systemic imperatives. Think here of the Atlantic dynamics that bound the two together in the eighteenth century. Through the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas between these two places—and the ocean in this regard functioned as a two-way street—the Atlantic was changed from a world into an integrated system.¹⁷ Deep and growing ties between the two places played a prominent role in this drama. And both Ireland and America were transformed through these systemic connections.

It is fitting that the doyen of Irish historians, Nicholas Canny, begins the volume. Canny sets the tone for the broader collection, showing how people, especially the Irish, engaged with empire creatively. They could exploit it, contest it, and use its structures to carve out meaningful niches. This sits nicely alongside Canny’s long practice of comparing the Irish and American experiences of the origins of empire, asking us to see power in light of global and local imperatives.¹⁸ Canny demonstrates that some Irish migrants found opportunities, first in Europe and then globally, through the Catholic church, a large, transnational institution that rivaled the major European empires in its global reach. Canny shows that Irish churchmen helped to shape European empires from the early modern period through the end of the nineteenth century. Just as Irish Protestants might find opportunities within the British Empire, Irish Catholics acquired global influence, within and without that empire, via the church. In so doing, their global experience fed back and transformed their local communities.

As Canny reminds us, the Atlantic connections implicit in empire, despite the chronological sweep of English / British imperial ambitions, would make for strategies that were strikingly similar for both Ireland and America. The interplay of local and global in the end defined the experience of all under the umbrella of empire. But the fact that American history often focuses on the settlers or newcomers and Irish history on the native or indigenous makes for some interpretive challenges when we compare the two.

In some cases, though, the comparison makes sense. In the eighteenth century, American creoles, as we know, would follow the example of Irish Protestant Patriots and challenge imperial rule. Just as William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift had done earlier for Ireland, the descendants of English settlers in America contested Parliament’s attempts to tax America and to legislate for it. Yet, there was a fundamental absurdity to contesting the vehicle of reform, Parliament. Gordon S. Wood considers how contesting the moves of the chief bulwark against prerogative, Parliament, placed American Whigs in a terribly uncomfortable position. In the wake of reform, Americans had to consider if they would still abide with parliamentary sovereignty, which should have served as a defense against arbitrary power, when it impinged on their ability to remain autonomous within what had been up to the 1760s an accommodationist imperial structure.¹⁹ The moment of the crisis made such logic unavoidable. Both places were in the same boat now, and Americans invoked Ireland for all different sorts of reasons.

Wood explores this well-known tension, but he does so in light of the ways Americans used the Irish example to push back against what Parliament was doing in the 1760s and early 1770s. As he argues, they employed Ireland in all sorts of ways, often distorting the Irish experience under empire to suit their rhetorical purposes. As the convergence between Irish and American experiences under empire became compelling, Americans looked to the Irish past to make sense of their present. Wood finds that Ireland at this key moment for the empire served a mediating role as the men who would become the founding fathers tried to figure ways out of their imperial conundrum. They would, of course, have no alternative but to leave.

Revolution stemmed from imperial overreach. And here is why T. H. Breen’s essay is so compelling. By juxtaposing an eighteenth-century American experience with a twentieth-century Irish one, Breen reminds us that empire and revolution are inextricably bound together. Moreover, the connections across time and space serve as vivid reminders of how the process of revolution worked. America in 1775 and Ireland in 1916 were essentially, for a moment at least, the same places, caught somewhere between sovereignty and anarchy, empire and republic.²⁰ Breen’s contribution gives us pause to consider things that do not normally go together to help us appreciate anew what we thought we understood implicitly. Yet, as Breen suggests in some of his other work, empire in America, because it was created in a manner that differed from the Irish case, also generated an institutional culture that could ensure crisis did not lead to appalling violence, as it would in Ireland in the years after revolution in America.²¹ Of course, Ireland would enter the abyss after the French Revolution in the fateful year of 1798. The Irish could not avoid what Breen argues Americans were able to evade.

Eliga Gould argues that while the period in question turned on convergence between the two places, revolution created complex counterpoints at key moments. First, Ireland served as the prototype of American status after 1765, one premised on a commonwealth theory of empire. Second, Ireland offered a constitutional alternative to the independent United States after the negotiations that led to what is popularly called Grattan’s Parliament. We see in Gould’s essay the choice that Irish Patriots would take; theirs would be the commonwealth model Americans had imagined in the 1760s but ultimately rejected thereafter. The comparative payoff does not end there. After the Revolution, the federal solution in adding new states, the American model of empire, in part owed something to the Irish example of dependent statehood, even if the Americans as a whole rejected such an arrangement earlier under British Empire. Ireland, then, played two roles. It was, as Gould believes, both model and counter-model.

At the time of the Revolution, the Irish represented something more than a comparative abstraction. Irishmen would, of course, play critical roles in fighting for the Patriot cause during the American Revolution. Perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the Continental Army was composed of Irish immigrants or their descendants. This revolutionary experience bound the Irish to the United States. Another revolutionary experience, the flip side of this coin, also pulled America and Ireland further apart. Matthew P. Dziennik argues that regions that had been unintegrated in empire before were tied more closely to British Empire through revolution. We know this was the case for the Highlands, and service in America during the war was used to tie the previously disaffected into the state.²² For Ireland, something similar happened. Irish soldiers would play a key role in the expansion of the British state after the Revolution because of the service they performed for empire during it. Soldiers, he argues, functioned as the human capital of empire. Tying the Irish into the British state also ensured that young men, now politicized, could be coopted. In this way, the state could quiet the minds of the people, and this the British had learned was a key to manage empire in an age of democratic revolution. The dominant majorities on the Celtic fringe could be put to good use, and new men of the age could be yoked to the ancien régime. The idea of empire, ironically, could help solve a problem that empire had created in the first place.²³

We might think that the era of revolutionary reform in the Atlantic would bring an end to empire. It did not. For the Irish, loyalty to the Crown would grow more appealing after another period of reform and a new era of revolutionary violence. According to Trevor Burnard, Britain emerged in a strong position after the loss of its colonies. And Ireland was part of this expanded empire. Authoritarian reformers now turned their attention to their provincial worlds. And soon reform led to another round of destabilization, eerily like that twenty years earlier. Burnard offers us a comparative history between Ireland and Britain’s American colonies that differs a bit from the comparative tack others take. He looks at Ireland and empire through the Caribbean lens. He finds that the British had some advantages they did not have at the earlier moment. Distance was a key one. Ireland proved easier to manage than islands so far away. In the Caribbean colonies like Jamaica, the British had fears of slave uprisings on their side.²⁴ In Jamaica, whites would always be complicit in rule, no matter how unsatisfied they were. In Ireland, the British government could not be so complacent, as 1798 demonstrated. Tighter control, not complacency, proved the answer. Ultimately, the two places converged within empire. Catholics would be liberated (but only with time); so too would slaves (but only with time). This second British Empire would have to turn its back on the excesses and most exploitative aspects of Atlantic integration to make empire viable in such an age.²⁵

While some of our contributors make direct connections between Ireland and America, others address the broader issues of empire and revolution in light of those comparisons. These essays appear in our second section, Empire and Revolution. Empires, however coercive, were sustained by imagining space, as S. Max Edelson reminds us, and the state at the end of the seventeenth century took a more systematic approach to governing space and peoples. Map-making was part and parcel of this approach. Lines were imagined and created and employed to exclude, to conquer, to manage. This, of course, is the Irish story within the English / British state. But the imperial state was not a monolithic entity. Indeed, map-making could even be a subtle affair. Such had defined the case for the American colonies up to the mid-eighteenth century. Only with the Seven Years’ War do we have a moment when map-making became more intentionally imperial for America, in much the same way it had been in Ireland at an earlier moment of conquest.²⁶ Maps allowed space, and the peoples who labored in that space, to be controlled. Making maps necessarily meant making empires. Making empires also meant making maps.²⁷

Empire was not only formally political. It was also an economic and cultural set of arrangements. It could be blunt; it could be sophisticated.²⁸ It is trite to say it, but the Atlantic empire was a complex place, and that complexity hinged on transformations which gripped the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. Robert G. Ingram acknowledges this dynamic, but he also asks us to recognize that continuities matter as much as change and shifting events.²⁹ We know that many throughout the English Atlantic saw themselves as a Protestant people, and the bundle of ideas implicit in Protestantism at the time could justify both the coercion and reform of people. This was the essence of English imperial ideology.³⁰ But Ingram shows us how some of the central tensions of the Reformation were alive and well and unresolved at the time of the British Atlantic eighteenth century. He gets us into the enduring implications of the Reformation’s ideas themselves.³¹ And these would have dramatic effects for how peoples thought of empire and the Atlantic, and how they made sense of each. Confessional fissures were deeper in Ireland than America, but sectarian divisions shaped notions of empire and power on both sides of the Atlantic.

Imperial complexity, refracted through the Irish and American experiences, also animates Rachel Banke’s essay. This contribution demonstrates how the period after the Seven Years’ War led to a thorough and multivalent reconsideration of what empire should be, and people began to probe the many implications of issues Canny, Edelson, and Ingram discuss. The period after the war ushered in an urgent and earnest debate about what sovereignty meant. Sovereignty could no longer remain either an abstraction or unarticulated. Americans soon offered their own visions, usually federal in nature, to suggest what form sovereignty should take. A number of British ministries countered with their own ideas of what it should look like.³² The empire began cracking apart at the moment the idea of empire was most fully realized. The upshot is that it became clear that an Irish model of subordination could not be applied on people an ocean away.³³ We see again that imperial officials had one of two paths to take: a more accommodationist model or one defined by coercion.³⁴ The path of John Stuart, Lord Bute, would not be taken for complex reasons. As Banke shows, Americans would turn the bête noir of English Whigs, Lord Bute, into their own nemesis. They fastened on him even though he epitomized the more accommodationist model because he represented for Britons the dangers of prerogative. Americans, after all, still insisted they were good Britons who refused to be ruled by coercive means. They used his image, one with purchase across the British Atlantic. But they did not do so to justify or explain empire. They did it to justify the fracture of empire.³⁵

As Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy suggests, it is only with a comparative approach and an imperial dimension that we can understand why some societies rebelled against the empire and some did not. With the sovereignty crisis after the Seven Years’ War, all British subjects in the empire faced the same calculations: Could Parliament legislate for them? And how far were they willing to go, given the distinctive tensions in each society, to press for their rights? Men and women in the West Indies and in Quebec also had to decide how they would imagine empire in these years and what provincial status meant. Officials and elites faced distinctive sorts of dilemmas within their own societies, and they had to decide if contesting imperial reform made sense.³⁶ They weighed the percentage of threatening people (Catholics, the poor, the enslaved), economic imperatives, and their status within their provincial cultures. In this case Bermuda is particularly instructive. Bermuda supported the Patriots because it was so dependent on the colonies in North America.

The age of revolution stemmed, then, from the incongruities unearthed by empire, however convergent provincial societies had become. It occurred within the British world in a kaleidoscopic way, and each society was haunted by its own history and defining fault lines, all of which had emerged through systemic integration and imperial state formation. The dilemmas all faced made for difficult decisions. Some would rebel. Others would not. As O’Shaughnessy’s essay illustrates, by studying varied places that remained loyal throughout the crisis of empire, we gain new purchase on the places that would rebel and those, like Ireland, that fell somewhere between the two. Those that fell into the abyss outside of the world of sovereignty dealt with the furies, or they found ways to manage them. Some, such as those in Ireland, were able to evade them for a time.

What happened to empire after revolution? Jessica Choppin Roney tackles this question with her investigation of white western settlers after the American Revolution by suggesting that empire defined post-revolutionary America every bit as much as it had for early modern Ireland.³⁷ Empire reined in the unruly and allowed the new state to govern its space. Empire was still about managing space and people. It was also about reform, setting up processes to turn the barbarous, in this case white settlers, into fit citizens. This imperative also created a need to negotiate, for these people could not be coerced and these people were politicized. They had after all become actors in the crucible of revolution. In other words, after the Revolution, Americans were back to the future. The old pressures had not changed for states. And empire was still the answer.

Old pressures still lived on. So too did older ways of categorizing difference. Americans after their Revolution had to come up with legal codes that looked a great deal like the penal codes of the Irish eighteenth century. But for Americans, they would be rooted in race.³⁸ Annette Gordon-Reed argues that the holdovers from the older world of imperial foundations were not done away with by revolution. Indeed, for revolution to come to an end, they had to be confronted and acknowledged. Blacks would bear the cost. She reminds us that elites were only able to create a legal regime that excluded African Americans from any share of rights because they were a minority, but a troubling one that had to be contained in neo-imperial thralldom. America’s formation as part of the British Empire was the result of chattel slavery. It was the engine of Atlantic integration and also American participation in an empire of the Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free. After the Revolution, even if the United States left the British Empire behind, it could not leave behind the ghosts of earlier imperial experiences, and imperial coercion would hold sway in a new guise. Gordon-Reed demonstrates, yet again, that even though on the surface Ireland, with its vexed relations between religious groups, looked different than an America transfixed with race, they were eerily similar.

Although America and Ireland had experienced a divergence, they were still bound. This too is a complex story. And the Irish would serve as a vital link between two empires, one old and retooling and reacting to a revolutionary age, and one new and figuring out how to manage space and people through revolutionary discourse. The Irish would people the British Army. They would catechize men and women from all corners of the earth. The bounds of an Anglophone world, through trade, coercion, and proselytization, were pushed ever outward by their efforts.³⁹ The Irish Empire was a parallel to America’s empire of liberty, but it would be within a British rubric. The Irish would also become imperial agents in America. They tended to fight for the Patriot side in the Revolution. After, the Irish would join the U.S. Army as avidly as they would the British one. They would toil as the foot soldiers of settlement in America, remaking the face of so many places though their movement. We tend to see the Irish as the anti-imperial Europeans. But their participation proved critical to empire; they just did so in subtler and perhaps even more effective ways.

These new empires would be strikingly alike. Christa Dierksheide shows us an American Empire that could mobilize and deploy force beyond its borders to develop markets every bit as effectively as the British Empire. If anything, both of these new empires in which the Irish featured were geared for growth. And the Irish would play important roles in both. We know how they would man the army of, for instance, the East India Company and then British Crown forces in India thereafter, all to open up ports to foreign trade.⁴⁰ They would do the same for America. And why shouldn’t they have? The two empires, one republican and the other under the Crown, were mirror images of one another. The successor empires of the first British Empire, one American and the other British, viewed themselves as Anglo-Saxon nations with Celts manning their armies and navies.

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The Irish and American cases during an age of tumult throughout the Atlantic world demonstrate the many ways empire and revolution were bound together. Americans had to embrace an old imperial culture, after a revolution against empire, to create a new set of norms that could sustain them as a republican people.⁴¹ They could not wish away such imperatives; in fact, they knew that managing power was the only thing that kept them from the abyss. This included, of course, laws to sustain the slave system, that ultimate holdover from the imperial age.⁴² The Irish had a similar experience of empire after a revolutionary moment. For the Irish case, the only arrangement that could sustain order in a politicized revolutionary world would be the Union.⁴³ Nonetheless, the continuation of the most basic asymmetries between the two places suggest how they would diverge after the age of revolution. In America, some—minorities—would and could be written out of citizenship, but the proportion of the disaffected in Ireland—the majority—would make for a different calculus. America’s conundrum could only be exorcised through civil war. For Ireland, in the place of the garrison government of the eighteenth century came Union and eventually Catholic emancipation, even if Ireland was imperfectly bound to the other kingdoms, a fact that would sustain continuing and escalating tension within the United Kingdom.⁴⁴

All the essays point to one uncomfortable consideration: the Irish and Americans were, and perhaps still are, imperial peoples. Peter S. Onuf considers the implications of this charged idea in his epilogue. The amazing thing is that both would take issue with this label. Think of it: the sense of collective self of both bridles at the notion. The Irish were the one European people to be colonized, and to confront this fact a number would wage revolutionary war in the twentieth century. And this struggle would come to define nationhood for many Irishmen and -women. Americans, we know, would develop a collective identity by throwing off the shackles of empire, one tied to their own experience waging a revolutionary war. In terms of identity, Americans and Irish were and are the ultimate anti-imperial peoples. In terms of their experience through the age of revolution, they are best conceived of as imperial and revolutionary anti-imperialists. As these essays suggest and as Onuf shows, both were the victims and the purveyors of empire, just as much as their ideals of nationhood