Irish HG 487-398-PB

1
Historical Geography
an annual journal of research,
commentary, and reviews
Irish Historical Geographies, Pt.2
Volume 42, 2014
2
Historical Geography
Volume 42 – 2014
Co-Editors…………………………………………………………Maria Lane, University of New Mexico

Arn Keeling, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Garth Myers, Trinity College
Book Review Editor………………………………………John T. Bauer, University of Nebraska-Kearney

Soren Larsen, University of Missouri
Special Guest Editor…………………………..Gerry Kearns, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Editorial Production Fellow…………………….................………..Tina Faris, University of New Mexico
Editorial Board
Christian Brannstrom…….………………………………………………………….Texas A&M University

Caroline Desbiens………………………………………….......……………………………Université Laval
Matthew Farish………………………………………………………….…………….University of Toronto
Tariq Jazeel………………………………………………………….……………University College London
Gerry Kearns………………………………………….…..……National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Karen M. Morin…………………………………………………………………...……..Bucknell University
Margaret Pearce….………………………………………………………………….….University of Kansas
Richard Powell………………………………………………………...….…….………University of Oxford
Richard Schein…………….…………………………………………………………University of Kentucky
Sarah Smiley………………………………...………………………………………….Kent State University
Angela Subulwa……………………………...…………………………University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
Robert Wilson………………………………………………...………………………….Syracuse University
Historical Geography is an annual journal that publishes scholarly articles, book reviews, conference
reports, and commentaries. The journal encourages an interdisciplinary and international dialogue
among scholars, professionals, and students interested in geographic perspectives on the past. Con-
cerned with maintaining historical geography’s ongoing intellectual contribution to social scientific
and humanities-based disciplines, Historical Geography is especially committed to presenting the
work of emerging scholars.
Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in EBSCO and Elsevier electronic data-
bases, including HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS and AMERICA HISTORY AND LIFE.
©2014 Historical Geography Specialty Group, Association of American Geographers, all rights re-
served. Historical Geography (ISSN 2331-7523) is published annually at https://ejournals.unm.edu/
index.php/historicalgeography.
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY:
EDITORIAL UPDATE

T
his is my (Garth Myers) final issue as a co-editor, as Arn Keeling of Memorial University of
Newfoundland steps in alongside Maria Lane of the University of New Mexico as the two
co-editors for the 2015 volume. It has been an adventurous decade at Historical Geography,
to say the least. I feel that, for much of the time since I came on to the team in 2005 to co-edit
with Karen Morin and Dydia DeLeyser, I have been the lesser partner, the silent partner, or at
least the stealth partner because of the strong efforts of my fellow co-editors. At the same time,
I am proud to have been a part of helping this journal weather the following storms (and, in
the first case, literally it was a storm): that of its very existence post-Katrina; its uncertainties
with a disappearing publisher/managing editor; its transition to a new role as journal of the
Historical Geography Specialty Group of the AAG; its transition to an all-digital format; and
its subsequent move to the University of New Mexico. Just writing that sentence reminds me
how many challenges the journal has faced, and yet also of the pleasure of working with Karen,
Dydia, Maria, and now Arn to publish some very high-quality, groundbreaking work in historical
geography, for a full decade.
The journal is in very good hands with Maria and Arn, and with its permanent home at
the University of New Mexico. As readers will no doubt be aware by now, we utilize the Open
Journals Systems platform hosted by UNM Libraries, publishing all of our content digitally and
conducting all production activities online. The OJS platform streamlines everything from peer
review and copyediting to subscription management, and we are extremely grateful to the UNM
Libraries for providing this resource and the technical support we need to use it. We wish to thank
our UNM-based team, including Jon Wheeler for conscientious technical support and Tina Faris
(an MS Geography student at UNM) for her outstanding editorial and production assistance.
Historical Geography continues to look forward to hearing from authors, subscribers, and
potential guest editors through our OJS site at ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography.
Authors should use the online portal for article submission, and we encourage submissions that
use diverse digital media forms for both analysis and presentation. Subscribers can begin or
renew subscriptions through the subscription portal, in order to enjoy access to HG content in
the first twelve months after publication. (All HG content is fully open-access after the first year.)
Members of the AAG’s Historical Geography Specialty Group receive subscriptions to HG as a
benefit of their HGSG membership. We also offer digital subscriptions to both individuals and
libraries. Those who are interested in editing a future special issue on a particular theme should
contact Maria Lane (mdlane@unm.edu) and Arn Keeling (akeeling@mun.ca) to discuss topical
and scheduling considerations.
I would also like to acknowledge the authors here, whose contributions have made Volume
42 one of the “thickest” issues in HG’s history - despite, of course, the lack of a thick hardcover
journal! In fact, the digital format now makes this “thick” issue cost-effective; it would have been
far too costly to have this many articles in the old (print) days. This issue offers the second Part
of our special theme section on Irish Historical Geographies, edited by Gerry Kearns. The theme
section blossomed to twelve research articles, in addition to Gerry Kearns’ introduction to the
section; Parts One and Two, combined, will provide a benchmark for years to come of the best and
brightest work in historical geography from and/or about (global) Ireland. This issue is graced
with the presence of a lively and provocative essay from Anne Knowles, her 2014 Distinguished
Historical Geographer Lecture from the AAG meeting in Tampa – where Anne was elected as the
new President of the HGSG. Volume 42 contains five other research articles, as well as numerous
book reviews.
This is also the final issue as Book Review Editor for Soren Larsen of the University of
Missouri, as John Bauer of the University of Nebraska-Kearney steps in to that role for Volume 43
next year. I would like to join Maria and Arn in thanking Soren for just short of a decade in charge
of the reviews, which remain a vital segment of the journal.
Garth Myers
Trinity College
DISTINGUISHED HISTORICAL
GEOGRAPHY LECTURE, 2013
Why We Must Make Maps:
Historical Geography as a Visual Craft
Anne Kelly Knowles
Department of Geography
Middlebury College
I
would like to thank Bob Wilson, Maria Lane, and Garth Myers for selecting me for this honor.
It means a great deal to me. I welcome the opportunity to reflect on what I value in historical
geography, a field that I have loved and sought to promote throughout my academic career.
The title of my talk sums up an argument that I have been making implicitly for
decades. I now want to make it explicit. If historical geographers can embrace the visual
craft in what we do, while opening ourselves to more creative collaboration, we can make
major contributions to emerging fields of interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly in the
digital humanities and geovisualization. If we do not, we will once again be left behind.
I would like to start by telling you about my own first encounters with our sub-
discipline, to explain why, for me, historical-geographical research is necessarily full of
images, especially maps. This will answer the first question: Why do I make maps? Then
I will turn to Brian Harley’s deconstruction of the kind of cartography that I was taught.
Harley asks an important question: Why do historical geographers’ maps tell us so little
about humanity? My answer points in two directions: (1) the role of collaboration in
creative scholarship, and (2) the connection between historical geography and the Digital
Humanities.
Why I make maps
Like so many Americans, I went through school with no formal education in geography.
In sixth grade, a friend and I made a model of an Amazonian village out of home-made play-
doh (on one side of a brown river stood several lumpy trees; on the other, several slab-walled,
toothpick-roofed huts). In eighth-grade Civics class, Mr. Driver told us to make a map of a state.
I chose Louisiana and lost myself for days drawing its fringed coastline, highways, cities, and the
Mississippi River. What geography I learned came from family trips, when I played navigator
and soaked up my father’s fascination with historical sites. My undergraduate college, Duke
University, had no geography department and no geography courses. I filled my time working
for the daily student newspaper and then founded a tabloid magazine of politics and the arts.
I had my first exposure to the discipline of geography in Chicago, where I worked in a
series of editing jobs at textbook publishing companies. At Dorsey Press, the publisher conceived
of a new U.S. history textbook for which he hired Michael Conzen to develop over one hundred
new thematic maps, hoping that a full-color “map program” would distinguish the book in a
crowded market. As the book’s developmental editor, I was given the extraordinary assignment
of meeting with Michael to hash out ideas and coordinate the maps’ creation with a firm called
Mapping Specialists in Madison, Wisconsin.
Historical Geography Volume 42 (2014): 3-26. © 2014, Historical Geography Specialty Group, Association of American Geographers
4 Knowles
My working meetings with Michael were intensive seminars in historical geography. He

could not resist introducing me to historical atlases and Arthur Robinson’s rules of map design.
I especially remember one evening when I was trying to convince Michael to simplify a map
whose design I thought was far too challenging for our undergraduate audience. Leaning in for
emphasis, Michael said, “But Anne, I want to build cathedrals in their minds!” I burst out laughing
at his outrageous zeal and ambition. But Michael’s enthusiasm worked a magical transformation
in my imagination. I was thrilled to see the continent turned on its side in what he called “a
satellite view of North America in 1650.” I learned how one’s sense of history changes with a
change of scale as he explained general and specific settlement patterns in New England. And I
found historical events, such as the massing of British troops at Boston, more meaningful when I
saw them unfold in a series of maps.1
From Michael I learned that maps are uniquely valuable sources for historical research,
that maps can tell stories, and that the lengthy process of creating a map combines assiduous
research with creative thinking and graphic design. I agreed with him that maps should be elegant
and exciting, communicate clearly, and always contribute substantively to the argument. The
book on which we collaborated, America’s History (1987), was immediately imitated; every self-
respecting textbook publisher needed a full-color map program in their flagship history survey
text. Working with Michael, I witnessed a brilliant geographic thinker conceiving of historical
interpretations that were informed by knowledge of geographic, historical, and cartographic
scholarship. I also saw how his ideas were refined through our own editorial discussion and the
back-and-forth exchanges with cartographers at Mapping Specialists. This became my model for
productive collaboration.
No wonder I hurried to graduate school at University of Wisconsin-Madison (Michael’s
alma mater and the place where Onno Brauer, who owned Mapping Specialists, ran the
Geography Department’s cartography lab). At Madison I met another visual-historical artisan:
David Woodward. David’s cartography course began my apprenticeship as a mapmaker. His
history of cartography course inculcated the inclusive yet rigorous approach that was shaping the
History of Cartography Project, which was humming busily in the garret offices in Science Hall.
From Woodward and his close collaborator, Brian Harley, I learned that cartography was rules +
craft + science + history + art + poetry + politics.2 These were the days of Rapidograph pens, ruby-
tipped scribers, and photographic developing, layer by layer, in the darkroom. My slow work at
the light table was a kind of meditation. It allowed me to dwell with the map as it took shape,
while larger contexts gradually formed in my mind.
Up to this point I have talked about personal encounters that influenced my sense of
historical geography. One also encounters texts, of course. In 1987, the year I began graduate
school, came the inaugural publication of three landmark projects: volume one of The History of
Cartography, Harley and Wodward’s Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and
the Mediterranean; the Historical Atlas of Canada’s first volume, From the Beginning to 1800, edited
by R. Cole Harris with senior cartographer Geoffrey Matthews; and Donald Meinig’s Atlantic
America, 1492 – 1800, the first of four volumes in The Shaping of America.3 Woodward and Harley’s
original vision for the History of Cartography Project continues to inspire its crew, now captained
by Matthew Edney. Harris and Matthews set a high bar for cartographic historical scholarship
that few other historical atlases have met. Meinig’s book garnered praise from geographers and
historians for its scope, erudition, and distinctly geographical interpretation of American history.4
Why We Must Make Maps 5
Figure 1a. Jean Daigle, “Acadian Marshland Settlement,” plate 29 (R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of
Canada, vol. 1, From the Beginning to 1800 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987]).
6 Knowles
Figure 1b. .
While I share others’ admiration for the tremendous scholarship in these works, I always
found them most inspiring as visual explanations, particularly Harris and Matthews’s atlas
and Meinig’s Atlantic America. The most arresting plates in the Canadian atlas, to my eyes, are
those that approach a kind of cartographic realism. The best example is the plate on “Acadian
Marshland Settlement” (Figure 1). At three perfectly nested scales, the two-page spread shows
us Acadian settlement along the Bay of Fundy, circa 1707; the string of tiny settlements along
the Dauphin River; and, claiming nearly half of the visual real estate, a topographic portrait of
the marshes, dyked fields, military defenses, and snippets of ribbon settlement along winding
paths in 1710. We also get two close-up views of the fort and central village of Port Royal. In a
later section we get “The Countryside” (Figure 2), Cole Harris’s summary of settlement along the
middle St. Lawrence. He and Matthews used three visual and spatial modes: a newly drawn map
of settlers’ homes along the shore in 1685; a redrawn cadastral survey of the neighborhood around
Charlesbourg; and a painting from 1730 that depicts the region’s vernacular architecture and land
use. This plate exemplifies multi-dimensional historical representation. Harris and Matthews
knew that no one map, image, or diagram could represent historical conditions and ways of life,
let alone the many modes of geographic analysis and interpretation. While their commitment
to reveal the many aspects of past geographies makes some plates in this atlas bewilderingly
complex, when they get it right, their visual craft feeds our curiosity. They bring the past close
while enabling us to see its structure.
Meinig’s spatial diagrams bowled me over as a grad student, and they still do. I consider
them the clearest expressions of his spatial thinking. They work on the imagination in ways
that his carefully worded exegesis rarely does. His map of the widening gyre of the Atlantic
World Figure 3) captures the circulating connections of fishing, slaving, and trade in the early
seventeenth century. The arrows carve restless inscriptions. Better than any map I know, this
one makes the ocean its subject, reducing early colonial ports to the touch-points they were for
mariners. This image is not as inventive as the upside-down Mediterranean that Jacques Bertin
drew for Fernand Braudel,5 but Meinig’s image has more narrative potential. I see people and
stories crossing Meinig’s Atlantic, whereas Bertin’s surprise, once you orient yourself, fades to
geographical facts (for example, that the desert of Northern Africa obstructed Mediterranean
Europeans’ awareness of the lush, peopled equatorial zone to the south).
Meinig was particularly adept at conceptualizing the spatial form of geographical
processes. In writing, he eschewed theory. He presented his craft as the art of geographic
description–“mere” description, some critics might say.6 His comparative spatial diagrams,
however, are steps toward a historically specific pattern language that models geographic and
historical change.7 Meinig’s diagram of “Three Colonial Types” of interaction between Europeans
and Native peoples (Figure 4) anticipates Bruno Latour’s concept of the metropole as a center of
calculation where information about newly identified lands was gathered, analyzed, and then
used in crafting policies that were enacted on remote frontiers.8 Even more Latouresque is his
“conspectus,” or overview, of colonial spatial relations (Figure 5). Meinig discards geographic
realism to highlight the abstract connections of capital investment and colonial rule that laced
North American and Caribbean colonies into the British Atlantic empire. This representation
of core-periphery relations suggests bondage; it suggests the abstraction of the imperial gaze
and the accounting mentality that calculated the immense value of the sugar islands (Barbados,
Grenada, Antigua, and Jamaica) to the British treasury and British foreign policy, and that made
Britain in the early eighteenth century such a willing participant in African slavery. The diagram
even suggests the shallow reach of British territorial control in North America, a problem that
would undermine British land campaigns during the Revolutionary War.9
8 Knowles
Figure 2a. R. Cole Harris, “The Countryside,” plate 52 (Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, From
the Beginning to 1800 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987]).
Figure 2b.
10 Knowles
Figure 3. “The North Atlantic World, c. 1630” (Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1, Atlantic
America, 1492 – 1800 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], p. 56).
I may give Meinig undue credit for theoretical insight where his maps are concerned. He
has never claimed that his maps carry interpretive, let alone theoretical, weight. In his 1983 essay
“Geography as an Art,” Meinig discusses “the craft of geography” as a purely literary endeavor,
whose “routine fundamentals” we employ when “we organize our thoughts, select our data,
choose our words, and make our statements...” 10
Unable to find any reference to mapmaking in his writing, I asked Don a few years ago
how he had made the maps in The Shaping of America. “Oh,” he said lightly, “I would just sketch a
Figure 4. “Transatlantic Interaction: Three Colonial Types of Relationships with Indigenous Peoples”
(Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492 – 1800 [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987], p. 71).
12 Knowles
Figure 5. “A Conspectus of the British Atlantic Empire” (Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1,
Atlantic America, 1492 – 1800 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], p. 376).
few ideas and give them to the cartographer, who then made the maps.”11 Since then, I discovered
that his most unusual maps were the result of a creative collaboration with a print-maker-turned-
cartographer named Marcia Harrington. Harrington told me that Meinig did indeed provide
pencil sketches to get her started, but that the meat of his communication came in his explanation
of the concepts and geographical relationships that he wanted a map to show–“the theory behind
things,” as she put it. Meing always knew exactly what he wanted, Harrington said, but it was up
to her to find the best visual expression of his conceptualizations.12 Marcia Harrington designed
each of the spatial diagrams I have shown here, and many more. It is her rendering of Meinig’s
ideas that I, and so many others, have admired all these years.
The problem of positivistic historical cartography: Harley’s argument
The creative working relationships between Meinig and Harrington, Harris and Matthews,
and, to a lesser extent, Conzen and Mapping Specialists, were exceptions to the typical relationship
that Brian Harley describes in “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion.” This piece,
one of his lesser-known essays, was published in the Journal of Historical Geography in 1989.13 For
all Harley’s importance as perhaps the single most influential figure in the history of cartography,
many are unaware that he began as an historical geographer, doing his PhD at Birmingham
University on the historical geography of medieval Warwickshire.14 There he was presumably
trained in the kind of scientific mapping of historical data that made Clifford Darby’s mapping of
the Domesday Book the epitome of innovative historical geography in Britain at the time.15
Harley’s essay is an excoriating critique of cartographic practice in historical geography
and, more broadly, of academic cartography as a whole. He begins by pointing out that
historical cartography–that is, mapping the past–“has remained…an unexamined aspect of our
creative scholarship.” He sets out to fill that gap. Harley demands that maps for history should
be understood as texts, and that historical geography, “like art,” is “a social practice” whose
representations should be produced with the full consciousness of engaged, critical scholarship.16
This argument was part of his broader effort in the late 1980s to shake geographers free from their
scientistic assumptions and to anchor historical geography and cartography in deconstructionist
theory. Unlike his other essays from this period, this one focuses on how present-day geographers
produced and thought about maps.
Ordinarily, Harley explains, a scholar hands over sketches or compilations for a
cartographer to render for publication.17 This practice has serious consequences. It disengages
historical geographers from the cartographic process, which perpetuates their failure “to grasp
the illusion of cartographic representation.” What is the illusion? That maps are a mirror of reality.
“It is as if an army of ghost writers had written a large part of our texts for us,” Harley writes. “We
have failed to question the inner logic, the rhetoric, and the style of the map in the same way that
we would question the syntax of the written word. We have abrogated to the cartographers a part
of our discourse, on the assumption that their standard techniques could somehow redescribe the
past for us in more rigorous terms…”18
Harley’s main target in “Cartographic Illusion” is thematic maps, a category that was the
brainchild of Arthur Robinson, father of the Wisconsin school of cartography. Robinson was lead
author of a widely used textbook, The Elements of Cartography, which presented map-making as a
science based on ever-increasing accuracy and fidelity in representing the earth and its human-
made features.19 Harley argues that this view of maps is fundamentally wrong:
The normal understanding is that we control the map: but through its internal
power or logic the map also controls us. We are prisoners in its spatial matrix. An
analogy can be drawn between what happens to our data in the cartographers’
hands and what happens to people in the disciplinary institutions – prisons,
14 Knowles
MAINE
Oneida County, NY VERMONT
Remsen NEW YORK

Steuben
Marcy
NEW
Trenton HAMPSHIRE
MICH. Rome
Deerfield
Utica
MASS.
Immigrant obituaries R.I.
recorded elsewhere:
CONN.
Wisconsin 90
Other Midwest 34
Tennessee 2 Carbondale
Far West 2 PENNSYLVANIA
New York City area
Minersville
Pottsville
OHIO
Ebensburgh
Radnor N.J.
Welsh Hills Pittsburgh area
M.D.
Legend
Cincinnati area
D.C. DEL. Number of Welsh
Jackson/ recorded in
Gallia
VIRGINIA obituaries
KENTUCKY 0 50 100 150 miles

1 4 12 37 95 256
Map 1.3
Figure Welsh-American
6. Places settlements,
of death of Welsh immigrants to1791 - 1853
the United States, 1838 – 1850, derived from immigrant
obituaries in Welsh-American religious periodicals (Map 1.3 in Anne Kelly Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated:
Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], p. 26. © 1997
The University of Chicago. All rights reserved).
schools, armies, factories – described by Foucault; in both cases a process of

normalisation occurs. Standardisation is the golden calf of ‘thematic’ cartography:
compilation, generalisation, classification, formation into hierarchies must all be
done according to standard principles. The result is a highly artificial image which
limits our ability to engage in interpretative manoeuvre. Mapping is a game,
almost a ritual, with its own set of rules. We learn to accept the results to be come
players at the chessboard of the map.20
I was trained, by Woodward and Conzen, to make maps in the “Wisconsin” style. Figure 6
is an image of my own imprisonment, a map of Welsh immigrant destinations from my first book,
Calvinists Incorporated.21 This map exemplifies the “frozen,” “vacuous and stultifying image[s]”
that Harley found so unsatisfying. Such maps draw “a curtain across the landscape…shutting out
the sense of place from our thoughts. They are a lexicon without people.”22 Figures 7 and 8 show
similar examples from my book Mastering Iron.23 Harley’s essay has removed the scales from my
eyes.
Figure 7. The route of Benjamin Smith Lyman as he gathered information on iron works in the South,
March – July 1857 (Figure 7 in Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American
Industry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013], p. 29. © 2013 The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved).
After believing for more than two decades that the Wisconsin school of cartography was the
epitome of excellence, I now see the lifelessness of these maps.
Harley’s cri de coeur ends with a bow to Denis Wood, who had pleaded “for a ‘cartography
of reality’ that is ‘humane, humanist, phenomenological, and phenomenalist’.” “The obvious
alternative” to dehumanized cartography, Harley concludes, “is a greater pluralism of cartographic
expression…we need a narrative cartography that tells a story and portrays a process at the
same time as it [reveals] the interconnectedness of humanity in space…we could try to make
cartography exciting again.”24
When GIS was being developed in the late twentieth century, its designers incorporated
the rules laid down by academic cartographers, including Robinson and his protégé Barbara Bartz
Petchenik.25 Their criteria for proper, scientific map design are embedded in the default settings of
cartographic “functionality” in ArcGIS and many other GIS programs. One can change the
16 Knowles
Figure 8. Map showing the market connections between pig iron producers and manufacturers, according
to J. Peter Lesley’s The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide (1859) (Figure 16 in Knowles, Mastering Iron, p. 52. ©
2013 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved).
settings, but how many of us do? Geographers know what it means when someone complains
about the stilted, abstract quality of “GIS maps.” Because today’s student cartographers, and many
professionals, are trained in GIS, it is all the more incumbent upon those of us who are conceiving
of maps not to abdicate our creative responsibility when we collaborate with cartographers.
It is much easier to identify what is lacking in maps of human experience than it is to find
better modes of geographic representation. One example can stand for many. In a recent article,
Figure 9. “Two Orthogonal Representations of the Mapping Impulse” (Figure 1 in Valérie November, Eduardo
Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour, “Entering Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 4 (2010), pp. 581-99, Pion Ltd., London. Figure
on p. 587).
Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour echo Harley’s complaint
against the assumptions of modernist cartography in the hands of geographers. “When social
scientists collaborate with geographers,” they write, “they are often puzzled by the weight given
by their colleagues to the base map, upon which they are asked to project their own objects as if
they had to add a more superficial layer to a more basic one.” These scholars argue that mimetic
maps–those that embody the “cascades of inscriptions” that make scientific cartography seem to
represent reality–are actually the farthest from reality because they freeze time, and thus deny the
flux and change that characterize life. Like Harley, these authors crave a kind of mapping that is
mobile and responsive, capable of conveying the complexity of life.26 Their own figures, however,
lack these qualities; they are pale, fixed diagrams that I have yet to understand (figure 9).
Almost none of us can master all three of the major modes of geographic expression,
namely empirical writing, theoretical writing, and geovisualization. November and her co-
authors are exceptional among theorists for attempting to visualize their ideas. So far as I know,
Harley never did this in his theoretical papers; he left mapping behind when he turned to critique
the history of cartography. Meinig described his interpretive concepts in words, but needed an
artist-cartographer to render them visually. If historical geographers cannot be both literary and
visual artists, what are we to do?
The answer is: collaborate. Historical geographers have produced exciting, creative, humane
cartography when they have had both powerful ideas and imaginative, talented cartographers
18 Knowles
AT
LA
NT
IC
Aberaeron OCE
AN
N
David sets out
early in the m orning
from Tynycwm .
Tynycwm
Caericed
Talfan
Aer e
on Riv
r
Lampeter
He reaches Lam peter
Day 1
at 9-10 o'clock that m orning,

slakes his thirst and feeds his
N horse at the Bush Tavern.
Tyfi R te He rests overnight

ive na e)
r
o ut at the Swan Tavern,
lte
r
Llandovery.
r
(a
Llandovery
Next m orning cart and driver

get an early start. David
washes down his breakfast
in Trecastle with a glass of gin.
Trecastle
Day 2
By 2 o'clock he reaches
"Tafarn y Mynydd"_
CONS
perhaps the Storey Arm s. BEA
N
COPen-y-fan Brecon
Storey Arms
E
BR
The second day ends as weary horse and

carrier arrive at the head of the industrial
Cefn Coed valleys_"Merthyr and Dowlais Top."
Dowlais
Merthyr Tydfil
Us
kR
iver
e r
R
iv
ff
Ta
0 4 8 miles
Map 2.3 Journey of David Griffiths, carrier, to

Merthyr Tydfil
Figure 10a. A map of the journey of David Griffiths to Merthyr Tydfil to sell farm goods in the city, based on
a Welsh folk song (Map 2.3 in Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated, p. 70. © 1997 The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved).
and graphic artists as collaborators. Collaboration is much more than handing off one’s sketches
to a technician. It is a process of intellectual exchange that engages the creative abilities of all
parties. The more unusual and complex one’s ideas are, the more necessary collaboration may be.
A) The filler dumps raw materials into the stack mouth

B) Blasts of pressurized air from the blowing engine aid combustion
C) Molten iron collects at the bottom of the crucible.
D) "Tapping" releases the molten metal into the main channel or "sow."
E) Side channels direct the metal into rows of molds, forming "pigs."
F) Once hardened, the pigs are broken out and loaded into wagons.
Boilers
A
Stack
C B
Casting Shed
D
F
Steam
Engine
E Blower
Pig Bed
Blowing Shed
Figure 10b. A cut-away view of a typical blast furnace in operation, drawn by Tom Willcockson (Figure 4.1
in Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated, p. 169. © 1997 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved).
I mentioned at the beginning that I learned a way of working from Michael Conzen. While
he did show me how to work with cartographers, collaboration had been my professional mode
of operation from college, when I was a cub journalist with the daily student newspaper at Duke
University. All of my work in publishing involved collaboration of some kind. Good books are
created by many talented people. In graduate school, I sought out gifted student cartographers to
help me create my more unusual maps, such as Figures 10a and 10b. The map on the left, based
on a Welsh folk song, was drawn by Sara Arscott for my dissertation. The drawing on the right,
a cut-away view of a blast furnace, was drawn by Tom Wilcockson, a historical illustrator, for
Calvinists Incorporated.
20 Knowles
Figure 11. The simultaneous concentration of iron works in certain localized regions and movement of the
industry west and south during the early 19th century (Figure 9 in Knowles, Mastering Iron, p. 35. © 2013
The University of Chicago. All rights reserved).
Geography undergraduate students at Middlebury College have been my collaborators

in geovisualization for the last decade. Garrott Kuzzy created the image in Figure 11 from my
historical GIS database of the U.S. iron industry. The data documented that during the antebellum
period, the iron industry moved westward while becoming concentrated in particular places,
mostly in the East. I asked Garrott to find a way to display both trends in a single graphic. His
solution was to plot iron companies’ longitude on the graph above (with time reading from top to
bottom), and then to connect the temporal distribution to geographic location on the map, below.
I still marvel at his ingenuity.
Figure 12. A diagrammatic view of the spatial organization of the Dowlais Iron Company Merthyr Tydfil,
Wales, circa 1852 (Figure 41 in Knowles, Mastering Iron, pp. 116-17. © 2013 The University of Chicago. All
rights reserved).
Chester Harvey, who drew most of the maps and diagrams in Mastering Iron, helped
me express my geographic ideas many times. Figure 12 is our pared-down version of an 1851
British Ordnance Survey map of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. Merthyr’s iron companies were the envy
of American entrepreneurs who wanted to replicate their low-cost, high-volume production
in the United States. By stripping away the historical richness of the manuscript map to reveal
the functional landscape of production, we highlighted the geographical efficiency of this large
company’s production system, which connected mines and quarries (just off the right side of the
map) through smelting, refining, and shipping (off the left side of the map).
I could show many more examples of students’ creativity, but my space is limited. My last
examples come from the Holocaust Geographies project.27 The case study of evacuations from
Auschwitz by Simone Gigliotti, Marc Masurovsky, and Erik Steiner began with conventional
mapping of evacuation routes. While this was useful information, it did not begin to represent
evacuees’ traumatic experiences as recorded in survivor testimonies. Well into the project, Erik
Steiner, a superb cartographer and graphic artist, began experimenting with non-cartographic
representation of the testimonial evidence. Figure 13 deconstructs seven women’s post-war
testimony into its constituent letters and locates them by the time and place to which they
refer. This image reveals striking gaps of silence. Erik also tried figurative representations, most
movingly in a poetic image of an evacuation (Figure 14) that captures the snows of Poland in
January, the profound isolation and disorientation of evacuees, the mobile community of the
marching column, and the seeming endlessness of the journey.
Each of these examples came from wrestling with complex historical information that
refused to be mapped politely. One of my students showed me just how valuable it can be to
confront the inadequacies of conventional mapping by thinking better about what one really
wants to visualize in historical evidence. The student, Hannah Day, was in my senior research
seminar on the historical geography of the Holocaust. She became fascinated by the massive two-
volume diary of Victor Klemperer, a secular Jew who survived the Holocaust and the bombings
of his native Dresden. Hannah wanted to map Klemperer’s experiences as recorded in his diary.
She began conventionally with a basemap of 1944 Dresden, to which she added short quotations
from Klemperer’s diary at the locations to which they refer. Hannah was dissatisfied with this
approach. It had no feeling. What she and I finally came up with was an emotional diagram
structured by time rather than place (Figure 15). Time runs from left to right along the horizontal
axis. The vertical axis rises above the centerpoint according to the degree of transcendence that
22 Knowles
at Rajsko camp
0km Rajsko
Departure
10
20
Pszczyna
30
40
50 Jastrzêbie Górne
60km Wodzisław
during march sometime
Figure 13. “Terrain of Encoded Memories,” by Erik B. Steiner. Figure from Simone Gigliotti, Marc J.
Masurovsky, and Erik Steiner, “From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz,
January 1945,” in Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust
(Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2014), 216. By permission of Erik B. Steiner.
Figure 14. A sketch of evacuees from Auschwitz, by Erik B. Steiner. By permission.
ught us dead. We were fed, we were able to rest. In the late afternoon, we walked up to Dolzschen.
tho , she had
transcendence
feeling of being alive.

tears and kisses
without rules? I now have only fits of depression, otherwise let things take their course and have for hours at a time a quite cheerful
feeling of living in an age which is absolutely
us again of belonging together, of our happiness , of the absolute unimportance of everything apart from being together.
autumnal storms, downpours, play of the sun -- is magnificent.
the good thing about the time of tribulation, that we became conscio
the
light of
eared in our room...very friendly...he then shook my hand - “so goodnight professor. Things are going to change , you will get your post back!” That in uniform, on duty, in front of witnesses! One is executed for less.
us with
sky above. It was glorious.

turning; a middle-aged police officer app
over the low-lying land, but also over the plateau, blue
sness of the situation. This is a peak; nothing, neither good nor evil, can remain in a state of superlatives...and we two have got so used to our poverty and troubles, that again and again there are nevertheless hours that are bearable.
smooth snow-covered fields, the fog in the distance and
everything
changing
to fear. One becomes blunted.

terrible hopeles
. Frau Glaser welcomed
antly, at every moment, have

const
t optimistic. In the evening we drank a whole bottle of Haut Sauterns.

bottom we were afraid of nothing anymore, because we
cheerful and almos
-- in the
from the
little house is pretty and the view
the world again

fairy tale
or is it the
and .
life
a certain comfort
idiocy, philosophy, age,
The car will give us a little bit of
pleasure and many cares Eva’s largely improved state of mind d a little by the romantic strangeness of the situation.
into a
me?
sign of the wind
The little house with much .- .

probably sustaine
What did 1934 bring
ts me up and keeps me alive gives me balance Blessing of the typewriter. uilty of anything imprisoned because of my blackout misdemeanor, but I am in prison as a Jew. Nothing can truly humiliate me, every humiliation only raises me up my future. I preach it to myself again and again, and it did
This is where the day turned
and secures help a little.

were
and . , I am not
succeeds couple go on with our everyday life: reading aloud, eating (as best we can), writing, garden.
I am not g
My book ea
elves, and sometimes it even

Sometimes I draw
for a of hours, to
force ours
On the whole we
home a comfort.
Perhaps this was
s at are
hour
Curious
--- But the
...we
The
I am
1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946
Is it
The
At
One is
Eva
Unpleasantnesses are more bothersome tha

I face the future
Incalculabe danger for all Jews
...in my
Now I had been
But as I lie down
Something hard and

My health is
The
On top of all the
Every day brings new restrictions. Only today, Saturday, December 3,

---
--- The
Mood has
The last
We both felt
Dreadful autumn wea
sixty years old. None of her birthdays, not even during the last war, celebrated under
No post, no prospe
who would now summon up enough scholarly interest for a tome -- about the eighteenth c
miseries
overwhelmed by the present, time is not divided up, everything is infinitely long in c
im p ris o nme nt
heart of hearts I am quite

unspeakable
few weeks have been the most
sunk greatly again. News came that the Russia

great
poor. My heart, my eyes. In adittion,

lack of space and confusion there is
to sleep I think: will they come
there for an endless
apathetically
glowi
silence.
melancho
cts, absolute
struck my face. I put my hand up, it was covered in blood, I felt for my eye, it was still there.
of the new
ng hot
pressure
the right side of
ther, dreadfully depressed about everything, still muddling along.

year the same
ly and bitterness. live with even a quarter of the troubles and miseries which constantly weigh upon us now.
time, a truly
to be such a matter of course for us to go to the cinema two and three times a week, and how easy and fulfilled our life was! And now...we would have been unable to imagine how one could
wretched of our life so far
It used
and
without ho
and with
for me tonight?
painful inflammations in my head, shoulders. Weeks of torment at the dentist. nearness of death shaken.
repulsivness of the continuing swastika
n the , and the unpleasentnesses are piling up now, and our powers of resistance and patience are very much
as before, the house, the cold, lack of time, lack of
endless time
little hope. It is very uncertain when the war will come to an end
eternal desperation of lack of money. The never ending worry is terrible.

not in Berlin
the
ns are , and that their advance has been halted.
here.
pe. I am no longer capable of imagining how I could ever live without the star as a free man again.
shot? be put concentration camp?
Will I be Will I in a
the newspaper reports ghettoization limitations free movement Jews Berlin and on the of in . Further stringent measures are promised.
. That is
cannot be described What with? One can convey what happened, the least event, the least thought. But endlessness consists in what lies in between, in the simple feeling of being in a cage emptiness nothingness constant lack of feeling.
...We
something that . , of , in the , in the
such terrible conditions. Hands completely empty, hungry, and one’s life in constant danger. I cannot even say: We’ll make up for it , because how much of a chance do we have of living to see the moment
shall not
when we can make up for it?
entury? It is hardly a question of vanity. After all this is my life’s work , which has been deprived of influence and even existence, and I now feel as if I really am being buried alive .
regime.
live to see the
money, no hope of credit, Eva’s obsession with building the house, and her desperation, still growing . This business will really be the end of us . I can see it coming and feel helpless.
oming; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only an eternity...one knows nothing of the history one has experiened. The sense of time has been abolished; one is at once too blunted and too overexcited, one is crammed full of the present.
end of the Third Reich.
more uncertain whether evidently come to the end of my life.

acity correspond to Klemperer’s ability - or inability - in a given moment to transcend psychological imprisonement
even
amplitude and op
. And to me it is I shall be able to benefit from the peace, since I have

excerpts chos
en as examples from Klemperer’s experience. font size varies for richer representation of the emotional shape of both the experience and its expression.
source: The diaries of Victor Klemperer

Klemperer, Victor. 1998. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941. Random House: New York.
Klemperer, Victor. 1999. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945. Random House: New York.
graphics created at Middlebury College by Hannah Day, spring 2010

Holocaust Geography Senior Seminar, Professor Anne Kelly Knowles
Figure 15. Hannah Day’s graphic representation of Victor Klemperer’s emotional experience during WWII,
as recorded in his diary. By permission.
24 Knowles
Klemperer felt in moments represented by quotations that rise above the timeline, or the depth of
imprisonment and despair he felt at moments that descend below the line. The final image makes
me think of an organ concerto, with deepening bass chords as conditions worsened but also notes
of pleasure and joy, as when he found his wife alive after a bombing raid, was able to get food, or
escaped the city for a day in the countryside.
What we have to offer as visual artisans
As spatial and visual thinkers, historical geographers have so much to offer scholarship.
We are adept at spatial thinking and capable of creative visualization that our colleagues in other
disciplines envy and are eager to learn.
In the Digital Humanities, literary and historical scholars are eagerly using digital
visualization tools that reveal relational patterns, including spatial patterns, in new ways that can
be very stimulating. The intellectual substance of some of this work is yet to be determined, but
I am convinced of its value in generating new questions and engaging new bodies of evidence.
What I see lacking in Digital Humanists’ embrace of visual technologies is precisely the critical
awareness that Harley urges us to exercise. Just as historical geographers have tended to be
oblivious of the cartographic illusion that maps mirror reality, those of us who are now using GIS,
virtual reality, NVivo, and the many other tools of geo- and socio-visualization should resist the
seductive impression that the images generated by computer programs are real.
It is never too late to learn how to think critically about visual representation. Where I
part company with more theoretically driven cultural and historical geographers is that I believe
we must continue to make visual images. At the same time, we must also critique our own
efforts. My work has benefited enormously from critical engagement with the visual craft of my
students, fellow scholars, and cartographers who have dared to break the mold of the Wisconsin
school. I hope we might all become more daring, and more human, in our efforts to represent our
understanding of the past.
NOTES
1 James A. Henretta, et al., America’s History (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1987): Maps 2.2,
2.4, and 6.2.
2 I met Harley during my last months working for Dorsey Press. When I acquired David
Buisseret’s book manuscript From Sea Charts to Satellite Images for the Press, Buisseret
suggested that I ask Harley to write an introduction. He agreed to meet me during one of
his regular visits to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I vividly remember his eagle-
sharp gaze when I walked into the long, narrow office under the eaves of Science Hall where
he sat tipped back in a swivel office chair. A formidable man, but generous. His typically
perceptive introductory essay was one of the last pieces he wrote before he died in 1991.
Sea Charts was picked up by University of Chicago Press when Dorsey Press was sold by its
parent company, Richard D. Irwin; the book was published in 1990.
3 J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval
Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. 1 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987); R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, From the Beginning
to 1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492 –
1800, vol. 1, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
4 See, for example, James E. Vance, Jr.’s review in Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 77, no.3 (1987): 479 – 80 and James Axtell’s review in William and Mary Quarterly
45, no.1 (1988): 173 – 75. For a contrary view, see Rowland Berthoff’s critique of Meinig’s
spatial thinking as inadequate to explain the character of American life, economy, and
national identity, in Journal of Southern History 53, no.4 (1987): 645 – 646.
5 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1,
trans. Siân Reynolds, abridged edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1992), 122.
6 This was historian Bernard Bailyn’s memorable critique of my mapping of the American
iron industry at a “Geography and Atlantic History” workshop at Harvard, 4 November
2006. I was unable to persuade Bailyn that mapping could be interpretive, not merely
descriptive. He is not alone.
7 Meinig’s capsule diagrams of spatial interactions have the universal quality and specificity
of architect Christopher Alexander’s conceptualizations of types of human living and
working spaces in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
8 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
9 For an elegant argument about the lack of geographic knowledge of the interior among
British military forces, see Stephen J. Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. F. W.
Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,
2011), chap. 5.
10 D. W. Meinig, “Geography as an Art,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new
series 8, no.3 (1983): 314. Emphasis added.
11 This almost casual approach was confirmed by Joseph Stoll, a Syracuse University
cartographer who worked with Meinig as he was completing volume 4 of The Shaping of
America; telephone interview with Joseph Stoll, 4 April 2014.
12 Telephone interview with Marcia Harrington, 5 April 2014. Thanks to John Olson of the
Syracuse University Cartography Lab for helping me find Ms. Harrington, who left the Lab
many years ago to begin a new career.
13 J. B. Harley, “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion,” Journal of Historical
Geography 15, no.1 (1989): 80 – 91. This essay is not included in the collection edited by
Paul Laxton, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001). Thanks to Stephen J. Hornsby for bringing this essay to my
attention.
14 Paul Laxton, “Harley, (John) Brian (1932–1991),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.
com/view/article/41115, accessed 24 November 2014].
15 There are many volumes. Between two covers, see H. C. Darby, Domesday England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). I see Darby’s exhaustive, iterative mapping
of the Domesday Book’s data, and his uses of it to interpret medieval England, as a direct
precursor to historical GIS. See Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250
– 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for a comprehensive but poorly
designed mapping of the Domesday data with GIS.
16 Harley, “Cartographic Illusion,” 80.
17 Harley’s work as a book editor may have given him insights into the limitations of this
process.
19 Harley, “Cartographic Illusion,” 85. Robinson, et al., The Elements of Cartography, went
through several editions. Karen Reppen of Mapping Specialists gave me a copy of the 5th
edition in 1984 to help prepare me for working on the maps in America’s History. Robinson’s
history of cartography, which opens the book, is a fine distillation of the progressive (or
26 Knowles
Whig) view of increasingly scientific cartography championed by Norman J. W. Thrower

in Maps and Map: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and Civilization
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972) and later editions.
21 Anne Kelly Knowles, Map 1.3 in Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial
Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 26.
23 Anne Kelly Knowles, Figs. 7 and 16 in Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American
Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 29, 52.
24 Harley, “Cartographic Illusion,” 87-88.
25 Arthur H. Robinson, The Look of Maps: An Examination of Cartographic Design (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1952); Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Nature of
Maps: Essays Toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976).
26 Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour, “Entering Risky
Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation,” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 28 (2010): 581 – 99.
27 Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014).
INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE
Historical Geographies of Ireland: Colonial

Contexts and Postcolonial Legacies, Part 2
Gerry Kearns
National University of Ireland Maynooth
R
eviewing the festschrift for Willie Smyth,1 Robin Butlin noted the focus of Irish historical
geographers upon “the question of Ireland as a colony.”2 Together with the half-dozen
essays published last year in Historical Geography 41, this further dozen adds weight to
this observation, not least by including a further substantial contribution from Willie Smyth
himself. The conceptual and historical context for these works was outlined in an introductory
essay for the first set of papers.3 Here, I will briefly relate this current set back to the themes
introduced in the earlier Introduction. The essay by Smyth and that by Cronin return us to the
bloody conquest of Ireland and the subsequent making of new administrative and economic
geographies to sustain the colonial order. Smyth notes that in his Map-Making, Landscapes and
Memory, he had been able to exploit the voluminous English language materials of the colonial
enterprise to evoke the patterns of the Gaelic society then placed under threat, of the English rule
that undermined that older order, and of the Irish-English society that, under the most unequal
and fraught of circumstances, took form in the aftermath of the conquest.4 In reflecting upon
that earlier work, Smyth remarks upon his relatively limited use of Irish language sources. In the
present essay, he supplements his earlier work in this regard. In particular, he looks at attempts to
reinvigorate as well as preserve Irish-language culture through compendious works that offered
a digest of historical knowledge about pre-Conquest Ireland. Such works were also a plea that
the oppressed Catholic majority in Ireland might get justice. Smyth argues that this renaissance of
historical scholarship is likely to have influenced the rebels who rose up in 1641 against English
rule. He then moves to the trauma of that rebellion and the decade of wars that ensued between
the Irish and their English and Scots neighbors in Ireland. The Irish poetry of the period registers
the unbearable horror of the interrelated destruction of a culture and a landscape.
Nessa Cronin takes up the story of the English re-settlement of large swathes of Ireland
after the desolation and displacement produced by Oliver Cromwell’s suppression of the
Confederate campaign of the 1640s and 1650s. There is now a substantial literature sustaining
the claim that colonies often served as a laboratory where social and economic policies were first
tried before being introduced back into the metropole.5 Cronin relates the mapmaking work that
William Petty did as part of the Down Survey in Ireland to his studies of the political arithmetic of
the English state. Political Geography and Political Economy were twins. Cronin follows Foucault
in highlighting the novelty of a governmentality that took “population” as its focus, but Cronin
goes somewhat further than Foucault in suggesting that this governmentality was at first blush
distinctly colonial.6 With this genealogy, the English suppression of the Irish rebellions in the
1640s and 1650s becomes a key focus for the study of the conditions for the emergence of the
modern state.
28 Kearns
Norbert Elias drew attention to the making bourgeois of a ruling class as a long process of
cultural innovation, a civilizing process.7 Alongside the self-regulation by the elite, there was at
various times the pursuit of respectability among the poor and the lower middle class.8 There was
also a more directed effort on the part of the ruling classes to inculcate in the poor that acceptance
of the social order that would make them cooperative, if not docile subjects. David Nally has
studied the Irish Famine from this perspective, emphasizing the opportunity for civilizing the
poor that Victorian legislators and administrators found in the desperate circumstances of the
starving millions.9 In different ways, Lougheed and Beckingham take up these themes of the
broader civilizing process. In the field of education, experiments were ventured in Ireland long
before similar were attempted in Britain. Ireland was visited with a project for a state-funded and
compulsory education system in the 1830s, something England would not see until the 1870s.
Kevin Lougheed shows the importance of local circumstances in shaping the controversies over
proselytizing that would ultimately end this novel effort at multi-denominational education.10
David Beckingham studies the self-regulation of the Irish in Britain and the importance of
temperance in this regard. He looks at the staging of Father Mathew’s phenomenally successful
campaign of pledge-taking. He also shows the ways that the nationalist agitation of Daniel
O’Connell created circumstances that Mathew could exploit but which also imperiled his claim
that his was a purely civilizational and not a political movement.
The complexity of the colonial political encounter is evident also in Carl Griffin’s essay
on the early reaction in Britain to the emerging Irish potato blight in 1845-7. He shows how
Ireland was conceptualized as a problem; the Irish question. This strips colonial agency from the
representation of the causes of the Famine, allowing the British to imagine their obligations to
Ireland as no more than those of voluntary charity. In my chapter, I look at how, in response to the
awful conclusion reached by many Irish people that the English seemed prepared to let hundreds
of thousands of Irish people starve to death, Irish nationalists were driven to integrate their
understanding of the economic and political dimensions of colonialism. The form of anticolonial
nationalism that developed comprehended an utopian ambition that saw some Irish political
thinkers conceptualize nationalism as a step towards social justice rather than as mere autonomy.
After the trauma of the Famine, many British observers moved towards a racial understanding
of the enduring difference of the Irish. Diarmid Finnegan remarks on the compatibility of racial
reading of Irishness with a very wide range of politics, extending even to some versions of
diasporic nationalism.
The diasporic dimension of Irish identities is well treated in essays by Mulligan and
Jenkins. Fenianism was a resolutely diasporic movement with political events in Ireland, Britain
and America influencing each other. Adrian Mulligan shows how international relations were
implicated in Irish nationalism thereby. The United States offered citizenship to residents who
rescinded earlier attachments. As a society of immigrants, it had to develop a novel form of
citizenship that went beyond the absolute spaces of monarchs and subjects. Ultimately, Britain
had to accede to the new world order. William Jenkins looks at the ethnic press and the cultivation
of Irish heroes as a way that diasporic identities were forged. He shows how particular versions
of diasporic Irishness were developed for and out of both the public and the covert practices of
Fenianism.
The failure in Ireland of the Fenian rising of 1867, and in 1866 and 1870 of the Fenian
raids from the United States into Canada, reshaped the mutual expectations of Irish nationalists
from America, Britain and Ireland. The political energies of the Irish nationalists in Ireland were
directed towards the land question and by the later part of the century towards constitutional
reform and Home Rule. In this context, the British government renewed its attempts to bring
the Irish to a more ready acceptance of their integration into the British polity. Arlene Crampsie
Historical Geographies of Ireland 29
shows the ways that the reform of local government was offered a vehicle for making the Irish
into citizens of an integrated British state. To a significant degree this worked and the new local
authorities in Ireland did much to improve the lives of Irish residents with sanitary and other
improvements. Of course, ultimately constitutional agitation was trumped by the insurrection of
1916 and the division of Ireland that was part of the settlement of 1921.
The postcolonial legacies of this division were an explicit focus of an art project, Troubling
Ireland, which Bryonie Reid both participated in and here writes about. In particular, Reid explores
the relations between history and identity, the ways that places interpellate people into traditions
and with consequences that they may find deeply troubling. Nuala Johnson shows how troubled
histories inflect projects of commemoration even where these are tied to an urban renewal
presented as being of benefit to all parts of the community. The violence in Northern Ireland
during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was part of the legacy of the division that came with qualified
independence in 1921. The legacy of this recent period of violence and struggle structures even
the commemoration an event such as the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The new Titanic quarter in
Belfast draws upon public fascination with the loss of this enormous ship on its maiden voyage.
Yet these spaces of new urbanism remain in thrall to the legacies of colonial and postcolonial
conflicts in ways that these essays in Irish historical geography can help us to appreciate.
NOTES
1 Patrick J. Duffy and William Nolan (eds), At the Anvil: Essay in Honour of William J. Smyth
(Dublin: Geography Publications, 2012).
2 Robin Butlin, “Review of Duffy and Nolan, At the Anvil,” Journal of Historical Geography 46
(2014): 129-130, 129.
3 Gerry Kearns, “Irish Historical Geographies: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial legacies,”
Historical Geography 41 (2013): 22-34.
4 William J. Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early
Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007).
5 Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge,
Massachusets: MIT Press, 1989).
6 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” [1979], trans. Rosi Braidotti, in Graham Burchell, Colin
Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104.
7 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982 [1939]).
8 Peter Bailey, “‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand up?’ Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-
Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12, no. 3 (1979): 336-353.
9 David Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
10 With consequences that continue to the present day: Gerry Kearns and David Meredith,
“Spatial Justice and Primary Education,” in Gerry Kearns, David Meredith, and John
Morrissey (eds) Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2014), 177-
206.
Towards a Traumatic Geography of Ireland 1530-1760 and
Beyond: the Evidence of Irish Language Texts
William J. Smyth
University College Cork
ABSTRACT: Many nations and groups have experienced forms of trauma, which
mark their memories for a very long time, changing their future identities in very
powerful ways. In Ireland, the Protestant settlers experienced such trauma during
and after the 1641 Rising/Rebellion. Their memories of these awful events were
recorded in the many volumes of the government-commissioned 1641 Depositions
and were perpetuated in key official writings and by the state in formal annual church
ceremonies. No comparable body of evidence was commissioned to record the many
subsequent murders and subjugation of the Catholic Irish at the hands of government
forces and local Protestant militias. One must turn to the poems and prose texts in the
Irish language to discover the recollection of these and related sufferings of the Catholic
Irish. Four such key Irish language texts are examined here: The Annals of the Four
Masters, Keating’s The History of Ireland, Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems,
and An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Major themes explored are
the devastating geographies of conquest and English language domination; the forging
of new Irish identities in the face of the New English hegemony; the emergence of a
history and a literature in the Irish language which repudiates an imperialist ideology
and imagines and defines a new national community; and the significance of a poetic
literature which describes a devastated culture and ravaged silent landscapes which
would long struggle to recover. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, some Irish
poetry combines older notions of sovereignty with a forward-looking, democratic
drive for justice and equality. In conclusion, the many different forms of adaptation by
the Catholic Irish to their subjugated, traumatic state are summarized.
I
n the book Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: The Geography of Colonial and Early Modern
Ireland c.1530-1750, I referenced the avalanche of English-language documentation on Ireland
in comparison with Irish-language evidence.1 Phenomenal survey information in English
allows one to map Ireland intimately over this period–but also noted was the neglect by Irish
geographers of the significant corpus of materials in the Irish language. In finishing the book, I
realized I may not have done justice to the insights such sources give on contemporary Irish life,
and in particular on the traumatic effects of the English conquest on the Irish psyche. So when
Gerry Kearns issued this general invitation, an opportunity arose to merge these two streams–to
pay greater attention to the insights to be gained from Irish-language sources in an exploration
of the geography of the pain of conquest and the trauma that followed. In writing traumatic
geographies, I am in particular reflecting on how writers in the Irish language, in their poetry,
annals, prose histories and topographies represented and coped with what was happening to
Ireland over this period.
There is a vast literature on culture, trauma and conflict and coping with such processes
and events. Duran and Duran define historical trauma more precisely as post-colonial psychology.
In order for it to exist, colonialism must have occurred and there is likely to be a continuing
aspect to the colonial trauma, namely psychological, physical, social and cultural consequences
Towards a Traumatic Geography of Ireland 1530-1760 and Beyond 31
and ramifications in the aftermath of the systematic subjugation of a society by a colonizing

culture.2 In traumatic stress literature, loss may refer to institutional violence–the attack on and
removal of values, beliefs and material items of a culture including sacred buildings, mansions
and properties. But it is more commonly associated with the loss of person(s) who have been
killed or have died. Loss and death are especially associated with war, forced migration and
relocation, slavery or servitude, starvation or even genocide.
Many nations and groups have experienced forms of trauma that become salient
elements in their consciousness and ongoing behaviors. Traumatic events and experiences leave
indelible marks upon such groups’ consciousness, marking their memories for a very long time
and changing their future identities in fundamental and powerful ways.3 National and cultural
trauma, therefore, requires a perspective that crosses back and forth over time and space whether
the peoples are Irish, African- and Native-Americans, Armenian, Cambodian, Jewish, Palestinian,
Syrian, or Vietnamese. The list is a very long one.
The most significant documents in the English language dealing with trauma in this
period are the thirty-three volumes of the 1641 Depositions. Commissioned by the colonial
administration in Ireland to collect formal statements from settlers traumatized by violent attacks
from the Irish, they document the terror experienced by the Protestant settlers at the beginning of
the 1641 rising/rebellion, when many were murdered and others driven from their homes. These
depositions, together with propagandist use made of them by key officials and writers like Henry
Jones and Sir John Temple, exerted a profound, long-term effect on the collective memory of the
Protestant Irish–a memory reinforced by the colonial state in annual, formal church ceremonies.4
No comparable body of evidence was commissioned to record the many subsequent murders the
Catholic Irish suffered at the hands of government forces and local Protestant militias. Rather, the
recollection of these events and many others is embedded in the Irish poems and prose-texts which
are the subject of this paper. The processes by which such collective memories were transmitted
across the generations were many, but they certainly involved informal group sessions of poetry,
music and song then so central (and still critical) to Irish culture. A well-known song-poem, Cill
Cais, typifies this tradition:
Cad a dhéanfaimíd feasta gan adhmad? (What shall we do for timber?

Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár; the last of the woods is down.
níl trácht ar Chill Chais ná a teaghlach There is no talk of Kilcash or the Butlers
is ní bainfear a cling go bráth. and the bell of the house is gone.
An áit úd a gconaíodh an deigh-bhean The home-place where that lady waited
fuair gradam is meidhir thar mhnáibh who shamed all women by her grace
bhíodh iarlaí ag tarraingt thar toinn ann when earls came sailing to greet her
is an t-aifreann bínn á rá And Mass was said in the place.5)
This much-recited Irish poem of the mid to late eighteenth century mourns the disappearance of
the woodlands of South Tipperary and, by inference, Ireland as a whole. In 1530, perhaps 18 to
20 percent of Ireland was wooded–by the 1730s, Ireland experienced a wood famine following
on from the felling and rapid commercial exploitation of the woodlands by the new planter class.
This poem, therefore, laments the passing of a familiar sylvan landscape–a landscape imbued
with memories of the hunt, sport and relaxation generally, as well as memories of the woodland
as a crucial resource for all aspects of living and farming. In this case, the great trees of the wood
are also a metaphor for the old ruling family of the Butlers–an Old English family living in County
Tipperary since the thirteenth century. The poem laments the loss of leadership and patronage once
32 Smyth
provided by such distinguished ancestral families–with their European continental connections

and their devotion to and defence of the Catholic tradition. Finally, the poem laments the loss of
culture associated with the woods, the bell-tower of the great tower-house cum mansion and its
chapel and people. The bell can be extended to mean an Irish “voice” or “voices” calling people
to prayer, to work, to play. The poem evokes a bare, desolate and silent landscape that once
was crowded with people chatting, sporting, loving and fighting in a familiar, warm and partly
wooded land.
From an English settler’s perspective, the Irish landscape looked very different–a
landscape cleared of woodland meant a landscape cleared for victory. The stumps of the trees
represented a new field won for farming: where the conquered (perhaps ruined) tower-house
meant a defensible space. Here a new English-style mansion-house could be built in a more
secure, visible, enclosed and English-speaking world that did not threaten attacks or burnings.
After conquest and boundary-making, a central aim of the settlers was to transform the habitat
into an image of their own home place. For English officials and colonizers, the Irish woodlands
had come to mean threat and danger, and the term “woodland Irish” was a synonym for the
“wild Irish” who were to be broken, tamed and enframed.
In this paper a brief overview of the geographies of conquest in Ireland 1530-1603 will first
be presented. Secondly, in a much lengthier section, how Irish writers over the period 1600 to
1760 represented the transformations of Ireland–and the traumatic consequences for the Catholic
Irish and the Irish language–will be explored. Four Irish language texts are judged central to this
task: Annála Ríoghtachta Éireann (The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland); Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The
History of Ireland); Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems and An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the
Dispossessed.6 The first three texts were originally written in the seventeenth century. Poems of the
Dispossessed, in contrast, is the justly acclaimed–albeit retrospective–Irish poetry collection from
1600 to 1900, compiled by two distinguished modern scholar/poets, Seán ó Tuama and Thomas
Kinsella. Thirdly and briefly, a preliminary sketch or path-analysis of the national and cultural
trauma experienced by the Catholic Irish over the whole period will be presented as well as a
summary of the strategies for survival that these Irish adopted in the face of conquest, plantations
and the construction of Ireland–not as a separate kingdom–but as an English colony.
The geographies of conquest
In Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, the story was recounted of how English mapping
of Ireland created an English-language Ireland–an Ireland as understood from a colonizing
English perspective where, for example, all the placenames are mapped and anglicized for the first
time and in the process shorn of their meaning. The maps–used for conquest and colonization–
were only a part of the wider discourse on colonialism. It was the numerous English-language
texts, reports on the tours of duty and actions/performances of New English ruling officials, the
compositions, surveys, inquisitions and views that made Ireland not only visible but legible and
governable from an English point of view. Cartographic narratives, epitomized by, for example,
Edmund Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland show this tight interweaving between colonial
narratives and practices.7
There is not space to pursue these matters here except to note–as Patricia Palmer has so
eloquently detailed–that after c.1540 the New English did not recognize the existence of the Irish
language, then the language of 85 to 90 percent of the people and whose written forms in literature
had been for centuries and were still to be the main expression of Irish life until the nineteenth
century.8 Despite the many encounters, exchanges, and negotiations between the English and the
Irish, the use of the Irish language is air-brushed from all those accounts. In the literature of the
English conquest, the sound of voices speaking Irish is scarcely heard at all. Irish is blanked out–
it is deemed not to exist yet is strongly legislated against.9 The New English, therefore, repress
linguistic differences, declining to recognize, utilize or investigate the “other” language. Rather,
the elite spokespeople of the Irish–brehons, clergy, lords, poets, historians and topographers–are
to be either eradicated or assimilated. After Henry VIII is declared King of Ireland in 1541, the
Tudor English sought to treat Ireland as an extension of their domestic space–a border province
in revolt from a central government rather than a separate polity resisting annexation. As Palmer
argues, an autonomous literature and rich, foreign tongue is heard as a dissident patois–as an
outlandish tongue.10 There is a deliberate policy of rendering a very vociferous and contending
culture inarticulate. So the maps and the texts illuminate an English-speaking Ireland and occlude
Irish-speaking and Irish-writing worlds (and continued to do so all through the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries).
This strategy of non-recognition, therefore, forced the Irish elite to negotiate in the English
language–as they became bilingual or trilingual. I shall return to this point at the end of the paper–
when by the mid-eighteenth century the Irish turn to the English language either to assimilate
to, or use English as a weapon of protest and resistance against, the metropolitan culture. In
the meantime, it is useful to return to not only the woodland themes but also the linguistic
fastnesses that the English conquerors and colonizers faced–the constant need for translations
and the inevitable misunderstandings, misrepresentations and damaging incomprehensions
that inevitably flowed from these multifaceted and labyrinthine encounters. The New English
policy of anglicization involved a military, political, settlement and linguistic conquest. The word
and the sword were to march together. Tudor England would insist on a uniformity of law and
language (English) and religion (Protestant) in Ireland.
In “The escalation of violence in sixteenth century Ireland,” David Edwards writes the
following:
Atrocity punctuates the history of sixteenth century Ireland. Countrywide from

the time of the Kildare rebellion [1534-40] until the end of the Nine Years War
[1603], there was a tendency for military and political conflict to spiral wildly out
of control. Combatants committed the worst excesses: multiple murders, summary
executions, the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians (women and children included),
dismemberment, even deliberate war-induced famines all became widespread in
the course of one of the bloodiest and nastiest episodes of Irish history. Large-scale
group killings, or massacres, occurred in many places, at Maynooth (1535) Belfast
(1574), Rathlin Island (1575), Mullagh-mast (1577), Smerwick (1580) and Dunboy
(1602), to name just some of the most notorious instances.11
As this list of massacres indicates, levels of violence appear to have escalated as the century
advances, with conditions especially bad from the 1570s. The killings climaxed at the century’s
end with the systematic scorched-earth operations carried out by the forces of the English Tudor
monarchy before and after the battle of Kinsale (1601). As those responsible intended, the Irish
population was starved and terrorized into submission. Many thousands died and much of
the country was destroyed and made wasteland. In the words of historian David Quinn, when
peace came at last, in March 1603, it was “the peace of death and exhaustion.”12 John McGurk
adds: “It may well be concluded that the post-Kinsale period in Ulster, the putting down of the
fifteen-month resistance movement was carried out with unprecedented violence against non-
combatants, clergy, women and children who traditionally were immune in warfare.”13 In the
putting down of the earlier Desmond rising/rebellion (1579-83), historians have estimated that
at least fifty thousand people died of battle, plague and famine. I estimate at least one-eighth of
34 Smyth
Munster perished. It is likely that at the very minimum another fifty thousand died in the Nine
Year Ulster-centerd war (1594-1603) and probably many more.
Up to 1603, the New English had to use interpreters–hidden from view in the accounts–to
deal with the insurgent Irish. After 1603, and the total conquest and shiring of the country and the
extension of English common law over the land, the English administrators were mainly talking
to themselves.14 The Irish language was finally excluded from political and economic power. The
Gaelic lords were defeated and some were in exile. The Old English–the descendants of medieval
settlers–were marginalized. The New English had gained full military, political, economic and
linguistic control.
Irish poetry and its bardic poets eventually realized this. It is very important to understand
the role and status of the bardic poet in pre-plantation Irish society. They were a hereditary
professional caste who travelled widely in their provinces or island-wide (and to Scotland);
they were wealthy landowners; they were key counsellors/politicians to their lords: they were
negotiators/ambassadors on the latter’s behalf. They were not only composers of elaborate praise-
poems for their patrons but also wrote political poetry either advising the lords to accommodate
themselves to New English legal requirements or as the sixteenth century moved on, increasingly
admonishing their lords to defend their territories and that of Ireland against what they describe
as the “heretic foreigner/invader.” Indeed their poetic-cum-political functions–if not their
ideology–were not that different from the roles that an Edmund Spenser or a John Milton played
in an English society and polity.15
But after 1603 there was little security for the Irish learned classes and their Irish language
except in those few regions where Irish-speaking lords and patrons remained as landowners. I
have a suspicion that there is a regional geography to variations in poetic feeling. At the turn of
the seventeeth century, I think the most perceptive poets of trauma and doom were then the Ulster
poets in the north of Ireland. In Cromwellian and post- Cromwellian times (1640s onwards), it
was the Munster poets in the south of Ireland who were most universally and most eloquent
about the defeat of the Irish. Ulster poets were particularly sensitive to the beginning of the great
silence that was to envelop the Irish language–trying to express a psychic loss that would be
literally unspeakable. The imagery used by some of their poets is magnificent. An Ulster poet
describes his desolation, as he drifts on a rising tide of English, hearing his words reduced to the
lonely call of seabirds:
Mé an murdhuchan (I am the guillemot

An mhuir Goill English is the sea.16)

The tide might have been going out for Irish and rising for English–but there was a very complicated
story still to unfold. The first half of the seventeenth century saw a very strong counter-cultural
movement–a necessary counter-discourse to the burgeoning English propaganda texts in and
about Ireland. However, the Irish then appeared to be somewhat more successful in opposing a
cultural conquest than they were in resisting a territorial and legal conquest.
Writing traumatic geographies and histories
The first half of the seventeenth century saw a great blossoming of materials written in
Irish and Latin in poetry, prose, religious texts, annals and a number of histories-cum- geographies
of Ireland. Artists are often most expressive when their society and culture are most stressed,
in crisis and/or undergoing tremendous change. This blossoming of literary texts in the Irish
language also reflected that scattering of Irish clergy, soldiers, merchants and other professionals
across Europe. This in turn saw a radical Europeanization and renewal of Irish literature both
stylistically and thematically. Two of the most significant works emerging from this period–
both written in the 1630s–are Seatrúin Céitinn’s (his name in English is Geoffrey Keating) Foras
Feasa ar Éirinn (loosely translated as The History of Ireland (to c.1200));17 and Annála Ríoghachta
Éireann: The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland.18 Now known as The Annals of the Four Masters, its
leading compiler was Micheál O Cléirigh, a Franciscan cleric from Co. Donegal. When printed,
two centuries later (complete with an English translation and commentary by the great Irish
scholar, John O’Donovan), the Annals came to seven large volumes. Annála Ríoghachta Éireann
was not the first use of the term ‘Kingdom of Ireland.’ But as Brendán Ó Buachalla emphasizes,
its compilers–known as the “Four Masters”–institutionalized the term, thus stressing that Ireland
was a single political entity (albeit still loyal to a Stuart king).19 All previous annals had been
anchored on provinces–as with the annals of Ulster, the annals of Clonmacnoise for Connaught
and the midland region, and the annals of Inisfallen for Munster. Annála Ríoghachta however, was
an inclusive historical record of the island as a whole.
The impetus for this eleven year (1625-36) investment in making as complete a collection
of all existing manuscripts relating to Irish history and its antiquities–ostensibly from prehistoric/
mythological times but actually reliable from about 1500 BP (500 AD)–came from the Franciscan
College at Leuven/Louvain in modern Belgium (then part of the Spanish Netherlands). Hugh
Ward, the Head of St. Anthony’s College there, instructed Micheál O Cléirigh to go to Ireland
to gather from all the scholars and learned centers across the country, these ancient annals, both
secular and ecclesiastical. Ó Cléirigh collected every shred of evidence he could find including the
history of the Irish saints, kings, bishops; he collected genealogies, other annals and all the prose
and poetry he could recover. Impressed by parallel work of retrieval going on across Western
Europe as national histories and national church histories were being compiled, as was then
happening in the Low Countries, Ó Cléirigh moved around Ireland from one Franciscan house
to another, doing his fieldwork in the summer and writing up in winter.20 Under the patronage
of a number of Gaelic lords who accepted James I of England as of original Gaelic stock, the Four
Masters were writing within and accepted the existing political system. But this did not stop
Micheál O Cléirigh and his contemporaries from criticizing what they saw as the horrendous acts
of violence committed by the officers and forces of the same king or his predecessors in Ireland.
There is disagreement as to whether this work was seen as a salvage operation so that the
memory of Ireland’s place in civilization would not be lost or as a confident statement of Ireland’s
national status. Some have described the Annals as a monument to a lost civilization now going
down in the face of English aggression and colonization.21 But the leading authority, Breandán
Ó Buachalla argues that the Annals were not constructed with that attitude and mentality.22
Rather the objective set out by its originators was to chart Ireland’s history and geography in
written form–in short to give Ireland back its status as a nation in the face of powerful English
propaganda to the contrary. The authors, and its mentors, were well aware of the European
intellectual logocentric view that a people without a history was not a nation and that it was not
a history until it was a written one. So the compilers of the Annals, in Ó Buachalla’s view, saw
this endeavour as a prologue of the new life to come–as one of the foundation texts for the Irish
nation, that is the Catholic Irish nation, which had then crystallized in the 1620s and 30s. Yet, in
retrospect, the Annals do seem to represent the end of specific notions of time, space and culture
in Ireland. They record the epic battles for sovereignty, which ended with the defeat of the Irish at
the battle of Kinsale in 1601. They stumble on intermittently until 1616. Then silence.
I have mapped the places named in the Annals and have found them to be remarkably
comprehensive geographically–only two noticeable gaps, in the north-east and the extreme west
and south-west (Figure 1). However, the annals are by no means comprehensive as to events such
36 Smyth
as English military operations. Just under forty entries for such military exercises are recorded for
the forty year period 1540-1579 whereas historian David Edwards, using an analysis of all state
records as well, shows a total of 51 operations for half that period–the twenty year span from 1546
to 1565.23 The Annals are essentially an Irish world view–for the most part they fail to note the
work of the New English in building new fortifications or new urban or rural settlements. And
they never mention the surveyors and map-makers as a category–these passed well underneath
the radar of the clerical-cum-aristocratic-focussed annalists–as do the Irish merchant classes and
the life of Irish cities and towns. The religious centers of Armagh and Clonmacnoise lead Dublin
in the names index and Cork and Limerick tail behind a number of the key monastic/diocesan
centers (Figure 1).
Nevertheless, the collapse of Ireland’s relative cultural and political stability after the
English Reformation i.e. post 1540 is dramatically highlighted in the Annals. As early as 1600 they
reveal that the power of the lordships is reduced by the order of four-fifths. The most important
lords and their sons have been executed or have gone into exile. Lay leadership is being eliminated.
The representatives of the Catholic Church–most especially in relation to the ownership or control
of church land–has been weakened considerably but not eliminated. However, in contrast to the
later fifteenth century when there was still a powerful dynamic for monastic foundations across
the country, all abbeys and monasteries are either in ruins or adapted for military-cum residential
functions by the New English at the end of the sixteenth century (Table 1). English legislative
and other attacks on Ireland’s secular cultural leaders is also showing success but there are still a
relatively vibrant if reduced group–confirming Brendaín Ó Buachalla’s interpretation.
But the role of the Irish judges, the brehons, has been radically reduced. By the 1600s, the spread
of the English county and legal systems was now impacting across the country, accelerated by an
Attorney General–Sir John Davies (another poet)–who saw conquest by law as an essential follow
up to the military subjugation of the country.24 Some Irish intellectuals–both lawyers and poets–
were already assimilating to the new regime. Fanon noted that this happens in most colonial
contexts.25
Perhaps the most dramatic evidence emerging from the Annals is the phenomenal
intensification of English military operations over the second half of the sixteenth century. Yet it is
likely the Annals are only documenting about 40% of the total. The Annals record eleven instances
of the killing of non-combatants in the field over the second half of the sixteenth century. 26 In Age
of Atrocity, David Edwards has documented in far greater detail the intensive use of state terror
over this period.27
The use of the Irish language in the Annals is always very precise–it distinguishes the
Old Irish (Gaels) from the descendants of the medieval English colony (Gallaibh or Sean-Ghaill)
but the latter are regionalized to emphasize their specificity as distinctly rooted communities:
Gallaibh Midhe for the Old Foreigners of Meath, Gallaibh Laigean for those of South Leinster. Those
who came to be known as the ‘New English’ are almost invariable rendered as Na Saxanaigh
(The Saxons). However, the most intriguing linguistic recognition of an identity shift was clearly
signalled in the Annals–that is the growing integration of the Gallaibh with the Old Irish. From
the early 1580s these are recognized in the Annals as the Fionngallaibh–the fair or the favoured
white foreigners whereas a second term for the New English is the Dubhghaill–the black/dark
foreigners. Ethnic categories were being polarized. The move towards the unification of the Old
Irish Gaels and the Old English was further signalled by the use of the inclusive term for both as
na Éireannaigh i.e. the Irish, the shared dwellers of the land of Éire/Ireland.28 These distinctions
were emerging by the 1580s–at about the same time as the Protestant New English disown the
Catholic Old English and put them metaphorically and physically “beyond the Pale.”
Figure 1. The distribution and frequency of all places mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters, from c.
550 CE to c.1600.
38 Smyth
Table 1. References in the Annals of the Four Masters to categories of actors/institutions, demonstrating
the cultural stability of Ireland pre-1540 and the dramatic impact of English conquest and colonization after
1540.
Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn
The Irish exiles abroad–mixing across the cities and colleges of Europe–also sought to
cement this new alliance, and leading this movement was the Tipperary-born priest Seatrúin
Céitinn/Geoffrey Keating (c.1580-1644). Keating was born of Old English stock on Butler lands
near Cahir town in Co. Tipperary, was trained in Irish literature by the local Gaelic scholars,
the McGraths, and later studied theology and history in Bordeaux and Rheims. Widely read in
Irish, Latin, English and French, Keating returned to Ireland in 1613, to earn fame as a diocesan
preacher-cum-theologian and as a very stylish poet and linguist.29 His greatest achievement was
to become the doyen of early modern Irish historians-cum-topographers. His history of Ireland,
Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, was one of the most circulated manuscripts in the Irish language. Literally
hundreds of manuscript copies were made well into the nineteenth century. The number and
geographical extent of this large manuscript that have survived from most parts of Ireland–well
over one hundred–is testimony to its immense popularity and wide reception after the 1630s.30
Astonishingly, Keating’s Foras Feasa was not printed in full until the early twentieth century,
probably the last book in European literature whose dissemination owed nothing, Joep Leerssen
argues, to the printing press.31 More significantly a translation into English was published as early
as 1726–the first English translation in manuscript form dates back to 1635. Others followed over
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including an 1811 edition which contains the first
printed map of Ireland in the Irish language.32 Keating’s collective history can, therefore, be seen
as not only preserving the past but also as recreating and reinterpretating the historic past. Such
an effort of reconstruction was a kind of compensation and reaction to a situation of conquest.
Keating’s Foras Feasa is reasonably comprehensive from a topographic and placename
perspective (Figure 2). Nevertheless–given that his narrative stops at c.1200–it is inevitable that it
is pre-Norman Ireland that dominates the narratives of the human geography of Ireland. Central
to his interpretation is both the old middle Kingdom of Ríocht na Midhe of North Leinster and
the rich heritage of the great midland monasteries. Equally, there is a clear emphasis on the
hammering out of an island-wide unity under such powerful medieval high kings as Brian Ború
from Thomond (North Munster). The weakness of the narrative relating to mid- and south Ulster
is also striking. However, this retrospective emphasis of the work may also point to another aspect
of the wider traumatic experiences and responses–some nostalgia for a previous ‘Golden Age’ in
the face of a devastating conquest.
Keating’s work–and that of a number of other early seventeenth-century writers, some
of whom were of Old English background–was in part a response to the English language
writings of Spenser, Holinshed, Stanihurst, Moryson and Camden.33 These and other English
authors promoted a view of the “primitive” and “barbaric” nature of Irish society–and argued
that religion and civilization were alien to those who lived in Ireland. Keating traced these views
back to the medieval writer Giraldus Cambrensis whom he described in a caustic Irish phrase as
“the bull of the herd who had produced false histories” of Ireland and the Irish.34
Immersed in European Renaissance learning and insights about the new methods of the historian,
Keating was to argue that none of the so-called historians of Ireland, writing in the English
language, had consulted the primary sources–the Irish annals, charters, poetry and genealogies–
which were collectively known in Irish as the seanchas. To Keating their work was without
authority–gan barántas–since few if any of them understood or read Irish. Keating stressed the
use of primary sources–especially the written sources. And it was Keating, more than any other
writer, who crystallized the concept of the Irish as na hÉireannaigh.
In previous centuries the Gael and the Gallaibh had fought each other for control of
Ireland. Now the dynamic interaction and conflict between the New English and the rest helped
emphasize this new notion of “the Irish”–and Keating makes a critical distinction between these
people, “the Catholic Irish”–and the New English/The Nua-Ghaill. Keating had a clear political
objective in articulating this new position of an integrated Catholic Irish nation united against
Na Saxanaigh, those “dreaded heretics.” The State Papers indicate the English point of view on all
this:
It is the perfidious Machiavellian friars at Louvain who foster this new perspective–
who seek to reconcile all their countrymen–to unite both the old descendants of
the Old English race and those that are mere Irish in a league of friendship and
concurrence against Your Majesty and the true religion now professed in your
Kingdoms.35
This comment is perceptive in noting the nation-building role of the Irish exiles, writing poetry
and prose and publishing on the continent to illuminate Ireland’s cause. Keating best reflects this
Europeanization of the Irish experience–especially what was happening in the Low Countries,
the center of new ways of thinking in art, learning, politics and religion. As early as the first
decade of the seventeenth century, Sir George Carew, then English President of Munster, was to
note: “As a consequence of exile, the Irish have become more civilised, grown to be disciplined
soldiers, scholars, politicians and much further instructed in most points of religion than they
were accustomed to be.”36
40 Smyth
Figure 2. Percentage distribution per county of places referred to in Keating’s History of Ireland.
Keating’s move to integrate the Old English into the Irish fold is even more profound.
Carew had gathered materials in the early seventeenth century, including many maps–intending
to write his history of Ireland. It seems to me that Keating’s move in incorporating the Old
English into the Irish tradition and nation is strongly emphasizing a major discontinuity and
deep rupture between the heritage of the medieval English colony in Ireland and the ethos of the
emerging New English colony. There is quite an ideological battle going on here, for Sir George
Carew and others were anxious to write histories of Ireland which stressed continuities from
the so-called original conquest of the medieval era to the seventeenth century, seeking to further
legitimize current English policies. Keating counters this viewpoint by stressing ruptures, fault
lines, and discontinuities by emphasizing how different the New English regime was. Yet in spite
of English propagandist historians like Carew, we end up with a supreme irony. The New English
led by people like Edmund Spenser denied their kinship with the Old English; and the Gaels of
Ireland embraced them for their Irishness.37 These changing allegiances are fundamental to what
happened in early modern/colonial Ireland and are central to the depth of resistance to colonial
conquest and rule.
Keating was also a modernizer in linguistic terms–he wrote in a fluent, highly polished
style, making the very elaborate Irish language more accessible to a much wider audience. Of
Keating it would be said he was the first to give intellectual form or shape to the story of Irish
civilization–rendering a very sophisticated and deliberate synthesis of the reality of the island’s
past–rather like Camden had done for England and paralleled by equivalent work in France, Spain
and elsewhere on the continent. But was Keating writing against the grain as the Irish language
and literature appeared to be falling into oblivion? Was his work part of a rescue operation or
was it part of a drive to reinvigorate the Irish language, culture and politics? More the latter,
one suspects. It is also important to note that Keating argued that the Irish were a very lawful
people if the law was fair and delivered fairly. Whereas close on 90 percent of the population
was then Catholic and 60 percent of the property was then owned by the Catholic Irish elite, they
constituted only a minority in parliament. The deliberately engineered Protestant-dominated
Irish parliament from 1613 onwards was not seen as a place where the laws were fair and just
but rather was seen as deeply partisan. Keating, like many others, arguing that Ireland had been
annexed to the Crown of England, looked to the king himself not the parliament for good laws.38 It
is now impossible to say how much of Keating’s and associated writings fed into the 1641 Rising/
Rebellion but it is clear that the military, intellectual and clerical classes were deeply intermeshed
and interwoven.
The discourse of English colonialism was by then being met with a discourse of Irish
resistance and nation-building. The great Irish-language narratives of the early decades of the
seventeenth century–including that of Keating’s–could be interpreted as restoring some sense
of purpose and pride to a people after much devastation as well as countering the detested
hegemonic/historical discourse of English officials and narrators. But these Irish narratives
might also be interpreted as evasive in part, blurring the harshest realities of the reconquest. If
nothing else, the circulation of Keating’s manuscript histories not only celebrated and made clear
the historic strength of Irish civilization, but it also stiffened the boundary between the Irish and
Na Saxanaigh. Looking at the wider comparative literature on colonialism–and recognizing that
Ireland was England’s first colony–Keating and his associates may well be the first colonized
people to repudiate an imperialist ideology and imagine and define a new national community.39
Five seventeenth-century political poems
The most definitive period in shaping Ireland’s modern geography and history is the era
that began with the 1641 rising/rebellion, leading to the Confederate wars and the Cromwellian
42 Smyth
conquest and plantations onto 1659-60. It was difficult to write about the horrors of this period
since their repercussions live on in people’s memories and commemorations to this day. This
was especially true when working on the thirty-three-volume 1641 Depositions and later the
Cromwellian Examinations, where one can listen in to the pain and confusion of the Protestant
settlers as they recounted the terrors of the early Irish attacks–and equally the later reprisals
against the Irish and particularly the dirty war after Cromwell left Ireland.40 In the Irish Folklore
Commission archives only Daniel O’Connell–Catholic Ireland’s greatest politician of the nineteenth
century–surpasses Oliver Cromwell in number of references. Clearly for the Catholic Irish the
memory of this perceived “demon-destroyer” and his actions had burned deep into their psyche.
We still do not know–we may never know–how much of a demographic disaster Ireland suffered
over the period 1641-59 and especially between 1641-3 and 1648-54. Indeed we are still uncertain
what Ireland’s total population was in 1641. My best guesstimate is a population of around 1.8
million in 1641, reduced to 1.3 or 1.4 million by 1654 and rising to 1.5 or 1.6 million by 1660,
following the in-migration of perhaps one hundred thousand new British settlers.41 Either way,
it is certain that Ireland lost over a quarter- and perhaps a half-million of its population over this
time (1641-54) through war, murders, reprisals, war-induced famine and plague and significant
out-migration–losses probably shared proportionately between the Protestant settler (18 percent
of total) and Catholic Irish populations.41 Clearly, this is a most terrifying and traumatic period for
both groups. Micheál O Siochrú’s and Jane Ohlmeyer’s Ireland: 1641-Contexts and Reactions deals
at length with the experiences, memories and commemoration of these awful years for both the
Protestant and Catholic comunities.42
Irish-language sources give some sense of the Catholic Irish experiences and responses
over this critical period and on into the eighteenth century. Given the depth of the trauma
associated with such a devastating conquest, the classic response of some Irish poets was
one of denial–denial that the world had changed so radically, denial of events too painful to
articulate. Yet the preponderance of vernacular poetic voices that have survived interrogate not
only the dislocations but, more particularly, the imposition of a radically new social and cultural
framework. Irish-speaking communities were not passive receivers of knowledge transmitted
downwards from an outsider conquering group; they were constantly engaged in trying to make
sense of, interpret and give meaning to their own often rapidly changing experiences and worlds.
Their storytellers, local historians, poets, priests and musicians continued to present to the parish,
locality or townland community its significant “texts.”
During the seventeenth century, the first English words to make fissures in the Irish
language and poetry related to economic exactions, taxes and rents, to religious discrimination
and to administrative and legal controls. The most pertinent commentary is provided in the
edited text of Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems from five different poets.43 Emphasizing the
deep impact of English law in Ireland, these poets broke their Irish rhythms/harmonies with the
names of powerful English legal institutions and processes: their poems are peppered with terms
such as “Court of Wards,” “Exchequer,” “Star Chamber,” “King’s Bench,” “Bishop’s Court,”
“Assizes,” “writ,” “provost,” “sheriff,” “receiver,” “cess” and “tax”–a litany that recalled their
respective functions in proselytizing, increasing crown revenue, in outlawing and sweeping away
Irish systems of law and land tenure (1603-5), in punishing “recusants,” and in imprisoning and
banishing “popish priests and school teachers.” Not forgotten is one other “little” legal stratagem:
“Surrender and Regrant”, which required the Irish lords to “surrender” the lands (held under
Gaelic and Gaelicized tenures) to the Crown and consent to their “re-granting” according to strict
English property laws.
Dlí beag eile do rinneadh do Gaeulaibh, (Yet another small law which was imposed on the
surrender ar a gceart do dhéanamh. Gaels;
Do chuir sin Leath Chuinn trí na chéile… To make surrender of what was theirs by right.
This put Leath Chuinn [Gaelic Ireland] into
turmoil…44)

A striking theme of much of this 1640s and 1650s Irish poetry is the celebration of both
the prowess and heroism of the great Irish families–of both Gaelic and Old English descent. Yet
the overwhelming impression is one of grief-stricken poets describing a devastated culture and
ravaged landscapes that would long struggle to recover (themes evident even in the titles of the
poems).45 They were only too well aware of the pain that followed the rupturing of a society’s
psychic moorings, the undermining of a people’s sense of place and identity. The parallels with
Aztec and Incan poetry are striking.46 In the 1750s, a century after the composition of Seán Ó
Conaill’s extraordinarily popular Tuireamh na hÉireann (The Lament for Ireland), this poem was
repeated and kept in memory on account of the great knowledge of ancestral Irish culture
comprehended in it.47 Thus, the poets of the 1640s and 1650s came to perpetuate the memories of
the cataclysm and trauma of conquest from a Catholic Irish perspective.
These mid seventeenth-century poets contrasted Ireland’s former prosperity with
the present miserable conditions and the devastated landscapes. They detailed the sufferings
of the people, the beheadings, hangings and executions; churches destroyed and desecrated;
monasteries thrown down to furnish materials for the palaces and mansions of the new elites,
whether lay or ecclesiastical: lands confiscated and the landowners, with their families and
tenants, transported to Connacht. Indeed, the most frequent English words to arrive in all these
poems are “transplantation” and “transportation”–words that came to sound the death knell
for the lives and loves of so many people. The hopes, aspirations and drive for redemption and
liberation–fitfully, yet powerfully expressed in the 1630s–and dramatically attempted in the 1641
rising/rebellion–had evaporated: or so it seemed.
Following the Williamite victories and land confiscations, the 1690s was a time of
celebration for the British at home and the new Protestant Irish and was known as the Glorious
Revolution. For the Catholic Irish, this era saw the imposition of these so-called apartheid-like
penal laws that were not fully repealed until the 1820s. In the previous seventeenth century, at
least 85 percent of Irish land had been transferred into the hands of New English (and Scottish)
colonists. The old Irish aristocratic order had almost disappeared and with it the patronage of the
hereditary bardic poetic caste. Obviously this transformation of Irish culture, polity and economy
is reflected in the Irish literature. Poets and poetry were transformed: poetry was no longer so
elaborate in rhyming metres and so conventional; learned yet looser accentual verse became
the norm, carried on by poet-priests and a growing number of lay-poets who came from the
lesser gentry, well-to-do-farmers, teachers, craftsmen and women. As Neil Buttimer has shown,
such highly accomplished poets as Daibidh Ó Bruadair (1625-98) and Aogán Ó Rathaille (c.1670-
1729) in poems such as An Longbriseadh (The Shipwreck) and Créachta crích Fódla (The Wounds of
Ireland) vividly express how their whole universe “had come apart and was foundering” as they
register in archetypal forms the “major overturning of indigenous Irish culture.”49
In addition, like the poem Cill Cais, there was a great blossoming of sophisticated folk poetry
which became embedded in the Irish literature and oral/aural tradition –much of it composed in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by anonymous poets and musicians. Such poetry was
frequently recited or rather chanted to a lively audience or music session–for it is the dramatic
or story-telling voice that is most characteristic and most effectively used in these poems. Most
44 Smyth
interestingly, there is a revival of the lyrics of the Fianna poems–tales of those heroic, carefree
warrior bands who had defended Ireland in mythic times. Clearly such poetic stories had a new
psychological function at this time. It should be appreciated that verse during these centuries–
as with songs and ballads–had a much wider function than is characteristic today, being more
often used where prose might now be considered more appropriate. As Séan Ó Tuama notes, for
the best of these poets–lyricists of great intellectual energy and skill–verse was a vehicle for not
only evoking personal or national mood and passion “but also for social, historical and other
rational discourses.”50 All of this took place in a context where the institutions that had hitherto
supported Irish language, poetry and literature had almost disappeared–we are referring here
to the educational, legal, religious and economic institutions once densely scattered across the
island.
The particular trauma experienced by the declassed poets–like Aogán Ó Rathaille–comes
through as they try to make sense and give shape to their own personal chaos and trauma through
their poetry. One is reminded how in our own time poets like Robert Lowell managed to survive
and keep themselves together and sane via their poetry.51 Otherwise it was to the madhouse or, as
with some other modern poets, suicide.
Poems of the dispossessed
A detailed place-based analysis of the poetic collection Poems of the Dispossessed edited by
Ó Tuama and with the English translations by Thomas Kinsella has been carried out (Figure 3). A
substantial majority of these poets came from the southern province of Munster. Munster was by
then the heartland of both the resistance and the poetry. Literal displacement was a major theme–
reflections on the castles and mansions now razed to the ground or abandoned like O’Loughlin’s
castle in the Burren in Clare:
Á fhágbháil ‘na aonar fúibh, (The great rooms of O Loughlin’s house

rostadh fairsing múir uí Róigh. abandoned to the birds alone…….
Tulach Uí Róigh mhórga na múrtha mbeann. Stately Tulagh Úi Róigh, of towering walls,
Gan choirm, gan ceol seolta ná lúbadh lann. without ale or the music of sails or blades
flexing.52)
Obviously, poems of dispossession describing the seizing of mansions, the seizing of the best
lands, “once well-defended and bordered places” were central. The declassed poets remembered
the lands of the great and generous lords who had been their patrons, their “settlements and
lands now savaged by alien lords” and their language outlawed. These were laments too for the
lavish hospitality of the Big House and reveries of a vanished world of revelry, music, singing,
hunting and poetic competitions.
The enmity towards the New English settlers was fiercely stated and the bitterness of the
ethnic divide comes through time and time again. An earlier Seathrún Céitinn poem is typical:
At the news from Fál’s [Ireland’s] high plain I cannot sleep

I am sick till doom at the plight of its faithful flock.
Long have they stood as a hedge against hostile trash
But a lot of the cockle has grown up through them at last.53
That very dominant English colonial metaphor of the need to break and plough the ground and
get rid of the weeds (the Irish) so as to plant the good seed (hence the use of the term “Plantations”)
Figure 3. Distribution of home-places of poets identified in An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems for the
Dispossessed.
46 Smyth
was reversed by the Irish poets who saw Irish lands polluted by new weeds. The poets rarely
if ever described the distinctions as rooted in religion–the division was ethnic and national, the
battle was between Irish and English notions of civilization.
A recurring theme was a comparison of the Irish and the Israelites in Egypt, best represented
in a poem called An Díbirt go Connachta/Exodus to Connacht:
Uirscéal as sin tuigthear libh: (Consider a parable of this:

clann Isreal a bhean le Dia, Israel’s people, God’s own,
san Éigipt cé bhí i mbroid Although they were in bonds in Egypt,
furtacht go grod a fuair siad. Found in time a prompt release.)
So there was always lingering hope of redemption–always hope in times of despair. Exodus to
Connacht concludes:
A Dhia atá fial, a thriath na mbeannachta, (God, Who art generous, O Prince of Blessings,
féach na Gaeil go léir gan bharanta; behold the Gael, stripped of authority [my italics];
má táimíd ag trial siar go Connachta, Now as we journey Westward to Connacht.
fágmaid ‘nár ndiaidh fó chiain ár seanchairde. old friends we’ll leave behind us in their grief.)
And if not to Connacht, the poet regretted that the youth of Ireland were being scattered to foreign
lands.54
The new breed of landlord came in for a fierce criticism. Well-to-do farmer-poet Sean
Clárach Mac Dónaill (1691-1754) described the behavior of the landlord Dawson in the Glen of
Aherlow in Co. Tipperary.
Keep fast under cover, o stones, in closet of clay

this grey-haired Dawson, a bloody and treacherous butcher.
Not in struggle and strife in the fight are his exploits known
but ravaging and hanging and mangling the poor forever….
To the wails of the abject he opened not his gate

and answered no cry, nor gave them food for their bodies.
If they dragged off brushwood or sticks or bits of bushes
he would draw down streams of blood from their shoulderblades.55
Dawson’s may be an extreme example of landlord behavior. Yet surprisingly a contemporary of

Mac Dónaill, the Anglican Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift, has much the same to
say in the English language of the new landlord class.56
But the dominant theme–which was already present in Ulster poetry at the turn of the
seventeenth century and echoed and re-echoed in that of the Munster poetry–is the attention to
soundscapes–the lost landscapes of sound in this profoundly oral/aural culture–and the silence
that had followed the conquest, the land-owning and administrative revolutions. The poems
return again and again to the absence of the beloved sounds of the language itself–the songs, the
sounds of the harps and poetry, the feasting with wine and talk, the sounds of soldiers as cattle
are plundered, the sounds of oars entering the harbour, of gulls in sea-flight, of chess fought
hard, debates over books and the words and music of wisemen and gentlewomen.57 And the
Irish placenames so lovingly listed, are a characteristic feature–as are the varied bird sounds of
a former much more woodland culture. There are powerful evocations of the emptiness of the
landscape in the wake of military defeat; halls, mansions, churches and assembly-places stand
void.58 The voices of their one-time companies and congregations stilled.
These poems are reveries of a vanished world–the recreation of dream landscapes as a
way of dealing with the trauma –like the “aisling” dream poems that I shall discuss at the end
of this section. A once familiar and loved landscape came to be seen and felt as alien, alienated
and alienating. Part of the logic of colonialism, as argued by Franz Fanon, is the alienation of
this colonial subject from home territory–and from the self.59 Once known and familiar home
landscapes become strange and alienated through the process of colonial displacement and
“othering.” The concept of home–whether domestic or territorial–is dislocated and displaced
since these domestic or territorial spheres have become sites of foreign inscriptions–as people are
made strangers in their own land.60 And the best Irish poets linked the traumatic ambivalences
of their own personal, physic displacement to the wider disjunctions of political and cultural
existence all over Ireland.61
However, as the eighteenth century rolled on, other poems revealed the vital and
sometimes novel central places of the adapting culture–the meeting-place of chapel for Sunday
Mass, the fair days and market days with their boisterous street life, lively dances, weddings,
wakes and funerals, meetings at burial places, holy wells, in country pubs, in the big houses of
the surviving Irish gentry and at hurling matches, race-meetings and pattern/saints days. It was
not all gloom and doom–a boisterous gaiety was also there for the Catholic Irish were only half
conquered, only half defeated. Yet this merriment may have been the kind that often emerges at
and after a time of societal chaos–a kind of release from an otherwise repressive environment.
One further idea needs to be explored in relation to poetic materials from the mid
eighteenth century that deals with redemption rather than destruction. What I have argued here
is that recurring poetic themes and stories–given their retention, dissemination and transmission
over so many generations–clearly represented something valuable, even therapeutic in a culture.
Hence the ongoing central importance of a manuscript literature like Keating’s Foras Feasa ar
Éirinn. These stories and poems clearly point to cultural self-knowledge. In the Cill Cais poem we
had a celebration of the deigh-bhean–the gentlewoman, Lady Butler–but perhaps there is an echo
here too of the Irish spéirbhean–the dream woman, the notion of the bean feasa, the wise woman of
knowledge, of healing, of birth and death.
Central to seventeenth and eighteenth aisling or vision poems is the notion of Ireland
personified as a sometimes beautiful woman (sometimes turned into a hag)–now having to
consort with an upstart intruder–and seeking the liberation of her country and the return of her
rightful spouse or king, then envisaged as the return of a Stuart king. This aisling or vision poem
is the dominant form of political literature in Irish from c.1650 to 1800. Deep in this Irish tradition
too was the notion that a just and rightful king must be married to the territory–to the land–as
personified by the territorial deity, the sovereignty Queen figure named Éire or Banba–the old
names for Ireland and thus symbolizing the royal sovereignty principle. In Irish folk tradition, this
feminine principle, as representing the symbol of sovereignty, was powerfully associated with,
named in and embedded in, a dynamic landscape of liminal areas. These include coasts, seas,
rivers, mountains, cross-roads, funerary tombs and places of solitude. Indeed in the folk tradition
a gendered conception of landscape, social environment and the Cosmos prevailed, as evidenced
in the myths and stories associated with places.62 The landscape and its place names constituted
(and still constitute) a phenomenal memory bank across Ireland. And this sovereignty symbol is
associated with fertility, prosperity–and especially the celebration of the harvest festivals.
There is widespread use of the aisling motif in poetry after the mid seventeenth century.
These aisling poems link the banishment of the “foreigners from Banba / Ireland” with “expelling
48 Smyth
Luther’s tribe and all English–speaking churls.” Thus ethnic, linguistic and religious dimensions
of a national ethos are now fused together. However, by the 1720s and certainly by the 1740s,
any belief in a restoration of the Stuarts had died. The aisling poems then went in two different
directions. Some became more clearly conventional and formulaic and in many ways are escapist–
dreaming of a redemption but without much hope of it.
On the other hand, the aisling is linked to agrarian protest movements. From the mid
eighteenth century and intensifying with the secret Whiteboy agrarian movements, which
forcefully opposed landlord enclosures and excessive tithe and rent payments, a really striking
illustration of the adaptation of old cultural forms to new political needs occurs. The beautiful and
now highly sexualized woman image of Ireland is no longer given the ancient Goddess names
for Ireland–Banba, Ériu or Fodhla–but are now democratized and given more everyday names
like Sadbh, Cáitlín Ní hUallacháin, Síle, Nóirín, Siobhán or Meibhín. The Whiteboys are celebrated
in quite a number of the vision aisling poems, such as The Children of Sadbh. Here the spéirbhean
implores “the true gentlemen of proper manners to come out on the attack any night at all […].
Let us forcefully drive out the hordes of English–speakers from the harbours of our forebears.”63
The Whiteboys were so called because they wore a uniform of a white cloak and white
cockade, which combined the medieval rites-de-passage dress–form of Wrenboys and Strawboys
with the French Jacobite style–and there were connections between the Munster Whiteboy
culture and France. But whereas the later French woman-figure of Marianne–who personifies
and represents France–is a clear symbol of the Republican ideals of liberty and equality, the Irish
symbolism combines the older notion of royal sovereignty with a forward-looking, democratic
drive for justice and equality. Mixed symbols, yes–but a corner had been turned.
It might, therefore, be argued that for some at least, the 1760s represented the beginning of
the end of the political traumas experienced by the Irish from the late sixteenth century onwards
but the wider cultural trauma persisted. Other traumas would follow. Yet it is interesting that by
the 1760s and 1770s the balance between the Irish and English languages had gradually shifted in
favour of the latter. Future political opposition to the ruling Anglo-Irish Protestant establishment
would be expressed either bilingually or more and more in English language forms, though still
rooted–as we have just noted–in an Irish poetic tradition. That tradition sustained a strong sense
of Irish nationality and a sharp awareness of the levels of oppression associated with the English-
speaking Protestant regime.64
However, the above examples may still hint at the ongoing problem of translations and
continuing misunderstandings between the two cultures. The hybrid Irish had learned to speak
English–it is true. But there was still a very significant cultural barrier. Their thought patterns
and cultural understandings were still embedded in the Irish language, in particular social codes,
cognitive styles, epistemologies and in the landscape and its cultural meanings.
Cultural trauma and the Catholic Irish c.1530–c.1760: a summary
To conclude, a preliminary sketch or path-analysis of cultural trauma as experienced by
the Catholic Irish after c.1530 is summarized. Traumatic events are judged to be so strong that their
legacies remain intact and salient across generations. As B.H. Stamm et al. argue, historical trauma
involves communal feelings of family and social disruption, confusions about identities, grief and
angst often manifested in destructive ways, daily re-experiencing of the colonial trauma through
racism and stereotyping and lack of resolution of a country’s communal pain.65 Lack of resolution
may be embedded in the most central feature of traumas–the disassociation of feelings from and
about unbearable experiences and happenings. Involved here is denial that these awful events
ever happened to the group or individual, so denying the shame and guilt of being a victim.66 For
healing, this shame and guilt must be acknowledged, addressed and articulated and narrated.
In the Irish context, the relatively peaceful conditions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries were shattered between the 1540s and 1690s by an epic and often brutal encounter
between two civilizations–English and Irish–which resulted in enormous cultural losses and
traumatic stresses for the conquered, Catholic Irish. Their adaptations to these traumatic events
took many different forms (Figure 4).
As explained at the outset of this paper, the documentary evidence in the English language
for England’s conquest of Ireland in the “early modern” era is both voluminous and highly
varied in format. In contrast, the level of documentation in the Irish language dealing with this
colonial era is much less, much narrower in range and, in addition, quite a number of Irish annals
and manuscripts were confiscated or burned by English officials in this turbulent era. As might
be predicted, the traumatic consequences for the Irish of this imperial expansion and violent
conquest are rarely if ever addressed in the English colonial record. On the other hand, some
Irish language texts do provide insight into the Irish reaction to conquest, its aftermath and in
particular the ways of coping with the ensuing trauma. Four key Irish language texts–the Annals
of the Four Masters, Keating’s history, and two major poetic collections–have been utilized in this
paper to explore these themes.
During the late fifteenth century and the very early sixteenth century (up to the 1520s),
Ireland was characterized by relative cultural stability. Apart from weak outliers of English
rule and custom beyond the Dublin Pale and south Wexford, Irish–either Gaelic or Gaelicized–
institutions dominated and flourished. The Annals of the Four Masters report significant
Figure 4. Path analysis of cultural trauma experienced by the (Catholic) Irish.

50 Smyth
continuities in a whole series of key actors and institutions over the period–including lords and
sub-lords, major and minor church officers and specialist key church officials as monasteries were
either newly created or renewed. Lay cultural leaders such as professors (ollaimh), poets, chief
musicians, historians and topographers, brehons, constables and warders remained vital actors
in the cultural system. Low to medium levels of violence were characteristic–governed by the
jostling between the greater and lesser lordships.67 For the most part pre-Renaissance modes of
thought and living still prevailed.
All of this was to change from the 1530s and especially the 1540s onwards. England’s
imperial expansionist drive into Ireland was then firmly anchored in a centralizing and
modernizing state system, “headed by a powerful monarch and supported by an elaborate but
co-ordinated system of administration and command that included ministers, the judiciary, army
and navy officers, local government officials, soldiers, merchants and the officers of the Anglican
Church.”68 As we have seen, this nationalizing culture expressed itself in a rapidly evolving and
rich language–English–and most critically wrote itself and its identity into world history via
the new print technology. Between 1540 and 1599, the Annals record the sudden acceleration
in military operations by English viceroys in Ireland, the emergence of new officer categories,
captains of cavalry, generals, admirals, lieutenants, musketeers and engineers on the Irish frontier.
The key institutions of a more conservative Irish society and culture were assaulted, disrupted
and eventually dismantled.
Two very dissimilar cultures came into contact and conflict. Early attempts at mediation
and assimilation failed. For a century and a half (1540s to 1690s), Ireland was characterized by
high levels of state violence, regional conflicts, numerous land confiscations and increasing
cultural stress for the Irish, arising from their systematic subjugation by the colonizing English
and later Scottish forces and settlers. This violent reconquest and colonization of Ireland by the
English (later British) state and its representatives was met with significant levels of violent
resistance. There were high levels of war-related mortalities, including significant war-induced
famines firstly in Munster (1579-83), then in Ulster (1599-1603) and then island-wide during the
mid seventeenth-century Cromwellian wars. Catherine Nash has commented on the problematic
impact of European-centered modernity drives outside of Europe–a dark side that involved
“violent, coercive and insidious cultural practices” against so-called traditional societies in the
New World.69 This too was Ireland’s experience.
Ireland’s capacity for cultural resistance appears to have been greater than its ability to
successfully sustain a military defence. English propagandist texts justifying and legitimizing
conquest were met by the blossoming of a counter-culture, epitomized in the writings of the
Four Masters and of Seatrún Céitinn / Geoffrey Keating. This renaissance in Irish writing and
incipient nation-building was energized by the emerging “emigrant Irish nation” overseas–in
Irish colleges abroad, in merchant houses in many Atlantic European cities and in the officer corps
of continental Catholic armies. The sudden military and administrative challenges posed by the
conquering English and the associated loss of cultural leaders was at least partially countered
by this resurgence in Irish writing which–it needs to be stressed–was widely promulgated in a
still predominantly oral/aural culture. Expansionist English nationalizing drives prompted the
emergence of a nationalizing Irish elite.
However, cultural resistance and the growing integration of Old Irish and Old English did
not prevent the achievement of English (later British) hegemony in military, political, economic,
legal and linguistic spheres. This hegemonic control was achieved and deepened over three
phases: in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the Cromwellian conquest of
the mid seventeenth century and by the Williamite victories and confiscations at the end of that
century. Even by 1600, Irish cultural and political losses were immense as its intellectual, political
and ecclesiastical elites–the traditional authority figures–were eliminated, radically reduced or

forced into exile.70 The older centers of rule and cultural leadership were ‘emptied’ of their power
and their familiar landscapes (as at Cill Cais) made unfamiliar by an array of new settlement
and legal arrangements from plantation towns and newly established landlord estates to greatly
enlarged barony, county and island-wide administrations. A profoundly unequal relationship
intensified between an imperial, urbanizing, print-based and aggressively expansionist English
culture and language and a newly-outlawed Irish language and culture that was far more rural-
based, more oral/aural in style and more manuscript dependent.
Levels of repression, shaming and humiliation invariably shaped a range of long-lasting
cultural responses. Some poets adopted a denial strategy–dwelling imaginatively in the past and
choosing not to see or speak of the chaotic socio-political situation developing in front of their
eyes.71 The repressive environment that came with military and legal rule brought with it the life-
saving need of not speaking up, the fear of confrontation, the dread of persecution from a whole
panoply of penal laws could be brought back into play at very short notice. For safety’s sake came
the need to suppress true feelings, to speak in code or sideways, the need to develop secretive ways
of doing and saying things–for example, priests disguising themselves as servants or harpers in
Big Houses in order to sustain their mission–or the need to develop secret organizations like the
Houghers (early eighteenth century) and the Whiteboys (1760s and 1770s). One could not be too
demonstrative either in one’s actions or in the display of one’s by-then limited material wealth.
Keeping such a low profile also meant that the traveller, viewing this world from a coach window,
saw a dishevelled and disordered landscape, which was in many ways still quite a nuanced and
well understood-world–not least the landscape of a very discreet yet well-organized Catholic
Church. The colonial state’s instruments of surveillance ran up against sophisticated cultural
techniques for ensuring invisibility and impenetrability.72
The repression of so many negative feelings also had their dark expressions. The response
to violence produced, for example, the vicious, explosive attacks and retaliations of the early
months and years of the 1641 rising/rebellion. The rage displayed by the Catholic Irish in a
number of uprisings and in particular in the early 1640s had much to do with humiliation and
inferiority. Evelin G. Lindner contends that humiliation–the enforced lowering of the status of a
person or groups, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor and
dignity–is not just about power.73 Rather it is seen as prompting the perpetrators–in this case the
Catholic Irish–to seek revenge for past humiliations. This notion of humiliation also carries the
need to rid oneself of the fear of further subjugation or feelings of admiration for the culture and
life of the conqueror–the original humiliating force. Lindner describes humiliation as “the nuclear
bomb of the emotions,”74 leading to the kind of explosive action and “the fury of the rebels” so
often recounted in the state’s own documents as in the 1641 depositions and sometimes echoed
in Irish language poetry. But as has happened in so many cases of ethnic violence, the resurgent
Irish ended up in a worse situation than before as a consequence of both the late sixteenth century
and the Cromwellian wars and subsequent plantations.
Levels of sexual violence were exacerbated due to the trauma and effects of conquest.
Likewise, levels of alcoholism, vagrancy and begging all rose after the conquest. A reverence
for family land, its retention and transmission was reinforced–sometimes to pathological levels.
A patriarchal land-law worked its way throughout the whole social system and reinforced
male dominance. One other inevitable product of the trauma of conquest and plantation was
a widespread confusion about issues of identity.75 One hitherto-unrecognized factor adding to
the explosiveness of various risings/rebellions was the threats to identities that followed on
from military, religious and linguistic repression, the rapidity of social changes, the attempts to
anglicize family surnames by the elimination of ‘O’ and ‘Mac’ prefixes and the anglicization of
52 Smyth
placenames. Yet there were striking regional and group variations in the intensity of traumatic
feelings, and in levels of adaptation and resistance to these pressures.
By the early 1700s, one can identify a number of different forms of adaptation by the
Catholic-Irish to the English/British regime. Ethnic-cum-cultural extinction–promulgated as
an objective amongst some extreme elements in the British elite76–had failed, but the Catholic
Irish were now subject to high levels of exclusion in most spheres of life. Regional and cultural
stability remained most characteristic in the still Irish-speaking communities in the west of Ireland
and especially in the province of Connacht. There was ongoing low-level resistance to British
institutions and personnel–firstly by guerrilla bands known as “rapparees” and in the early
decades of the eighteenth century by localized agrarian movements, which aimed to conserve
customary rights in relation to land and labour (Figure 4). Many of the poorer Irish subsisting on
small holdings on marginal lands and along the roadsides lowered their heads, adapted to the
new realities, took good care of their cow, a few cattle and pigs and/or grain crops to pay the rent,
became servants and workers on the estates or big farms or endured in the burgeoning Irishtowns
and cabin suburbs.
However, probably the most dominant–certainly the most politically significant–form of
adaptation to colonial rule took place among the mainly tenant farming and merchant classes.
This involved the reorganization of some segments of Irish culture, combined with a partial
assimilation to English cultural norms–including the evolution and spread of bilingualism in
Irish and English between the 1690s and 1760s. These adaptive strategies included the emergence
of independent, secular educational provision via the so-called “hedge schools.” The poet, priest,
musician and balladeer continued to occupy central roles in articulating the beliefs, values and
mythico-history of the Catholic Irish. The reorganization and revitalization of the territorial and
behavioral organization of the Catholic Church was also a central feature with a revitalized parish
playing a critical role. A wide range of folkloric practices and rituals in the localities were not only
maintained but also strengthened. Other strategies of accommodation included the maintenance
and elaboration of a number of recreational activities and leisure-cum-meeting places including
public houses, hurling matches and horse racing. A striking innovation was the emergence and
elaboration at growing regional scales of secret, sophisticated, quasi-political agrarian movements
like the Whiteboys and Righboys. Some Catholic Irish also came to occupy key niche positions in
specific sectors of the landlord estate and urban economies. The maintenance of still vibrant quasi-
lineage kinship systems and information fields may well have been the most significant survival
strategy. These adaptive processes reinforced powerful identification with specific places and key
ethnic symbols that may have only partially helped in healing with the traumatic consequences
of colonialism.77
Even amongst this more adaptive group, attitudes of passive compliance were strategically
necessary to survive in this profound unequal colonizer/colonized relationship. Fanon, Said and
Memmi have identified the long-term consequences of this post-colonial dependency.78 Irish-
born psychiatrist, Garrett O’Connor, describes the behavioral syndrome of subjugated people
like the Catholic Irish as “malignant shame”–a combination of dependency, low self-esteem,
self-misrepresentation of cultural inferiority and suppressed feelings.79 He sees these behaviors
as consequent on the destructive forces of colonialism–including physical abuse, shaming and
humiliation–being internalized and transmitted across generations. He asserts that this behavioral
syndrome is concentrated in post-colonial cultures such as Ireland and Mexico where imperialist
forces have subjected the indigenous peoples to appalling excesses.80 The core of the problem for
such populations is a widespread conviction of cultural inferiority, generated by a prolonged
abuse of power in the relationship between the colonizer and colonized.
For the most marginalized poor, so-called adaptation in the eighteenth century involved
displacement, further impoverishment, begging and sometimes exposure to local famines. In
contrast, a significant minority–mainly from the aristocratic, gentry and merchant classes of the
original Catholic Irish–came to identify with and be assimilated to the anglophone, Anglo-Irish
“Protestant ascendancy.” Another very significant form of adaptation involved the scattering
of the emigrant Irish–first to continental Europe–and later in the eighteenth century across the
English-speaking world. This scattering was to be massively augmented during and after the
Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century–probably the ultimate expression of the long-
run effects of colonialism in Ireland. The historical traumas and literary responses to the earlier
conquest and colonization–addressed in this paper were to be renewed and deepened by the
horrors and traumas of the Great Hunger.81 Trauma piled upon trauma.
NOTES
Modern Ireland c.1530–1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006). See also Gerry Kearns,
‘Historical Geographies of Ireland: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Legacies’ in Historical
Geography, vol. 41 (2013): 24–26.
2 Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran, “Introduction,” in Native American Postcolonial
Psychology, eds. Duran and Duran (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995),
1–3. See also Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, and
Susan Yellow Horse-Davis, “Healing the American Indian Soul Wound,” in International
Handbook of Multi-generational Legacies of Trauma, ed. Yael Danieli (New York: Plenum Press,
1998), 341–354. See also B. Hudnall Stamm, ed., Measurement of Stress, Trauma and Adaptation
(Baltimore, Maryland: Sidran Press, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, Illinois:
University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007).
3 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka,
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See
especially Chapter 1: Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 1–30.
4 Smyth, Map-Making, 21–197. See also Smyth, “Towards a Cultural Geography of the 1641
Rising/Rebellion,” in Ireland: 1641 Contexts and Reactions, eds. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane
Ohlmeyer (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2013), 71–94; and
reference 40 below.
5 The Irish language version of the poem is from An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the
Disposessed, ed. Seán Ó Tuama with translation into English verse by Thomas Kinsella
(Mountrath/Portlaoise: Dolmen Press, 1981), 328–329. This English translation fuses that of
Frank O’Connor and my own.
6 The full references to each of these texts are provided at the appropriate place in the
discussion below.
7 Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford, United Kingdom:
Clarendon Press, 1970).
8 Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 2001). For other insightful views from the Irish language side
of the frontier, see Marc Caball, Poets and Politics: Reaction and Continuity in Irish Poetry 1558–
1625 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998).
9 See Palmer, Language and Conquest, especially the section “A ‘Discourse of Sameness’ and the
Elision of Irish,” 45–64.
54 Smyth
10 Ibid., Chapter 2, especially 69–72.

11 David Edwards, “The Escalation of Violence in Sixteenth Century Ireland,” in Age of
Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, eds. David Edwards, Pádraig
Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 34–78, especially 34.
12 David B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
1966), 140.
13 John McGurk, “The Pacification of Ulster, 1600–3,” in Age of Atrocity, 119-129, 129.
14 Palmer, Language and Conquest, 185. See also Raymond Hickey (ed.), Researching the
Languages of Ireland (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2011), 27–29.
15 Breandán Ó Buachalla in Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-Aos Léinn 1603–1788
(Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1996) provides the most comprehensive interpretation for this
period of the complex relationships between politics and poetry in the Irish language. See
69–129 and especially 117–26. See also Michelle O’Riordan The Gaelic Mind and the Collapse of
the Gaelic World (Cork: Cork University Press, 1990) for a rather different perspective which
stresses the more hermetic, enclosed nature of the bardic world and its commentary; see also
Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development
and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edition (Cork: University Press,
1996), for interesting insights into the roles and functions of the bardic poet “who did not
recite his own poetry but would leave that task to one of his retinue, a reciter-harpist,” 152–
153.
16 “Mé an murdhuchan | An mhuir Goill” was written in the 1570s by Brian Ó Gnímh, quoted
in Patricia Palmer’s superb study Language and Conquest, 211.
17 Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland, 4 vols., eds.
D. Comyn and P. Dineen (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1914).
18 John O’Donovan, ed. and transl., Annála Ríoghachta Éireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland
by the Four Masters from the Earliest Times to the Year 1616, vols 1- 7, 3rd edn (Dublin: Edmund
Burke, 1998). See Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History,
Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Court Press, 2010),
especially chapters 2 and 4 for a useful survey of the contexts and influences at work in the
writing up of the Annals.
19 Ó Buachalla, “Annála Ríoghtachta Éireann is Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: An Comhthéacs
Comhaimseartha,” Studia Hibernica 22-3 (1982-3): 59–105.
20 See “Introductory Remarks” in Annála Ríoghachta, vii–xliv.
21 See, for example, James F. Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1929), 37; Tom Dunne, “The Gaelic Response to Conquest and
Colonisation: The Evidence of the Poetry,” Studia Hibernica 20 (1980): 7–30, 19.
22 Ó Buachalla, “An Comhtheacs Comhaimseartha,” 59–105. See also Raymond Gillespie,
“Introduction” in Raymond Gillespie and Ruairi Ó hUiginn, eds., Irish Europe, 1600–1650:
Writing and Learning (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 11–15.
23 Edwards, “Escalation of Violence,” 64–65.
24 John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued [London,
1612] (Shannon: Irish Academic Press, 1969), 368; see also Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A
World History of Genocides and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 2006).
25 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Santa Barbara, California: Grove Press, 1963), 49–50,
148–150.
26 This material is based on an occupational analysis of the Annals of the Four Masters between
1460 and 1599.
27 David Edwards, “The escalation of violence in sixteenth–century Ireland” in Edwards et al.,
Age of Atrocity, 34–78; see also his “Out of the Blue: Provincial Unrest in Ireland before 1641,”
in Ireland: 1641, eds. Ó Siochrú and Ohlmeyer, 95–114.

28 As elaborated upon by Caball in Poets and Politics, 12–13, 45–51, 66–67, 100–102. Later
sixteenth-century bardic poets such as Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn in Connacht and a nobleman
poet of Old English background such as William Nuinseann (William Nugent) in Leinster
both emphasized a newly forged patriotic sensibility and the emergence of the notion of
the Irish / na hÉireannaigh and the “effecting of ethnic coalescence amongst both historic
communities on the basis of language and culture.” See also T. T. O’Donnell ed. Selections
from the Zoilomastix of Philip O’Sullivan Beare [1625] (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission,
1960) where O’Sullivan, writing in Spain, makes the same inferences.
29 See Bernadette Cunningham’s The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in
Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000) for many stimulating insights
into Keating’s milieu, his work, his construction of a Catholic Irish perspective on the past
and the later dissemination and reception of his work in both Irish and English forms. See
also Ó Buachalla, “An Comhtheacs Comhaimseartha.”
30 A total of over five thousand Irish-language manuscripts are extant, with three great periods
of blossoming: the twelfth century; the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The seventeenth-century material constitutes a kind of bridge
or plateau between the late medieval and modern manuscript collections. My thanks to
Dr. Neil Buttimer, University College Cork, for discussions on these and many related
matters in this paper. See also Raymond Gillespie, “Introduction” and Ruairí Ó hUiginn,
“Transmitting the text: some linguistic issues in the work of the Franciscans” in Gillespie
and Ó hUiginn, Irish Europe, 1–15, 93–95.
31 Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 274.
32 Ó Buachalla, “An Comhtheacs Comhaimseartha,” 75, 97; see also Caball, “Lost in
translation: reading Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn’ in Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland
1600–1900, eds. Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter, eds., (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010),
47–68; which illuminates how Keating’s text was interpreted in three different English
translations between 1635 and 1841; and Vincent Morley, “The Popular influence of Foras
Feasa ar Éireann from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries,” in Irish and English: Essays
on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, eds. James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), 96–116.
33 A.L. Rowse, “The Elizabethan Discovery of England,” in Rowse, The England of Elizabeth
(London: Macmillan, 1950), 49–86; Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early
Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Press, 2001).
34 John J. O’Meara, ed. and transl., The First Version of the Topography of Ireland by Giraldus
Cambrensis (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1951).
35 C.P. Meehan, The Fate and Fortunes of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Rory O’Donnell, Earl
of Tyrconnell (Dublin: James Duffy, 1868), 328, quoted by Ó Buachalla, “An Comhthéacs
Comhaimseartha,” 81.
36 George Carew, ‘A Discourse of the Present Estate of Ireland 1614’, Calendar of Carew Mss,
1603-14: 305-6.
37 Edmund Spenser, A View. See also Andrew Hadfield and William Maley, eds., Edmund
Spenser: A View of the State of Ireland (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press,
1997).
38 Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar, 90–98. See also Brendán Ó Doibhlin, Manuail de Litríocht na
Gaeilge: Faisicil III: An “Lá idir dhá Shíon”: 1616–1641 (Beann Éadair: Coiscéim, 2007).
39 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), Chapter 3
56 Smyth
“Resistance and Opposition,” 230-340, especially 241.

40 Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer at Trinity College Dublin in conjunction with Thomas
Bartlett, Aberdeen University, John Morrill, Cambridge University, and Aidan Clarke,
Trinity College Dublin, completed The 1641 Depositions Project in 2010 which means that
all 33 volumes of the depositions are now freely available online http://1641.tcd.ie. See also
their editing of Ireland: 1641.
41 Smyth, Map-Making, 160–163. See also L.M. Cullen, “Population Trends in Seventeenth
Century Ireland,” Economic and Social Review 6, no. 2 (1975): 149–165.
42 Ó Siochrú and Ohlmeyer, Ireland: 1641.
43 Cecile O’Rahilly, ed., Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems (Dublin: Irish Institute for
Advanced Studies, 1977).
44 The translation is from Leerssen, Mere Irish, 211.
45 O’Rahilly ed., Political Poems. The five poems are: Do frith, monuar, an uain si ar Éirinn (An
opportunity arose, alas, to reduce Ireland); An Síogaí Rómhánach (The Irish Vision of Rome)
which could be described as a very early aisling poem; Aiste Dháibhí Cúnduín (David
Condon’s poem); Tuireamh na hÉireann (The Lament for Ireland) and Mo lá leóin go deó go
néagad (My day of sadness, forever, until I die). These poems were composed between 1640–
41 and 1658, that is during the rising/rebellion and the subsequent Cromwellian conquest.
46 Kurt Ross, ed., Codex Mendoza: Aztec Manuscript (Fribourg, Switzerland: Liber, 1978-84).
Large numbers of the Aztec painted books, including their chronicles, annals and other land
records were destroyed by Spanish military action when the libraries of the defeated Aztec
towns were burnt down; see also Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish
Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570 (Brighton, United Kingdom: Harvester Press,
1977) for the story of the destruction of Incan civilization.
47 Ibid., 75. At least 130 different manuscript versions of Tuireamh na hÉireann still survive.
48 Ibid.
49 Neil Buttimer, “Literature in Irish, 1690–1800: From the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union”
in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, eds. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary
(Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 322–327. See also Ó
Tuama and Kinsella, “Introduction,” in An Duanaire 1600–1900, eds. Ó Tuama and Kinsella,
xxvii–xxxiii; see also Brendán Ó Doibhlin, Manuail de Litríocht na Gaeilge: Faisicil IV 1641–
1704: Dísealbhú and Faisicil V 1704–1750: An Dubhaois (Beann Éadair: Coiscéim, 2008, 2009).
50 Ibid., xxvii and xxi.
51 Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1967) and Day by Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1978).
52 Ó Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire 1600–1900, 23.
53 Ibid., 85.
54 Ibid., 105–109.
55 Ibid., 173.
56 See Declan Kiberd’s commentary on Jonathan Swift in Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta
Books, 2000).
57 This description is based on materials in An Duanaire 1600–1900 especially 21–23 and Mere
Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 192–193.
58 Ó Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire 1600–1900, 110–123 and 140–167.
59 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
60 Nessa M. Cronin, “The Eye of History Spatiality and Colonial Cartography in Ireland,” PhD
thesis, National University of Ireland, 2007 is insightful about alienation and dislocation
from the homeplace.
61 Ó Tuama and Kinsella, An Duanaire 1600–1900, xxvii–xxix, 152 and 187.
62 Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer (Cork: Cork
University Press, 2003), 7–13.
63 Ibid., 61.
64 Smyth, Map-Making, 410–415. See also Morley, Ó Chéitinn go Raiftearaí: Mar a Cumadh Stair
na hÉireann (Beann Éadair: Coiscéim, 2011).
65 B. Hudnall Stamm, Henry E. Stamm, Amy C. Hudnall and Craig Higson-Smith,
“Considering a Theory of Cultural Trauma and Loss,” Journal of Loss and Trauma:
International Perspectives on Stress and Coping 9, no. 1 (2004): 89–111. This paper also provided
a model for the making of Figure 4.
66 Garrett O’Connor, Recognising and Healing Malignant Shame (2010), available at http://
v1.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/zreco2.html (accessed 1 June 2014) has been
helpful to my understanding of these issues as has been discussion with other colleagues,
particularly Maria Huss.
67 This section is based on a detailed analysis of entries in the Annals of the Four Masters
between the years 1460 and 1539.
68 Smyth, Map-Making, 59.
69 Catherine Nash, “Historical Geographies of Modernity,” in Modern Historical Geographies,
eds. Brian Graham and Catherine Nash (Harlow, United Kingdom: Prentice Hall, 2000),
10–40, 17–18.
70 This summary is based on an analysis of the Annals of the Four Masters from the year 1540 to
1600.
71 Dunne, “Gaelic Response,” 7–30; Caball, Poets and Politics.
72 Kevin Whelan, “The Catholic Parish, the Catholic Chapel and Village Development in
Ireland,” Irish Geography 16, no. 1 (1983): 1–15.
73 Evelin G. Lindner, “Genocides, Humiliation and Inferiority: An Inter-disciplinary
Perspective,” in Genocides of the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocides in Theory and Practice, eds.
N.A. Robins and Adam Jones (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 138–158.
74 Ibid., 150–151.
75 This theme is explored more fully in the concluding chapter of Smyth, Map-Making, 451–469.
76 See Smyth, Map-Making, 7–8, 162–163 and 167–169 which documents both Edmund
Spenser’s and some Cromwellian officers arguments for the uprooting, and if necessary, the
eradication of the “wild Irish.”
77 For a more comprehensive analysis of these adaptations see concluding chapter in: Smyth,
Map-Making, 451–469.
78 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth; Said, Cultural Imperialism, 230–340; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer
and the Colonized (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990 [1965]).
79 O’Connor, Recognising and Healing Malignant Shame; see also Geraldine Moane, “A
Psychological Analysis of Colonialism in an Irish Context,” Irish Journal of Psychology 15,
nos. 2-3 (1994): 250–265 for an insightful survey of the psychological literature, and Michael
Cronin, Irish in the New Century (Dublin: Cois Life Teoranta, 2005) 37-42. My thanks to an
tOllamh Máirín Ní Dhonchada, National University of Ireland, Galway, for drawing my
attention to this reference and other materials.
80 Ibid.
81 John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy, Atlas of the Great Irish Famine 1845–1852
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2012).
Writing the “New Geography”:
Cartographic Discourse and Colonial Governmentality
in William Petty’s
The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672)
Dr. Nessa Cronin
Centre for Irish Studies
National University of Ireland, Galway
ABSTRACT: Within the context of historical geography, William Petty (1623-87)

is almost exclusively known for his mapmaking activities as the Director of the
Down Survey (1654-6) and is less well known for his theories on political economy,
populations and productivity. While Petty’s achievements have been historically
examined within various disciplinary contexts, this interdisciplinary paper seeks to
link two key elements of his career (mapmaking and political writings) and argues
that his experiences in Ireland largely shaped the trajectory of what he later termed
as “political arithmetic.” In offering a re-appraisal of William Petty’s “cartographic
discourse” in The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672), this paper links the mapping
of the forfeited lands of Catholic Ireland, the development of a nascent form of
colonial geopolitics and governmentality, the gendering of a political anatomy, to the
emergence of “political arithmetic” as a new instrument of state. The paper is primarily
concerned with cartographic discourse of the “new geography” of late seventeenth-
century Ireland, and explores the implications of re-reading Petty’s political writings
on Ireland. It extends observations by Patricia Coughlan (1990), Hugh Goodacre
(2008, 2009), and Ted McCormick (2010) in terms of highlighting the colonial context
of Petty’s work, and views Petty’s Political Anatomy as a nascent form of colonial
governmentality specifically concerned with securing and regulating the Irish “colony”
through the management of the mobility and conduct of its population. In opening up
the connections between Petty’s scientific training in continental Europe, his mapping
experiences in Ireland, and his development of “political arithmetic,” this paper
offers an alternative genealogy of the history of political economy that is disruptive in
highlighting its colonialist “origins” by re-evaluating Petty’s cartographic discourse
on Ireland.
Mapping Ireland, reading Petty
W
ithin the context of historical geography, William Petty (1623-87) is almost exclusively
known for his mapmaking activities as the Director of the Down Survey and is less well
known for his theories on populations and productivity. As economic historian Cormac
Ó Gráda observes, Petty “is best remembered by Irish economic historians for his estimates of
population and income and by geographers for his maps and surveys. In both fields he was a
pioneer, and his work forms the starting-point for all subsequent inquiries.”1 In stressing the
historical connections between geography and economics, Hugh Goodacre argues that there is
an additional challenge to the reading of Petty’s work as being a precursor of modern spatial
economic analysis, in that the focus has been predominantly on English-language accounts of the
European history of political economy. In what he calls “The William Petty Problem” (translating
the nineteenth-century German debate of “Das Adam Smith Problem”), Goodacre argues that
Writing the “New Geography” 59
French economic historians have not only included, but foregrounded, Petty’s contribution to the
evolution of the sub-discipline of political economy, but that their work has been to a large degree
under-read or neglected by historians whose work is anglophone-centred.2
While Petty’s achievements have been examined within various disciplinary contexts, this
paper seeks to link two key elements of his career and argues that his experiences in Ireland largely
shaped the trajectory of what he later termed in his writings as “political arithmetic.” While the
exclusive nature of this relationship (the influence that the natural sciences and contemporary
philosophical thought had on the development of Petty’s ideas must also be acknowledged)
is not being posited here, what is argued however is that the arc of development of Petty’s
“political arithmetic” has to be read within the context of early modern colonial Ireland. The
importance of Baconian induction, Hobbesian social theory, and the “new science” of mechanistic
philosophy that Petty adapted and applied to his theories concerning Ireland has been well noted
and documented by scholars such as Mary Poovey, Hugh Goodacre, and most recently by Ted
McCormick in his William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic, which is “simultaneously
an intellectual biography of Petty […] and a critique of the new science of ‘political arithmetic’.”3
The Down Survey (1654-6) was a monumental task in military organization and land
surveying; a cartographic leviathan that stretched across the landscape of Ireland and would
not be surpassed, in geographic, legal or cultural terms, until the achievements of the Ordnance
Survey were published almost two centuries later. The Survey entailed the division of the country
into new, legal administrative boundaries, and as William J. Smyth has argued, simultaneously
demanded the re-formation of the Gaelic Irish land divisions and ownership of over half of the
country. This effective “desocialization of Gaelic Irish space,” which commenced in earnest with
the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland in the middle decades of the 1500s, also worked to consolidate
the gains made after the Ulster Plantation in 1609 and the Cromwellian wars later in that century.4
It is argued here that William Petty, through his cartographic work and political narratives, was
a key architect in the building and shaping of the colonial geopolitics of seventeenth-century
Ireland. This article focuses less on the cartographic history of the maps of the Down Survey than
on the cartographic discourse of the survey and the implications for Petty’s political writings on
Ireland. In addition, to open up the connections between Petty’s scientific training in continental
Europe, his mapping experiences in Ireland, and his development of “political arithmetic” is
to consider an alternative genealogy of political economy that is disruptive in highlighting its
colonialist “origins.” Such a genealogical re-routing implies a distinct shift from the received
Enlightenment narrative of political economy through the figure of Adam Smith, and grounds
one rhizomatic root of that family tree firmly in the soil of early modern colonial Ireland.5
Reading and interpreting Petty’s work as a whole therefore demands cross-disciplinary
research, a multilingual toolkit and much archival patience. A concern with the historiography
and critical analysis of this period is also observed by Patricia Coughlan. Coughlan maintains
that “there has not yet been any significant attempt to investigate the various writings of the
period in themselves as symbolic representations (as distinct from seeing them as relatively
inert and transparently readable pieces of evidence for the views or political positions of various
factions).”6 Any contemporary critical analysis must be mindful of the epistemological challenges
and theoretical fault-lines that such an approach demands. As McCormick writes:
Economists can study Petty’s economics, Irish historians his role in Ireland, and
historians of science his contributions to the Royal Society; but connecting these
things and assessing their relationships requires mastering literatures that have
developed along separate lines, printed sources that come pre-packaged for
subdisciplinary use, and manuscript sources that have, until recently, been hard to
consult at all. Bringing in the still wider range of interests that Petty’s manuscripts
reveal is no easy task.7
60 Cronin
While McCormack focuses mainly on the scientific origins and political writings of Petty,
and does not foreground the cartographic impulse and origins of his writings per se, I would like to
foreground both the cartographic imaginary operating in the writings on political arithmetic with
an emphasis on Petty’s deployment of language. Petty’s writings and cartographic work attempted
an all-encompassing cartographic discourse on Ireland, a discourse that is deeply embedded within
the typologies of English writing on Ireland from the renaissance to early modern periods. I would
also like to extend the observations and the much-welcomed colonial contextualisation of Petty’s
work made by Goodacre, and to view Petty’s work as a nascent form not just of governmentality
(control over populations) but of a colonial governmentality specifically concerned with securing
and regulating a colony through the mobility and conduct of its population.
The links then between the mapping of Catholic Ireland, the development of a nascent
form of colonial geopolitics and governmentality, the gendering of a political anatomy, and
finally the emergence of “political arithmetic” as a new instrument of state (for use crucially both
at home and abroad), are brought into sharp relief and explored here through Petty’s cartographic
discourse in his The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672). As Goodacre argues,
Petty’s survey of Ireland must surely be recognised as a pivotal episode in the

history of the relationship between economic and geographical thought, an
episode which, furthermore, places in the highest possible relief the inextricable
connection of his spatial-economic analysis with the context in which he forged it,
a context of bureaucratic-military officialdom and predatory colonialism.8
Soldiers, surveyors, speculators: William Petty and the Down Survey (1654-6)
Petty was born on 26 May 1623, the son of a Hampshire trader. His rise to later success
and peerage was a mark both of his own character and of the age in which he lived. From
inauspicious beginnings, Petty rose to become the physician-general to Oliver Cromwell’s army,
a celebrity physician, an advocate of a state-funded medical system and a national identity card,
the inventor of the catamaran, and a founding member of the Royal Society, to name but a few
of his achievements.9 In 1637, he went to sea as a cabin-boy and after ten months and injured
with a broken leg, he was put ashore in France where he was educated by the Jesuits at Caen. In
demonstrating his future entrepreneurial spirit, he paid for his education by selling beeswax and
hair hats, and by playing cards. Interestingly, considering the religious politics of the period, it was
to this Catholic education that he owed his knowledge of Latin, Greek, French and mathematics.
Without the fundamental building blocks of his Jesuit education, it could be argued, Petty’s rise
would not have been so swift, nor so spectacular.
In the 1640s, Petty resumed his studies in Paris where he became acquainted with figures
associated with the famous Mersenne Circle which included luminaries such as Descartes,
Fermat, Pascal and Gassendi. In 1645 he was reading Vesalius with Thomas Hobbes, and working
on the drawings for Hobbes’s Optics, which demonstrated his acquaintance and knowledge of the
work of what would become known as the “new science.” Indeed, in his portrait in his Doctor
of Medicine gown by the artist Issac Fuller, he is shown with a skull in one hand and Vesalius’
book on anatomy laid open for inspection beside him.10 Knowledge was thus something to be
demonstrated both in theory and in practice, to be revealed in print, and illustrated on the page
or canvas for public inspection, consumption and circulation. Petty was introduced to the chemist
and physicist Robert Boyle in 1646 through his friend Samuel Hartlib, a German refugee who
advocated the application of science to social and economic needs and whose methodologies
may later have influenced Petty.11 During this period, Petty travelled and studied medicine in
Utrecht, Leyden, Amsterdam and Paris, and his French and Dutch experiences would particularly
reverberate later throughout his work in physical anatomy and his theories of political arithmetic.
In 1650 he was appointed Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, and also Professor of Music at Gresham
College, London, later becoming Physician General to Cromwell’s army in Ireland in 1652. The
purpose of anatomy was, he wrote, primarily to show the mechanistic nature of the “enginry” of
“man.”12
Petty, as McCormick wryly states, “had a very high opinion on his own abilities, an
opinion widely but not universally shared.”13 While Petty, in a letter to his friend Sir Roger
Southwell in 1681, may have bemoaned the fact that his audience “are as deaf as haddocks,” the
history of his life and writings is also a history of early modern science and print culture, and
more importantly in Petty’s case, the history of manuscript circulation and networks of learned
societies. The lamentation regarding the “deaf ears” of his audience was undoubtedly related
to the fact that for much of his life Petty was embroiled in personal debates and legal disputes
regarding the legitimacy of his Irish estates acquired after he completed the Survey. In addition,
his ideas concerning political arithmetic were arguably too large-ranging and overly ambitious
for the short-term political life of Restoration England.
The Down Survey was to be the means by which Petty made his fortune, but in this he was
not without his detractors. In 1652, Petty’s income totalled £800 per year, with a private fortune
estimated at £480. By the time he had completed the survey a decade later, Emil Strauss estimates
that Petty had cash resources amounting to £13,060, and was drawing a rental income of £4,200
a year from his Irish lands.14 Clearly, Petty’s mapmaking exploits in Ireland and subsequent
purchase of land formed the basis for his later financial success. This did not go unnoticed by
his contemporaries, nor by his critics who were deeply suspicious of the ways in which Petty
obtained vast amounts of profitable Irish land. The survey became known as the Down Survey as
the surveyors were instructed to ascertain the boundaries of any “parcell of fforfeited lands” so
that, “the same may be drawne and sett downe by you in a touch plott [map].”15 It was therefore
a survey that was to be “sett downe” visually on maps and textually in terriers, and was not to
be simply a list of tabulated information as was the case in previous surveys.16 The name “Down
Survey” was applied to the maps by the Lord Lieutenant and the Privy Council in 1658, and has
been officially retained ever since.17 Over one thousand people were employed in a process that
took just over thirteen months to survey all the land held by Catholic proprietors at the outbreak
of the rebellion in 1641; this covering about 47.5 percent of the land of the country (later estimated
to be nearly 8,400,000 acres).18 With the deployment of soldiers in measuring boundary lines, the
Survey was run along efficient military lines.19 As highlighted by William J. Smyth, the process
of “conquest, confiscation and colonization” was paved by soldiers, surveyors and speculators
alike.20
“A commin Knife and a Clout:” Dissecting Ireland’s Political Anatomy
Three years after completing the maps for the Down Survey, Petty wrote of how religious
reform in Ireland could be made possible with the advent of “the new Geography”. In the preface
to A Treatise of Taxes & Contributions […] The same being frequently applied to the present State and
Affairs of Ireland (1662), Petty wrote:
The parishes of Ireland do much want Regulation, by uniting and dividing them;
so as to make them fit Enclosures wherein to plant the Gospel; wherefore what I
have said as to the danger of supernumerary Ministers, may also be seasonable
there, when the new Geography we expect of that Island shall have afforded means
for the Regulation abovementioned.[Italics in original.]21
62 Cronin
The Good Word could thus be planted within the “Enclosures” of the parish, but this was
dependent upon the “new Geography,” which provided the space in which this new ecclesiastical
history could be written. This was written in a rhetorical mode of an imagined geography,
when the new geography “we expect of that Island shall have afforded” (my emphasis) would
allow for such “regulation” in the future. Petty would later ignore the idea of resistance to such
culturally transformative policies a decade later in his The Political Anatomy of Ireland with its
recommendations for the forcible transplanting of people from one country to another in order
to develop the economic growth of England and Ireland and which also, by extension, crucially
provided a ready stream of labor for the colonies overseas. Significantly, he placed the use of
the map as the second most important item to consider and utilize when enquiring into the
conditions of a country, thus acknowledging the instrumental use of cartography as necessary
tool of government, a convention that had been established in Ireland in the previous century, in
particular through the work of Lord Burghley, William Cecil.22
The dramatic changes to the Irish political and human landscape after decades of wars,
famine and the forced displacement of the native populations were noted and referenced in the
Political Anatomy. Here, the large-scale change in native settlement was placed in direct relation
to the “destruction of people:”
Now if it could be known what number of people were in Ireland, Ann. 1641, then
the difference between said number, and 850 [M.], adding unto it the encrease by
Generation, in 11 years will shew the destruction of the people made by the Wars,
viz., by the Sword, Plague, and Famine occasioned thereby […] It follows also, that
about 504 M. of the Irish perished, and were wasted by the Sword, Plague, Famine,
Hardship and Banishment, between the 23 October 1641 and the same day 1652.23
The rhetoric of the laying waste of Irish land with the, “destruction of the people […] by
the Sword, Plague and Famine,” strongly recalled Edmund Spenser’s infamous account of the
Desmond Wars in Munster in the Elizabethan period as does his deep suspicion of language and
its use.24 While lands such as these were interpreted as being laid “waste”, it is no surprise then
that the idea of Ireland as tabula rasa, as white paper or blank space, occurred in English writings
on Ireland in this period. Petty referred to Ireland in the 1660s as a legal and cartographic blank
space. In 1662, he argued that “when Ireland is as a white paper,”25 then, the Duke of Ormond
will “pass into Positive Laws whatsoever is right reason and the Law of Nature,” (giving another
resonance to the term carte blanche).26 However much Petty could project into the future the notion
of an Ireland emptied of its Gaelic Irish populations and of its social and cultural systems of land,
law and religious practices, the “when” of this speculative statement was a problem that would
remain largely unresolved. The issue was not that Ireland would be entirely “emptied of the
majority of its inhabitants as Petty had advocated,”27 but the recognition that while there may be
a new geography there was still a very old history, with the additional question of labor being
required to work the land to extract resources from it. The real problem, as T.C. Barnard points out,
was that “Ireland was not a tabula rasa. There were old institutions; there was a native population,
both Protestant and Catholic, whose support was necessary to any regime’s permanence.”28
While the Down Survey made a claim to a certain kind of geographical “realism”, the political
and cultural assumptions that were obscured in the maps were foregrounded in corresponding
cartographic narratives (map terriers, official documents, and administrative letters).29
The proposed land confiscations and transplantations were however, as Smyth argues,
not as successful as initially planned. While the “clearing” of the confiscated lands in the creation
of this new geography may have been a rhetorical flourish, the more practical question remained
as to who would actually work the eleven million acres that were to be assiduously cleared?
Assessments for the need of labor and, in particular cheap and readily available labor, meant
that as the 1650s progressed “more realistic adjustments were made as to who would be obliged
to transplant and who might be permitted to remain.”30 And so, “requests to retain Irish tenants,
artisans and labourers flooded into the Dublin administration from the representatives of the
‘reserved’ counties.”31 Smyth states that only one in eight landowners in Munster ended up in
Connacht and that “a great many old Irish families held their ground, survived, and adapted to
the new landlord regimes.”32 In examining the 1659 Census, he contends that “it would appear
that close on 60 per cent of the adventurer grantees had not settled in their allocated baronies
by 1660. Only about one-fifth had actually settled,” and also significantly that some of the old
Catholic families had “slipped back home from ‘exile’ in Connacht as well.”33
While the maps of the Hiberniae delineatio were being engraved, Petty was writing his
treatise Political Arithmetic (1671, published posthumously in 1690), and The Political Anatomy of
Ireland, with the Establishment for that Kingdom and Verbum Sapienti (1672, published posthumously
in 1691).34 In the preface to the Political Arithmetic, Petty outlined the details of his particular
approach to interpreting the “perplexed and intricate Ways of the World:”
The Method I take to do this, is not yet very usual; for instead of using only
comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the
Course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long aimed at) to express
myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense,
and to confide only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving
those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of
particular Men, to the Considerations of others […].35
The “number, weight and measure” of the Political Arithmetic in 1671 was to be drawn up
a year later in line with the idea of the “symmetry, fabric and proportion” of the state as described
in the Political Anatomy. This book was an examination of the political, religious, economic and
social structures of a particular country as case-study, with Ireland being chosen as the site for
this experimental investigation.36 Here the rhetoric of the dissection of the colonial body politic
performed a clear framing device for the treatise. One may well ask the question why did Petty
focus on the “new geography” of a colony, and not write a political anatomy of the English state?
The Preface answered this in part. He explained to the reader that: “I have chosen Ireland as such a
Political Animal, who is scarce Twenty years old; where the Intrigue of State is not very complicate and
with which I have been conversant from an Embricon.”37 The glossing over of the decades of “Sword,
Plague and Famine” that Petty had previously referred to, marked his determination to read
Ireland as a “white paper” which is scarce twenty years old, and thus was conveniently absolved
of bearing the weight of any determinable history, “complicate” or otherwise.38
Petty drew attention to the influence of Bacon, his training in the medical sciences, and
introduced the idea of reading and writing about the body politic of Ireland in terms of an
anatomical body, an experiment waiting to be dissected with the instrument of political anatomy:
Sir Francis Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, hath made a judicious Parallel in
many particulars, between the Body Natural, and Body Politick, and between the Arts
of preserving both in Health and Strength: And it is as reasonable, that as Anatomy is the
best foundation of one, so also of the other; and that to practice upon the Politick, without
knowing the Symmetry, Fabrick, and Proportion of it, is as casual as the practice of Old-
women and Empyricks. [Italics in original.]39
The argument made here is that the use of a general principle in one area should then
also be equally applicable to another, with the “Body Natural” being translated into the “Body
64 Cronin
Politick.” Moreover, the “practice upon the Politick” was seen as based on the “casual”, as opposed
to expert, knowledge of “Old-women and Empyricks”, and as running the risk of ignorance and
of damaging the health of that very body under investigation.40 In the next paragraph, he stressed
his political neutrality in positing such matters: “I therefore, who profess no Politicks, have, for
my curiosity, at large attempted the first Essay of Political Anatomy.”41
Petty’s “curiosity” was thus maintained from the outset as a professional, scientific
curiosity, based on his objective experiences in Ireland. He drew an analogy between the “cheap
and common Animals” that students of anatomy practice upon, and Ireland as “such a Political
Animal,” thus reinforcing the shameful status of the body to be openly displayed in such
investigations. In a move that echoed Irenius’ privileging discourse of experience in Spenser’s A
View of the Present State of Ireland (1590), it is Petty’s own experience of that country with which
he is “conversant,” that ironically provided him with the necessary “evidence” and authority
for such an investigation. The narrative “I” of the discourse collapsed the boundary between
“objective” vision and the narrative voice, to the point where the subjective narrative provided
an authenticated experience that added the aura of truth and knowledge to the pronouncements
that follow. The value of experience over that of received knowledge gained precedence in this
new world of the “new science” and the Royal Society. In bemoaning the fact that there was a
lack of “proper Instruments,” he settled for the blunt instrument of a “commin Knife and a Clout”
(which was understood as being “political arithmetick”), and which was evident throughout the
work in the dissection of the socio- and geo-political body of Ireland:
Tis true, that curious Dissections cannot be made without variety of proper Instruments;
whereas I have had only a commin Knife and a Clout, instead of the many more helps which
such a Work requires: However, my rude approaches being enough to find whereabout the
Liver and Spleen, and Lungs lye, tho’ not to discern the Lymphatick Vessels, the Plexus,
Choroidus, the Volvuli of vessels within the Testicles; yet not knowing, that even what
I have here readily done, was much considered, or indeed thought useful by others, I have
ventur’d to begin a new Work, which, when Corrected and Enlarged by better Hands and
Helps, I believe will tend to the Peace and Plenty of my Country; besides which, I have no
other end. [Italics in original.]42
Petty was self-consciously aware that there was a lack of a sophisticated language (only
the use of the “common” instruments of the barber/surgeon were available to him) but he was
firm in the belief that here was the beginning of a new discourse in which to describe the world,
the instrumental method being political arithmetic and the object of scrutiny being Ireland.
Petty’s Political Anatomy dealt with topics such as land ownership, trade, religion and
language. The first chapter, “Of the Lands of Ireland,” gave an account of the amount of land in
Ireland and its value, noting for his English audience that, “whereof 121 Acres makes 196 English
measure.”43 As land values were outlined, the transportation of the Irish to Spain and Barbados
was mentioned which set up the next stage of the argument–the value of the inhabitants of
Ireland. The Irish were valued in relation to “Slaves and Negroes” who are “usually rated [...] one
with another,” so that the “value of the people will be about 10,355,000 l.”44 This concern (that of
the value of a people) was central to Petty’s concept of political arithmetic, and would later be
discussed in more detail in his last work A Treatise of Ireland. Petty argued that given the present
conditions in Ireland, “the Irish will not easily rebel again.”45 This was set against the somewhat
genocidal intent of some “furious Spirits” who “have wished, that the Irish would rebel again,
that they might be put to the sword.”46
Petty continued by commenting on the advantage of the “declining of all Military means of
setling [sic] and securing Ireland in peace and plenty, what we offer shall tend to the transmuting
of one People into the other, and the thorough union of Interests upon natural and lasting
Principles.”47 This marked a distinct and significant shift in the proposed treatment and control
of Ireland, from the outright domination of military conquest to the control of the population
through hegemonic means by securing consent and acquiescence. The “transmuting of one People
into the other” had one central motivation behind it, the maximization of labor in order to benefit
the state. This “transmutation” was not to come about solely through a process of acculturation
or assimilation, but was to be primarily effected through enforced mobility and transmigration,
through the physical dislocation and displacement of large bodies of the population across the two
islands of the archipelago, which would additionally serve to consolidate “Union” between the
two nations. The physical translation of bodies across the Irish Sea would then ensure the cultural
translation and political assimilation of such populations. This would come about, suggested
Petty, by exchanging two hundred thousand Irish people with their British counterparts.
It is important to note that there is a particular gendering to this “transmutation” that
demands further critical scrutiny. Of the six hundred thousand people in Ireland that Petty
described as living “in the wretched way above mentioned,” he estimated that there were:
[N]ot above 20 M. of unmarried marriageable Women […]. Whereof if ½ the said

Women were in one year, and ½ the next transported into England and disposed of
one to each Parish, and as many English brought back and married to the Irish, as
would improve their Dwelling but to an House and Garden of 3 l. value, the whole
Work of Natural Transmutation and Union would in 4 or 5 years be accomplished.
The charge of making the exchange would not be 20,000 l. per Ann. which is about
6 Weeks Pay of the present or late Armies in Ireland.48
Petty never envisaged any objection, or resistance, to such plans of exchange and forcible
transplantation from either the Irish or, for that matter, the English who were to be equally
subjected to displacement. The forced exchange would be a highly gendered one, with single
women playing a vital role in integrating and creating the next generation of labor to produce,
reproduce and circulate; a mobile, transnational labor force was now figured as being the life-
blood of the “nation.” The plan was seen primarily as securing the political health of Ireland,
and therefore of England, in terms of a mutually beneficial relationship. In offering a kind of
cost-benefit analysis in terms of overall advantages, the proposal was presented as being a more
peaceful (and thus economical) way of gaining much-needed stability in Ireland as opposed to
the instability wrought by costly wars of previous decades, in costing only “about 6 Weeks Pay of
the present or late Armies in Ireland.”
The final and total translation of the Irish people would come about, Petty argued, with the
sustained use of the English language in that primary nucleus of the body politic, the family. In a
statement that again recalled Spenser and other renaissance writers on Ireland, he wrote: “[W]hen
the Language of the Children shall be English, and the whole Oeconomy of the Family English,
viz. Diet, Apperel, &c. the Transmutation will be very easy and quick.”49 That the etymological
origins of “Oeconomy” were derived from oikos (house) and nomia (from nemein, to manage)
would not have been lost on Petty in his consideration of the domestic element of the economy
in relation to the “Family.” The economic translation of the people seems then to be linked if not
contingent to the “transmutation,” or forking, of the native and mother tongue.
The spatial context of an Atlantic Ireland was never far from Petty’s mind. His repeated
emphasis on Ireland’s geographical location between England and the colonies of the New World
showed his concern for an efficient mode of operating trade both domestically and between
66 Cronin
the colonies. The “fitness of Ireland for Trade” lay in that, “Ireland lieth Commodiusly for the
Trade of the new American world; which we see everyday to Grow and Flourish. It lyeth well for
sending Butter, Cheese, Beef, Fish, to their proper Markets, which are to the Southward, and the
Plantations of America.”50 The colonial analogy is further explicitly stated when Petty called for
an increasing of trade between Ireland and England, and compared Ireland to the West Indies:
“[W]e should do to Trade between the Two Kingdoms, as the Spaniards in the West-Indies do to
all other Nations.”51 Bowls of oatmeal became negotiated in terms of bowls of rice. Foodstuffs
were one of the main elements of trade between the colonies, and so one could be traded against
the other, “[b]ut if Rice be brought out of India into Ireland, or Oatmeal carried from Ireland
thither; then in India the pint of Oatmeal must be dearer than half a pint of Rice, by the freight
and hazard of Carriage.”52
Colonial governmentality
Michel Foucault’s broad argument for tracing a genealogy of governmentality
to the eighteenth century may have merit in the context of the European metropole, but in the
context of a colonial geography I would argue that forms of governmentality as outlined by
Foucault can be traced much earlier to the work of Petty and his experiences in seventeenth-
century Ireland.53 While recent discussions of Foucault’s writings on governmentality have
focused on reiterating his genealogy of statecraft to designate this shift that commences in the
eighteenth century, an alternative narrative is posited here, in being one that incorporates the site
of the colonial (within European space) which may also take into account the notable absence of
“territory” in Foucault’s now famous “Governmentality” lecture. With regard to the question of
“what happens to territory?” as noted by Stuart Elden,54 it seems that from the eighteenth century
onwards territory is now assumed to be the stage upon which history acts, and state concern is
now focused on “controlling the mass of the population on its territory rather than controlling
territoriality as such.”55 By this time, it is argued, population, its quantification and its control,
is now the main focus once treaties had been signed, borders consolidated, and states mapped.
Following this line of argument, European territory after Westphalia no longer had to be “taken,”
but could instead now be taken for granted.
If Foucault’s argument of governmentality has at its core three main points of discussion–
these being the transition from feudal sovereignty to that of governmentality, the concerns of
territory becoming that of population, and the control and retention of land transferring to
control of social bodies inhabiting such lived geographies–then the work of Petty on Ireland
would seem to fit all three criteria, but in an earlier context of seventeenth-century colonial
Ireland. Historically, the shift from sovereign to governmental power can explicitly be traced
to the English Interregnum, the power of parliament in the context of the Commonwealth of
England, Scotland and Ireland in the period after the Civil War and the execution of Charles
I, under the protectorate of Cromwell’s New Model Army (1653-9), with the restoration of
the monarchy coming with Charles II in 1660. The shift from a concern of territory to that of
population may be seen throughout the political writings of Petty, where territory was treated
as given or “taken for granted” (lands confiscated, resources mapped), but now however it was
the category of “population” (particularly the remaining Catholic Gaelic Irish population) which
was the problem. And finally, the shift from the control of land to the control of bodily movement
and social behavior—seen in Petty’s writings on the “transmutation” of the Irish, on planting the
Protestant faith upon the tabula rasa of the “new geography” of plantation Ireland, and in terms
of the proposed changes of “language, religion and manners”—completed the circle of colonial
biopower and governmentality with regard to the mobility and conduct of the population.
One could argue that the absence of “other” spaces in Foucault’s analysis was a logical
outcome of his lack of any sustained critical analysis of the role of the colonies in the construction
of the European metropolitan core. As geographers, historians and critical theorists have noted,
Foucault’s work demands to be continually contextualized but the generality that is implied in
his work on governmentality seems to be a generality that takes the European imperial center as
the norm, with the colonial periphery (with a particular omission of the francophone spaces of
les départements and les territoires d’outre-mer) rarely getting a look in.56 As Elden notes, “Foucault
says little, for instance, about the numerous governmental practices of colonial empires but there
are some interesting remarks on the discovery of America [...] and on the constitution of colonial
empires.”57 In his 1967 lecture “Des Espaces Autres” (“Of Other Spaces”), Foucault asks the
question: “I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain
cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of
heterotopias.”58 The question of the role and function of such heterotopias vis-à-vis the colonies
is one which the begs the question of whether they can be seen as “counter-sites” or “spaces of
illusion,” in which real sites “are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.”59 Where
then are the sustained critical discussions of, rather than passing references to, Madagascar,
Algeria, and Indochina in the Foucauldian analysis? Would the colonial inflection radically
change the ways in which governmentality is exported and developed overseas? Gyan Prakash
has argued that “[c]olonial governmentality could not be the tropicalization of its Western form,
but rather was its fundamental dislocation,” and that colonial governmentality in colonial India
is radically discontinuous with the Western “norm.”60 Does governmentality of the colonial core
“travel” unevenly to the peripheries? If so, we need to rethink governmentality then by (re)
contextualizing it, and by extension we also need to rethink it in terms of the specificities of
colonial history in addition to concerns of contemporary neo-colonial world systems.
In Foucault’s analysis, the “final elimination of the model of the family and the recentring
of the notion of economy” is rendered through the perspective of population.61 The “problem
of population” through rates of births, deaths and diseases is shown to have its own rationale,
a rationale that cannot be reduced to the dimension of the family. The family now therefore
declines as a model of state and “population” is now regarded as “a fundamental instrument
to its government”, and this can also be seen in Petty’s writings.62 Population would now be
the category of social organization, the object of analysis, and as such, the “ultimate end of
government.”63 Petty’s later work very much focused on this control and movement of domestic
and colonial populations as the “ultimate end of government.” As Simon Shapin and Steven
Schaffer argue, “questions of epistemology are also questions of social order.”64 This is of absolute
importance when considering the exportation of metropolitan epistemes to the colonies from the
early modern period onwards as evidenced in the “new geography” and cartographic discourse
of William Petty. In transforming both domestic and colonial subjects into mobile, mercantile
commodities that bore a new relationship to land, labor and politics, Petty was providing the
grist of “number, weight and measure” for the statistical mill of political arithmetic that had been
codified with a “knife and clout” in his Political Anatomy of Ireland.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge conversations with Tadhg Foley, Hugh Goodacre,
Mark Hennessy, Gerry Kearns, Ted McCormick and William J. Smyth, and for their individual
insights on William Petty and Ireland that have very much shaped my thinking on the subject. A
previous version of this paper was presented as part of the History of Cartography Seminar Series,
University of Cambridge, May 2011, and I would also like to thank Sarah Bendall and Catherine
Delano-Smith for comments received on that occasion.
68 Cronin
NOTES
1 Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780-1939 (Oxford UK: Clarendon Press,
1994), 24.
2 Hugh Goodacre, “The William Petty Problem and the Whig History of Economics,”
Cambridge Journal of Economics (in press).
3 Nessa Cronin, “Review of Ted McCormick, ‘William Petty and the Ambitions of Political
Arithmetic,’” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 344-45, 344. See also Mary Poovey,
“The Political Anatomy of the Economy: English Science and Irish Land,” A History of the
Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), 92-143. I am grateful to Kevin Whelan for this reference. Ted
McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010).
4 Cronin, The Eye of History: Spatiality and Colonial Cartography in Ireland (unpublished PhD
Thesis, NUI Galway, 2007). See especially Chapter Two, “Desocialising Native Space: Plots,
‘Plats’ and Policy in Early Modern Ireland,” 52-115.
5 On the re-alignment of the “origins” of political economy, see Goodacre, “Review article:
From Petty to Ricardo up to Sraffa,” Economic Issues 13 (2008): 106-8.
6 Patricia Coughlan, “‘Cheap and Common Animals’: The English Anatomy of Ireland in the
Seventeenth Century” in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds., Literature and the English
Civil War (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205-23, 206.
7 McCormick, William Petty, 4.
8 Goodacre, “Economics, Geography and Colonialism in the Writings of William Petty,” in
Richard Arena, Sheila Dow, and Mattias Klaes, eds., Open Economics: Economics in Relation to
Other Disciplines (London UK: Routledge, 2009), 233-46, 244.
9 My biographical information on Petty is from Emil Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a
Genius (Glencoe IL: The Free Press, 1954). Petty named his catamaran aptly enough, “The
Experiment” and gave equal emphasis to the originality of his double-bottomed boat called
“The Invention.”
10 Wilson Lloyd Bevan, Sir William Petty: A Study in English Economic Literature (Baltimore MD:
Guggenheimer, Weil & Co., 1894), 7; www.socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3113/
petty/bevan.html.
11 I owe this note on Samuel Hartlib to, S.J. Connolly ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1998]), 464.
12 The full reference reads as follows: “[…] to show proud man that his most mysterious and
complicated enginry is nothing to the compounded and decompounded mysteries in the
fabric of man. That all their … mechanics whatsoever, are no more compared to the fabric of
an animal than putting two sticks across is to a loom, a clock, or a ship under sail.” Petty as
cited in, Strauss, Sir William Petty, 34.
13 McCormick, William Petty, 260.
14 Strauss, Sir William Petty, 70.
15 “Instructions to be observed by Mr. Thomas Jackson, appointed Surveyor for the Barronies of
Clanwilliam,[…]in his Surveying and Admeasuring the said Baronies, and in making his Returne of
the same,” 12 June 1654, as cited in, William Petty, A History of the Survey of Ireland Commonly
Called The Down Survey, ed. Thomas Aiskew Larcom (New York: Augustus M. Kelley
Publishers, 1967 [1851]), 388.
16 Thomas Larcom correctly argues that the Strafford Survey could also have held this
nomination, but the name is maintained for Petty’s survey of 1654-9: “Editor’s Preface,” in
A History of the Survey of Ireland, viii.
17 W. H., “On Manuscript Mapped and other Townland Surveys in Ireland of a Public
Character, embracing the Gross, Civil, and Down Surveys,” Transactions of the Royal Irish
Academy 24, Antiquities (1873): 3-115, 21.
18 Y.M., Goblet, ed., A Topographical Index of the Parishes and Townlands of Ireland in Sir William
Petty’s MSS Barony Maps (c. 1655-9) (Bibliothéque Nationale de Paris, Fonds Anglais, Nos 1 &
2) and Hiberniae Delineatio (c. 1672) (Dublin: Comisiún Láimhscribhinní na hÉireann, 1932),
vi. See also, John H. Andrews, Plantation Acres: An Historical Study of the Irish Land Surveyor
(Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1985).
19 Jacinta Prunty makes this point in, Maps and Map-making in Local History (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2004), 51.
Modern Ireland c. 1530-1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), 153.
21 Petty, “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions” in, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty,
together with the Observations Upon the Bills of Mortality, more probably by Captain John Graunt,
2 Volumes, ed. Charles Henry Hull (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press 1899), 5-6,
my emphasis added in last line only.
22 Petty, “The Method of Enquiring into the State of any Country,” in ed. Marquis of
Lansdowne [H.W.E. Petty-Fitzmaurice], ed., The Petty Papers:Some Unpublished Writings of
Sir William Petty from the Bowood Papers, 2 Volumes, Vol. I (London UK: Constable, 1927), 175.
On the life and work of William Cecil, see Christopher Maginn, William Cecil, Ireland, and the
Tudor State (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
23 Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland, with the Establishment for that Kingdom and Verbum
Sapienti (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970 [1691]), 17, 18. Petty makes reference here to
the transportation of the Irish to Spain and “Barbadoes,” and he also writes that, “[t]he Irish
transported into Foreign parts, between 1651 and 1654, were 34,000 Men,” Political Anatomy,
20, 7.
24 This point has already been made in Cronin, “Review of William Petty,” 344-45.
25 The blank spaces as purporting to represent “empty” space, in order to encourage
habitation and cultivation, and profit.
26 The full quotation is, “[l]astly, this great Person [Ormond] takes the great Settlement in
hand, when Ireland is as a white paper, and capable of his Counsel, under a King curious
as well as careful of Reformation; and when there is opportunity, to pass into Positive
Laws whatsoever is right reason and the Law of Nature”, Petty, “A Treatise of Taxes and
Contributions,” 9.
27 Goodacre, “Economics, Geography and Colonialism,” 245.
28 T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649-1660
(Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1975), 14-5.
29 The need to re-establish the links and connections between maps, texts and manuscripts is
noted by John H. Andrews when he urges the researcher to reunite what the librarian has
divided. John H. Andrews, “Maps, Prints and Drawings,” in William Nolan and Angret
Simms, eds., Irish Towns, A Guide to Sources, (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1998), 27-
40. See also Keith Lilley and Catherine Porter, “Mapping worlds? Excavating Cartographic
Encounters in Plantation Ireland through GIS,” Historical Geography 41 (2013) 35-58. I am
grateful to Professor Gerry Kearns for the latter reference.
70 Cronin
30 Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, 182.

31 Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, 182.
32 Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, 182-3. Smyth also makes the important point
that landowners were transplanted often within their own county and/or province, Map-
making, Landscapes and Memory, 184.
33 Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory, 195, 197.
34 The Hibernia delineatio was an atlas of the Irish counties, based on Petty’s work on the Down
Survey and influenced by the format, success and use of Christopher Saxton’s celebrated
county maps of England and Wales, and a map of England and Wales as a whole (1579). The
margins of Saxton’s maps in Lord Burghley’s “atlas” in the British Library contain notes in
Burghley’s hand, as Burghley clearly saw the value of cartographic knowledge and was an
avid map user, patron and collector.
35 Petty, “Political Arithmetick,” in Several Essays in Political Arithmetick with Memoirs of
the Author’s Life (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1992), 98. See also the copy of Sir
William Petty’s “Essay in Political Arithmetick concerning Ireland,” National Library of
Ireland, Larcom Papers, MS 7795.
36 Postcolonial scholars of Irish history have often cited nineteenth-century Ireland as the
period in which Ireland as a colonial laboratory is best exemplified; however, a precursor for
this can be seen in this instance here. See also, Frances Harris, “Ireland as a Laboratory: The
Archive of Sir William Petty,” in Michael Hunter, ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The
Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe, (Woodbridge UK: The Boydell
Press, 1998), 73-90.
37 Petty, Political Anatomy, Author’s Preface, n.p. Italics are original.
38 The narrative of colonial land as “empty,” a void terra nullius awaiting inscription while
also being a virgin terra incognita awaiting expansion, allowed for a re-inscription of
that land, naming it into existence. This is evident in the various colonial histories and
toponymies associated with Ireland, North America and Australia in the British context, and
the gendering of such discourse has been noted by feminist scholars.
39 Petty, Political Anatomy, Author’s Preface, n.p.
40 Original italics have been removed from quoted text. The advances in the different systems
of knowledge led to the training of people within such systems which gave rise, as Mary
Poovey argues, to a new social position that of the expert. Poovey, A History of the Modern
Fact, 15.
43 Petty, Political Anatomy, 1.
47 Petty, Political Anatomy, 29. Italics in original.
50 Petty, Political Anatomy, 78-9.
53 Foucault states that political economy arises “out of the perception of new networks of
continuous and multiple relations between population, territory, and wealth [...]. In other
words, the transition which takes place in the eighteenth century from an art of government
to a political science, from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to one ruled

by techniques of government, turns on the theme of population and hence also on the
birth of political economy.” Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller , eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel
Hempstead UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87-104, 101. On Foucault and the Irish context
see also John Morrissey, “Foucault and the Colonial Subject: Emergent Forms of Colonial
Governmentality in Early Modern Ireland,” in Patrick Duffy and William Nolan, eds., At the
Anvil: Essays in Honour of William J. Smyth (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2012), 135-150.
54 As noted by Stuart Elden, “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580, 563.
55 Bob Jessop, “From Micro-Powers to Governmentality: Foucault’s Work on Statehood, State
Formation, Statecraft and State Power,” Political Geography 26 (2006): 34-40, 38.
56 Elden, “Governmentality,” 567. See also, the question of French intellectual engagement
with decolonisation from the 1950s as noted by Robert Young in Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction (Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 397.
57 Elden, “Governmentality,” 576.
58 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16 (1986) [1967]: 22-7, 27.
59 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.
60 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 125-6.
61 Foucault, “Governmentality,” 99.
62 Foucault, “Governmentality,” 99.
63 Foucault, “Governmentality,” 100
64 Simon Shapin and Steven Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 342.
“Not So Much for Their Sake as for Its Own”:
The State and the Geography of National Education
in Pre-Famine Ireland
Kevin Lougheed
Trinity College Dublin
ABSTRACT: The centralization of state power in pre-Famine Ireland enabled the British
government to target the Irish social body under the pretext of reform. Institutional
reform was part of a wider governmental rationale and resulted in the transformation
of institutions such that their focus shifted to acting on the Irish social body more
generally, with the intention of civilizing Irish subjects. In Ireland the transformation
took on the added imputes of attempting to legitimize the British state as key actor
in Irish society. The shift in focus of institutions in Ireland represents what Michel
Foucault referred to as governmentality, with the British state aiming to “conduct the
conduct” of the Irish population in order to provide security. One key institution was the
establishment of a national education system pre-Famine Ireland. The establishment
of the Commissioners of National Education in 1831 attempted to introduce a non-
denominational education system in Ireland that would unite the children of different
creeds in the same classroom. This paper examines this introduction of a national
education system in Ireland as a governmental technology and the geography of the
early years of the system. The system involved a central-local management system,
with the Commissioners controlling regulations and local actors responsible for
the operation of schools. The establishment and operation of national schools was
therefore dependent on local networks of social relations developing common interests
in accessing state capacities for education and therefore interacted with the rationale
of the state. The placing of local actors under the regulations of the system, while
also being placed under the surveillance of the British administration, resulted in the
establishment and engineering of social norms that extended well beyond the walls of
the schools. The introduction of national education therefore sought to reshape local
social relations in line with the rationale of the state. The emerging geography of the
system, with core regions of high and low national school densities, were therefore the
result of the spatial variation of social relations and interactions with the state across
the country. A case study of east Ulster is examined to provide an example of how the
introduction of national education attempted to reshape local social relations and how
those relations were also influenced by other social actors in pre-Famine Ireland.
A
n important element within the emerging research on the colonial contexts in Irish
historical geography has been the legacy of colonial technologies, such as plantation,
partition, and state institutions. Discussions around the nature of colonial technologies
used by the British administration in nineteenth-century Ireland have focused on the “social
engineering” of the Irish populations and have been examined in various cases; such as the
policy of the British government in dealing with the Great Famine.1 Many recent studies have
depicted the British colonial administration of Ireland as an exemplar of what Michel Foucault
called governmentality.2 Governmentality refers to a range of practices and institutions intending
the “conduct of conduct” of the population, shaping behavior according to a particular set of
norms for a variety of ends.3 Foucault states that power, and more specifically social power, is
“Not So Much for Their Sake as for Its Own” 73
generated through social relations on a local level, and that in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century these social relations were “progressively elaborated, rationalised and centralised in the
form of or under the auspices of state institutions.”4 The centralization of state power enabled the
British government to target the Irish social body under the pretext of reform. Institutional reform
was part of a wider governmental rationale and resulted in the transformation of institutions
that previously acted on disciplining and enhancing the lives of individuals, such as jails, police,
workhouses, and hospitals, so that their focus shifted to acting on the Irish social body more
generally, with the stated intention of civilizing and not just restraining Irish subjects. The Act
of Union, introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, signified the beginning of the
shift of focus towards civilizing the Irish population. The Union occurred between two rebellions
indicating the unsettled nature of Irish society. The transformation of institutions within a
civilizing mission in Ireland therefore took on the added impetus of attempting to legitimize the
British state as key actor in Irish society. The most intense period of institutional reform occurred
from 1830–45 and took place against the backdrop of the tithe war, highlighting the importance of
a civilizing mission and the need for state intervention in Irish society.
One example of this transformation was the introduction of national education. The
establishment of the Commissioners of National Education in 1831 attempted to introduce a
non-denominational education system in Ireland, which would unite the children of different
creeds in the same classroom. In doing so, children of all backgrounds would come under the
disciplinary techniques of schools run by the British administration, which could define the
capacities of the child and elaborate the way children should behave in regards to social norms,
both inside and outside the classroom.5 National education was an important state institution as it
extended beyond the youth, as the structure of the system required cooperation between various
local actors and the central authority in the establishment and operation of schools.
Inquiries in 1812 and 1825 found that Irish education was in a poor state, and concluded
that the central issue was distrust between the clergy of different faiths and attitudes against
the proselytizing nature of educational provisions.6 The inquiries recommended the intervention
of the government and the creation of a centrally controlled national system of education.
The educational inquiries were part of a wider trend of information gathering, with over 175
commissions that reported on Ireland between the Act of Union (1801) and the Famine (1847-
52). These inquiries acted as a colonial mechanism that defined the condition of the Irish “social
body” and thus determined the basis of colonial intervention in Ireland.7 The reports presented
a comprehensive plan for a system of general education for Ireland, the aim of which was to
provide “a system of united education from which suspicion should, if possible, be banished, and
the cause of distrust and jealousy be effectively removed.”8 To achieve this it was recommended
to establish a central authority that would control the expenditure of public money, define the
curriculum, appoint inspectors, and have the power to appoint and dismiss schoolmasters.
Despite similar systems proposed in both inquiries, it took another parliamentary committee and
a failed bill before the system was finally introduced through the infamous letter from Edward
Stanley.9 Edward Stanley was the Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1831 to 1833 and outlined the
system of national education in a letter to the Duke of Leinster in October 1831. It is from this
letter, and not from any official legislation, that the national education system was established
and it remains the legal basis for national education in Ireland to this day.
The educational developments influenced by the British administration in the eighteenth
century were often aimed at proselytizing Catholic children. The reports and debates around
the creation of a centralized education system for Ireland therefore chart the transformation of
education from a mechanism to convert the Irish population from “the errors of Popery” to one
74 Lougheed
intended to train the Irish population so that they would act within the norms of society and
become “useful citizens.”10 Educational reform therefore represents the shift from disciplinary
power, targeting the body (and mind) of the pupil, to a mode of governmentality targeting the
behavior of the Irish social body more generally.11 National education would mean the Irish
population would “receive its benefits as one undivided body, under one and the same system,
and in the same establishments,” and in doing so would instill habits and discipline “which
are yet more valuable than mere learning.”12 The shift in focus of the British government was
summed up by Thomas Spring-Rice, who stated that it was the “duty of the state to provide the
means of instruction for all classes of its subjects, not so much for their sakes as for its own.”13
The education policy implemented in Ireland was important in a wider colonial
context. The introduction of a centralized system of education as a governmental technology
in Ireland was of much interest in the British Empire, especially in the Anglophone colonies. As
a result, the national system in Ireland became a model, with colonies in Canada and Australia
directly importing the structure of the Irish system in the 1840s.14 Education reform was also
implemented in 1830s India, with policy shifting to the pursuit of Western science and literature
through the medium of the English language.15 The colonial impact of Irish national education
was not confined to the structure of the system, as the textbooks published by the Commissioners
of National Education became one of the most widely used series of textbooks throughout the
Empire. The books did not contain material overtly specific to Ireland and Irish culture as they
viewed the world through an overtly British imperial lens. The Irish system therefore represents
a wider attempt throughout the Empire to normalize the ideology of imperialism and attempt
to legitimize a dominant culture and secure imperialist control.16 The educational reforms of the
British state were therefore not unique to Ireland, and demonstrate an imperial governmentality
aimed at the ‘conduct of conduct’ of the colonial populations. National education in Ireland
therefore represents the view that Ireland was treated as a ground for social experimentation for
the Empire, as it was “a social laboratory, the scene of daring and ambitious experiments... the
most conventional of Englishmen were willing to experiment in Ireland on the lines which they
were not prepared to contemplate or tolerate at home.”17
This paper examines this introduction of a national education system in Ireland, the
effects that it had on social relations, and how that policy influenced the geography of education
in the country. The rationale of the state in introducing a centrally regulated system of education
interacted with location-specific relations to form unique social networks. The spatial variation
of social relations and interactions with the state therefore provided the basis for the unique
geography of national education in pre-Famine Ireland. The examination of national education is
part of the emerging discussions of Irish education, which draw upon Michel Foucault’s writings
on governmentality, which includes John Morrissey’s research on the emergence of a neoliberal
governmentality, which seeks to regulate the subjectivity of academic life in Ireland.18
The structure of national education
In a departure from the earlier proposals, the later plans for reform embodied a more liberal
view of schooling. A central element of this was the belief that education should be demanded
and offered rather than forced. Frankland Lewis, the Chief Commissioner of the 1825 inquiry,
exemplified this belief in parliament when he stated that “if education was to be generally given
to all, it must be given in a manner in which those to whom it is offered were willing to receive
it.”19 Once again the continuing discussions on education represent the shift to more liberal
attitudes towards the use of education, developing of the concept of self-regulation with only
those who desired education approaching the state for aid, and therefore interacting with the
regulations of the state system for their own interests. The relation between security and liberty is
highlighted through this, where security involves the regulation of groups in order to lead them
to exercise their liberty in a disciplined manner and, as such, governmentality only works when
individuals act upon themselves as free members of society.20 In this way, national education
attempted to shape individuals so that they would not need to be explicitly governed by others
but instead could govern themselves; “if we take educational institutions, we realize that one
is managing others and teaching them to manage themselves.”21 Self-regulation in the colonial
education policy in Ireland had the added impetus of attempting to shape the Irish population
so they would exercise their liberty in a disciplined manner that accepted the legitimacy of the
Union, while also reducing religious animosity.
To establish a national school, local individuals had to apply to the Commissioners
of National Education and fill out a query sheet with the details of the proposed school. The
Commissioners had a three-grade classification system for applications, introduced in Stanley’s
letter, based on the main principle of uniting those of different creeds. The first class of applications
were those that were signed by both Protestant (including Presbyterian) and Roman Catholic
clergymen, which in effect needed cooperation of clergy members of different creeds.22 In most
cases, one of these clergymen became the patron of the schools, with the others granted visitation
privileges. The patron was heavily involved in the local management of national schools, usually
in charge of hiring schoolmasters and providing local funds. While there were many school
managers and committees in existence, the Commissioners directly communicated with the
patron. It was in this way that the dual-management system emerged, with central regulation
of the system and local management of schools headed by the patron. The importance placed on
local management opened the system to influence from a variety of actors on many scales. The
main example of this was that, in most cases, the patrons and school managers were local clergy
who were often heavily influenced by the views of the bishops in the area. The second class of
applications were those signed by clergymen of one denomination and laity of the opposite creed,
again seen as cooperation between different faiths. In these cases the clergyman who signed the
application usually became the patron, but cases existed where agents of landlords or influential
lay members of the community were the applicant and patron. Third-class applications were those
signed by laity from both denominations with no clergy member. The regulations stated that if
applications were exclusively signed by only one denomination the Commissioners would make
an inquiry as to the circumstance of the application. The majority of schools were established
through second-class applications, with 1,106 national schools established by 1834, out of which
176 were from first-class applications, 601 were from second class and 114 were from third-class
applications.
The character of the grading system is a clear indication of the state’s attempt to place
different local actors in a unified system that promoted unity and thus secure governance. The
encouragement of local management was an element of using liberal government to achieve
security while respecting the freedom of those to be governed, with the local actors self-regulating
and self-governing, thus leaving the state to govern from a distance.23 The attempt to encourage
the clergy to establish or transfer existing schools to the national system was part of the strategy
to colonize existing education provisions, with liberal modes of government utilizing the existing
capacities of free actors to connect to the system.24 Once connected to the state system, local actors
who did not respond to self-regulation were subjected to corrective action by the Commissioners,
such as withholding salaries or discontinuing funds.25 The inspectorate played a vital role in
linking central regulation to local management, focusing on the layout and character of the
school building and the competencies of the schoolmaster or -mistress. The attention to school
maintenance and teaching standards meant added responsibility was assigned to the patrons,
committees, managers, and schoolmasters to uphold standards. The power of national education
76 Lougheed
as a governmental technology was rooted in the inspectorate as it extended the state’s gaze into
the schools and thus regulated the behavior of schoolmasters and local management. The local
management was thus accountable to the Commissioners and, therefore, those who exercised
power within the schools were subjected by its functions as much as the children taught within
them.26 The state was thus using the national education system as a technology that extended
beyond shaping the behavior of the youth, and it cultivated lateral techniques that allowed for
the supervision of parents, local actors in schools and, ultimately, society as a whole. In this way,
national schools in pre-Famine Ireland represented minute “social observatories.”27
As the system was based on the liberal rationale of government, local actors interacted with
the state through pursuing their own interests in gaining access to state capacities. Relationships
were therefore established between the nature and character of educational problems facing
various social groups at a local level in pre-Famine Ireland, which became linked into a common
interest in accessing resources for the establishment of schools. The development of a common
interest at a local level and the complex interactions of strategies at various scales may have
transformed what was essentially a local issue of the establishment of schools and tied them into
much larger political ones. If so, associations would be established between a variety of local
actors, all of whom were seeking to enhance their powers by gaining access to state capacities and
resources so that they could function to their own advantage.28 The liberal rationale of government
meant that national education, as an emerging technology of government, did not have overall
control and domination by a central authority but sought to manage the domain outside politics
without destroying the autonomy of the actors in that domain. As such, the structure of national
education in Ireland meant the system was dependent on the strength of the various local relations
and their ability to cooperate. To achieve this without destroying the autonomy of local actors, the
state granted them roles in the governance of the system at all levels.29
The national education system in Ireland was therefore based on a complex network
of social relations. Figure 1 is used as an illustrative tool to view the network of relations that
resulted from the interactions with actors at different scales. The central-local management
structure meant that the system was open to influence from a variety of scales. At the highest level
were the institutions that acted on a national scale. The Commissioners of National Education
regulated the whole system and controlled the nature of applications, and therefore influenced
those at all levels. Religious institutions were also influential as the central administrative
bodies of the various Churches had influence on a national scale, either through interacting
with the Commissioners or by influencing their clergy at various lower scales. These national
authorities had regional agents that implemented the strategies of the central authority, such
as superintendents who managed regional model schools and Archbishops who regulated the
local clergy. In the network of national education, regional agents interacted closely with the
patrons of national schools, who in some cases were patrons to several national schools over
an area, and thus the various agents acted as the intermediaries between the central and local
management of national education. At a local level, there was a series of different actors who
influenced the establishment and operation of national schools, such as managers who regulated
individual schools, inspectors who ensured schools were properly regulated and landlords, local
clergy, and laity who established and operated national school. At the bottom-most scale were
the schoolmasters who influenced the children attending national schools. The network of social
relations illustrates that power was distributed as a net of systems of relations spread throughout
society, and that control was conducted by governmental programs in the sense that it held the
network of actors together.30
Figure 1. Network of Influence of National Education.

The geography of national education
National schools became an important element in the Irish landscape and appeared in a
wide variety of locations, often sited near the outskirts of villages, mirroring the location of other
state-run institutions and Catholic institutions as part of the “governmental and ecclesiastical
fringe-belt” that emerged in nineteenth-century Ireland.31 National schools were a unique state
institution, however, as it was also common to find them in peripheral locations, including Roman
Catholic chapel grounds or in isolated rural areas. As an element of the institutional emergence
of the state in the Irish landscape, national education “symbolises the transformation of the state
from an abstract set of power relationships into a physical entity” which would eventually be
witnessed in every parish in Ireland.32 The Commissioners of National Education began receiving
applications for the establishment of national schools in 1832 and by the onset of the Famine
there were 3,426 national schools in operation, affording education to 432,844 children.33 Figure 2
shows the location of national schools established in this time period and illustrates that national
education did not emerge uniformly. A brief observation of the location of national schools
indicates that there were larger numbers of national schools established in the northeast and east
of the country, with western areas having fewer national schools. While it is possible to make
overall comments about trends of national-school establishment from this distribution map,
when this information is aggregated into barony units, patterns of national-school establishment
become easier to identify. The examination of national-school distribution at a barony level
78 Lougheed
Figure 2. National school locations, 1833−43.

provides an indication of the regions that were quick to adopt national education in pre-Famine
Ireland, and also regions that experienced relative non-adoption. While baronies are a more
suitable unit to study the distribution, there is a problem of relative size. National-school density
per ten thousand people is used to provide a more instructive unit of measure for true national-
school distributions.
The years after the creation of the national school system saw rapid expansion, with 1,106
schools established by the end of 1834. The map of national-school densities in 1834 demonstrates
that areas of high and low density emerged with the creation of the system; see Figure 3a. A
region in the east of Ulster emerged with high densities. High school establishment was localized
to a relatively small area. Baronies with high densities stretched from the east coast area of Down
and Antrim, north to Glenarm in the Glens of Antrim. The baronies in this region all contained
more than 2 national schools per ten thousand people, with the baronies around Belfast and
Carrickfergus containing between 6.5 and 9.5 national schools per ten thousand people. The
urban area of Belfast City had a relatively small number of schools, amounting to only 0.5 national
schools per ten thousand people, suggesting that different processes occurred in urban centers
with regard to national-school establishment. The area of central Ulster, specifically around north
Monaghan and south Tyrone, emerged with relatively high national-school densities. The region
had above the national average densities of 1.6 national schools per ten thousand people, as most
of the baronies had more than 2 national schools per ten thousand people. The rest of the northern
areas of the country had close to the average densities, except for the low densities contained
in Armagh and the west coast area of Donegal. Inishowen was an outlier in the region of low
densities with a density of 3.6 national schools per ten thousand people in 1834.
Another region of high national-school densities emerged in the north Dublin and
southern Meath area. The majority of baronies from the north of Dublin City stretching to the
southern area of Meath had high densities of above 4.5 national schools per ten thousand people.
Similar to Belfast City, there was a low density of national schools within Dublin City, equating to
less than one national school per ten thousand people. A region of central Leinster stretching from
west Kildare through east Laois and into Carlow emerged as an area of relatively high densities,
as the majority of baronies contained densities above the national average. There was a zone of
relative low densities on the east coast of Leinster, with the baronies in the south of Wicklow and
north Wexford having densities lower than one national school per ten thousand people, and
with three baronies having no national school.
A zone of mixed densities emerged in the south of the country, with an area that arched
from south Wexford, across south Tipperary, and into south Cork that had close to average
densities. Some baronies adjacent to urban centers had slightly higher densities, such as those
close to Waterford City and Wexford Town. The region coincided with the old established
Catholic big farm heartland as identified by Whelan, who stated that there was a survival of
significant Catholic landlords in a district from Waterford Harbour through to Limerick.34 This
Catholic core had a number of common features such as a monolithic Catholic population, a
commercialized Catholic farmer class, capacity to generate wealth, an outward-looking orientation
with connections to Catholic Europe and a leadership class based on surviving Catholic landed
families. Educationally, this manifested itself with the diffusion of exclusively Catholic-sponsored
schools and the educational institutions of Catholic Orders across the region, such as the Christian
Brothers schools that originated in Waterford in 1802 and the Presentation Sisters who originated
in Cork in 1775. The Christian Brothers responded to a request from Archbishop Murray, a
member of the Commissioners of National Education, to give the national system a fair trial in
some of their schools; however they began withdrawing their schools from the system from 1836,
only a few years after the national system began.35
80 Lougheed
Figure 3. National-school distribution, 1834 and 1843.
A large region of low national-school densities stretched throughout the western area of
the country and included much of the midlands. The region arched from the south of Donegal
through Longford and Westmeath to Clare. Nearly all the baronies in this region had fewer than
two national schools per ten thousand people, with a large proportion below one school per ten
thousand people. There were a large number of baronies, over twenty, which had no national
schools. Once again the urban areas, such as Limerick City and Galway had low densities of 0.5
national schools per ten thousand people or fewer. There was an outlier in the western region of
low density as the area surrounding Clew Bay had high densities of around 3.5 national schools
per ten thousand people in 1834. Overall, in the initial years after the creation of national education
in Ireland it can be said that the pattern of national-school establishment was highly regional with
core regions of high and low density, regions of mixed density, and several significant outliers.
Over the period from the creation of the system to the period just before the Famine, there
were some significant changes to the regional nature of the system; see Figure 3b. The region of
east Ulster had expanded to encompass much of Antrim and Derry. The increases around the area
of west Antrim, up to the Bann Valley, meant that the region now stretched from the area from
southeast Down to Coleraine, with all baronies having densities over five national schools per ten
thousand people. The vast increase was mainly due to the official adoption of the national system
by the Synod of Ulster. The Synod was the largest congregation of Presbyterians in the country
who met annually to discuss and debate various issues that affected members of the Church
in the region. A special meeting of the Synod was called to discuss the merits of the national
system soon after the regulations were published in 1831. The Synod opposed the national system
for several reasons. While officially it was stated that it opposed increased interference of the
state and the exclusion of the Bible as a common school book, it soon became apparent that
the true reasons for opposition was due to the increased influence of Catholic priests in their
schools.36 The Synod entered into negotiations with the Commissioners of National Education,
and in 1838 the regulations were altered in line with the Synod’s opposition. The result of this was
that in 1839-42 there was a large increase in the numbers of Presbyterians establishing schools
in the region, accounting for a quarter of application in 1839 alone. The central-Ulster region
was still apparentin 1842 but, due to a lack of major increase, possessed by then significantly
lower densities then the east-Ulster region. Other increases in the peripheries of these two regions
meant that a transitional zone emerged which connected the two relatively high-density regions
in Ulster with a zone close to the average density. Inishowen was again an outlier which, in 1842,
had the highest number of national schools in the country with forty-five. Armagh was the only
area that contained a significant number of baronies below the average.
The changes in the pattern and regions of national-school establishment in the east of the
country were similar to what occurred in the north. The core region around north Dublin was
again evident in 1842, and had extended northwards to include the area north of Drogheda. The
region of central Leinster, while still present, had lessened in densities when compared to the
north Dublin region. This region, which stretched from west Kildare into the Barrow Valley, had
densities slightly above the average. Slight increases in the periphery of this region, especially in
east Kildare, led to the connection of the two Leinster regions, meaning that a zone of relatively
high densities existed from the area surrounding Drogheda to the south of Carlow. The southern
zone of the country had a consistent pattern of national-school establishment over the period. The
area stretching from south Wexford to the west of Munster had densities from around one to three
national schools per 10,000 residents, with the areas around Waterford having higher densities,
meaning there was not a significant change to the initial region.
The western region of the country still has the lowest densities in the country, with an
area stretching from south Donegal to western Tipperary and Limerick that possessed lower-
than-average densities. The outlier of high density surrounding Clew Bay had transformed to an
area of low national-school density by this time. The vast reduction in the number of schools in
the area was the result of the opposition of Archbishop John McHale. While initially a reluctant
supporter of the system, McHale changed his attitude publically in 1838 and began protesting
against the system for what he saw as an unfair distribution of funds. In reality, McHale was
reacting to the increasing influence that the Commissioners exercised over local clergy involved
in the system.37 McHale influenced local clergy who had become patrons to national schools to
withdraw from the national system.38 As a result of the public campaign against the system, the
Catholic clergy in the Galway and Mayo areas started to withdraw their schools from the national
system. In the three years after Archbishop McHale denounced the system, a total of fifty-six
schools were withdrawn from the national system in Ireland, with fifty-three (95 percent) of these
located in the diocese of Tuam. The twenty-four schools that had been connected to the national
system in the Clew Bay area were all withdrawn by 1840.
The change in the distribution of national schools in the period prior to the Famine resulted
in the modification of the various regions that emerged after the creation of the system. The initial
high adoption rates in the north and east of the country and low densities in the west were further
82 Lougheed
consolidated with an extension to the initial core areas of high and low density. The distribution
therefore displayed an east/west pattern that can be highly generalized by a line running from an
area around Sheephaven Bay in Donegal to Waterford Harbour. The regions to the east of this line
can be characterized as areas with a high rate of adoption of the system, while those to the west of
the line were areas of relative non-adoption. A similar generalized line was identified by Smyth
in a study of the variations in vulnerability to the Famine.39 Within this generalized pattern, the
geography of national education in pre-Famine Ireland was highly regional. Overall it can be said
that there were two core regions of the country that were particularly quick to adopt the national
system, with two zones of relative high adoption close to each. The whole western area of the
country showed relative non-adoption of the system, except for a small number of isolated cases.
It was seen that between and connecting the regions of high and low densities were transitional
zones that showed a degree of mixed densities. Figure 4 presents the regional character of
national education. Influenced by Whelan’s methods in producing his map of regional archetypes
in Ireland, it delineates various regions that were not necessarily continuous. The borders of the
various regions are used for illustrative purposes, as they did not possess definitive boundaries,
and as a result, should be considered as “reified abstractions.”40
Regional example of East Ulster
The examination of national education policy in Ireland illustrated that the system relied
on a complex network of social relations, while observations of the geography of the system
highlighted the regional dimension in the emergence of the system. The examination of a regional
case illustrates how the structure of the system and the network of social relations influenced the
establishment of national education and resulted in regional patterns. The examination of regions
in this way follows on from the work of Anne Gilbert, among others, who discuss the nature
of regions as a physical setting for social interactions, with social actors attempting to change
relationships within society. The focus, therefore, is on the spatial networks where interactions
take place, thus leading to a general understanding of the functioning of society and space as
a “geography of power.” In this sense, networks of social relations are region-specific, with
groups having differential access to power through interactions within these networks, leading
to regional differences.41 The examination of how different actors interacted, in particular spaces,
to form distinct social networks suggests how localities came to be different, and forms the basis
of the asymmetrical distribution of national education.42 In order to describe the social relations
involved in national education it is necessary to research local case studies and for this purpose
the case of east Ulster has been chosen.
East Ulster was an area of dramatic social change from the eighteenth century which
resulted in the interaction of a large number of social groups. The complex nature of labor and
industry, landholding, and religion in Pre-Famine Ulster resulted in a unique social configuration,
which was divided into distinct self-aware groups and strata that had their own tactical outlook.43
The complexity of the social structure in the region increased public interest in education. The
different classes of applications are taken as a central source in providing an indication of
interactions of social actors in the region. The fact that clergymen of different faiths participated
together in the establishment of national schools for first-class applications is taken as a sign of
cooperation between the different social actors in the local network. Across the country there was
evidence to suggest that when applications were being made to the Commissioners, there was
communication between the clergy of different faith, and also with influential lay members of
the community. An example from the east-Ulster region comes from an interview with a Catholic
priest in Antrim where he stated that he had “the attestation of a respectable neighboring Roman
Catholic clergyman, that in three schools which he has succeeded in connecting with the Board
Figure 4. Regions of national-school establishment in pre-Famine Ireland.

84 Lougheed
[of National Education] the Presbyterians have no objection in his neighborhood to send their
children to them; and I may affirm of this clergyman that he lives, I believe, in harmony with
the Protestant clergymen of the neighborhood.”44 The evidence of communication between the
various social actors involved in the establishment of national schools suggests that signatures
present on applications represent real cooperative interactions within the local social network.
The distribution of the various classes of applications in east Ulster is presented in Figure 5.
There was a concentration of first-class applications that correlated with the high national-school
densities in the Lagan Valley, Belfast, Carrickfergus and Larne axis. The combined baronies of
Belfast Upper, Belfast Lower, Carrickfergus, Massereene Lower, and Glenarm Upper had a total
of forty-three first-class applications out of a total of sixty-eight schools established. The clergy
of different faiths were therefore jointly involved in 63 percent of the schools established in the
region. Out of the remaining applications, 27 percent were second-class, meaning that clergymen
of only one faith were involved in their establishment, and 10 percent were signed by laity alone.
A drop in the levels of first-class applications occurred outside of this core region. In the areas of
northwest Antrim and east Derry first-class applications dropped to 36 percent and 44 percent
were second-class applications. The distribution indicates that the cooperation between the
clergy in the east-Ulster region was confined to a specific locality and highlights that the behavior
of the clergy varied over space. The distribution can thus be seen as a result of the changing
nature of social interactions over space, with the actions of the various clergy as key drivers. The
area of high clergy interaction indicates a different local social network that resulted in a higher
establishment of national schools. The nature of local social networks and how they interacted
with the state was therefore central to the distribution of national schools.
The proportion and distribution of clergy signatures provides a clearer indication of
interactions and social relations of the various actors across the region; see Figure 6. The clergy
of the Church of Ireland were not very active in the establishment of national schools in the
east-Ulster region, with only 7 percent of all national schools established in Antrim and Down
having the involvement of the Church of Ireland. The negative reaction of the Church of Ireland
hierarchy to the introduction of the system likely influenced the actions of the local clergy and
resulted in the lack of involvement in establishing national schools.45 The Presbyterian clergy were
active in the initial establishment of national schools in the region, as 41 percent of the schools
were established with the involvement of Presbyterian clergymen. While this high rate might
be expected given that the area was home to a high proportion of Presbyterians, it is surprising
given the seemingly negative reaction of the Presbyterian Church, namely the Synod of Ulster,
to the creation of the national system. The signatures of Presbyterian clergymen in the initial
three years of the system were concentrated in the Lagan Valley-Larne crescent of high density.
The activity was highest in the baronies of Belfast Lower and Carrickfergus, where 77 percent
of all applications were signed by Presbyterian clergymen, with 22 percent of those signed by
more than one Presbyterian minister. Outside of this core region, the level of Presbyterian clergy
involvement dropped to 23 percent of applications signed. The correlation between Presbyterian
clergy involvement and high national-school density indicates that they were important drivers
in the adoption of the national school system in the east of Ulster, but the behavior was variable
over the region. The importance of the Presbyterian clergy as actors in the wider region was
highlighted by the fact that they had a much higher proportion of places of worship in the area.
Out of all the places of worship in the Dioceses of Connor; 41 percent were Presbyterian, with 25
percent being Church of Ireland, 20 percent were Catholic, and 14 percent were other Protestant
dissenter places of worship.46
Figure 5. East Ulster national schools and application distribution, 1835.
The Catholic clergy had the largest proportion of the signatures, with 52 percent of all
the signatures on applications in the wider region. The strategy of the state, which unofficially
assigned preference to the Catholic Church in applications for schools, was a factor in the high
proportions. The involvement of the Catholic clergy in national-school establishment was not
necessarily concentrated around any one locality within the region, indicating the widespread
activity of Catholic priests. The majority of applications signed by the Catholic clergy, however,
were signed by a single priest, unlike the distribution of Presbyterian signatures that often had
two or more clergy ministers. The core region of the Lagan Valley to Larne belt was the only area
where multiple Catholic priests signed applications. The high level of Presbyterian and Catholic
clergy signatures, combined with the high percentage of first-class applications in the area,
suggests the existence of a high degree of cooperation between the clergy of these two Churches.
The cooperation is highlighted as 75 percent of schools in the core region had both Catholic and
Presbyterian clergymen involved in the application process. It can thus be inferred that a tactical
alliance formed between Presbyterian and Catholic clergymen in the core region after the creation
of the national education system that led to a high rate of school establishment.
86 Lougheed
Figure 6. East Ulster clergy signatures of the various Churches, 1835.

Local case study

A closer examination of the core area in the baronies of Lower Belfast and Carrickfergus
reveals more detail of the interactions and strategies involved in the process of establishing
national schools. In the area there were a number of individual clergymen who signed several
applications for national schools. Out of the seventeen schools with Catholic clergy signatures in
the first year of the system, eight were signed by the Catholic priest Arthur O’Neill, while three
were signed by the Bishop of Connor-and-Down William Crolly. In the case-study area, only six
different Catholic priests signed applications for the seventeen schools. This pattern was mirrored
by the Presbyterian ministers, where the same four ministers were involved in 70 percent of the
national schools established with the involvement of Presbyterian clergy. William Glendy signed
the application for five national schools, while William Heron signed four applications in the two
baronies. The area surrounding Carrickfergus provides a good example of the local interaction
of the clergy, as all eight national schools established in the initial years were jointly signed by
the Presbyterian ministers William Flinter and James Seaton Reid. It is significant to note that the
Presbyterian clergy involved in establishing schools in the region were not part of the Synod of
Ulster, with many being members of the Presbytery of Antrim, thus highlighting the importance
of regional actors on local actions. The repeated signature of a few clergymen of the various
faiths indicated a tactical push to establish national schools in the area by both Churches which
therefore dominated the network of social relations involved in education in the area.
The tactical alliance between the clergy was illustrated by the various ministers of different
faiths jointly involved in several schools. Out of the five applications signed by William Glendy,
three were also signed by Arthur O’Neill, a Catholic priest. In the Larne area, Arthur O’Neill also
signed the application for four schools with another Presbyterian minister, J. C. Ledlie. Ledlie was
reported to have stated that the system brought significant benefit to the area and confirmed that
there was true cooperation between the clergy, stating “some of the clergy [...] have cooperated
in the management of schools; clergymen of all persuasions attend [...] examinations; and no
clergyman of any denomination has made any formal opposition to a national school.”47 In this
locality a small number of Presbyterian ministers became patrons to the vast majority of national
schools. Given that none of the schools were given grants for building a schoolhouse, it is very
possible that they were already in existence, under the patronage of the Presbyterian ministers,
and were subsequently transferred to the national system. The fact that the clergy were working
together in the establishment and operation of the schools that were most likely previously
Presbyterian schools suggests that the clergy of both Churches took a tactical position to cooperate
in transferring schools to the national system.
These local relationships differed in the northern parts of the east-Ulster region, where the
density of national schools was significantly lower. In the baronies of Cary, Dunluce Lower, and
Glenarm in the north of Antrim the local clergy were not significantly active in the cooperation or
establishment of national schools. The lack of activity of the clergy was not matched by the laity,
as there were a large number of signatures from lay people of all faiths. The Catholic clergy were
the most active of the clergy in signing applications, but again it was only single priests involved
in school establishment. The Catholic community, both clergy and laity, attempted to establish
national education in this area, but the lack of cooperation with other actors led to low densities.
The isolated activity of the Catholic community is backed up by the fact that it was the only place
in the east-Ulster region where the majority of the patrons were either Catholic priests or laity.
The lack of cooperation between the clergy outside the initial core region was highlighted when
the Catholic priest in Drummale in west Antrim, Daniel Curoe, discussed the establishment of
national schools in his parish. In reference to the communication with the Protestant clergyman
88 Lougheed
of the parish he stated that “on my first attempting to connect the school with the New Board [of
National Education] in March 1832 I applied to [the Protestant clergyman] for his co-operation;
he replied, that he felt a delicacy and a reluctance to co-operate with me.”48
In the initial period after the creation of the national system, the state’s capacity to supply
funds for education led to the tactical tie between a body of Presbyterians, Catholics, and the
Commissioners in the core region of east-Ulster. Variations in the behavior of these actors, and
the influence over the local management of the actors at different scales, such as the Synod of
Ulster and the Catholic bishops, resulted in the strategic ties being localized to a specific area in a
crescent from the Lagan Valley to Larne. The rationale of the state required the Presbyterian clergy
to cooperate with the Catholic clergy to implement their strategy in this area. The Catholic clergy
were active in national-school establishment across the region, and it is possible that the clergy
saw the link with the institutionally strong Presbyterian Church, and the government rationale of
integrating Catholics, as a way to strengthen their influence in the educational landscape of the
area. In other areas with lower densities this tactical alliance was not as present, which illustrates
that the behavior of actors varied over space and therefore strategies of the various actors were
driven by localized social relations. As such, outside the core area the responsibility fell to other
actors, such as landlords and other influential lay members of a community, to establish national
schools. These actors did not possess the same institutional strength to implement a significant
spatial strategy and therefore often acted in isolation. The less complex social network in the
other areas of this region, and the reduced involvement of the clergy, resulted in the lack of a
common interest and therefore less activity with regard to national-school establishment.
Technologies of government can be effective only if they tie various actors together and
give them a common goal.49 The intervention of the state with the introduction of a national
system of education that had specific regulations, application criteria, and inspections, resulted
in the formation of new sorts of local social relations. Local actors developed a common interest
to acquire state funds for education, which resulted in the development of local alliances that
interacted with the state to achieve this goal. In this way, the introduction of national education as
a governmental technology shifted the nature of social relations in Ireland such that local actors
came under the surveillance of the British state through their own self-interest. Relationships
were thus established between the Commissioners of National Education and actors in other
socio-spatial domains and were consolidated to form unique networks of relations, with a diverse
range of actors linked through expertise and disciplinary techniques, with the power of the system
distributed through the network.
Conclusion
The study of national-school establishment in pre-Famine Ireland showed the emergence
of certain regions. The various regions were not the result of independent events, but were
formed through social processes situated in their historical context, which stemmed from the
social relations and interactions that were specific to a localized area. Relationships established
between the Commissioners of National Education and actors in other socio-spatial domains
were consolidated to form a network of relations.50 The structure and regulations of the national
system were important as they created a central-local management system that linked the state
officials, in the form of the Commissioners of National Education and their inspectors, to the
wider social environment. The interplay between the governmental rationale, the strategies of
state agents, and wider social networks was central in the emergence of a regional dimension to
the national education system.
The national education system resulted in the creation of a differential spatial web of
relations and interactions across the country. The examination of a localized case study illustrated
how this differential web of relations led to the adoption or relative non-adoption of national
education across space. The nature of school establishment resulted in local actors having different
abilities in pursuing strategies, which were shaped and constrained by the regulations of the
system and the rationale of various actors on a local level. The influence of regional actors further
complicated the strategic networks, as the strategies of institutions that functioned on many scales
shaped local strategies. An example of this was seen with the opposition of Archbishop John
McHale to the national system, which represented his wider nationalist viewpoint and opposition
to the colonial civilizing mission of the British state in Ireland. The wider rationale and strategy
of McHale influenced the local clergy in the West with regards to national education and greatly
affected the establishment of national schools throughout the region. Government in pre-Famine
Ireland was therefore the domain of strategies and techniques where different forces sought to
render programs such as national education operable and, as a result, connections were formed
between the rationales and aspirations of central authorities and the activities of social groups
and individuals.51 It is important to note that the introduction of the system itself influenced the
nature of these social relations. The degree of integration, the incorporation of the influential
actors at various scales, and spatial variation in the emergence and development of the national
system all affected the nature of social ties and their impact upon educational interaction.52 In
this way sub-national regions formed as sites of social relations and were reliant upon social and
historical processes while simultaneously formative of society and history.53
The interconnectedness of interest and rationales at various scales show how the
essentially local issue of schools became tied to larger political matters, such as the opposition
to the intrusion of the British state in Irish matters and the increase of influences of other actors.
The local issue of the establishment of schools represented a clash in mentalities and rationalities,
with the transforming governmental rationality of the state conflicting with the pastoral power
of the Churches and ultimately influencing the larger political matters such as the legitimization
of the Union. In this way, associations were established between a variety of local and regional
actors who sought to enhance their own powers by accessing state capacities so that they could
function to their own advantage.54 When combined with the liberal rationale of governmentality,
and the attempt to establish a self-regulating population that acted within their liberties, it
was seen that the national education system depended on the formation of strategic ties at a
locality. The strategic ties between the Catholic and Presbyterian clergy in the establishment of
national schools in east Ulster, and the activities of the Synod of Ulster in this region, illustrate
the interaction of local issues of school establishment and how it became tied into larger political
matters.
The introduction of national education represents the attempts of the British state to
civilize the country and legitimize the Union and left a lasting colonial legacy. The education
of children of different creeds in the same classroom without regard to religion was an attempt
to reduce sectarian conflict in the times of the tithe war while challenging the position that the
Established Church held in Ireland. The control of school regulations meant the British state were
able to influence the conduct of the Irish youth and, combined with the creation of textbooks
specifically for the system, attempted to normalize the ideology of imperialism, legitimize British
culture, and secure the Union in Ireland. The most significant colonial impact, and legacy, of
national education was the restructuring of local social relations. The central-local management
system resulted in local actors, especially Catholic clergymen, becoming tied into the actions of
government. The incorporation of the local community into the state structure also resulted in
the assimilation of a whole range of independent educational networks into the state system,
and resulted in the modification of these networks in-line with the rationale of government.
The placing of local actors under the regulations of the system, while also being placed under
90 Lougheed
the surveillance of the British administration, resulted in the establishment and engineering of
social norms that extended well beyond the walls of the schools. The national education system
ultimately increased the influence of the state over local actors as it extended central surveillance
over the system. The activities of the inspectorate, combined with the regulations of the system
such as the need for annual returns from each school, threw a web of visibility over the local and
regional actors within the system. In this way the conduct of actors was shaped through constant
observation, judgment, and the capacity for corrective action.55 The colonial context and legacy
therefore meant that the British state-regulated system of national education in Ireland extended
the power and influence of the state beyond the pupil to the conduct of the Irish population,
as national schools represented minute “social observatories” that exercised regular supervision
over actors at various scales of the system, and ultimately society.56
NOTES
1 David Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
2 See Mark Hennessy, “Administration,” in H. B. Clarke and Sarah Gearty, eds., Maps and
Texts: Exploring the Irish Historic Towns Atlas (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013), 152–163;
David Nally, “Governmentality,” in Key Concepts in Historical Geography, eds. John Morrissey,
David Nally, Ulf Strohmayer, and Yvonne Whelan (London UK: Sage, 2014), 238–249; Arlene
Crampsie, Governmentality and Locality: An Historical Geography of Rural District Councils in
Ireland, 1898–1925 (PhD Thesis, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, 2008); Kevin Lougheed,
“National Education and Empire: Ireland and the Geography of the National Education
System,” in Irish Classrooms and British Empire: Imperial Contexts in the Origins of Modern
Education, eds. David Dickson, Justyna Pyz, and Christopher Shepard (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2012), 5–17.
3 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, second edition (London
UK: Sage, 2010), 18.
4 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no.4 (1982): 777-795, 794.
5 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 22.
6 Fourteenth Report of the Commissioners of the Board of Education, in Ireland, H.C. 1812/13 (21)
vi.221, 4.
7 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); Nally, Human Encumbrances, 59; Matthew Hannah,
Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28.
8 First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, H.C. 1825 (400) xii.1, 91.
9 Copy of a letter from the Chief Secretary for Ireland, to His Grace the Duke of Leinster, on the
formation of a Board of Commissioners for Education in Ireland, H.C. 1831/32 (196) xxix.757
10 Third Report of the Commissioners of the Board of Education, in Ireland: The Protestant Charter
Schools, p. 15, H.C. 1809 (142) vii.461., 25; Nally, “‘The coming storm’: The Irish Poor Law,
colonial biopolitics, and the Great Famine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
98, no. 3 (2008): 714–741, 723–4.
11 Nally, “Governmentality,” 244.
12 Fourteenth Report of the Commissioners of the Board of Education, 1–5.
13 Hansard parliamentary debates, second series, xv, House of Commons (20 March 1826), cc. 2–24.
14 Kevin Lougheed, “National Education and Empire,” 11.
15 Clive Whitehead, “The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India,”
History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society, 34, no.3 (2005): 315-329.
16 Patrick Walsh, “Education and the ‘Universalist’ Idiom of Empire: Irish National School
Books in Ireland and Ontario,” History of Education, 37, no.5 (2008): 645-660, 656.
17 W. L. Burn, “Free trade in land: an aspect of the Irish question,” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society (4th series), 31 (1949): 61–74, 68.
18 John Morrissey, “Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal
University,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34: 1–24; John Morrissey, “Governing
the Academic Subject: Foucault, Governmentality and the Performing University,” Oxford
Review of Education, 39, no.6: 797-810.
19 Hansard parliamentary debates, second series, xv, House of Commons (20 March 1826), cc. 2–24.
20 Dean, Governmentality, 139; Rose, Powers of Freedom, 68.
21 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul
Rabinow (London UK: Penguin, 2000 [1983]), 277.
22 Copy of a letter from the Chief Secretary for Ireland, 2.
23 Dean, Governmentality, 138.
24 M.A. Peters, “Special Issue – The Learning Society from the Perspective of
Governmentality,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 38, no.4 (2006): 413–578, 413–4.
25 Rebecca Raby, “Polite, Well-dressed and On Time: Secondary School Conduct Codes and
the Production of Docile Children,” Canadian Review of Sociology 42, no. 1 (2008): 71–91, 77.
26 Roger Deacon, “Michel Foucault on Education: A Preliminary Theoretical Overview,” South
African Journal of Education 26, no. 2 (2006): 177–187, 184.
27 Dave Jones, “The Genealogy of the urban schoolteacher,” in S. J. Ball, ed., Foucault and
Education: Discipline and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990), 59; Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London UK: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), 211.
28 Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of
Government” British Journal of Sociology 43, no.2 (1992): 173–205, 185.
29 C. A. Airriess, “Governmentality and Power in Politically Contested Space: Refugee
Farming in Hong Kong’s New Territories, 1945-1970,” Journal of Historical Geography 31, no.4
(2005): 763–783, 776.
30 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London UK: Routledge, 2003), 34; Murdoch and Ward,
“Governmentality and territoriality,” 311.
31 Hennessy, “Administration,” 160.
32 Lougheed, “National Education and Empire,” 8.
33 Thirteenth Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, for the year 1846, H.C.
1847 (832) xvii.187, 3.
34 Kevin Whelan, “The Regional Impact of Irish Catholicism, 1700–1850,” in Common Ground:
Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland, eds. William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (Cork:
Cork University Press, 1988), 253–62.
35 Dáire Keogh, Edmund Rice 1762–1844 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 80–5.
36 Freeman’s Journal, 5 July 1834.
37 Open Letter to the Roman Catholic Clergy and Faithful of the Diocese of Tuam, as printed in
Freeman’s Journal, 2 November 1838.
38 Freeman’s Journal, 5 June 1839.
39 William J. Smyth, “Variations in Vulnerability: Understanding Where and Why People
Died,” in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, ed. John Crowley, Michael Murphy, William J. Smyth
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 180-198, 183.
92 Lougheed
40 Whelan, “Settlement and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in History of Settlement in

Ireland, ed. Terry Barry (London UK: Routledge, 2000), 187-205, 201.
41 Anne Gilbert, “The New Regional Geography in English and French-Speaking Countries,”
Progress in Human Geography 12, no. 2 (1988): 210; Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London UK: Verso, 1989), 212–7.
42 Doreen Massey, “Introduction: Geography Matters,” in Geography matters! A reader, eds.
Doreen Massey and John Allen (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1.
43 John Lynch, “Labour and Society, 1780–1945,” in Ulster Since 1600: Politics, Economy, and
Society, eds. Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press,
2013), 195-210, 197–8.
44 Evidence of Daniel Curoe, Roman Catholic Priest, parish of Drummaule, in Report from the
Select Committee on the New Plan of Education in Ireland, H.C., 1837, (543-1)(543-II) viiipt.I.1
viii pt.II.1, 1330-33.
45 See D. H. Akenson, The Irish Educational Experiment: The National System of Education in the
Nineteenth Century (London UK: Routledge, 1970), 187-202.
46 First Report of the Commissioners of Public Instruction, Ireland H.C. 1835 (45)(46)(47), 16.
47 Evidence of Maurice Cross, Manager of a bank in Belfast, in Report […] on the New Plan of
Education in Ireland, 1182.
48 Evidence of Daniel Curoe in Report […] on the New Plan of Education in Ireland, 1330-34.
49 Jonathan Murdoch and Neil Ward, “Governmentality and Territoriality: The Statistical
Manufacture of Britain’s ‘National Farm,’” Political Geography 16, no.4 (1997): 307–324, 311.
50 Murdoch and Ward, “Governmentality and territoriality,” 312.
51 Rose and Miller, “Political Power beyond the State,” 184.
52 M. S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems (London UK: Sage, 1984), 35.
53 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 163.
54 Rose and Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State,” 185.
55 Jones, “The Genealogy of the Urban Schoolteacher,” 59.
56 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 211.
The Press and the Pledge:
Father Theobald Mathew’s 1843
Temperance Tour of Britain
David Beckingham
University of Cambridge
ABSTRACT: This article examines Father Theobald Mathew’s temperance tour of

Britain in 1843. Estimates vary, but by this point some six million people in Ireland
may have made a personal pledge to abstain from consuming alcohol. This pledge
involved more than individual transformation, however. Building on recent Mathew
scholarship, this article explores how, through its methods of pledges, processions, and
meetings, temperance offered a new mode of moral politics. It is widely appreciated
that Mathew’s mission became entangled in the Repeal politics of Daniel O’Connell;
using newspaper sources and other contemporary accounts, the paper argues that
their campaigns instantiated differently drawn scalar moral visions, and different
ways of imaginatively connecting temperate bodies to broader social and political
aims that were mobilized around the category of the “nation.”
Introduction: the politics of temperance
For centuries past, drunkenness was the shame and the bane of Ireland; an Irishman
had become proverbial for intoxication.1
B
efore the great temperance movement had taken place in Ireland,” the Capuchin Friar
Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856) declared on a visit to London in August 1843, “that
unfortunate country was stained with crimes of the greatest enormity in consequence of
the habitual drunkenness of the people. No country in the world was ever affected with that sin
so much as Ireland, and to be an Irishman was almost to be branded as a drunkard.”2 Ireland,
Mathew’s speech suggests, had been a synonym for drunkenness. Frank Mathew, Theobald’s
brother’s grandson, wrote in 1890 that drunkenness was “the great fault of the peasantry, and was
almost universal among them,” believing that drink “made their day-dreams splendid.”3 Such
enduring tropes—evident in travel writing of the period—often tied concerns about land tenure
and the organization of agriculture to the role of alcohol as a cultural prop and as a potential cause
of poverty and disorder.4 Such stereotypes were not necessarily accurate, of course, and official
statistics for production and apprehensions for drunkenness were more indices of regulation than
offences against the law. But they nevertheless performed important cultural work, notably on
the other side of the Irish Sea: as Simon Potter notes in a recent review, British attitudes from
the 1798 rebellion through to the Land War often characterized the Irish as “ignorant, savage,
uncivilised, superstitious, priest-ridden, lazy and land-hungry.”5 There is, as Potter describes, a
complex historiographical debate over such representations and the work antonymic civilizing
discourses did to justify British government in Ireland.6 Nevertheless, as Mathew’s declaration
in London intimates, such characterizations formed an important underpinning to the emerging
politics of temperance, to a dramatic movement that challenged such representations of Irish
drunkenness.
94 Beckingham
Temperance, to quote James Kneale, “was not an aspect of bourgeois ‘social control’ [...] or
a disciplinary crusade, producing new mechanisms for subduing an unruly mass of drinkers.”7
Rather, in Britain, at least, its emergence in the 1820s and 1830s was linked to the articulation of
a vision of a society freed from the social and economic consequences of alcohol consumption.
Scholars have connected this to the effects of the liberalizing Beer Act of 1830, which had led to an
increase in the number of premises selling beer.8 Reproducing an early distinction between types
of drinks, a parliamentary select committee in 1834—whose radical chair James Silk Buckingham
(1786-1855) would play a prominent part in Mathew’s visit to London in 1843—blamed spirits
rather than beer for a range of personal, social and moral problems.9 But this anti-spirits stance
was itself challenged by an emerging culture of total abstinence, or teetotalism, with pioneers such
as Joseph Livesey in Preston having made public pledges to abstain from all alcohol.10 This radical
model of total abstinence symbolically demanded that pre-existing social structures such as the
pub be challenged by counter-attractions such as reading rooms and meeting halls.11 Notably, as
Henry Yeomans has recently put it, building lasting temperance relied on “transforming how
people perceive[d] themselves.”12
The teetotal message was embraced in Cork, Ireland, by a Quaker named William Martin,
who established a total abstinence society in 1835.13 It could count amongst its members a Church
of Ireland minister, a Unitarian merchant and lay-Catholics, but Martin’s masterstroke was to
persuade a Capuchin friar, Theobald Mathew, to join its ranks. Born at Thomastown, in County
Tipperary, in 1790, a descendent of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, Mathew had moved to Cork in
1814.14 Having worked with Martin at the town’s House of Industry and seen there the damage
caused by drink, in April 1838 Mathew agreed to sign the register of the new Cork Total Abstinence
Society.15 By August 1839 CTAS claimed twenty-four thousand members. Once Mathew started
travelling—to Limerick and Waterford in the winter of 1839, and then across Ireland in 1840—he
began to plant and draw together temperance communities in a broader national network.16 At
the center of these emerging “routes and routines,” to quote David Nally, was the pledge.17 The
candidates—or postulants—would kneel before Mathew in a semi-circle and repeat the words of
the pledge:
I promise, with the Divine assistance, as long as I shall continue a member of

the Total Abstinence Society, to abstain from all intoxicating liquors, except for
medicinal or sacramental purposes, and to prevent, as much as possible, by advice
and example, drunkenness in others.18
He would then place his hand on each person’s head, tracing the sign of the cross and giving
them a blessing. Ideally, they would then have their names and addresses entered in the Society’s
registers and receive a medal and rule card (those with means being asked to pay 8d.).19 The
nature of this pledge came under sustained scrutiny. Mathew repeatedly rejected claims that the
pledge was a “vow,” telling one correspondent in 1840 that it was a “resolution to perform a
moral act.”20 Some expressed concern that Mathew was appealing to supposed Celtic and Catholic
superstitions about the powers of priests: in other words that there was no moral transformation.21
The centrality of claims over morals to temperance disputes is especially significant. We
get a sense of this in letters from the pastor of the Independent Church in Cork, Alexander King,
to Mathew and to Daniel O’Connell. In November 1842 he urged Mathew to expand the moral
character of the people who had taken the pledge. “It is in, and by society, character is generally
formed,” he told Mathew, arguing that temperance was only a first step towards the improvement
and elevation of society.22 The pledge brought people under “the plastic power of reason and
religion,” putting them “in a position of susceptibility of improvement.” It was up to Mathew to
The Press and the Pledge 95
see that the “moral power of Christianity” was harnessed to improve individuals and thus “elevate
the intellectual and moral character of Ireland.”23 But what would this improvement look like?
King had already written to O’Connell, celebrated for his campaign for Catholic emancipation.
“You are the man to mould the mind of the Nation,” he wrote, arguing that from his privileged
position he could secure a heritage of “mental and moral dignity.”24 By appealing to Mathew to
consider society and to O’Connell the “Nation,” King was connecting what might have been read
as matters of individual conscience to the much more extensive moral geographies of the social
and the political.25
Various accounts suggest that by 1843 some six million Irishmen and women had taken
the pledge.26 The production of spirits as recorded by the government—hence not necessarily
a reliable index—had fallen, while anecdotal reports also hinted at the improved conduct and,
often, appearance, of the people.27 Figure 1 shows that the recorded production of spirits fell
steadily in the peak years of Mathew’s movement, as did the recorded number of distillers.
Even acknowledging Elizabeth Malcolm’s claim that subsequent government attempts to
increase duties probably stimulated illicit production, the impact on government revenues is
worth considering.28 The Cambridge-trained cleric William Wight reported that in 1842-43 the
government lost £300,000 in revenue on drink. Though cutting the tax-take might have appealed
to Repealers—Mathew even warned drinkers that their hard-earned money was “transferred
to a foreign country”29—Wight reckoned that revenues from Ireland that year rose by £90,000.
He suggested that people might be switching their spending to morally more desirable (though
still taxable) commodities.30 It is to the entwining of Repeal and temperance debates with this
recurrent theme of morality that I want to turn. The next section presents temperance as a form of
moral regulation and examines the moral visions that Mathew and O’Connell promoted.
Figure 1. Recorded production of spirits in Ireland (source BPP 1854 (175) LXV, 445 “Distillers, &c.”).
96 Beckingham
Moral regulation
The scale of Mathew’s movement prompts an important reflection on what James
Vernon has termed the broader “public political sphere” beyond the franchise.31 It is important
to consider the relationship between personal practices and the creation of spaces of temperance
politics. With badges and banners and organizational structures to unite and empower, Vernon
suggests that in Britain temperance should be seen in relation to an emerging party political
culture.32 These united identities were performed in mass-participation social events such as
parades. Bailey, Harvey and Brace note in their study of Methodist temperance in Cornwall that
religious doctrines helped routinize and inscribe on the body particular kinds of moral behavior.33
They also marked the spaces through which people paraded when they took to the streets with
their banners, accompanied by temperance bands. Mathew defended the rights of people who
had labored all week to “recreate” themselves on Sunday afternoons in such bands, though some
played at Repeal meetings against his wishes.34 That word “recreate” is significant here; it hints
at both recreation, as in leisure, and it indicates that participants were morally re-created through
routinization and inscription, through what Mark Billinge has described as temporal strategies, as
in how to use Sundays, and spatial strategies such as the creation of normatively “good” spaces.35
This relied on replacing the public house—which Kneale notes was widely read as “democratic
and popular”—with spaces and times where people could meet to read and talk.36 Mathew’s
friend Charles Gavan Duffy, a Young Islander and co-founder of The Nation newspaper, hoped
that the teetotal societies could “become the clubs, the adult schools, the lecture-rooms, the parish
parliaments of sober people.”37 This new temperance society—by which I mean socialization
rather than a particular institution—was at odds with models of boisterous and unruly public
assembly. And the regeneration of society was symbolically realized, Paul Townend perceptively
notes, in the way sober men and women could enjoy each other’s “rational company” at events
such as soirées, something Mathew was also forced to defend.38 In this environment, Townend
suggests, women were better able to exercise “moral influence” over their sober men in this
“transformed public sphere.”39
In his analysis of English temperance, Michael Roberts notes that, following franchise
reform in 1832, “the temperance movement acted both as a claim to citizenship and a training
for it.”40 But if, as Pamela Gilbert has also argued for England, “[t]he imagined community that
legitimated citizenship was the nation,” then, I would suggest that by creating a new kind of
moral community Irish temperance was making it possible to imagine a new kind of nation.41
This was the result of an uneasy alliance of modes of ethical self-formation—or the government
“of self by self” that delivered individual freedom from drink—and an alternative scalar vision
of governmental self-formation that challenged the notion that the British presence in Ireland
brought civility. I propose that temperance can be understood as a moral mentality and, following
Michel Foucault, as a practice of freedom.42 John Quinn links Mathew’s studiedly non-sectarian
and anti-confrontational campaign to a desire to gain the “goodwill of the British authorities and
the Ascendancy.”43 But this, Quinn argues, made Mathew “a man behind his times.”44 According
to Frank Mathew, the Friar would rebuke people for “their own folly,” rather than simply blame
English misrule.45 By individualizing faults and failings he sought to help the Irish free themselves
from the “degradation and shame” wrought by drink and so raise their children to be doctors,
councilors, and judges. People freed from drink made better subjects, then. On those terms,
freedom from drink was to Repealers no freedom at all. To return to Foucault, freedom is also the
product of “acting ethically,” of having fuller relationships with others; but care of the self only
comes about where there are pre-existing conditions of liberty.46 For O’Connell, temperance was
a means to a very different end. This reading saw individual freedom as a precursor to political
self-sovereignty, calling into question what Philip Howell terms the “moral scale of the nation
itself.”47
O’Connell told a Dublin meeting in April 1841 that temperance was producing “a moral
power, a magical intellectual force.”48 It had given him a “thoroughly obedient and docile people to
teach,” said one biographer in 1885, making his large and orderly “monster” meetings possible.49
The repeated references to morality and order are telling. O’Connell went on: “[M]y friends, no
country that conquers its own vices will ever be a slave to, or conquered by, any other on the face
of the earth.”50 A week later, The Times cast temperance as a kind of Trojan horse for Repeal.51
For The Freeman’s Journal, this attack went too far, the paper lamenting “that even our morality
should cause us to be assailed by the English press.” Did it follow, then, “that teetotallers should
have no politics?”52 Mathew knew that people could not be expected to give up on politics simply
because they had given up drink.53 All he could do was repeat that teetotalism did not control
people’s political opinions and demand that temperance meetings be kept free from political
discussions.54 For this reason, he was nervous about appearing alongside O’Connell in the Cork
Easter teetotal procession in 1842, an event that apparently brought two hundred thousand people
onto the streets. On Lancaster Quay, O’Connell knelt down to receive Mathew’s blessing, to the
recorded delight of onlookers.55 Mathew wrote to the Dublin Quaker teetotaller Richard Allen,
regretting “the insidious efforts to give to our society a political coloring, and to invoke a gloomy
fanatic cry against us.”56
The second half of this paper examines Mathew’s tour of England between June 1 and
September 15, 1843, a period when Repeal activity was intensifying. The physical distance
between Mathew and O’Connell symbolically highlights their contrasting moral visions, with
the tour serving as an opportunity for Mathew to build the movement among people “who were
alien to him in race and creed.”57 While Mathew emphasized the separation of temperance from
Repeal politics, I will argue that the reporting of Mathew’s meetings reveals that temperance
assembly was, nevertheless, political.
The pledge and the press
Having docked at Liverpool, Mathew headed for York where he had been invited to
a conference of northern teetotallers (see Figure 2).58 I want to note, briefly, the importance of
correspondence and correspondents in shaping Mathew’s travel.59 Newspaper coverage of his
work in Ireland meant that he was eagerly anticipated by teetotallers and spoken about by
opponents. Speaking before Mathew’s arrival, Edward Grubb—a founder member of Preston
total abstinence—launched into the editor of the Yorkshire Gazette for criticizing temperance
“processions, harangues, and tea drinkings.” Grubb argued that they had every “right to parade
the town,” defending their work against a rather common charge that it was somehow akin to
socialism and, therefore, presumably anti-bourgeois. Tellingly, the meeting ended with a vote of
thanks to the editors of three other local papers for their “disinterested” reports.60 And parade
again they would, with a procession through the suburbs and town to a place called St. George’s
Fields, where Mathew administered the pledge. As well as containing Mathew in a carriage-and-
four, the procession included teetotallers wearing medals, sashes, and white roses, from different
religious and practical causes. The spectacle was also witnessed by the local Catholic bishop and
two local Catholic noblemen, whose nearby estates Mathew would visit. Speaking later that day,
Mathew referred to anonymous letters that he had received in York accusing him of “imposing
upon the superstitions of the people of Ireland, by substituting teetotalism for the Gospel.”
Bluntly, he told his audience, temperance was the “foundation of every Gospel virtue,” to which
end he had paid for and distributed one thousand copies of the Bible and was having a 6d.-edition
98 Beckingham
printed to make the Bible accessible to “every teetotal head of a family in Ireland.”61 Echoing
Alexander King that temperance put people in a position of “susceptibility of improvement,”
Mathew’s defense was that temperance made other things possible.
The pattern for Mathew’s stay in England was set, with regular reports of processions,
charity sermons and non-denominational meetings. He administered the pledge where possible
and frequently confronted the issue of Repeal. At a breakfast meeting in Leeds, chaired by Edward
Baines of the Leeds Mercury, and surrounded by temperance advocates of different religious
persuasions, Mathew admitted that some teetotallers were “partisans of Repeal” but he made the
point that Ireland was a country of Repealers. Three hundred thousand people could now meet
and disperse without incident, when previously fifty had been unable to do so without trouble.
“If I am to be blamed upon that ground,” he said, “I must bear it.”62 Mathew asked his audience
to be “temperate also in their teetotalism” and “to be united,” as he hoped were the people of
“distracted” Ireland.63 He travelled on to Bradford, Huddersfield and Halifax before visiting
Figure 2. Towns on Father Mathew’s temperance tour.

Liverpool and Manchester. There would be no temperance procession in Liverpool, the Liberal
mayor Robertson Gladstone being concerned about potential sectarian tensions.64 Another was
cancelled in Manchester after Mathew was delayed.65 In these northern cities, he was careful
to attend to the immigrant Irish communities, often delivering the pledge in Irish. Six days in
Manchester apparently won eighty thousand people to the cause and three in Liverpool some
sixty thousand.66 In Manchester he reportedly offered this blessing:
May God bless you, and grant you strength and grace to keep your promise! May
God in his mercy grant you every corporal blessing and every spiritual blessing! I
will now mark each one of you with a sign of the cross, that you may bear in mind
that you have sealed your promise with the sign of man’s redemption; and should
the enemy tempt you to sin again, you may say to the tempter, “Do not molest me;
for I bear the sign of man’s redemption, by which I have sealed my promise and
pledge.”67
The value of the pledge as a kind of protection against future temptation is important. To some
critics the reference to sin and the invocation of God’s assistance for a healthy body and soul
made the religious status of the pledge somewhat ambiguous. The reference to corporal and
spiritual blessings might call to mind Foucault’s theory of pastoral power, but it is important to
note that total abstinence was not a religion; rather, Mathew told a Liverpool meeting that it was
the “superstructure” on which it could be built.68 For several days on two visits to Liverpool,
Mathew used a cemetery adjacent to St. Anthony’s church on Scotland Road to administer the
pledge. The setting and the accompanying clergyman on the platform—as many as nineteen on
July 17, 1843—surely heightened the sense of a church-sanctioned ceremony?69 Thomas Carlyle
happened to be passing, and wrote to his wife to explain how he had been attracted by the flags
and brass. He found Mathew distributing the pledge to a “lost-looking squadron.” “I almost cried
to listen to him,” he wrote, “and could not but lift my broadbrim [hat] at the end, when he called
for God’s blessing on the vow these poor wretches had taken. I have seen nothing so religious
since I set on my travels as the squalid scene of this day.”70 Thomas Carlyle’s reflections reveal
a belief that these squalid masses needed moral training and direction. In this context, Mathew
must have seemed like an effective leader. But, as he travelled, debates about the nature of the
pledge helped limit the appeal of his project.
From Liverpool, Mathew headed to Birmingham, though finding them unprepared he
travelled directly to London. As well as divisions between anti-spirits activists and total abstainers,
London’s teetotal groups disagreed over whether a postulant should be expected to pledge not to
provide other people with drink.71 Leading temperance figures such as J.S. Buckingham and Earl
Stanhope, president of the Westminster Friendly Temperance Society, which had sent an invitation
to Mathew as early as 1840, hoped the Friar’s visit would unite and promote different temperance
interests.72 His work in the capital began in earnest on July 31, 1843 on Commercial Road in the
East End, on the site of the soon-to-be-built church of St. Mary and St. Michael. He was late, East-
End Catholics apparently having insisted on parading him to the site. Earl Stanhope arrived at
1:00 p.m. and eulogized Mathew’s movement before taking the pledge in public in a group of
some three hundred people. It is no surprise that the papers began to debate the significance of
the pledge. The Times reported Mathew as administering a vow, though he sought to correct them
that it was simply a resolution. This was more than a trivial question of semantics. The Catholic
Tablet noted that, in contrast to a vow to God, there was nothing inherently sinful in breaking
the pledge. Sin would only result from actions committed after a return to drink. It is significant
for how we theorize the politics of assembly at Mathew’s meetings but also religion in the public
100 Beckingham
sphere—specifically with regard to what Habermas has termed “will formation”—that the paper
identified distinguishing features of the pledge.73 It was a “public” resolution, whose “solemnity”
would impress the postulant. But administering the pledge to groups was also important; it made
it a “joint” resolution, which deepened “the individual force of purpose.” Anyone breaking their
pledge would thus risk falling in the estimation of their peers. It was this sense of collective
enterprise that would bind the group, not the feeling of a promise to God.74
Mathew came under attack from a group convinced that there was no legitimate reason to
make such a declaration. The English Churchman argued that through baptism and confirmation
people had effectively pledged to abstain from “carnal desires of the flesh,” while they professed
in their catechism to keep their bodies “in temperance, soberness, and chastity.” It asked whether
Mathew’s “theatrical performance” would “secure a larger share of the Holy Spirit” than
would be received by dutiful sacramental Christians.75 Ahead of an expected visit by Mathew
to Cambridge, “A Churchman” told the town’s high church Chronicle that as they had never
made such sacramental professions Dissenters would be free to participate.76 The hostility in
Cambridge was certainly vocal. “I trust every true Protestant will scorn the man in Cambridge,”
wrote one correspondent to the Chronicle.77 But Mathew never made it, some accounts suggesting
that the Mayor refused the use of the town hall.78 The Cambridge Independent Press reprinted
correspondence between Mathew and the local temperance secretary Eli Walker, the Friar
explaining that he had been delayed in London and had been unable “to control circumstances.”79
But he did head from London to Norwich where, at a temperance rally, Bishop Edward Stanley
repented of his previous hostility to Mathew, asking the audience to receive him on his “sacred
mission [...] from a distant country.” The visit aroused some hostility, with opponents posting
criticisms on walls and in shop windows that the pledge was a kind of Catholic pseudo-religion.
They also raised the matter of repeal, which Mathew met with his customary argument that
teetotalism did not “control the political opinions of persons” but simply made their meeting
possible in a way that had previously been unimaginable.80
From Norwich he travelled to Birmingham, where the Catholic bishop Nicholas Wiseman
again probed the nature of the pledge. He noted that some preferred the idea of promising
rather than resolving to avoid alcohol. Wiseman put it to Mathew that rather than making a
promise to God, postulants “promised society—they promised their wives—they promised their
children—they promised themselves.” In some accounts, such as in The Times and the Illustrated
London News, Mathew was recorded as saying: “Precisely so.”81 The Metropolitan Temperance
Intelligencer and Journal, the organ of the Metropolitan Total Abstinence Society, thought that
most people would feel they were making “a promise to God, as well as to those around them.”82
Though Wiseman reckoned the distinction would be widely understood in Ireland, The Times
expressed its belief that the “kneeling crowds, the benediction, the solemn promise made by the
recipients” and the “sacred character” of Mathew all suggested that the pledge was a vow.83 And
it seems that Mathew lost the support of The Tablet’s editor Frederick Lucas here; having written
to a number of Irish priests, Lucas claims to have discovered at least fourteen different views on
the nature of the pledge.84
The public nature of this discussion is worth considering. Newspapers were also used to
advertise, such as the 2s. required to join Mathew for breakfast at the Mechanics’ Hall in Leeds, the
2s. 6d. for gallery seats at his charity sermon at Mount St. Marie Catholic Chapel in Bradford, or
the time he would start his work at St. Anthony’s in Liverpool.85 But coverage of the meetings and
speeches was even more important if the events were to have a wider impact.86 Jane Carlyle seems
to have feared such publicity. At Commercial Road, Mathew had helped her onto the platform
to witness him administer the pledge. She told her husband that she could not sleep that night,
for the “pale faces I had seen haunted me.” She admitted that she would have taken the pledge
there and then had she not “feared it would be put in the papers.”87 Others had more confidence.
Administering the pledge to Henry FitzAlan-Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, at Golden
Lane near the Barbican, Mathew said that it “was indeed delightful” to hear the Earl’s pledge in
public. The Earl was followed in the next group by twenty-one stokers from a local gas works
who, like the Earl, were presented with silver medals, Mathew reportedly quipping that when
they “came possessed of £500 each they could pay him for them.”88 The previous day Mathew
had taken the Marchioness of Wellesley’s pledge in private, though she apparently expressed
her desire that her example would encourage others. At the Wellington Cricket Ground near
Sloane Square, Mathew made capital from her “glorious example”, praising women for their
“moral courage and virtue.”89 But the Earl’s public pledge was doubly significant, not only for its
visibility but also its proximity to the stokers.
Here was Mathew’s method: appealing to people to come forward in small groups meant
that this was the very opposite of a faceless, disorderly crowd. Such orderly association would
be seen by casual observers, while Mathew knew about the power of the press. The attitude of
The Times, which had earlier likened temperance to treason, stands out. Mathew singled it out,
asking for three cheers for “The Times altered,” and elsewhere thanked it for the “partiality they
had shown to him.”90 Presumably such praise was an attempt to generate press coverage; indeed,
Mathew even suggested that next to God the press was the main reason for the “success which has
attended the great moral movement, total abstinence.”91 The papers, too, could report on different
groups, such as stokers or schoolchildren, their proximity a central part of the universalizing aims
and benefits of temperance. Seeing such scenes would encourage others to come forward. The
papers, meanwhile, were also watching each other. The Intelligencer, for example, was critical
of the “No Popery” of the Morning Herald and complained that The Tablet was ignorant of the
principles of teetotalism.92 While Irish papers such as the Freeman’s Journal were keen to update
their readers on Mathew’s progress in Britain, British editors were deciding how much coverage
to afford events in Ireland.
The Irish in London
On the same day that Mathew was teaching the Irish poor of St. Giles in London that
they could challenge the coding of their area as a “byword and a scoff” for drunkenness, Daniel
O’Connell was out in Roscommon. There he had argued that “no other country could exhibit so
much force coupled with so much propriety of conduct.”93 Now, days after his famous monster
meeting at Tara, he hailed “the mighty moral miracle of five million men pledged against
intoxicating liquors” as “the precursor of the liberty of Ireland.” If he “had to go to battle,” he
told them, “he should have the strong and steady teetotallers with him—the teetotal bands would
play before them and animate them in their time of peril.” Together, he said, they could fight
any army: “Yes, teetotalism was the first sure ground on which rested their hope of sweeping
away Saxon domination” in Ireland.94 Their second hope, he said, was their patience, virtue,
and goodness. They could defeat Wellington and Peel by moral force. At this point Mathew and
O’Connell were some 600 km apart; imaginatively it seems they were even more distant. For the
following morning, Mathew was at the house of the Conservative MP Colonel Dawson-Damer to
have breakfast with some seventy members of the nobility, including Lord and Lady Palmerston
and the Marquis of Clanricarde. Wellington and Peel were to have been there, but their absence
was perhaps accounted for by the impending close of the parliamentary session, Peel sending
apologies that he had been detained at Windsor.95
Readers of the Freeman’s Journal could turn the page from news of the breakfast meeting
to find John O’Connell quoting the Morning Herald’s account of the rest of Mathew’s day. Mathew
had gone from Dawson-Damer’s to Deptford where the platform was rushed by anti-teetotallers
102 Beckingham
wearing pint pots, a satire on the temperance medal. This was not the only such incident. John
O’Connell contrasted such disturbances with the orderly nature of the Repeal movement, built
on the moral force of Mathew’s message. Where was “civilization now,” he asked?96 The where
was as important as the now, here. Irish morality stood in direct contrast to British incivility.
Temporally, too, the now was a reference to self-sovereignty, a first step towards future political
self-determination. Father John Moore, a Catholic priest at Virginia Street Chapel in London,
made a similar critical comparison at one of Mathew’s meetings near Regent’s Park. Moore
likened intemperance in England to a “worm gnawing [at] society.” The report of his address is
worth quoting in detail, because it reveals the power of collective re-creation:
England was renowned for her naval and military strength, but if other nations had
not the power of sending 100,000 bayonets across the Atlantic to enslave far distant
countries, and to drag their people into the same infamous vice of drunkenness–if
other kingdoms had not this tyrannical power, which enabled them to command
the ocean and bid defiance to the world, they had something greater–they had that
virtue, that purity and innocence of mind, which could only be derived from the
observance of that beautiful virtue, temperance (cheers). Where was the man who
would tell him to-day that Ireland was not, morally speaking, infinitely superior to
England (cries of “No, no,” “Yes, yes,” and some confusion, which was drowned
in the vociferous cheering of the Irish portion of the people assembled).97
By any comparison with temperance speeches in those weeks—if accurately recorded—

this was quite an extraordinary contribution, Moore’s “moral imagination,” to use Philip Howell’s
phrase, explicitly reflecting back on the failures of England.98 But the English were not the target
here; rather, the priest was appealing to the apathetic Irish in the metropolis to claim and practice
their moral superiority (the Chronicle reported that though fifteen thousand visited the site
during the day only twelve hundred to fourteen hundred took the pledge):
Father Moore concluded by declaring that Irishmen in England who did not come
forward and take the pledge were no longer worthy of their country–they were
abortions of Ireland, and were worse even than the wild Indians or the savage
beasts of the field, who had already enlisted themselves under the banner of Father
Mathew.99
It seems that some were reluctant to “come forward” lest it reduce their chances of being
employed. Here we have to realize the centrality of the public house to the circuits of hiring
and paying wages for professions such as coal-whippers (who unloaded coal from barges), an
issue that was raised at one of the Commercial Road meetings at the same time as legislation
was being debated in parliament.100 Colm Kerrigan suggests that this anxiety about Irish jobs
explains the reluctance of the local Catholic hierarchy to embrace Mathew. The Vicar Apostolic
Dr. Griffiths was apparently worried that teetotalism would serve as another label with which to
exclude the Irish.101 Things may have been different further north, where, according to Ryan Dye,
Mathew represented “the type of Irish Catholic that the [English] church wanted Irish migrants
to emulate.”102 But by avoiding nationalist questions, Mathew may have alienated sections of the
Irish poor.103
He must have been disappointed by this, particularly as it seems that the English
contingent at his meetings was often motivated by curiosity rather than conversion. On a trip to
Enfield, Mathew elaborated how, though drink may have been a particular problem for the Irish,
it was never exclusively an Irish problem:
He said, it might be considered presumption on his part to address an English

audience on the subject of temperance. It might be said, why did he not stop in
Ireland? He could assure them that he came to this country on the most pressing
invitations. He had another inducement also, and that was the fear of resisting
the will of God; for he did believe from his heart that the cause of temperance
was blessed with Divine influence. Irishmen had been a depraved race of beings
through the baneful vice of drunkenness; but he was happy to say that they had
now become greatly improved, and that improvement had been effected by the
principles of total abstinence. Surely, then, if temperance was capable of effecting
so much good in Ireland, it might be attended with similar beneficial results in this
country.104
To achieve this, temperance could never be sectarian, a point Mathew reiterated with regard to
the constitution of Irish temperance societies.105 And it could not stop at the borders of Ireland.
Elsewhere he gave examples of the scale of his moral vision. In Hackney, for example, he praised
“Hindoos and Mahometans” for being favorable to total abstinence. Indeed, to demonstrate his
central claim that total abstinence was good for health and morals he even went as far as to claim:
“If there were no religion—if there were no hereafter—it was still better to have a sober population
than a drunken one.”106 But, self-evidently, despite some high-profile exceptions, Mathew’s hope
that his trip would help build a new movement lacked the large-scale support he had found in
Ireland. As a result, it seems only to have emphasized the differences that made what Ina Ferris
terms the “awkward space of Union.”107
Conclusion
Temperance and Repeal thrived on what Paul Townend terms the “parallel sense of
personal degradation, and the humiliating condition of Ireland as a disparaged national entity.”
Townend argues that they took root in the same soil: the “myth” of Ireland’s status as “a degraded
colonial slave-state.”108 Even if this hints at reasons why temperance won such support in Ireland,
it does not quite explain Mathew’s attempt to build relations with non-Catholic and non-Irish
temperance campaigners while in England. Townend implicitly recognizes the scalar politics at
work, but there are subtle differences in Mathew’s and O’Connell’s moral mentalities. Mathew
unequivocally connected freedom from drink to a recreated, regenerated Ireland. Frank Mathew
argued that Theobald’s dream was that “Ireland should cease to be the Cinderella of the sisterhood,
and should have equal rights and laws.” But, “he left others to decide whether Ireland should be
ruled from Dublin or Westminster so long as it was ruled fairly.”109 As such, he saw Repeal as a
short-term issue—it would succeed or fail, but either way it would have to be resolved quickly.
In scalar terms, temperance was a potentially limitless challenge. The apathy and antagonism
that greeted him in certain quarters in London appear to have taken their toll, Frank Mathew
concluding that the Friar returned to Ireland with “no belief in the Repeal Year day-dream.”110
The central Repeal message, by contrast, was that the sovereignty of the self that was displayed
by the temperate Irish preceded and made possible the kind of political sovereignty that others
would deny to Ireland. In this sense, and in contrast to Mathew’s model, temperance was a means
and not an end in itself. Freedom from drink was just the start; sobriety and order could be used
to challenge the very moral scale and category of the “nation” that campaigners such as Mathew
sought to improve.
I began this paper with an epigraph from the Halls. Samuel Hall published “A Letter
to Irish Temperance Societies” in November 1843. He noted that in their earlier work they had
challenged misrepresentations that surrounded Mathew’s campaign. Temperance, he said, had
104 Beckingham
given the Irish “an increased inclination to see, hear, think, and judge for yourselves.” Presenting
the end of the Penal Laws and the passage of Catholic emancipation as “proof that England is
determined to consider Ireland part of herself,” he complained of those who were striving after
a vain and undesirable object. Repeal, he warned, would not deliver “ample employment and
plenty of food.”111 The government’s subsequent clampdown on O’Connell’s monster meetings in
October 1843 and O’Connell’s imprisonment effectively finished the constitutional cause.112 But so
successful had O’Connell been in entangling Repeal with temperance that Mathew’s movement
was also dealt a significant blow.113 Its fate was largely sealed before the terrible famine years
transformed Ireland’s population in a very different way.114 But those skills of seeing, hearing
and thinking that Hall identified perhaps had a deeper legacy. Paul Townend contends that
CTAS’s legacy was “not so much a new standard of moral social behaviour,” but a new kind of
politics, “a new benchmark for the potential of collective action in Ireland.”115 Townend’s remark
about behavior carries weight, because so much about temperance was prospective; it sold a
brighter future. Various speakers at the London meetings made claims that temperance was
not intrinsically religious or political, but instead made such professions possible. Though he
outlined secular justifications for total abstinence, it is probably fairer to characterize Mathew’s
own position as non-sectarian.116 To say that temperance was not intrinsically religious belies
the fact that Mathew’s mission was grounded in the transformation of private consciences, of
souls and selves. Through its transformative potential, revealed in the structure of those London
meetings, temperance was also always political. As is evident from the very public nature of the
“pledge”—that promise to “society,” as Wiseman put it—the drama of temperance assembly held
out the possibility of forging more than individual identities.117
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philip Howell, John Morrissey, David Nally and, in particular,
Gerry Kearns, for commenting on different drafts of this paper. Philip Stickler provided the
outline map for Figure 2.
NOTES
1 Mr. and Mrs. S.C. [Samuel Carter and Anna Maria] Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c.
Vol. I (London: How and Parsons, 1841), 33.
2 “Father Mathew at Fulham,” Times, August 11, 1843, 6.
3 Frank Mathew, Father Mathew: His Life and Times (London: Cassell and Company, Limited,
1890), 23-24; Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement 1838-1849
(Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), 3.
4 Kerrigan, Father Mathew, 12.
5 Simon Potter, “Review of The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–
1882,” Reviews in History 501 (2006). http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/501
(accessed: June 9, 2014).
6 For more on representations of the Irish see Michael De Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish identity
and the British press, 1798-1882 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 25; David
Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame,
Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), 92 and Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch:
Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, 1993), chapter 9.
7 James Kneale, “The Place of Drink: Temperance and the Public, 1856–1914”, Social and
Cultural Geography 2, no. 1 (2001): 43-59, 45.
8 Henry Yeomans, “What Did the British Temperance Movement Accomplish? Attitudes to
Alcohol, the Law and Moral Regulation,” Sociology 45, no. 1 (2011): 38-53, 42-43; Michael
Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787-1886
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117. Also see Alan Hunt, Governing Morals:
A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9 British Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness,
1834 (559) VIII, 315.
10 Christopher Cook, Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 82; Lilian Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1988), 18.
11 The 1834 committee had recommended the establishment of parks, libraries and reading-
rooms, though it was largely ignored or ridiculed at Westminster. See Brian Harrison, Drink
and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1814-1872 (Keele, United Kingdom:
Keele University Press, 1994), 106-108.
12 Yeomans, “What did the British Temperance Movement Accomplish?” 42-43.
13 Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade, 52.
14 His Franciscan novitiate followed his withdrawal from Maynooth after hosting a party
in his room. The resulting freedom from Maynooth’s “nationalist orientation” may have
shaped his clerical and ecumenical development. See Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade, 35-6.
15 Katherine Tynan, Father Mathew (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1910), 28; Quinn, Father
Mathew’s Crusade, 58.
16 Paul Townend, Father Mathew, Temperance and Irish Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
2002), 41.
17 Nally, Human Encumbrances, 58.
18 John Sheil, Dr. Sheil’s Historical Account of the Temperance Movement in Ireland (Dublin:
Samuel J. Machen, 1843), 5. Original emphasis.
19 Ibid. Quinn notes that in 1841 Mathew removed the reference to membership and later the
clauses on medicinal or sacramental use, meaning people were pledging for life. See Quinn,
Father Mathew’s Crusade, 63.
20 Rev. James Birmingham concluded that the pledge bound people for only as long as their
membership of the Society, which they could revoke on request. Rev. James Birmingham, A
Memoir of the Very Rev. Theobald Mathew, with an account of the rise and progress of temperance in
Ireland (Dublin: Milliken and Son, 1840), 81.
21 “(From the Ulster Times.) Our Holy Father the Pope Again,” Times, January 16, 1840, 6.
Priests were often connected with “superstitious notions,” though the Halls argued Mathew
could have done more to remove the association; Hall and Hall, Ireland, 43. The Standard
reported claims that Mathew had performed upward of four hundred miracles, accusing
him of “spiritual and secular fraud,” Leader, The Standard, March 11, 1840, 2.
22 Alexander King, The Might and the Right of the People. Letters on Popular Education,
Temperance–Political Reform, &c. (London: Ward and Company, 1843), 20.
23 Ibid., 28.
24 Ibid., 17. Original emphasis. McGraw and Whelan have argued that before O’Connell
“Catholic culture was denied a public sphere; after O’Connell that was inconceivable”; Sean
McGraw and Kevin Whelan, “Daniel O’Connell in Comparative Perspective, 1800-50,” Eire-
Ireland 40, nos. 1-2 (2005): 60-89, 74. For more on the Catholic Church before emancipation,
see Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750-
1850 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006).
106 Beckingham
25 Kneale, “The Place of Drink,” 45. Also see David Beckingham, “Scale and the Moral
Geographies of Victorian and Edwardian Child Protection,” Journal of Historical Geography 42
(2013): 140-151.
26 George Bretherton, “Against the Flowing Tide: Whiskey and Temperance in the Making of
Modern Ireland,” in Drinking: Behaviour and Belief in Modern History, eds. Susanna Barrows
and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 147-164, 156; Townend,
Father Mathew, 1. For a discussion of the numbers, see Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation of
Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 6.
27 Some police inspectors did report local connections between temperance and Repeal. See
Kerrigan, Father Mathew, 124.
28 Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Ireland Sober, Ireland Free’: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century
Ireland (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 144; Kerrigan, Father Mathew,
170.
29 “The Very Rev. Theobald Mathew at Naas,” Freeman’s Journal, August 17, 1840, 1.
30 Rev. William Wight, A Word to People of Common Sense; Or, the Temperance Movement–
The Public Press–Opium Eating–Father Mathew, and English Protestants. By a Member of the
University of Cambridge (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1846), 21.
31 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815-1867
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 225.
32 Ibid., 79 and 164.
33 Adrian Bailey, David Harvey and Catherine Brace, “Disciplining Youthful Methodist Bodies
in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 1
(2007): 142-157, 143.
34 John Maguire, Father Mathew: A Biography (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Robert, &
Green, 1863) 191. See “Ireland. The Peaceful Agitation,” Times, October 3, 1842, 5.
35 Mark Billinge, “A Time and Place for Everything: An Essay on Recreation, re-Creation and
the Victorians,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 4 (1996): 443-459, 443.
36 Kneale, “The Place of Drink,” 45. Original emphasis. For more on the institutions and
infrastructures of the public sphere see Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures:
Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 288- 339, 291. For an account of the
Catholic Church’s attempts to create a “moral monopoly” through such a transformation,
see Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland (Dublin:
University College Dublin Press, 1998).
37 Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres. Volume I (Shannon: Irish University Press,
1969[1898]), 66. Mathew would later provide a character reference at Gavan Duffy’s trial.
The Young Islander William Smith O’Brien also spoke in support of temperance. See Richard
Davis, Revolutionary Imperialist William Smith O’Brien: 1803-1864 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press,
1998), 146.
38 Bretherton, “Against the Flowing Tide,” 150.
39 Townend, Father Mathew, 122. James Vernon makes a similar observation. See Vernon,
Politics and the People, 237.
40 Roberts, Morals, 152.
41 Pamela Gilbert, The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health and the Social in Victorian England
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 8.
42 Stephen Legg and Michael Brown, “Moral Regulation: Historical Geography and Scale,”
Journal of Historical Geography 42, (2013): 134-139, 136. See Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut
Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Müller and J.D. Gauthier, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice
of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” Philosophy & Social
Criticism 12, nos. 2-3 (1987): 112-131, 114.
43 John Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and America
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002) 8. For more on temperance and loyalty
see Matthew Allen, “Sectarianism, Respectability and Cultural Identity: The St. Patrick’s
Total Abstinence Society and Irish Catholic Temperance in mid-Nineteenth Century
Sydney,” Journal of Religious History 35, no. 3 (2011): 374-392, 392; Beckingham, “The Irish
Question and the Question of Drunkenness: Catholic Loyalty in Nineteenth-Century
Liverpool,” Irish Geography 42, no. 2 (2009): 125-144.
44 Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade, 8.
45 Mathew, Father Mathew, 69 and 71; Anonymous, An accurate report of the proceedings of the
Very Rev. Theobald Mathew, in Dublin, in the cause of temperance, when eighty thousand persons
took the pledge. With the sermon preached by him in the Church of the Conception, Marlborough
Street (Dublin: Richard Grace, 1840), 40.
46 Justen Infinito, “Ethical Self-Formation: A Look at the Later Foucault,” Educational Theory
53, no. 2 (2003): 155-171, 157. For a discussion of ethics see Barry Smart, “Foucault, Levinas
and the Subject of Responsibility,” in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy
Moss (London: Sage, 1998), 78-92.
47 Tony Ballantyne, “Ireland, India and the Construction of the British Colonial Knowledge,”
in Was Ireland A Colony? Economics, politics and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland, ed.
Terence McDonough (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 145-161, 146 for a discussion of
the imagination of the nation. Philip Howell, “Afterword: Remapping the Terrain of Moral
Regulation,” Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013): 193-202, 195. Original emphasis. In
some respects O’Connell’s “oppositional nationalism,” as David Lloyd terms it, needed
to obscure alternative readings of the very forms that were held to provide a unifying
identity. Lloyd profiles James Clarence Mangan, who declined to take Mathew’s pledge
apparently, according to Father C.P. Meehan, “because he doubted his ability to keep it”;
more symbolically, this might be read as a rejection of respectability as that quality that
constituted the nation. Lloyd examines how Mangan could nevertheless be recovered as
an “ethical subject by identifying him with an aesthetic or political type.” See David Lloyd,
Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural
Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), x, 46-7.
48 “Teetotalism and Repeal,” Times, April 15, 1841, 3.
49 S. Hubert Burke, The Rise and Progress of Father Mathew’s Temperance Mission (London: S.W.
Bleach, 1885), 4. Original emphasis. Also see Sean O’Faolain, King of the Beggars: A Life of
Daniel O’Connell (Swords: Poolbeg Press, 1980[1938]), 297.
50 “Teetotalism and Repeal.”
51 Leader, Times, April 21, 1841, 4.
52 Leader, “The Times–Teetotalism,” Freeman’s Journal, April 23, 1841, 2.
53 Maguire, Father Mathew, 231.
54 Speech at Lucan, June, 1842, cited in Burke, The Rise and Progress, 7-8; Rev. Patrick Rogers,
Father Theobald Mathew: Apostle of Temperance (Dublin: Browne and Nolan Limited, 1943), 61.
55 “Grand Temperance Procession at Cork,” Freeman’s Journal, March 30, 1842, 3; Maguire,
Father Mathew, 234-5, 237.
56 Cited in Tynan, Father Mathew, 87, and Townend, Father Mathew, 216.
57 Mathew, Father Mathew, 87.
58 Father Augustine, Footprints of Father Theobald Mathew: Apostle of Temperance (Dublin: M.H.
Gill, 1947) 281.
108 Beckingham
59 Mathew frequently travelled in mail coaches. One anecdote records that he was delayed at
Athy for five hours after local people demand he stop and take their pledges. See Stephen
Gwynn, Saints and Scholars (London: Thornton Butterworth, Limited, 1929) 130. Maguire
notes that protests at the “stopping of Her Majesty’s Mail” in an English paper were brought
to the attention of the coach operator, who promptly gave Mathew free use of his services.
See Maguire, Father Mathew, 55.
60 “Great Northern Temperance Demonstration,” York Herald, July 15, 1843, 6; Alex Tyrrell,
“Preston Teetotal Movement,” in Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: A Global
Encylopedia, eds. Jack Blocker, Ian Tyrrell and David Fahey (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003),
490-491.
61 “Father Mathew in England,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal, July 22, 1843,
225-7; “Father Mathew in England,” Tablet, July 15, 1843, 12.
62 “Father Mathew in England,” Tablet, July 15, 1843, 12. Baines had been inspired by
developments in Bradford, where a society had been founded in 1830, and later helped
establish one in Leeds. See Harrison, The Drink Question, 102.
63 “Father Mathew in England,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal, July 22, 1843,
225-7, 227. Original emphasis.
64 “Temperance Festival,” Liverpool Mercury, July 7, 1843, 226 ; “Progress of Father Mathew,”
Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal, July 29, 1843, 233.
65 “Local and General Intelligence,” Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, July 22, 1843, 5.
66 “Father Mathew in Manchester and Liverpool,” Liverpool Mercury, July 28, 1843, 252.
67 “Father Mathew in Manchester,” Manchester Guardian, July 22, 1843, 6.
68 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777-795, 783.
69 “Arrival of Father Mathew in Liverpool,” Liverpool Mercury, July 21, 1843, 242.
70 Letter dated 24 July 1843, cited in David Wilson, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others (1837-48)
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Turner & Co., Ltd, 1925), 232.
71 Kerrigan, “Father Mathew and Teetotalism in London, 1843,” London Journal 11, no. 2 (1985):
107-114, 107. See Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 130, for more on “schisms.”
72 For more on early disagreements, see Roberts, Morals, 150-1.
73 Jurgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1
(2006): 1-25, 3.
74 “The ‘Times’ and Father Mathew,” Tablet, August 19, 1843, 521-2.
75 “Father Mathew,” English Churchman, August 3, 1849, 491.
76 A Churchman, “Letters to the Editor. Father Mathew,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, and
Huntingdonshire Gazette, August 19, 1843, 2.
77 A Protestant, “Letters to the Editor. Father Mathew,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, and
Huntingdonshire Gazette, August 19, 1843, 2.
78 “Cambridge, August 28,” Bury and Norwich Post, and East Anglian, August 30, 1843, 3.
79 “Father Mathew’s Temperance Union,” Cambridge Independent Press and Huntingdon, Bedford
& Peterborough Gazette, September 9, 1843, 2.
80 “Father Mathew at Norwich,” Times, September 9, 1843, 3; Augustine, Footprints, 304.
81 “Father Mathew and Dr. Wiseman at Birmingham,” Times, September 13, 1843, 6; “Country
News. The Temperance Movement,” Illustrated London News, September 16, 1843, 183.
Wiseman wrote to The Times to elaborate on this distinction. See Nicholas Wiseman, “Dr.
Wiseman and Father Mathew. To the Editor of The Times,” Times, September 16, 1843, 6.
82 “Father Mathew at Birmingham,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal,
September 23, 1843, 300-302, 302.
83 Leader, Times, September 14, 1843, 4.
84 Augustine, Footprints, 323; Kerrigan, Father Mathew, 140.

85 Untitled, Leeds Mercury, July 8, 1842, 1; “Public Amusements,” Liverpool Mercury, July 21,
1843, 237. For more on the impact of ticketing see Vernon, Politics and the People, 151.
86 Andy Croll has argued that the letters columns of local papers formed an important part
in a kind of citizen-surveillance. Andy Croll, “Street Disorder, Surveillance and Shame:
Regulating Behaviour in the Public Spaces of the late Victorian British Town,” Social History
24, no. 3 (1999): 250-68.
87 Augustine, Footprints, 293; Mathew, Father Mathew, 85.
88 “Conclusion of Father Mathew’s Labours in the Metropolis,” Metropolitan Temperance
Intelligencer and Journal, September 16, 1843, 289-296, 293.
89 “Father Mathew at Chelsea,” Morning Chronicle, September 2, 1843, 4.
90 “Father Mathew in London,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal, August 5,
1843, 241-245; “Father Mathew at Regent’s-Park,” Times, August 12, 1843, 8.
91 Maguire, Father Mathew, 288.
92 “Continued Success of Father Mathew,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer, September 2,
1843, 273-274.
93 “Ireland,” Times, August 17, 1843, 6-7, 7.
94 “Father Mathew in St. Giles’s,” Times, August 21, 1843, 6; “Ireland,” Times, August 23, 1843,
5.
95 “Father Mathew in St. Giles’s,” Freeman’s Journal, August 24, 1843, 3.
96 “Loyal National Repeal Association,” Freeman’s Journal, August 24, 1843, 4; “Father Mathew
at Greenwich,” Times, August 22, 1843, 6.
97 “Father Mathew in Marylebone on Saturday,” Morning Chronicle, August 14, 1843, 6.
98 Howell, “Afterword,” 198.
99 “Father Mathew in Marylebone on Saturday.”
100 Mathew was reportedly interrupted by representatives of the licensed trade at Bermondsey,
where an attempt was made to sabotage the supports for his platform. See “Father Mathew
at Bermondsey–Outrage on the Apostle and Disgraceful Proceedings,” Morning Chronicle,
August 26, 1843, 2; Kerrigan, “Father Mathew and teetotalism in London,” 111.
101 Kerrigan, “Father Mathew and Teetotalism in London,” 112. The ambivalence of the
hierarchy mirrored a general reluctance among Irish bishops to endorse Mathew’s mission.
See Rogers, Father Theobald Mathew, 150.
102 Ryan Dye, “Catholic Protectionism or Irish Nationalism? Religion and Politics in Liverpool,
1829-1845,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 3 (2001): 357-90, 386; Beckingham, “The Irish
Question,” 128.
103 Peter Doyle, Mitres and Missions in Lancashire: The Roman Catholic Diocese of Liverpool 1850-
2000 (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2005), 42.
104 “Father Mathew in the Rural Districts,” Times, August 18, 1843, 6.
105 “Father Mathew in Kennington-Common,” Times, August 9, 1843, 7.
106 “The Temperance Movement in London,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal,
September 9, 281-288.
107 Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
108 Ibid., 269. My emphasis.
109 Ibid., 157.
110 Ibid., 125. Frank Mathew suggests that the Friar was anxious that those who followed
O’Connell might be fired by a “war-spirit.”
110 Beckingham
111 Samuel Carter Hall, A Letter to Irish Temperance Societies, Concerning the Present State of
Ireland, and its Connexion with England (London: J. How, 1843) 1, 7, 15.
112 For more on the geography of repeal see Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 276, though Bartlett references Mathew only in the
context of an 1870s concern with respectability (see p. 301).
113 Townend, Father Mathew, 231.
114 Mathew’s letters reveal a providentialist reading of the famine. See Quinn, Father Mathew’s
Crusade, 135.
115 Townend, Father Mathew, 268-9.
116 “The Temperance Movement in London,” Metropolitan Temperance Intelligencer and Journal,
September 9, 1843, 281-88, 283 and 286.
117 Habermas’s recent emphasis on the role of religion as a source of values in a contemporary
“postsecular” public sphere can be used to redress the neglect of religion and spirituality.
Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen, “Introduction: The Power of Religion in
the Public Sphere,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere: Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas,
Charles Taylor, Cornel West, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), 1-14, 4.
The Great Famine in Colonial Context:
Public Reaction and Responses in Britain
before the “Black ’47”
Carl J. Griffin
University of Sussex
ABSTRACT: Since the early 1990s the study of the Great Famine of 1845-52 has been
subject to a critical and creative renewal, with historians and historical geographers
alike producing detailed, nuanced, and theoretically rich understandings of the causes
and consequences of the blight made famine. Central to this renewal has been the
focus on the policy and relief reactions of the British government, the direct colonial
controllers of Irish policy. We also now know, thanks to the pioneering work of Christine
Kinealy, much about government-sanctioned and regulated charitable relief efforts
in operation from early 1847. What has not been subject to such detailed scrutiny is
the reaction and responses of the wider British public before 1847, the period when
the blight first appeared and changing British governmental responses acted to turn
acute scarcity into absolute biological need. In so doing, it shows that initially public
reactions were confused and complex, tending towards sympathy and indifference
at once, informed by a deep-seated public understanding—themselves shaped by
wider political discourses—that Ireland was a problem. Moreover, the major popular
political movements of the Anti-Corn Law League and Chartism opportunistically
exploited the emergent famine for their own campaigning ends. This is not to claim,
however, that popular reactions were altogether unfeeling, the fear and threat of
scarcity and famine in England and Scotland acting to foster shared concerns with the
poor Irish victims of uncaring absentee landlords. When it became apparent that after
the failure of the 1846 potato harvest and with the withdrawal of direct government
relief, people were beginning to die of want and from famine-related diseases, non-
government sponsored subscriptions to relieve the famine Irish were readily and
extensively entered into.
[Mrs Forster of Arranmore had written to England] till she was ashamed to tire
their generosity again, not once had she been refused from the churches there.1
The good faith of the empire should be staked to prevent the scenes that have
occurred in the west.2
T
he Great Famine casts a shadow over the culture and politics of Ireland and its peoples so
totally that it belongs to small group of events in global history that can truly be claimed as
marking a profound fissure in time and space.3 As is well-rehearsed, if not absolutely without
controversy, between 1846 and 1852 scarcity-made-famine robbed Ireland of one million of its
sons and daughters through starvation and conditions associated with chronic malnourishment,
and ultimately led to two million others fleeing destitution (and possible death) by seeking a
life overseas.4 The shadow of this disgraceful episode is, unsurprisingly, also cast on the telling
of Ireland’s “national story,” taking a central part in both general survey histories and in famine
112 Griffin
historiography’s dominant position in Irish social and political history and historical geography.
This has not always been the case. As Emily Mark-Fitzgerald has recently noted, it was not until
the 1990s that famine memorials increased in number from a “small handful” to more than 100.5
Similarly, as Christine Kinealy has suggested, it was not until the 1990s that the famine assumed a
vital place in the teaching of Irish history in schools and universities. Teaching of the famine had
been important before the 1930s, but thereafter revisionist histories in their attempt to forge new,
self-confident, post-reactionary nationalist identities “played down” the famine as a watershed in
the making of modern Ireland.6
From the late 1980s, the historiography of the Great Famine has witnessed an
unprecedented flowering. Through the pioneering acts of post-revisionist synthesis of, amongst
others, Margaret Crawford, Peter Gray, and Christine Kinealy, to the more quantitative,
economic history approaches of Joel Mokyr and Cormac O’Grada, to more recent culturally and
politically sophisticated studies by Tim Pat Coogan, Emily Mark-Fitzgerald and David Nally,
and in John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy’s Atlas, the famine has truly assumed
a new centrality in Irish history.7 One aspect of post-revisionist accounts that is truly novel—
in comparison to both pre-1930s historiography and later revisionist accounts—is the emphasis
placed on relief schemes, highlighting the ways in which the giving of “relief” was in and of
itself constitutive of turning scarcity into a devastating famine. Conversely, this post-revisionist
literature has also shown how humanitarian impulses acted to check further devastation. Indeed,
the giving of relief in both the form of formal, statutory poor relief through the Irish Poor Law
of 1838 and through public donations have become a critical theme in post-revisionist accounts,
perhaps best reflected in Kinealy’s 2013 monograph Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: the
Kindness of Strangers.8 Moreover, as James Donnelly notes, “ever since the Great Famine people
have debated the culpability of the British government in the mass deaths which marked
and defined that horrendous social catastrophe.” 9 The response of the governments of Prime
Ministers Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell has been subjected to intense critical scrutiny.
What has not figured in such studies, though, is the British public’s reaction to the famine. The
one exception is Donnelly’s examination of British public opinion of the June 1847 Poor Law
Amendment Act, and this exclusively through the lens of the anti-relief Times and the Illustrated
London News. Similarly, Kinealy’s recent study of relief practices and giving has analyzed in
detail the workings of the British Relief Association of Extreme Distress in the Remote Parishes
of Ireland and Scotland (BRA). It is important to note though that the BRA was established in
January 1847 at the behest of Prime Minister Lord John Russell and assistant secretary to the
British Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and publicly backed in two letters of support by Queen
Victoria. This was no spontaneous public outpouring of sympathy and support. While many
working and middle-class communities and individuals did generously the support the BRA, in
relation to the British public reaction Kinealy’s account focuses more on the actions of prominent
individuals and businesses and groups supporting the mission of the BRA.10
This paper builds upon these critical studies in asking what the British public response
and reaction to the famine was before the founding of the BRA. In so doing, it widens Donnelly’s
study of British public opinion to encompass a broader range of sources of public record, considers
the responses of the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartist movement, and asks whether non-
state sanctioned public subscriptions were raised before the “official” call.11 It does so, initially, by
placing into perspective British official and state-sanctioned relief efforts and responses. Before
that, it is necessary to place the making of the famine into Ireland’s wider colonial and geo-
pathogenic context.
The Great Famine in Colonial Context 113
Blight made famine: the British colonial context
In commercial affairs, as well as in political, Ireland is going backwards. Her

population in latter years has doubled; so have her resources–so have her
agricultural capabilities–but the blight of English legislation is over it all.12
The potato harvest of 1845 promised to be prodigious. As the Banner of Ulster put it at the
beginning of August, “this crop—the staple of Ireland—is more abundant this season than it has
been for several years past.”13 Plants were healthy and there was “scarcely” any blight “in the
North.” So bountiful would be the crop—the heaviest in years even—that prices were expected
to fall.14 A month later and in the full swing of harvest, the Belfast press was not only reporting a
better than expected grain harvest in Antrim but also that the late unseasonal showers had in no
way damaged the potatoes.15 The Dublin Evening Post went further: “[T]here never, perhaps, was
a finer growth of Potatoes, which are selling at about half the price of this time last year.”16 The
blessing of Divine Providence, so reckoned the Limerick Chronicle, had protected the crops and
allowed a glut of new potatoes to be sold cheaply at Limerick market in late August.17
Reports from elsewhere in north-western Europe were in stark contrast. In early August
a strange phenomenon was witnessed in the potato fields around Nimeguen and Heusden in the
south Netherlands: potatoes dying in the course of one night.18 Once infected, all potato plants
in the field withered and dried up in a few hours. Similar reports were soon also being made in
Belgium, northern France and around the Rhine. More-or-less concurrently, reports of an unusual
blight also issued from the Weald of Kent and Sussex in England.19 In late July, a localized “partial
blight” had been noticed, but by August 12, 1845 it had spread through East Sussex and Kent
leading to predictions that there would be a “failure, to a great extent” in the crop.20 “Complaints”
that potatoes had turned black and were found to be of no use whatsoever were soon termed
“very general.”21 A week later, the spread was said to be rapid, with cases confirmed on the east
coast in Essex and Suffolk and westwards into Hampshire and Surrey.22 By the end of August
reports confirmed that the blight had spread as far west as the area around Truro and Redruth in
Cornwall. So extensive was the damage—and so all consuming was critical commentary in the
provincial and horticultural press—that speculation started as to the cause of the blight (variably
the poor weather of the “season” was to blame, murrain had spread from cattle, or a pathogen
was spread in the air) and as to ways in which the “rot” could be cured.23
In Ireland these reports were noted with, as Kinealy puts it, “curiosity rather than
alarm.”24 On August 29, 1845 the Cork Examiner, on reporting the “most serious apprehensions”
in southern England, could still reassure its readers that the north of England was as yet free from
the blight and there was “not the least symptom of its approach” anywhere in Ireland.25 This
was not strictly true, for in late August the blight had been observed at the Botanical Gardens in
Glasnevin, Dublin.26 While this was not initially made public, and similar observations were not
published “lest after all the suspected visitation should only prove imaginary,”27 on September
6, 1845 both the Dublin Evening Post and the Waterford Freeman announced that Irish potatoes
had now been killed by the blight.28 As the editor of the latter publication grimly reported, the
spread of the blight was already “considerable” and the likely consequences “very serious.” Or
as the Cork Examiner put it four days later, “our worst fears are likely to be realised”; and soon,
notwithstanding that markets continued to be plentifully supplied and prices low, it and other
newspapers were warning of the likelihood of famine.29
While subject to revision and counter-revision, an effect of the potato blight—the water—
and air-borne pathogen phytophthora infestans as it was later identified—was a famine with a
mortality rate, according to Amartya Sen, higher than for any other recorded famine in human
114 Griffin
history, with only the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s comparable in the history of modern Europe.30
Between 1846 (there were no famine deaths in 1845) and 1852 one million people perished, with
some two million others leaving Ireland, many of these individuals also dying on their journeys
or soon after arriving in America, Canada and England.31 But, as historians of the famine have
noted, crop failures do not themselves make famines. Social, cultural, legal, and political systems
do. In the context of 1840s Ireland, it was arguably the interplay between three interrelated
colonial systems that turned scarcity into famine.
First, the landowning system meant that the vast majority of the land was owned by
a small group of largely absentee landlords who through land law and customary practices
enjoyed almost total power over their tenants. Most tenants were the landless laborers, holding
one-year contracts with no incentive to invest in their small plots, while at the same time needing
to maximize the return from their rental planted for the short-term only, invariably in the form
of the prolific potato. British acknowledgements that the system was essentially unfair as well
as fears for the sustainability of agricultural subdivision, given recent rapid population growth
(from 6.5 million in 1841 to a probable 8 million in 1845), led to the Devon Commission being
established by Peel in 1843 to investigate the occupation of land. Reporting in early 1845, the
Commission’s investigations were neither as extensive nor were its recommendations for land
reform as wide-reaching as had been hoped.32
Second, British mercantile policy was both in a state of ideological flux and geopolitical
confusion. By the time the potato blight started to wreak its havoc in the fields of Ireland,
the dominant issue in British politics was reform of the so-called Corn Laws, a complex and
much-amended protectionist system comprising a sliding scale of import duties for corn
designed to protect English farmers from the full effects of foreign competition. An anathema
to both industrialists who believed that the corn laws acted to “artificially” inflate the cost of
food, and hence the wages they paid to their workforce thereby reducing their international
competitiveness, and to the apostles of Adam Smith, the balance of members of the House
of Commons was gradually shifting in favor of repeal. This was in no small part due to the
innovative and effective campaigns of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League. Amongst
their number was Peel, converted to the free trade cause in the 1820s but leading a Tory party
and government of landowners ideologically and self-interestedly against repeal. The position in
relation to Ireland–at once part of the union and yet commercially subject to different values and
rules–was messy, provisional and decidedly partial. When, seemingly against the parliamentary
odds, repeal passed through the Houses of Commons and Lords on May 12, 1846, it was applied
in relation to Ireland in decidedly doctrinaire ways.33
Relatedly, and finally, Ireland’s status as a colonial “problem” while also part of the Union
was reflected in confused and often contradictory policy impulses and prescriptions. As noted,
the issue of land reform never achieved wholehearted support from either Whigs or Tories,
both often finding their governments reliant on support from Irish landowning MPs. Even the
early evidence of famine conditions in late 1845 and early 1846 proved no spur to shift from the
characteristic hesitancy to actually “meddle” with Irish land policy. As Robert Shipkey has put
it, Peel’s 1841-46 administration initially followed the by-then customary “do nothing” policy in
relation to Ireland. From 1843, the position of Peel’s government shifted from policy inactivity to
“conciliation,” this evidenced in the setting up of the Devon Commission and Peel’s unequivocal
public support for Catholic education in the form of significantly increasing the grant to the
Maynooth seminary in 1845.34
It is possible to overplay conciliation though, for neither policy met Irish demands
nor worked politically for Peel, a situation reminiscent of the political aftermath of his Irish
“concession” in the form of Catholic Emancipation in 1828-9. For the majority of British
(elected) politicians, Ireland remained a problem. One hundred years of scarcity and famine and
seemingly endemic agrarian protest against hardnosed absentee landlords and their capitalist
grazier tenants producing grain, dairy and meat for the British market, had left successive
Westminster governments frustrated at their inability to control the unruly colony. Not even the
bitter repression of the United Irishmen between 1798 and 1803 and the concurrent dissolution of
the Irish parliament and the passing of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland acted
to check the perception that Ireland remained not only a problem but apart. The resurgence of
Irish nationalism in the early 1840s through the Young Ireland “movement” (arguably the most
coherent, non-sectarian assertion of Ireland’s right to self-government against British colonial self-
interest) under the charismatic direction of John Blake Dillon and Thomas Davis, also represented
a major nationalist threat to the future of the Union. Contra the form of Irish nationalism peddled
by Daniel O’Connell, it also represented a threat to the interests of landowners.35
None of this meant that the British state had given up on Ireland. Social reform, political
control and the cultural embrace with the Union remained the holy grail, the solution (always) one
piece of legislation away. As Gray has noted, “[t]he transformation of Irish society was to follow
directly from Corn Law repeal,” this just the latest in a long time of attempts to engineer colonial
cohesion.36 Nally has recently suggested that not only was the British state complicit in trying to
reform Ireland, to bring it under its control, but it also actively used Ireland as a test bed for new
techniques of governing, new forms of governmentality. By positioning Ireland as both a form
of property and as a problem, it was also possible to assert the authority to regulate and classify
the Irish body politic and the bodies of Irish men and women, with the population disaggregated
according to their use, “conduct and perceived threat to social order.”37 The primary object of
political strategy of this new approach then was the regulation of “the basic biological features
of the human species,” and under its prescriptions scarcity and famine were permissible as the
possible means to provoke desired political and social outcomes.38 As Nally, drawing on the work
of David Keen, puts it, “famines now ha[d] functions as well as causes.”39 With this in mind, the
following section details the response of the British government to the onset of the scarcity and
the (engineering of the) famine.
British state responses and relief, 1845-47
As noted, the immediate reaction of the Westminster government to the sign of extensive
potato blight in Ireland was to do nothing. Initially the policy was not without some justification,
for Home Secretary Sir James Graham was correct in his assessment that, while blighted, the
crop was abundant.40 Past shortages had not led to famines, hence there was hope—however
naïve and misplaced—that Irish cottiers would be able to survive the winter without government
intervention. Peel was also deeply skeptical of Irish communications in the early months after
the identification of the blight, believing that, as in the past as he saw it, Irish magistrates were
“calling wolf.”41 Pleas by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury, on October 27, 1845
that to “tranquilise the public mind and diminish the panic” the government ought to offer some,
as Shipkey has put it, “show of action” were ignored. The revived Mansion House Committee
(formed in Dublin in 1821 to raise subscriptions to assist distressed areas) also made a plea to
Peel through Heytesbury that exports should be banned, distilleries prohibited from using grain,
public granaries founded, and a program of public works set up to employ those out of work. This
too received short shrift. Missives from similar organisations in Belfast, Cork and Londonderry
were likewise passed off.42
In short, the initial response was thereby predicated on a combination of past prejudices
and experiences, Peel’s ideological adherence to the self-righting powers of political economy,
combined with what he perceived to be a lack of decisive evidence. To this end, two factors are
116 Griffin
critical. Governmental refusal to ban exports was founded on two understandings. First, that if
merchants could find an overseas market for diseased potatoes then they should be allowed to
export them and bring cash into the economy, which, in turn, would be used to import nutritious
foodstuffs. Second, food exports were normally limited to the main cash crop, wheat (“corn”),
dairy products and livestock. While potatoes dominated the diet of the vast majority of the
population—Irish laboring families not just eating potatoes out of necessity but also supposedly
preferring them to other foodstuffs—the acreage devoted to wheat far exceeded that given to
potatoes. Wheat was a cash crop, a cash crop that supported Irish landlords, merchants and
British bread-dependant consumers. Hence allowing wheat exports, especially after what had
been a fine harvest, would be of no consequence.43 Or so the theory went. This would later have
public consequences as the theories of political economy were more doggedly and ideologically
followed by Russell’s Whig administration than Peel’s Tories. By 1849 as, George Bernstein has
put it, “the British were sick of the whole business and were reluctant to spend any more of their
money on a people who would not help themselves.”44 Non-interventionism was thought to be
“justified” by the political economy policy prescription of laissez-faire and was supported by the
“famine mythology” that nothing could be done, that the deaths were acts of God.
Towards gathering evidence as to the actuality of scarcity and the severity of the blight, in
October 1845 Peel instituted a Scientific Commission and accordingly sent two scientific advisors
to Dublin. Their reading of the evidence in eventuality was proved wrong, the claim that five-
sixths of the crop would be lost thankfully being unduly pessimistic. Their claim was, however,
at least in part responsible for a shift in policy.45 Realizing the potential severity of the situation,
in November 1845 it was agreed that a new approach was to be implemented from the following
spring, when it was thought food supplies would in all probability become perilously short.
Mirroring government responses to the 1816 crisis and building upon relief offered by the 118
operable poor law workhouses, Peel instituted a program of public works to employ those out
of work, the secret purchase of £100,000 of Indian corn (maize) from the United States, and the
creation of a relief commission.46 The impact of these policies is hard to precisely discern, but it is
worth noting that the one hundred or so local relief committees (most being based in the southwest)
had to apply to the Dublin-based Relief Commission for Indian corn, and, if successful, were to
sell it at market prices, later changed to cost price and in cases of extreme distress gratis. The Relief
Commission was also slow to act, something not helped by the constant and resented interference
of Trevelyan, the permanent secretary to the Treasury under both Peel and Russell’s governments.
Slowness as a result of monitoring was also a problem that afflicted the special relief department
of the Board of Public Works administering public work programs.47 Furthermore, food depots
supplying the local committees were not to open until May, notwithstanding that localized
shortages were felt from March. Food riots followed in Carrick-on-Suir, Clonmel and Tipperary
targeting merchants and forestallers charging “famine” prices for wheat. Notwithstanding their
being put down by the military and provoking strong condemnation in parliament, they did lead
to some depots being opened earlier than had otherwise been planned.48 The local committees also
had some success in raising financial support through local subscriptions, the £98,000 collected in
this way supplemented by a grant of £65,914 from the Lord Lieutenant.49 While the importation of
Indian corn was not meant as a direct substitute for potatoes—Peel’s intention was that it would
help to keep the price of food down and deter hoarding by speculators—it did act as a substitute.
Albeit one popularly loathed as evidenced in the popular satirical name given to maize, “Peel’s
Brimstone.”50
Together, such measures (notwithstanding the myriad problems including administrative
frauds on the public works that were widely publicized in the British press) were effective in
preventing famine deaths, though badly stored and prepared Indian corn did lead to widespread
illness. Against this “success,” it has been claimed that a consensus emerged in British public and
political opinion. The efforts and expenses of the Westminster government had allowed, so the
argument went, Irish landlords to shirk from their duty. Peel’s package was therefore just another
sticking plaster against the pressing need to reform Ireland. Moreover, the giving of relief had
supposedly acted to depress local stimuli to action.51
The blight reappeared in July 1846 and by mid September the whole country was affected.
Coinciding with a British political crisis and the fall of Peel’s government in the fallout after the
passing of the Importation Act on May 16 that repealed the Corn Laws, relief policy initially
remained unaltered. Besides, Peel’s policy of importing Indian corn was scheduled to end on
August 15 and as a temporary expedient was never intended to continue after that date, the
government now acting only as the supplier of last resort. Indeed, only a handful of depots
remained open, and these in the worst affected areas of the west.52 Yet against mounting evidence
of likely chronic scarcity, the policy adopted by Russell’s incoming (minority) Whig administration
proved even more doctrinaire and inflexible than Peel’s government. Considerable power now
rested in the hands of Trevelyan and Charles Wood at the Treasury. Working from a belief that
Irish taxpayers as opposed to the Treasury should be liable for relief costs, Russell’s government
not only decided not to renew the import of Indian corn but also determined that public works
should be funded through Poor Law taxation. Wages on public works were also to be set below
market rates, though such were the delays created by Treasury-imposed checks before works
could start and so late were payments often made that what little potential positive effects of the
scheme were further checked.53
Despite this and that in some places individuals refused to work on the schemes such
was the pay and the conditions of work—the Treasury in such cases decreeing that the particular
project would stop until all “outrages” had stopped—the demand for public work exceeded
supply in the exceptionally harsh winter. By January 1847 570,000 men were so employed, a figure
that rose to 734,000 in March, thus at its peak one in three men and roughly two million people
were supported by the public works program.54 But against this level of support, in January 1847
the British government resolved to end the program of public works and by the autumn make
the poor law responsible for the maintenance of all individuals, a system of public soup kitchens
to meet needs in the interim. To this end, a 20 percent reduction in public works was imposed on
March 20, 1847, with a sliding scale of further cuts following, this notwithstanding that public
soup kitchens in many places were not yet operative. In this way, so Russell’s government
desired, ultimately the needs of the suffering Irish would be met by Irish taxpayers, the market
for foodstuffs left to operate without state intervention, and Irish society and the economy would
be transformed. That winter, with the ports continuing to export huge amounts of corn and
livestock to Britain and even America, the Irish constabulary estimated that 400,000 individuals
died through want of food.55 As the Irish radical newspaper The Nation put it, the abandonment
of public works was a “murderous absurdity,” evidence of the British government’s “utter apathy
to the tremendous responsibility with which they are trifling.”56
Against the slow withdrawal of the direct relief efforts of the British state, charity was
not only encouraged but directly supported by Russell’s government. As noted, the landlord-
dominated local relief committees had by August 1846 raised £98,000 in donations, but this
represented a fraction of what was being spent, let alone that needed to prevent a humanitarian
disaster.57 Moreover, in Britain, so Peel had believed, there would be little private sympathy,
and thus no efforts were made to stimulate charity. If the Whigs too were slow to recognise
the possibilities of harnessing charitable support, this soon changed. Through the influence of
the Indian Relief Fund—which raised funds for Ireland in India and Ceylon—and pleas from
Anglican clergy in Ireland, Trevelyan began to conceive that charity could provide an important
118 Griffin
safety net, which would allow the government to, as Gray puts it, “adhere rigidly to its relief
rules.”58 Evangelical morality could thus save political economy. Providing Irish landowners set
the example, all would follow out of a sense of brotherly and sisterly compassion.
The British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in the Remote Parishes of
Ireland and Scotland was founded in the City of London in January 1847. The Association
was under the immediate lead of chair Thomas Baring, of the self-named bank that had earlier
purchased the Indian corn on behalf of Peel’s government, but had been founded at Trevelyan
and Russell’s instigation.59 The (publicly stated) aim was to aid the poor “who are beyond the
reach of government” with food, clothes and fuel.60Advice was also taken as to the best means
to proceed in Ireland from the most important pre-existing relief organisation, the Central Relief
Committee, itself founded in Dublin in November 1846 by the Society of Friends and active in
raising money from their members in both Ireland and England.61 In support of this new British
charitable initiative, the Queen issued an official letter in January 1847 calling for collections in
every parish in the land, this supported by sermons in parish churches. The effect, as has been
well documented, was immediate and emphatic. Personal donations from Queen Victoria of
£2,000—her support doubled due to the inclusion of Scotland in the scheme—and her ministers
(Russell giving £300) made giving to Irish charity both an act of religious duty and fashionable.62
By the time the BRA finished its activities in the summer of 1848 it had raised £470,041 1s. 2d.,
of which £391,700 17s. 8d. was expended in Ireland.63 Over fifteen thousand donations had been
made, including from British corporations, universities, the British army, as well as from overseas,
mostly from British colonies.64 Relief, it was resolved, was to be given in food rather than money,
though in some areas this rule could not be adhered to as no food was available to purchase. In
the spring of 1847 seed oats were also distributed in the west in a further departure from stated
policy. Local committees were created, food depots founded, and agents and even the Royal
Navy engaged to help determine need and distribute relief. Most of its money was expended
that spring and summer of 1847, thereafter on the introduction of the Poor Law Extension Act in
August its activities were confined to the most distressed unions, continuing until July 1848 when
its funds were finally exhausted.65
British public responses and relief, 1845-47
Given the ravages of phytophthora infestans in England and Scotland, initial commentary in
the British press about the effects of the blight in Ireland were quick to draw parallels but also to
forewarn of singularly devastating consequences given the reliance of Irish cottiers on the potato.
As a letter to the Cambridge Independent Press suggested, the on-going public scandal over the fact
that inmates of the Andover Union workhouse in Hampshire had been reduced to supplementing
their potato-heavy diet by gnawing green bones was a ready warning of the reliance on the potato.
England might be “far removed at present from the horrors of […] the depopulation of famine,”
but this served as a warning.66 More directly, as the Wiltshire Independent reported, “Ireland is
threatened with famine, not merely that periodical dearth between the potato-crops every year
which puts a third part of the people into a state of destitution, but a failure of the potato-crop
itself.”67 Detailing cases of crop failure throughout Ireland, the piece concluded by predicting that
as “[t]he consequences of such a failure of the staple food in Ireland are terrible to contemplate
[…]. Government will of course take some steps.”68
With the notable exception of the Chartist press—of which more below—anti-Tory
newspapers invariably suggested the solution to the likely crisis was to repeal the Corn Laws
and throw open the ports. Even some parts of the provincial and agrarian Tory press suggested
that some limited, targeted opening of the Irish ports to allow relief for the sufferers of Ireland
was laudable. As the editor of the Ipswich Journal put it: “[I]mportation made under the proper
regulations […] will excite no regret, or cause complaints from the agricultural interest.”69 The
temporary repeal of the Corn Laws would however offer no “relief” to the Irish poor. The paper
of the Hampshire landowners, likewise believed it was “an absurdity” opening the Irish ports for
the import of corn because those in need “cannot afford to purchase it.”70 Instead, relief would
come from “the [charitable] benevolence of the people of England.”71
The loudest voices though were those clamouring to open the ports as a prelude to (or
part of an immediate) Corn Law repeal. Richard Cobden, co-founder and chief propagandist
of the Anti-Corn Law League (ACCL), was quick in the autumn of 1845 to offer free trade as
the solution to the failure of the potato crop, “starvation staring in the face” of the people of the
“unhappy sister island.”72 Such commentaries, not least his speech given at the Great League
Meeting at Manchester on October 28, 1845, were widely publicized and Cobden’s argument
and language adopted in the editorials and published letters of the pro-Corn Law repeal press. A
speaker at a “great free trade meeting” at Taunton in late December even went as far as to claim
that campaigning for the repeal of the Corn Laws was a “noble struggle” for the good it would
be in opening up the Irish ports to avoid “all their horrors.”73 Speakers at a further Manchester
meeting in December again spoke in emotive terms about the likely sufferings of the Irish poor
and (tellingly) on the negative impact the blight had made on Manchester-Irish trade.74 A £50,000
subscription was duly raised—not to relieve the Irish but to support the ACLL’s campaign.
Similarly at a public meeting in Sheffield to consider the repeal of the Corn Laws, in the main
speech Alderman Dunn played on the emotional solidarities of the largely working-class audience
by, when mentioning the state of the poor in Ireland, proclaiming “he could never do so without
feelings that he could scarcely describe.”75 While the first speech of a public meeting at Leeds
on December 3, 1845—postponed from noon to 7pm so as to enable the “working classes” to
attend—opened by making reference to the state of the hungry in Ireland and England, it asserted
that the poor in both countries the victims of “class” legislation.76 This belief was ‘confirmed’ by
comments made by the Dukes of Richmond and Norfolk at a meeting of Sussex agriculturalists
at Steyning, near Brighton, in early December. Richmond, improbably, suggested that laborers to
‘uphold the flags of Nelson and Wellington’ and import their own potatoes from Portugal, while
Norfolk, explosively, recommended that the Irish eat their diseased potatoes with curry powder.
Norfolk’s comments quickly gained notoriety throughout Britain and Ireland, giving further
credence to the emergent popular belief that the landed classes of both islands little understood
or cared for the hungry working poor. The situation was especially pressing given that, as the
Exeter press saw it, Ireland was ‘bordering upon a state of absolute famine’ with the ‘same evil’
also threatening England. 77
Blight in Ireland was thus read as a warning for England’s domestic situation—note,
reporting on the possible effects of the blight in Scotland figured little in the initial English
commentary—and mobilized as evidential ammunition in the increasingly vituperative battle
between those for and against the repeal of the Corn Laws.78 No less vitriol-laden was the
relationship between the ACCL and the Chartist leadership, a dynamic which can be read as
having impacted upon Chartist responses to the blight and emergent famine in Ireland.79 While
the ACCL swiftly and decisively attached themselves to the issue, prominent Chartists were
more equivocal. Chartism had a loose grip on Ireland, only flourishing in Dublin (and then in
partnership with the Irish Universal Suffrage Association) between 1841 and 1844. Thereafter, the
most obvious connection was through Irish migrants in Britain subscribing to the Charter and
assuming positions of power in the movement, notably founder and editor of the Leeds-based
mouthpiece of the movement the Northern Star Feargus O’Connor, and advocate of the Chartist
Land Plan Bronterre O’Brien. Moreover, in matters Irish there was considerable division between
prominent Chartists, with dissent over O’Connor’s prominent use of the Northern Star to espouse
the repeal of the Union.80
120 Griffin
The Northern Star first reported the existence of the blight in the Channel Island and
south and west England on August 30, 1845, but it was not until November 1 that the paper first
alluded to the possibility of a famine in Ireland and England.81 This, and subsequent reporting,
were used to attack both the ACCL—accused of using the “crisis” to advance the interests of
“capital” against those of “labor”—and Peel’s mercantile and colonial policy. O’Connor also used
the opportunity of a speech in London on November 5, 1845—his first in Britain that autumn—to
mobilize the blight as evidence of the need for land reform and support for the Chartist Land
Plan.82 Beyond opportunism to push particular agendas, the early Chartist response was best
summed up in an open letter from O’Connor to “the Imperial Chartists” published in the Northern
Star: “the excitement of free trade, the militia, war, famine, and the Queen’s speech, instead of
diverting your attention from that all-important subject [land reform], will rather lead you to a
consideration of it as the means of making you independent of all casualties, whims, caprices,
and class legislation.”83 Even as late as the May Day Chartist rally of 1847 when the full enormity
of the effects of famine in Ireland were evident, the response of O’Connor and other prominent
Chartists was to espouse the criticality of the Land Plan as a solution to the Malthusian check.84
This is not to say that ACCL and Chartist commentary, speechifying and reporting were
devoid of genuine sympathy towards the Irish poor. Indeed, what united pro- and anti-Corn
Law repealers and Chartists alike was an apparent genuine fear for the human consequences
of blight and government inaction. From early 1846, almost without exception each issue of the
Northern Star made some reference to the effects of the blight (both in Ireland and elsewhere) and
the actual and likely effects on the Irish poor. Yet outside of reprinting news from the Irish press,
such reports invariably were used to make a broader political point. Thus on February 14, 1846,
a report on the appearance in “many districts” of “pestilence” (“ever the attendant of famine”)
juxtaposed “the assaults of the hungry” with “sleek and fat horses […,] a bloated police force,
a gorged soldiery, bursting war horses.”85 At the same time Peel was accused by O’Connor of
a similar opportunism in using the pretext of the social dislocations of scarcity and the rise in
agrarian protest to introduce to Parliament in May 1846 the Irish Coercion Bill. Ultimately the bill
failed and with it brought down Peel’s government.86
Nor were other public journals entirely without feeling in their reporting, but, as with
Chartist commentary, at least before October 1846 reports on the state of rural Ireland were often
used to offer a wider critique of British mercantile, agrarian and colonial policy. Thus the Church
and State Toryism of the Salisbury Journal berated Peel for the state of Ireland:
If any thing were wanting to demonstrate Sir Robert Peel’s incompetence to carry
on her Majesty’s Government in Ireland, it might be found in the present state
of that kingdom. [With] rampant and furious […] Orangemen in Ulster, and
O’Connell and his followers […] howl[ing] for repeal of the Union in the south,
Ireland was out of control. Against this, [f]amine, with all its attendant horrors,
glares at them [Peel’s cabinet].87
The solution, however, was not “English charity, Saxon benevolence,” as in the past,
but instead the Irish Poor Law and the “proprietors of the soil […] exposed to the indignation
and disgust of the British public,” who themselves had grown rich “by exactions from these
poor creatures.”88 From a different political perspective, Peel was also subject to the scorn of the
Fife Herald in late October for having sent only the two scientific commissioners to Ireland to
investigate the “disease” in the potato crop.89 Less obviously wracked by ideological feeling was
a commentary in the Leeds Times on 8 November 1846 bemoaning that against famine—“already
a pressing and palpable thing”—the poor were suffering as “Ireland is being drained of her best
food to supply the wants of England and Scotland.”90 At the same time, Scottish potatoes were also
still being exported to the Nordic countries and Baltic states. Through such trading England was
again averting famine, but Ireland was still subject to the structured “perennial famine” which
kept a third of its population in a state of constant hunger and starvation and Scotland likely
subject to like disaster.91 Or as the Cambridge Independent Press put it, “it is an extraordinary fact,
that while the people of the south of Ireland are threatened with famine, the quays of Limerick
and Waterford are crowded with vessels taking grain and other provisions for England.”92 As
Peter Gurney has suggested, in such ways the ‘politics of provisions’ remained center of the
British political stage in late 1845, the example of Ireland a warning to England.93
Such early reports betray a degree of confusion as to the actual and likely impact of the
blight on the people of Ireland and as to the best prescription to aid the problem. This was not
even divided on political (or Corn Law repeal) lines. For every Tory press assertion that this was
Ireland’s problem, came commentaries, such as that in the Tory Hampshire Advertiser, that the
people of England had a charitable duty to help.94 The only explicit call to raise subscriptions to
aid those suffering from the early effects of the blight I have uncovered though related not to the
Irish poor but instead the hungry of Scotland.95
During the winter of 1845-6 this might have been a function of reports acting to reduce the
humanitarian impulse when suggesting that the initial fears as to the universality and severity
of the blight had not been realized. This and the eventual government relief policies evidently
impacted public willingness to collect money to support Ireland. Nor should we underestimate
the potential impact of the ACLL campaign to raise £250,000 through subscriptions, not least given
that this campaigning was strongest in those places with the large migrant Irish communities
and thus also where metropole-colony solidarities were strongest.96 In the first half of 1846
other dynamics militated against the raising of public subscriptions. The reporting of abuses
of state-funded public work schemes was, as noted, widespread, as were reports of agrarian
protest and landlord evictions. Collectively such reports were taken by much of the press as
evidence of purblind landlords and violent mendicant peasants, of a country beyond the help of
further charitable giving.97 This was best exemplified by Home Secretary Graham placing before
Parliament on June 8, 1846 a bill by the name of “Protection of Life (Ireland),” concerned not
with famine relief measures but instead the means to put down “agrarian insurrection.”98 And
this followed parliamentary utterances to the tune that past English subscriptions had simply
found their way directly into the pockets of Irish landlords, their exported corn being purchased
in England by subscriptions and shipped back to Ireland. As Peel had stated in the House of
Commons after the Easter recess: “I affirm that the responsibility rests rather upon those who
are resident on the spot, and upon those who, not being resident, have a still moral obligation to
transmit their subscriptions through their resident brethren.”99 The duty was resolutely not that
of the British people.
The depth of feeling on issue was best summed up by an editorial of the independent,
politically liberal Bristol Mercury in April 1846. The British government, it noted, had intervened
in providing Indian corn but could not, so it had professed, undertake to feed the Irish people, this
after all being the duty of Irish landlords. What stores it had left were being held, for it foresaw
“a far worse time coming,” and this retention was thus, as the paper asserted, the “humane
course.”100 Irish landlords, by way of contrast, had raised only a “few paltry hundreds” through
subscriptions, even though the mechanisms to collect funds were in place via Daniel O’Connell’s
Union “repeal rent” fund.101 England, it thundered, was ‘”looked [to] for everything—and blamed
for everything.”102
Beyond the emotive rhetoric and the misinformation regarding indigenous relief-raising,
the fact that such reports even appeared in the politically liberal press acted powerfully to
122 Griffin
undermine British public action. This was explicitly, if sheepishly, acknowledged in reports of
the “munificent contribution” from India for the relief of the Irish poor.103 As the Morning Post
related: “Whatever distrust may have been entertained at home at the representation made by the
‘Mansion-House Committee’ on the subject of Irish distress, there can be no second opinion as
to the noble generosity which has prompted the remittance of no less a sum than three thousand
pounds for its relief.”104 A “respectable meeting” had been held in Calcutta on January 2, 1846,
a general committee formed and various members of the Irish–note, not British–nobility, clergy,
and academy invited to become trustees of the “Bengal Subscription” and responsible for the
distribution of the funds.105 By January 21, 1846, the subscription amounted to 39,000 rupees,
with a further subscription started in Madras with hopes of the like happening in Bombay. As
Kinealy notes, subscribers were supposed to be limited to British and Irish settlers, though some
Indians also offered their support, the Calcutta Committee (a.k.a. the Irish Relief Fund and the
Indian Relief Fund) expressing their wish that even the smallest donations were welcome.106 At a
distance, if not at home, the British did raise relief funds by subscription before the prompt of the
government-backed scheme.
The tenor of British public reactions changed markedly in late summer when the potato
crop was found to be an almost total failure. “The people of this country,” warned the editorial in the
London Standard on September 3, 1846, “must prepare for exertions to save millions of our fellow
subjects.”107 While stopping short of advocating public subscriptions—though the subscription
of 1822 had been a “glorious monument to British generosity”—the columns of the paper in the
ensuing days marked a notable shift in tone.108 By the beginning of October the absolute certainty
of a humanitarian disaster prompted a shift in British popular opinion and action. Well-attended
public meetings to consider what means to adopt to alleviate the suffering of the Irish poor were
held in London and entered into subscriptions.109 Concurrently, the National Club (founded in
London the previous June with the aim of upholding “the Protestant Principles of the Constitution,
and for Raising the Moral and Social Condition of the People” in Britain and Ireland) unilaterally
acted. It resolved in “this frightful emergency” to act on “the impulse of their own feelings and on
the suggestions of many” to open a general subscription to support both the Irish and the poor in
the Scottish Highlands.110 A large committee of noblemen and MPs was duly formed to determine
upon the distribution of subscribed funds, and to provide against “imposition” from claimants.
This news prompted the Standard to change its line on subscriptions: “they who feel and rejoice
in ‘the blessedness of giving, may now indulge in their glorious disposition with a full assurance
that they can do nothing but good.”111 By mid November the National Club had already raised
over £900.112
This and the aforementioned other early October London subscriptions were by no means
the only such funds raised before the foundation of the BRA in January 1847. While London was to
remain the central focus for British relief efforts—something acknowledged by a deputation from
the Cork Relief Committee being dispatched to London in November to solicit subscriptions—
other local subscriptions were also launched.113 While the archive is no doubt defective in recording
such ad-hoc, localized collections, it is striking that those schemes reported figured heavily in
Lancashire and Yorkshire, counties with large migrant Irish populations and strong cultural and
trade links with Ireland. Bristol, another large maritime city with a large Irish population and a
strong Irish trade, followed suit in raising a subscription in early January 1847.114 Concurrently,
in December the Quakers also entered into a national subscription in Britain to aid the Central
Committee in Dublin in establishing soup kitchens. By mid December it was reported that £20,000
had been raised, of which £1,000 alone came from the “good givers” of Leeds.115
Conclusion
In many ways initial British public reactions to the famine mirrored those of the Peel’s Tory
administration and those of the wider Imperial Parliament. Blight, and its likely attendant effects,
was at once a domestic and a colonial issue. It was something that united Britain and Ireland,
for the fear of famine was not something confined to Ireland but something sensed in England
and absolutely felt in the Scottish Highlands. The demotic experience of the “Hungry 40s” in
Britain mediated the understanding of the plight of more distant kin.116 But while shared, lived
experiences and an emergent laboring cosmopolitanism (as given expression in much Chartist
writing) underpinned empathy for the hungry Irish in some places, it is important to note that
there continued to be an entrenched culture of xenophobia.117 Attacks on Irish migrant workers,
for instance, remained an important part of working culture into the 1840s.118
In the case of the major centers of Irish migrant populations, the experience of Irish hunger
was not shared at a distance but something shared immediately and in place. At the same time
against this Unionist interpretation, the wider political rhetoric was not that this was a British
problem, a problem of the united countries of the Union. Rather, it was represented as a colonial
problem, a consequence of the structural problems with the Irish economy and society. Together
these dynamics meant that the undoubted deep human feeling for the sufferings of the Irish poor
evident in the public response was tempered by the belief that, at best, this was either another
false alarm or, at worst, this was something the Irish had brought upon themselves, a belief later
given scriptural frame in the “providential” reading of famine deaths. Typified by the responses of
both the ACCL and Chartist campaigners, the problem was therefore, as Gray and Nally amongst
others have suggested, an opportunity to restructure Ireland. To change Ireland from a problem
colony to an effective and profitable part of Britain.119 This reading is given further depth by the
fact that whereas before the autumn of 1846 popular subscriptions for the relief of the hungry
Irish were not raised in Britain, they were raised in other British colonies. Such were the bonds of
solidarity.
In addition, it is important to underline that beyond hardened positions, when the
evidential realities of “pestilence and famine” in Ireland became irrefutable, the response was
unequivocal. Against the brutality of the policy response of Russell’s government—and before
the Treasury-sanctioned launch of the BRA campaign—subscriptions for the relief of the famine
Irish were raised in Britain. Beyond the coordinated activities of the National Club though, it is
impossible to get at the depth of this subscription movement by virtue of its ad-hoc, uncoordinated
nature, and as such we will in all probability never know how universal or important it was.120
Yet the existence alone of such pre-BRA local subscriptions is telling. It speaks directly to the
existence of a humanitarian concern motivated not by government, royal speeches, popular
political movements, religious foundations, or even charities, but something moved by a sense
of colonial responsibility and human solidarity. It is important to note though that this corrective
assertion of empathy does not act to diminish the importance of the popular fervor manipulated
by the BRA subscription. Critically, nor does it reduce the human impact of the ‘compassion
fatigue’ that followed the BRA, the discourse of the British press and political debate shifting
from sympathy to asserting that resurgent Irish Nationalism and rural rebellion was evidence
of “monstrous ingratitude.”121 Rather, it reminds us that there was not one British response but
many, changing both over time, and between different places and groups.
As noted, the literature on this devastating, politically framed famine has since the
early 1990s developed at pace, addressing gaps in our knowledge, asking new questions of the
archive, and showing a more nuanced, sophisticated understanding of the catastrophe. Historical
geographers in particular have contributed massively to these new understandings, visualizing
124 Griffin
the effects of the famine and placing the events of 1845-9 into a wider theoretical and international
context.122 In this spirit, this paper has shown that further nuances and complexities can be fruitfully
examined from a historical-geographical perspective. Beyond showing that the British popular
reaction went beyond politically manipulated and controlled, this paper also demonstrates the
need to look not only at the wider colonial landscape but also at the contours of reaction and
response in the metropole itself.
NOTES
1 Maureen Murphy, ed., Annals of the Famine in Ireland: Asenath Nicholson (Dublin: Lilliput
Press, 1998), 77. Nicholson’s account was originally published in London in 1850 and in
New York the following year.
2 Letter to the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, 8 January 1847; quoted in Cormac Ó Gráda,
Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 77.
3 For an important recent study of the memorialization of the famine, see Emily Mark-
Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool, United
Kingdom: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
4 For a recent geographical analysis of the impact of the Great Famine on Irish demographics,
see A. Stewart Fotheringham, Mary Kelly, and Martin Charlton, “The Demographic Impacts
of the Irish famine: Towards a Greater Geographical Understanding,” Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 2 (2013): 221-37.
5 Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine, 2.
6 Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan,
2006), xviii-xix.
7 Margaret Crawford, Famine: The Irish Experience, 900-1900 (Edinburgh, United Kingdom:
John Donald Publishing 1989); Peter Gray, The Irish Famine (London: Thames and Hudson,
1995); Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843-1850 (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 1999); Kinealy, Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland
(London: Pluto Press, 1997); Kinealy, The Great Famine in Ireland: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Kinealy, This Great Calamity; Charity and the Great Hunger
in Ireland: the Kindness of Strangers (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland
Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850 second edition
(London: Routledge, 2005); Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond; Tim Pat Coogan, The
Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (Basingstoke, United Kingdom:
Palgrave, 2013); Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine; David Nally, Human
Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2010); John Crowley, William J. Smyth, Mike Murphy, eds., Atlas of the
Great Irish Famine (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012).
8 Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland.
9 James Donnelly, “‘Irish Property Must Pay for Irish Poverty’: British Public Opinion and
the Great Irish Famine,” in Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, eds., “Fearful Realities”: New
Perspectives on the Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996), 60-76.
10 Donnelly, “Irish Property Must Pay for Irish Poverty”; Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger
in Ireland, chs. 8 and 9. Also of note is David Nally’s study of Thomas Carlyle’s writings
on his travels through Ireland from September 1846, though this is not a study of public
reactions per se: ‘“Eternity’s Commissioner’: Thomas Carlyle, the Great Irish Famine and the
geopolitics of travel,” Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 3 (2006): 313-335.
11 Donnelly, “Irish Property Must Pay for Irish Poverty.”

12 Cork Examiner, 20 January 1845, 2.
13 Report from the Banner of Ulster reprinted in Freeman’s Journal, 6 August 1845, 4.
14 Leeds Times, 9 August 1845, 4.
15 Belfast News-Letter, 2 September 1845, 4.
16 Dublin Evening Post; quoted in Belfast News-Letter, 2 September 1845, 4.
17 Limerick Chronicle; quoted in Belfast News-Letter, 2 September 1845, 4.
18 Cork Examiner, 20 August 1845, 4.
19 Sussex Advertiser, 12 August 1845, 2.
20 Morning Post, 15 August 1845, 2; including report from Kentish Observer.
21 London Standard, 19 August 1845, 4; including report from Dover Chronicle. “Some ‘failures’
of the potato harvest had been noticed in Devon in late July, though whether this was due to
the same blight seems improbable,” Sherborne Mercury, 2 August 1845, 4.
22 Sussex Advertiser, 19 August 1845, 2; Morning Chronicle, 20 August 1845, 6; Cork Examiner, 22
August 1845, 2 (including letter to the editor from Body and Co., Mark Lane, London).
23 Cork Examiner, 27 August 1845, 4; including report from the Gardener’s Chronicle; Royal
Cornwall Gazette, 29 August, 3; Sherborne Mercury, 30 August 1845, 4.
24 Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 31.
25 Cork Examiner, 29 August 1845, 3.
26 E. Charles Nelson, The Cause of the Calamity: Potato Blight in Ireland 1845-7, and the Role of the
National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1995): 5. As Nuala Johnson
notes, under the lead of head gardener David Moore, Glasnevin became a major center of
study into the blight, though the various experiments into prevention and cures ultimately
had no positive effect: Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical
Gardens (London: IB Tauris, 2011), 60-63.
27 Cork Examiner, 10 September 1845, 3.
28 Dublin Evening Post, 6 September 1845, quoted in Austin Bourke, “The Use of the Potato
Crop in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland
21 (1968): 72-96, 72; Waterford Freeman, 6 September 1845, quoted in Cork Examiner, 10
September 1845, 3.
29 Cork Examiner, 10 September 1845, 3; Cork Examiner 15 September 1845, 2; Freeman’s Journal,
17 September 1845, 1. See also: Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop.”
30 For references on revision and counter-revision, see note 7 above. Amartya Sen, Poverty
and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
University Press, 1990 [1981]).
31 Five thousand famine refugees alone were buried at Grosse-Île in Quebec in 1847, this being
the largest famine gravesite outside of Ireland: Gilbert Tucker, “The Famine Immigration
to Canada, 1847,” American Historical Review, 36, no. 3 (1931): 533-49. For an excellent study
of the public health implications of the arrival of the “famine Irish” in Liverpool, see Gerry
Kearns and Paul Laxton, “Ethnic Groups as Public Health Hazards: the Famine Irish in
Liverpool and Lazaretto Politics,” in Esteban Rodríguez-Ocaña, ed., The Politics of the Healthy
Life: An International Perspective (Sheffield, United Kingdom: EAHMH Publications, 2003):
13-40.
32 On the structure of Irish landholding and its agricultural and social effects, see Robert
C. Shipkey, Robert Peel’s Irish Policy: 1812-1846 (New York: Garland, 1987): 472-477; Gray,
Famine, Land and Politics, passim.
33 Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League
(Leicester, United Kingdom: Leicester University Press, 2000).
126 Griffin
34 Shipkey, Robert Peel’s Irish Policy, 468, 361.

35 On the aftermath of the United Irishmen’s 1798 rebellion, see James Patterson’s excellent In
The Wake of the Great Rebellion. Republicanism, Agrarianism and Banditry in Ireland after 1798
(Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2008). For the Young Ireland
“movement,” see Richard Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1988); Gerry Kearns, “Time and Some Citizenship: Nationalism and Thomas Davis,” Bullán:
An Irish Studies Review 5, no. 2 (2001): 23-54
36 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, 119.
37 Nally, “The Biopolitics of Food Provisioning,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 36, no. 1 (2011): 37-53, 40.
38 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.
39 Nally, “The Biopolitics of Food Provisioning,” 40. For David Keen’s conception: The Benefits
of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwesern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).
40 British Library, Add Mss. 40451, fo. 286, Sir James Graham to Sir Robert Peel, 18 September
1845.
41 Shipkey, Peel’s Irish Policy, 468-9.
42 Ibid., 470; Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 56.
43 Iain McLean and Camilla Bustani, “Irish Potatoes and British Politics: Interests, Ideology,
Heresthetic and the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” Political Studies 47, no. 2 (1999): 817-839.
Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 49, 60.
44 George Bernstein, “‘Liberals, the Irish Famine and the Role of the State’,” Irish Historical
Studies, 29, no. 116 (1995): 513-536, 536.
45 Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 53-56. A further survey was carried out by Irish
constabulary in March 1846. The blight was found to have had the worst impact in Armagh,
Clare, Kilkenny, Louth, Monaghan, and Waterford where losses were in excess of two fifths
of the crop.
46 Ibid., 56-57; Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, 18-23. On the state of the Irish
Poor Law see: Peter Gray, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815-43 (Manchester, United
Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2009). It is important to note that initially import
duties on Indian corn were not respited, for, in the words of Home Secretary Graham, “if
we opened the ports to maize duty-free, most popular and irresistible arguments present
themselves why flour and oatmeal, the staple of the food of man, should not be restricted
in it supply by artificial means, while Heaven has withheld from an entire people its
accustomed sustenance […]. Can these duties, once remitted by Act of Parliament, be ever
again reimposed?” Graham, to Peel, 13 October 1845, in Charles Stuart Parker, ed., Life and
Letters of Sir James Graham, Second Baronet of Netherby (London: John Murrary, 1907), 115.
47 The best study of the administration of the public works during the famine remains Arthur
Griffiths, “The Irish Board of Works during the Famine Years,” Historical Journal 13, no. 4
(1970): 634-652.
48 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, 120; Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 61-63.
49 Instructions to the Committees of Relief Districts, extracted from Minutes of the
Proceedings of the Commissioners appointed in reference to the apprehended scarcity,
British Parliamentary Papers 1846, vol. 37 [171].
50 Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 62, 64.
51 Ibid., 63-4.
52 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, pp.252-3; Kinealy, A Death Dealing Famine, 77.
53 Poor Employment Act, 9 and 10 Victoria (1846), c.107; Kinealy, A Death Dealing Famine, 67,
71-72, 73. On the contested role and impact of Trevelyan, see Robin Haines, Charles Trevelyan
and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
54 Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 90-106. For a detailed analysis of the numbers employed in
public works, and the variation by region, see: Ibid., 363-5.
55 Times, 12 March 1847, 6; Kinealy, A Death Dealing Famine, 74-75, 79-80.
56 The Nation, 27 March 1847, cited in Kinealy, A Death Dealing Famine, 75.
57 But as Peter Gray has asserted, despite such efforts they still came in for considerable
criticism in the British media: Famine, Land and Politics, 132.
58 Indian Relief Fund, Distress in Ireland: Report of the Trustees of the Indian Relief Fund…
(Dublin: J. Browne, 1847); Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, 257.
59 Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland, July 1846 - January
1847, British Parliamentary Papers 1847, vol. 51 [761]. On Baring’s earlier involvement see:
Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, 22-23
60 Murphy (ed.) Annals of the Famine in Ireland, n.34, 208.
61 Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, 3 63-83; Murphy, ed., Annals of the Famine in
Ireland, 46-7, 207 (n. 30).
62 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, 257-258; Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, 195-
208, 219-220.
63 Ibid., 192.
64 British Association Minute Book, National Library of Dublin, MS2022. For analysis of the
donations see: Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, ch.9.
65 Ibid., 185-189.
66 Cambridge Independent Press, 18 October 1845, 4.
67 Wiltshire Independent, 23 October 1845, 6.
68 Loc. cit.
69 Ipswich Journal, 25 October 1845, 2.
70 Hampshire Advertiser, 1 November 1845, 4.
71 Loc. cit.
72 Morning Post, 30 October 1845, 2.
73 Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, 24 December 1845, 6-7.
74 Leeds Times, 27 December 1845, 6.
75 Sheffield Independent, 6 December 1845, 8.
76 Bradford Observer, 4 December 1845, 4-5; Morning Post, 10 December 1845, 5-6.
77 Western Times, 8 November 1845, 2-3. On the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaigning, see
Pickering and Tyrrell, The People’s Bread, esp. chapters 2 and 8.
78 As Charles Withers notes, though, policy responses and migratory consequences between
the famines in Ireland and Scotland were similar: “Destitution and Migration: Labour
Mobility and Relief from Famine in Highland Scotland 1836–1850,”, Journal of Historical
Geography 14, no. 2 (1988): 128-150.
79 This fractious, complex relationship was perhaps best typified by the fact that in the ACCL’s
hometown of Manchester it hired “‘Irish thugs”’ to protect the League Platform and disrupt
Chartist platforms: Janette Martin, “‘Popular Political Oratory and Itinerant Lecturing in
Yorkshire and the North East in the Age of Chartism, c 1837-1860”’ (unpublished PhD thesis,
University of York, United Kingdom, 2010), 57.
80 The outstanding recent study of Chartism is Malcolm Chase’s Chartism: A New History
(Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2007). For an analysis of the
work of Irish Chartists in England, see Roger Swift, “Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and The
Irish in Early Victorian England,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 29, no. 1 (2001): 67-83.
128 Griffin
81 Northern Star, 30 August 1845, 15; Northern Star, 1 November 1845, esp. 21.
82 Northern Star, 15 November 1845, 12.
83 Northern Star, 10 January, 4; Northern Star, 24 January 1846, 1.
84 Chase, Chartism, 271. The idea that there was insufficient land in Ireland to support the level
of population in the mid 1840s has been absolutely refuted; see Louis Cullen, “Irish History
Without the Potato,” Past & Present 40 (1968): 72-83.
85 Northern Star, 14 February 1846, 5.
86 Shipkey, Peel’s Irish Policy, 321.
87 Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 4 October 1845, 2.
88 Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 25 October 1845, 2.
89 Fife Herald, 28 October 1845, 2-3.
90 Leeds Times, 8 November 1845, 4.
91 Loc. cit.
92 Cambridge Independent Press, 29 November 1845, 8.
93 Peter J. Gurney, “‘Rejoicing in Potatoes’: The Politics of Consumption in England during the
‘Hungry Forties,’” Past & Present, 203, no. 1 (2009): 99-136, 131.
94 Hampshire Advertiser, 1 November 1845, 4.
95 Hereford Journal, 26 November 1845, 3.
96 On the geography of Irish migrant settlement in Britain see: Donald MacRaild, The Irish
Diaspora in Britain, 1750-1939 (Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave, 2011), ch. 2.
97 Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine, 63.
98 Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 8 June 1846, vol. 87 cc. 129-94.
99 Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 24 April 1846, vol. 85 cc. 980-1022. For further
reporting not detailed in Hansard, see Bradford Observer, 23 April 1846, 3-4. An exception to
this rhetoric was George Bankes, Tory landowner and MP for the “family seat” at Wareham
in Dorset. During the debate in the Commons on 8 May 1846 on the Corn Importation
Bill, Bankes, an ardent supporter of the Corn Laws, stated that the “distress” in Ireland
ought be supported by “public subscriptions and grants from the Exchequer” as opposed
to “aggravated by the sacrifice of one of the great interest of the country”: Hansard, House
of Commons Debate, 8 May 1846, vol. 86 cc. 226-99. The direct quotation comes from the
Parliamentary report in Liverpool Mercury, 15 May 1846, 2.
100 Bristol Mercury, 25 April 1846, 5.
101 Loc. cit.
102 Loc. cit.
103 Morning Post, 10 April 1846, 3.
104 Loc. cit.
105 Morning Post, 10 April 1846, 3; Indian Relief Fund, Distress in Ireland. Also see: Gray, Famine,
Land and Politics, 257.
106 Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland, 42-4. A subscription was also raised
amongst the “European and Native” residents of Kandy, Ceylon/Sri Lanka: Freeman’s
Journal, 2 June 1846, 2.
107 Standard, 3 September 1846, 2.
108 Standard, 15 September 1846, 2.
111 Standard, 17 October 1846, 2.
112 Standard, 13 November 1846, 1-2.

113 Freeman’s Journal, 20 November 1846, 4. The surviving administrative records of the
National Club are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Dep. b. 235-40, c. 682-4, d. 754-7.
114 For instance see reports of schemes in: Hull Packet, 23 October 1846, 8; Hull Packet, 25
December 1846, 5; York Herald, 24 October 1846, 7; Standard, 28 December 1846, 4 (regarding
a meeting at Liverpool to raise a general subscription); Leeds Mercury, 2 January 1847, 4.
115 Leeds Mercury, 19 December 1846, 5.
116 On the popular experience of the “Hungry 40s” in England see: Gurney, “Rejoicing in
potatoes.”
117 The best articulation of these geographies of working cosmopolitanism appears in the
ongoing work of David Featherstone. For his most detailed exposition, see Solidarity: Hidden
Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012), esp. ch.3.
118 MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora, pp.163-7; Louise Miskell, “Reassessing the Anti-Irish Riot:
Popular Protest and the Irish in South Wales, c. 1826-1882,” in Paul O’Leary, ed., Irish
Migrants in Modern Wales (Liverpool, United Kingdom: Liverpool University Press, 2004),
101-118. On the culture of working xenophobia in rural England see: Keith D.M. Snell, “The
Culture of Local Xenophobia,” Social History 28, no. 1 (2003): 1-30.
119 Gray, Famine, Land and Politics; Nally, Human Encumbrances, esp. chs 4 and 6.
120 One possibility is the systematic analysis of the Dublin-based Relief Commission’s
surviving papers held at the National Archives of Ireland, but given that the Commission
was formally stood down in August 1846 and not re-constituted until February 1847, this
source does not offer a systematic survey.
121 On the idea of compassion fatigue and ingratitude, see Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of
Enmity 1789-2006 (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2007), 210; Kinealy,
A Death-Dealing Famine, 13, 118; Kearns and Laxton, “Ethnic Groups as Public Health
Hazards,” 31. The phrase “monstrous ingratitude” was first used in a report in the Times, 22
September 1847, 4.
122 The outstanding recent contributions are Nally, Human Encumbrances; and Crowley, Smyth
and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Irish Famine.
“Up to the Sun and Down to the Centre:”
The Utopian Moment in Anticolonial Nationalism
Gerry Kearns
Maynooth University
ABSTRACT: The ideology and practice of James Fintan Lalor is examined as a

geographical imagination in the service of anticolonial nationalism. The utopian
and forward-looking aspects of nationalism have not received as much attention as
the retrospective emphasis upon the restoration of past glories. Yet in anticolonial
nationalism, the question of what an independent state could achieve incites a utopian
moment and links nationalism to a more universalist discourse concerning justice.
Anticolonial nationalism and young Ireland
I
n Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Benedict Anderson explored
the ways that anticolonial struggle produces intellectual insights that anticipate a utopian
future.1 In developing their criticisms of the social and economic disabilities required by
colonial rule, anticolonial theorists must imagine ways that social, economic and political life
might be better ordered. One implication of Anderson’s analysis, according to Amrith and Sluga,
is that the United Nations “would have been unthinkable without the intellectual labor of Asian
radical nationalists, who appropriated elements of European thought but transcended the racial
exclusions inherent within them.”2 Not all anticolonial thought is this creative, and on occasion
it amounts to little more than a passionate wish to expel the colonial power. Furthermore, the
anticolonial imagination is also fed by the utopianism that animates other political struggles
such as those around class, political representation, and freedom of expression. Nevertheless,
some anticolonial thought is clearly emancipatory in its own right. Robert Young found among
anticolonial theorists, such as Franz Fanon, some of the earliest and most trenchant of attacks
upon the grand narratives of the Rise of the West and upon the racist imaginaries that sustain
the arrogance of colonial rule.3 The American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century rallied
around the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” and although they claimed to be
doing little more than asserting their rights as free-born British subjects, they were, argued Grant
Dorfman, proposing a new basis for government that could find no legal answer under British
rule, colonial or otherwise: “The implausibility of their case doomed all efforts to gain redress
within the system and drove events towards their ultimate impasse.”4 The rights they wanted to
assert could be realized only under a new sovereign dispensation. The justifications for the fight
against colonialism can thus project a radically new society.
In 1994, launching the journal, Nations and Nationalism, Anthony Smith suggested that:
“Perhaps the central question in our understanding of nationalism is the role of the past in the
creation of the present.”5 National ideologies often have a historicist hue and this may explain
why the utopian and progressive elements of nationalism receive comparatively little attention
and why scholars, such as Smith, glance ever backwards. Certainly, many Irish nationalists
presented themselves as anxious to restore a pre-colonial society, pure in its authentic Irishness.
In The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, John Hutchinson drew upon the Irish example to examine
the bases and purposes of this ideology and he has proposed more recently that this form of
“Up to the Sun and Down to the Centre” 131
nationalism seeks “the defense and activation of the historical community,” as well as “a moral
regeneration of the national community by returning to the spirit of its ancient past encoded
in its myths, memories and culture.”6 Hutchinson was unhappy with the notion that this was
little more than the opportunistic “invention of tradition” identified by scholars such as Eric
Hobsbawm,7 but he also accepted that the nationalists he had studied were often “reformers in
conservative dress. They seek to use tradition to legitimate social innovation […] building on
indigenous traditions rather than […] obliterating them.”8 Karl Marx, too, noted the paradox that
the most radical of revolutionaries often choose to appear in antic clothing: “[J]ust as they seem
to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist
before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to
present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”9
In this paper, I want to examine some elements of social innovation associated with
the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. The early decades of the nineteenth century was a
time when religious discrimination was the focus of anti-British energies in Ireland. A broad-
based campaign for political liberties and the right of an Irish parliament to legislate for an
Irish people had produced an unsuccessful rebellion in 1798. The subsequent dissolution of
the Irish parliament and the enforced Union under the British crown demoralized nationalists.
The campaign to remove the civil disabilities of Catholics revived political organization and
discourse in Ireland but, insofar as it challenged British domination, it did so in the name of Irish
Catholics and thus risked anticipating a distinctly confessional tone for an independent Ireland.
Nevertheless, its concern with tithes, the taxation of land to support the established Protestant
church, raised more general issues about the propriety of property. By questioning the legality
of the Protestant establishment, the Irish anti-tithe movement begged wider questions about the
legitimacy of the colonial state. These matters were brought to the fore when Daniel O’Connell
(1775-1847) split with the English Whig party and agitated separately as an Irish organization for
the repeal of the Union. With a series of mass meetings in 1842 and 1843, O’Connell marched a
good share of the Irish polity up the hill of defiance. In October 1843, O’Connell promised a mass
meeting for Clontarf, the site of a battle where in 1014 Brian Boru had led an Irish army to victory
against Viking invaders. The British government declared the meeting to be insurrectionary and,
in submitting to the ban, O’Connell not only deflated his movement but also alienated its more
radical thinkers: those who were reflecting upon the interdependence of economic and political
questions.
The relations between property and state formed the colonial political economy of
Ireland, and in taking up these matters, nationalists could be some distance from the matters of
genealogy and descent that are part of the historical narrative of nationalism, at least as reported
by scholars such as Smith. Instead, this nationalist imaginary describes a political geography for
the relations between Britain and Ireland, and between urban and rural Ireland. These anxieties
about property and the state shaped the development of the Young Ireland movement and the
cultural and political renaissance it developed through its journal, The Nation.10 It was called Young
Ireland because many of its leaders shared with Guiseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy movement of the
1830s and 1840s a belief that force of arms would be necessary and justified to dislodge imperial
rule and establish an independent republic. Young Ireland broke with O’Connell’s movement for
Repeal of the Union, which, under pressure from the Catholic bishops, had resolutely disavowed
any sort of violent insurrection.
Daniel O’Connell, himself, was no stranger to violent rhetoric, nor even to evoking the
threat of a revolution averted by himself alone.11 In 1840, speaking at a meeting of his Loyal
National Repeal Association of Ireland, O’Connell referred in the following terms to the
revolutionary potential of the Catholic priests then in training at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth:
132 Kearns
While I live, and my influence remains unbroken, [nothing …] shall induce us to

commit a breach of the peace; but it depends upon a single life, and when I rest
in the tomb that course may not be pursued (hear, hear). I had seen yesterday the
boys of Maynooth, whose blood was boiling in their veins, and they asked me
would not their country be free (hear)? When they grow into manhood, having
served their apprenticeship in the service of old Ireland–when, I say, they grow
into manhood, they will not act as their fathers did, who were born slaves and
lived in habits of submission; but they being brought into the world free, will
insist on freedom for their country (cheers). [… T]he wrongs inflicted may swell
the bubbling current of the warm blood of young Ireland, and will not consent to
any species of slavery (cheers).12
Later O’Connell came to use the term “Young Ireland” in a more derisory manner to refer to those
not willing to join him in abjuring all violence. When he insisted that all must publicly disavow
violence at a meeting of the Repeal Association, he did so in very clear terms: “Formerly every
change was effected by physical force, but he had inculcated the doctrine that force and violence
injure the holiest cause, and that the greatest political advantages are not worth one drop of
blood.”13 O’Connell recognized that recent political change had often been effected by revolution,
but this was something he decried, specifically charging that in place after place: “A sort of Young
Ireland party sprung up, who succeeded in creating revolution after revolution.”14 O’Connell
could not have been more explicit: “I draw up this resolution to draw a marked line between
Young Ireland and Old Ireland (cheers). I do not accept the services of any man who does not
agree with me both in theory and in practice.”15 O’Connell’s own influence, as very likely he saw
it, depended upon being the one who could deliver social peace in return for political concessions
towards independence.
First by virtue of a sort of religious test, acknowledging the authority of the Catholic
bishops of Ireland, and then by foreswearing any resort to violence, O’Connell alienated Young
Ireland from his Repeal Association. Yet Young Ireland continued to engage with matters of land
and state, the central concerns of the Catholic movements of the first decades of the nineteenth
century. Its differences with O’Connell incited Young Irelanders to a more systematic engagement
with the political economy of colonialism and with the desirable forms of a postcolonial social
contract. In this paper, I focus upon the emancipatory thought of James Fintan Lalor (1807-49),
the Young Irelander who took these speculations furthest and perhaps gave most to political
economy and political science.
Lalor’s reputation
The posthumous influence ascribed to Lalor is remarkable. A fellow Young Irelander
described him as “one of the most powerful political writers that ever took pen in hand.”16 He
has been credited with devising the organizational form that was the essence of Fenianism,
otherwise known as the insurrectionary Irish Republican Brotherhood. Of the Head Centre of
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, James O’Connor wrote that “[a]dopting the plan of a secret
revolutionary organization sketched out by James Fintan Lalor, […] James Stephens [1825-1901]
gave it practical shape, and started single-handed to establish it in the four Provinces of Ireland.”17
With his elaboration of the notion that being limited in supply, land would ever be a natural
monopoly, Lalor has been offered as the source of Henry George’s (1839-1907) proposal of a single
tax on the unimproved value of land, as set out in Progress and Poverty.18 The cultural nationalist
Standish O’Grady (1846-1908) described Lalor as one who believed in the common ownership
of land, and he saw this theory as passing with John Mitchel (1815-1875) to the United States,
“propagating itself there in the Irish-American press, and from America it has come back upon
Europe, advertising itself as ‘Progress and Poverty.’”19
The most radical agrarian movement in nineteenth-century Ireland was the Land League,
and Lalor was acknowledged as primary inspiration by both its primary Irish strategist, Michael
Davitt (1846-1906), and by its principal American supporter, John Devoy (1842-1928). Davitt was
clear that: “There was no real revolutionary mind in the ’48 period except Lalor’s.”20 Although
David Buckley has suggested that in giving credit to Lalor, Davitt was seeking to “retrospectively
legitimize” his own conclusions, the standing of Lalor is evident in the effort.21 Davitt acknowledged
as Lalor’s singular contribution, the insight that the remedy for Irish starvation lay in an attack
upon landlordism via a “strike against rent,”22 and Davitt characterized the “agrarian revolution
of the Land League” as an attack upon “rent tyranny.”23 John Devoy, in turn, also recognized
that “James Fintan Lalor might be said to the be the real Father of Fenianism, as well of the Land
League.”24
Turning to the revolutionaries of 1916, Pádraig Pearse (1879-1916) proposed that “[t]he
conception of an Irish nation has been developed in modern times chiefly by four great minds,”25
and he included Lalor as one of these four who “have thought most authentically for Ireland,
[whose] voices […] have come out of the Irish struggle itself.”26 The most resonant encomium
to Lalor came from James Connolly (1868-1916), himself the leading socialist theorist of early
twentieth-century Ireland, who, when writing of the Young Ireland movement, concluded that:
“[T]he palm of honour for the clearest exposition of the doctrine of revolution, social and political,
must be given to James Fintan Lalor.”27 Connolly admired him for, “like all the really dangerous
revolutionists of Ireland, [Lalor] advocated his principles as part of the creed of the democracy
of the world, and not merely as applicable only to the incidents of the struggle of Ireland against
England.”28 It is this reaching towards more general principles of justice and fairness that
grounds the utopian ambition of some versions of anticolonial nationalism, and this ambition
to universalism echoes the service to global human rights that Benedict Anderson identified in
the nationalists he studied in Under Three Flags. A final testimony to the appetite for Lalor’s ideas
is provided by Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) who, when giving a radio broadcast that went live
not only to the residents of the Irish Free State but also to the Irish in North America, and which
followed the entry of Fianna Fáil into government after a decade of abstention, declared that,
for expressing the policy of his new administration, he knew “no words […] better than those of
Fintan Lalor: ‘Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky.’”29
Lalor, father and son
James Fintan Lalor was born to a family with a large farm of about one thousand English
acres, at Tenakill, county Laois. His father Patrick Lalor (1781-1856) was a fervent supporter of
Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association and a radical opponent of the tithe. These two elements
of Catholic liberation led the father to explore the relations between land and state in ways that
suggested, although he personally refused, the radical conclusions later reached by his son. Patrick
Lalor understood refusing to pay the tithe as the use of moral rather than physical force since the
law anticipated refusal by providing for a penalty. As he explained to a parliamentary committee
investigating the system of tithes: “I considered it a debt not morally binding; that if the law
allowed the nonpayment of it, I conceive there was no moral obligation to enforce it.”30 The penalty
was that the local Church of Ireland vicar could enforce payment by distraint of goods. In this
case, in 1831, Rev. Latouche made a claim for the tithe due to him and upon Lalor’s refusal to pay,
Latouche obtained twenty ewes and their lambs from Lalor. However, Lalor branded the word
“tithe” on the side of each animal and no local purchaser could be found. Nor was a purchaser
to be found in Dublin, Liverpool or Manchester and, indeed, as Lalor reported with some relish,
no “salesmaster would allow them on his standing; nor a bit of food would the poor animals get,
until they actually died of starvation, some in Liverpool and the rest of them in Manchester.”31
134 Kearns
In 1832, on the back of the popularity of his having defied the tithe, and taking advantage of
the 1829 Catholic Emancipation that opened parliamentary representation to Catholics, Patrick
Lalor ran for election against local landowners and headed the poll.32 At the next election (1835),
the tenants of the landlord, under threat of eviction, mustered once again behind their master,
and Lalor’s tenure at Westminster was terminated. Patrick Lalor was appalled at this abuse of
landowner power and this surely explains the following note about his parliamentary career that
was published in 1847 in the Nation: “P. Lalor. An honest man. Retired in disgust.”33
As a Catholic, Lalor considered the tithe, going as it did to support Protestant clergy, “a
great hardship, […] inasmuch as I receive no value for it.”34 Lalor was aware of local opposition to
tithes “for time immemorial” and remarked that they had been “the cause of much bloodshed in
[Laois] particularly so far as related to the White Boys,” the agrarian rebels, and indeed “[a] great
number of people have been from time to time executed for the illegal conduct they pursued,
in striving to rid themselves of that impost of tithe.”35 At a meeting of the Repeal Association
held in Mayborough (now Portlaoise) in January 1831, he had announced his intention to refuse
henceforth to pay the tithe and this ejaculation had produced a more general defiance throughout
the county of Laois. This defiance was spread beyond Laois, for posters addressing the “Tithe
Payers of Ireland” appeared at least in Kildare and probably other places too. On this poster
were given extracts from Lalor’s speech advising others how to defy the tithe: “I will never
again pay tithe: I will obstruct no law. The tithe owner will, of course, distrain my goods; but
my countrymen esteem me, I am proud to say, and I do not think there is one amongst them
will, under such circumstances, buy my goods so distrained and offered for sale.”36 Lalor’s form
of civil disobedience was modeled on the actions of the Quakers: “I had been for years before
thinking within my own mind that there was every facility to avoid the payment of tithes, if the
people were only unanimous, and acted peaceably, as the society called Quakers did.”37 In Patrick
Lalor’s argument over the tithe, then, there was an appeal to justice based on the failure of people
to benefit from payments that they made, and there was, as a tactic, a refusal to pay what was
considered an unjust impost.
The Repeal Association was also the context in which Patrick Lalor developed further
arguments about the justice issues attending rent and land tenure. At a meeting of the Repeal
Association in Castletown in 1843, he moved a motion “advocating fixity of tenure. He spoke
with great force of the evils resulting to Ireland from the precarious nature of the tenure of land,
and gave a powerful exposition of its disastrous results.”38 In 1844, to the Devon Commission on
“The Occupation of Land in Ireland,” Patrick Lalor explained some of the links between tenure
and religion. Speaking of the county of Laois, he reported that: “[T]he tenures in this country are
almost invariably at will. It was always too much the case, but about eleven years ago a meeting
of the landlords (or very many of them) took place, at which they entered into a solemn promise
or engagement with each other not to give any lease in future to a Catholic.”39 In other words,
Protestant landlords had resolved to offer Catholics no security of tenure, reserving the right
to evict them “at will.” Patrick Lalor went on to argue that this opposition was political first
and religious only as a secondary consideration. It was because Catholic tenants accepted voting
direction from their local Catholic parish priest rather than from their Protestant landlord, that
these landlords sought more servile tenants.
Evidence before a Select Committee on Bribery at Elections provides more context for
this and makes clear the difficulty of separating religion from politics in matters relating to land.
One witness claimed that a Catholic shopkeeper who in 1835 had voted for the ticket of the two
Protestant landowners, Charles Coote and Thomas Vesey, found himself named on a public notice
which alleged that he “gave his vote to Coote, sold his country, denied Christ and his church,
perjured himself, and joined the Orangemen. I hope you neighbours will all take notice of this,
and withdraw your custom from him.”40 Making clear the intimate relations between religious
and political contention, another list of the Catholics who voted for Coote and Vesey was headed,
“A List of the tithe supporters who voted for Coote and Vesey and against the people.”41 At one
public meeting Patrick Lalor himself moved the following motion:
That whilst we are determined to support those honest freeholders who may be
oppressed for the honest exercise of their franchise by persecuting landlords, who,
not content with extracting the last penny that can be made from the soil, also seek
to turn to their own base purposes the franchise intrusted to the people for the
public good: also pledge ourselves not to hold neighbourship, to have any dealing
whatsoever with those persons who shall by their votes inflect the deadly injury
on the country of returning Tory conservatives for this county.42
When he was asked about the “non-dealing” with those who voted Conservative rather than
Liberal, Lalor claimed that in the face of the threats of eviction, the people had “no other mode of
protecting themselves […] and a very effectual one it is, […] and I think a very legitimate one.”43
Lacking reasonable security of title, the Catholic tenants would not make improvements
because they could not be sure they would get the benefit: “With regard to the occupation of
land in Ireland I have been always of opinion […] that the practice and the law ought to be
that every man, when he gets possession of land ought to have it for ever.”44 Beyond this, he
would have set the rent at a certain amount of corn per acre so that the tenant got the benefit
of any improvements made. Fixity of tenure and some means of restraining the landlord from
appropriating improvements through raising rent were to become central concerns of the Land
League in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Patrick Lalor went further into legal philosophy when he argued that there was no absolute
right in private property:
Before any landlord or tenant had any individual interest […] in the land it
belonged to the state. The state transferred certain rights in the land, but not an
unrestricted or unlimited ownership; it transferred it subject to the support of the
state in the shape of taxation, subject to have any of it re-occupied by the state
which may be found necessary, and above all, it was transferred saddled with the
support of the population.45
Private property in land, then, was considered by Patrick Lalor to be a conditional right and
crucially its legitimacy hinged upon how efficacious were the legal and tenurial arrangements:
“If the land be neglected, and not made to yield its capable produce through the mal-construction
or inefficiency of the law between landlord and tenant, the state has an undoubted right to step
in and regulate the law and practice.”46 The argument for fixity of tenure, then, was that only this
would “induce the occupier of land to improve it so as to make it yield its full powers (without
which the state is defrauded of part of its just rights).”47 This utilitarian approach to property and
tenure contributed to a wider debate concerning the political economy of Ireland, but Patrick’s
own contribution was constrained by his loyalty to Daniel O’Connell and his abhorrence of
violence of any kind.
Social versus political reform
The relations between father and son are of interest here insofar as they shed light upon
the distinctive features of James Fintan’s own ideas. James was the eldest of eleven sons and one
daughter. He was afflicted with some curvature of the spine “which retarded his growth, and
136 Kearns
prevented his attaining the enormous proportions of his big brothers.”48 As a weakly child he was
educated at home, where his mother “fitted up an attic study for him, where he could be away
from the noise and horse-play of his sturdy brothers, and enjoy to the full the peace and quiet
which he craved. She also stood between him and the practical notions of his sturdy father.”49
At the age of 17, James attended for a single year at Carlow College excelling at Classics and
Chemistry, prompting his father to secure his apprenticeship to a local medical man, Dr. Jacob,
who prepared him further in Chemistry perhaps with a view to his taking up a medical degree.50
At some time during 1827, he terminated this apprenticeship. At this point he may have gone
away from home. Certainly, he was back at Tenakill in time for his father’s election in 1832 and
thereafter he more of less managed the household during the three years of his father’s absence
at Westminster.51 However, while his younger brothers were reported as campaigning for the
father on both the anti-tithe agitation and the related parliamentary campaign, James made no
such appearance.
James aligned himself with the social and economic campaign of a land reformer, William
Conner, rather than with the political campaigns led by Daniel O’Connell. Conner argued that
tenants could never flourish without “the State’s abridging the landlord’s power over the land.”52
He argued that tenants needed security (or fixity) of tenure together with fair rents established by
arbitration. He had reached these conclusions in 1833 and promoted this cause in fair weather and
foul for the next eighteen years and initially at least he had the full support of James Fintan Lalor.
He did not enjoy the same either from the leaders of the Repeal movement or from those of Young
Ireland. Daniel O’Connell made a show of committing the Repeal movement to fixity of tenure
but, treating property rights with great tenderness, he opposed the setting of rents by arbitration
and his version of the fixity of tenure was punctured with so many qualifications that it leaked all
radical implication. In 1843, after Conner had advocated a rent strike to force landlords to concede
fixity and fair valuation, O’Connell expelled him from the Repeal Association.53 A government
inquiry into the Irish land question, popularly named after its chair the Devon Commission,
published in 1845 a mountain of evidence that in Ireland, given the police and military powers
they could rely upon, landlords could collect rents that amounted to extortion.54 This encouraged
the Young Ireland movement and its journal, the Nation, to endorse fixity of tenure but it too
rejected the coercive setting of rents by arbitration.
By 1845, however, James had parted from Conner. Lalor was exploring a range of ways
that tenants, small farmers and laborers might see an improvement in their circumstances and
was involved with various agricultural cooperatives in pursuit of something like a credit union
for rural folk.55 To Conner this was a deviation and when, in 1847, Lalor called a meeting to create
a tenant society at Holycross, Tipperary, Conner not only showed up to heckle but mounted the
platform: “The two men came to blows and the platform collapsed under them; the meeting broke
up in disorder, with Conner speaking from the ruined platform while Lalor’s supporters chaired
him to the nearest pub.”56 Lalor later returned to Conner’s principles and even to the tactic of rent
strike, but this was part of a more comprehensive rethinking of the colonial basis of landlordism
than Conner had offered. Before this, Lalor had one further disillusion to suffer.
An article he wrote on agricultural cooperation may have precipitated a crisis with his
father, and O’Neill suggests that this was the occasion for James leaving home in January 1844.57
Some months previously, James had sent an astonishing letter to the British Prime Minister, Robert
Peel. He placed his faith in Peel, in landlords, and in the British Conservatives. In the letter he
offered to betray his father’s political ambitions. Lalor argued that social peace was necessary
before there could be social and economic improvement in Ireland. To that end, he considered the
Repeal agitation pernicious:
I was, myself, at one time something more than a mere Repealer, in private
feeling—but Mr. O’Connell, his agitators, and his series of wretched agitations,
first disgusted me into a conservative in point of feeling, and reflection and
experience have convicted me into one in point of principle. I have been driven
into the conviction, more strongly confirmed by every day’s experience, that it is
only to a Conservative Government, to her landed proprietors, and to peace that
this country can look for any improvement in her social condition.58
He introduced himself as the son of “Mr. P. Lalor […] who then was, and I regret to say, still continues,
a zealous and active Repealer,” and adds that “my family–friends are all violent Repealers.”59 It
is clear from the letter that James Fintan Lalor’s primary aim was an “improvement in [Ireland’s]
social condition,” and that, at this time, he thought it might come from “her landed proprietors.”60
Given his father’s experience in 1835, when the local Protestant landlord threatened tenants with
eviction rather than allow them to vote for the Catholic candidate, it was the wish begat the fact
when Lalor affected to believe that the landlords in Ireland could be persuaded to a historic
compromise with their tenants. Lalor considered the major obstacle to such an arrangement was
landlord fear of the violence threatened by elements of the Repeal movement and for this reason
he offered Peel such information about the movement as would aid in its suppression.
Certainly in mid 1843, when Lalor wrote, the British government was worried about
violence in Ireland but it is not clear that much of this was related to the Repeal agitation. The
first six months of 1843 saw eleven illegal meetings reported by the police, the same in the first
half of 1842.61 Such public assembly offences are part of a continuum of disorderly politics and
clearly the sort of thing that Lalor wanted suppressed so that the landlords might feel safe in
Ireland and thus willing to take up their civic duty towards their tenants. Taking affray, riot,
fights and demonstrations associated with political parties or factions, together with these illegal
processions, there were on average 170 such events in each year of the period 1837-45.62 Far more
threatening to landowners and large farmers was a sort of class-war violence with an annual
average of 9 assaults on bailiffs, 461 arsons, 585 incidents of cattle-stealing, 292 of the maiming
of cattle, 111 of the illegal shearing of sheep, 11 of the destruction of pasture known as turning
up land, 21 of pound-breach or the recovering of goods that had been taken in place of unpaid
rent, and fully 800 instances each year of threatening letters sent in the main to landlords or
farmers judged by popular opinion to have treated harshly their tenants or laborers. This was
the sort of violence that was associated with secret agrarian societies such as the Whiteboys and
Ribbonism.63 Over the period 1837-45, there was each year an average of 77 offences relating to
the administering of unlawful oaths, 70 where people were apprehended going about armed at
night, and there were 209 cases each year of the robbery of or illegal demand made for arms. This
class war was about social relations in the countryside and had very little to do with matters of
nationalism, tithes, or the repeal of the Union.
Yet it is in the context of the Repeal movement that Lalor told Peel that he had reached
a belief in the “absolute necessity which exists, that all agitation for political objects should
entirely cease, before any improvement can be effected in the condition of the Irish people. I am
most anxious that the present Repeal-movement should be speedily and safely suppressed–not
imperfectly and for a period, but fully and for ever.”64 Instead of the Irish Repeal Movement,
Lalor looks to the British government for assistance: “[I]t is only to a Conservative government, to
her landed proprietors, and to peace that this country can look for any improvement in her social
condition.”65
Given the doctrines for which Connolly and others admired Lalor, this seems an
extraordinary act of faith. The themes of his later work are already here but his conclusions about
138 Kearns
these matters had not yet received the shock that rearranged so radically the elements in this
kaleidoscope. Despite his differences with Conner, Lalor’s emphasis upon social and economic
rather than political reform was a shared and constant feature of his thought. Buckley has deftly
argued that “economics for Lalor was not a ‘political’ but a ‘social’ matter.”66 Lalor was not able
at this point to read rural violence as being social in this sense, crediting the Repeal agitation with
too much influence over this dispersed aggression towards landlords and the other agents of the
landed system.
The question of violence
Lalor’s faith in the landlords soon received two severe tests. When, in the wake of the
reports from the Devon Commission, modest reforms were introduced into the British House
of Commons, the Irish landlords hooted them out. With a potato blight in Ireland from 1845,
Peel opportunistically secured the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, promising cheaper food for
Ireland, although he full knew that in the short term scarcity of food would keep prices high.
Lalor realized that the removal of the tariff against American grain would see Irish exports to
Britain driven from the market and would thus complete the conversion of Ireland from a tillage
economy of pigs, grain and potatoes to one of pasture.67 In this context, landlords wanted to
evict their tenants and to take the land back into their own hands for consolidation as grazing.
In his pamphlet of 1844, only part of which has survived, Lalor criticized the Repeal press for
not appreciating this revolutionary potential of the repeal of the Corn Laws.68 The famine gave
the landlords just this opportunity and, with no thought for the ‘fair’ rents Lalor advocated,
the landlords seemed almost to be making war upon their tenants. Lalor reworked his earlier
pamphlet for the new times and in April 1847 accused the landlords of having “doomed a people
to extinction and decreed to abolish Ireland,” albeit with “the unanimous and cordial support of
the people of England.”69
The famine of 1845-52 was an event of almost unimaginable horror. The subsistence of the
majority of the Irish people rotted before it could be eaten. In the summer of 1847, three million
people, fully one-third of the population, were surviving on soup provided by government.70 At
that point the British government decided to manage the famine in an unprecedented manner
and concluded that the famine could be used to correct Irish economy and society. Comforting
itself with the thought that God had a plan that was delivered by nature, the government
proceeded to let people die.71 And over one million did. Perhaps a further one-and-a-half million
emigrated.72 Daniel O’Connell died early in the famine (April 1847) barely nine months after his
peace resolutions had driven the Young Irelanders from the movement. Thereafter, Young Ireland
had to develop its own philosophy of the legitimate use of violence. In a letter of October 1846 to
the Cork Examiner, Fr John Kenyon (1812-69) countered O’Connell’s blanket dismissal of violence
and adverting to the acceptability of capital punishment argued that:
As matters stand, the rejection of everything that could lead to violence or

bloodshed is enjoined by no rule of Christian morality. Else could civil government
be rejected in the bulk, because civil government not only can lead, but actually and
daily does lead, to violence and bloodshed, as the records of Newgate abundantly
attest.73
In a pamphlet of 1846, Physical and Moral Force, Kenyon went further, writing that even popes
condoned violence, granting indulgences to crusaders of old. Kenyon conceded that he did “not
believe that in point of fact any political rights have been attained during this century for Ireland
by moral force alone.”74 Kenyon wrote to the Nation in November 1846 with the observation that
“in all cases of controversy in which [O’Connell] was asked to interfere, I think he will have been
more generally found on the side of wealth, or power, or title, or dignity.”75 Kenyon directed
readers of the Nation towards the paired incubi of landlordism and colonialism. In August 1847
he told them that “England was the only nation whose baneful intercourse had robbed Ireland
of her wealth and drained all her resources,”76 and in February 1848 he insisted that: “If […] the
landlord class linked with [the] English interest, persist in opposing themselves to the wishes and
wants of our people–say, rather in grinding and crushing them, soul and body, heart and hope,–
why should [we] insist upon their company.”77
This was the tone of debate in the pages of the Nation in the months after July 1846 when
the Young Irelanders had been driven out of the Repeal Association by the oath of peaceability
insisted upon by Daniel O’Connell. In January 1847 they proposed their own organization, the
Irish Confederation, and at this point the resolute tone of the Nation encouraged James Fintan
Lalor to approach its editor, Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903) with his new schema for Irish
revolution. Lalor was animated by the imminent creation of the Confederation; yet he wanted
to ensure that the ends and means of the new body would be acceptable to himself. He did not
want the ambition of the new organization to be constrained by the old formula of the Repeal
of the Union. He pleaded with Duffy for a more expansive goal: “Call it by some general name–
independence if you will.”78 Lalor thought independence could comprise not only the legislative
separation promised with a Repeal of the Union, but also an economic independence achieved
by expropriating the British landlords. This brings him to his central claim that alongside the
legislative independence:
A mightier question is in the land–one beside which Repeal dwarfs down into a
petty parish question; one on which Ireland may not try alone her own right, but
try the right of the world; on which she would be, not merely an asserter of old
principles often asserted, and better asserted before her, an humble and feeble
imitator and follower of other countries–but an original inventor, propounder
and propagandist, in the van of the earth, and heading the nations; on which her
success or her failure alike would never be forgotten by man, but would make her
for ever, the lodestar of history.79
Here, in essence, was the utopian moment of Young Ireland’s anticolonial nationalism.
Lalor was inviting the Confederation to attempt a revolution that would have a significance
for global civilization equivalent to such caesura as the French Revolution. The parallel was an
important one for Lalor. Such a revolution, argued Lalor, was unlikely to be achieved purely by
legal means: “[A]ny means and all means might be made illegal by Act of Parliament; and such
pledge, therefore, is passive obedience.”80 This was the lesson he drew from O’Connell’s failure.
When O’Connell had, with his monster meetings, devised an instrument that could threaten
British rule, the British government promptly made such meetings illegal and, in complying,
O’Connell had set down the lever of civil disobedience with which he might perhaps have moved
an Empire. Lalor applauded Young Ireland’s refusal to foreswear illegality and even violence but
as he urged his own agenda upon them he found many of its leaders committed to insurrection
only in principle and not in practice.
The practice of revolution
In one respect, Lalor’s letter to Duffy was welcomed by the editor of the Nation, who
had been encouraging debate about the land question since the publication of the reports of the
Devon Commission in 1845. Duffy wanted to induce landowners to acknowledge the dire needs
140 Kearns
of their tenants but he detected a whiff of Jacobinism about Lalor’s land crusade. He circulated
the letter among others in the Confederation and asked Lalor to explain his ideas more fully. In
a further three letters, Lalor spelled out his vision of rural revolution. Duffy had seen enough.
In a letter of 24 February 1847, he told Lalor that his ideas amounted to “a very bold and clever
mistake.”81 Duffy did not believe that a peasant-led revolution was either likely or desirable but
he did see the force of the argument that peasants required greater security of tenure. To this
extent, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825-68) could reassure Lalor on 8 March 1847 that many of the
leading Confederates, including Duffy, agreed that the land of Ireland should indeed belong to
the people. In reply, Lalor told D’Arcy McGee that his basic principle was quite simple: “The
entire ownership of Ireland moral and material up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested by
right in the people of Ireland.”82
The objections to Lalor were theoretical and practical. Mitchel, for example, accepted
that Lalor’s analysis of the land question was correct in its fundamentals and he told Lalor so.83
When Lalor published an account of his views in the Nation in April 1847, Mitchel urged others,
including O’Brien, to read it.84 O’Brien, however, was not the only person to recoil at Lalor’s
explicit questioning of property rights. Most believed that it was wrong to imperil an alliance with
the landlords by waging social war in the countryside. This was Mitchel’s position until late 1847
and thus whereas Lalor called for a rent strike, Mitchel would only contemplate the withholding
of poor rates.85 Many argued that peasants were simply not prepared to rebel. Doheny went out to
rural Queen’s County (now Laois) to visit Lalor at Abbeyleix: “I could not be persuaded that I had
before me, in the poor, distorted, ill-favoured, hunch-backed, little creature, the bold propounder
of the singular doctrines in the Nation letters.”86 Lalor moved to Dublin and began writing for
the Nation but he was still unable to win the hearts and minds of the leaders of Confederation to
the cause of revolution. He was not even able to convince them to take the first step of advising
farmers to refuse to pay rent. Duffy was sure that the peasantry were fatalistic and supine: “Our
greatest difficulty was that the largest class, instead of being capable of scientific organisation
preferred to lie down and die rather than put themselves in an attitude of self-defence.”87 An
exasperated Lalor expostulated to Mitchel: “Egad! Mr Duffy was bred a townsman.”88 Lalor next
went out to rural Tipperary to organize among the peasants. He called a meeting of farmers at
Holycross “to found a League which should assert the natural property of the people in the soil
of the country, and the right of the occupying tenantry to a sufficient subsistence out of the crop,
and sufficient seed for next year, superior and prior to every other claim.”89 This was the occasion
when Lalor was shouted down by William Conner, who then persuaded the meeting to accept
security of tenure and arbitration of rents as sufficient goals.90
Two developments gained Lalor a better hearing in Dublin. First, although 39 Repealers
had been returned from Ireland to the new British parliament that sat from November 1847,
only 17 of them were willing to vote against the introduction of a Coercion Bill for Ireland.91 For
Mitchel this was the ultimate proof of the treachery of the Irish landlords. They stood with the
British in defense of their property against the desperate needs of their tenants who could eat
only if they withheld the corn that was generally their rent. On 4 January 1848, Mitchel wrote to
Lalor: “I am ashamed to be forced to admit, that on the only question we ever differed about I was
wholly wrong. Last summer the time had come for giving up the humbug of ‘conciliating classes,’
winning over landlords to nationality and the rest of it.”92 But as Mitchel grew more revolutionary,
he found Duffy increasingly constitutional. In December 1847, Mitchel left the Nation. In the
Confederation, O’Brien was anxious to distance himself from Mitchel too and a series of debates
in January 1848 resulted in resolutions being passed on 5 February 1848 disavowing civil war
and the refusal of rents or even poor rates.93 Mitchel left the Confederation. Mitchel used his own
money to set up the United Irishman, the first number of which was published on 12 February
1848.94 Here, Mitchel expounded what he had learned from Lalor but, after Lalor refused his offer
of a job on the journal, Mitchel rarely mentioned him by name.95
Alongside the conversion of Mitchel, the second development which gave Lalor’s ideas
wider currency was the “intoxication of hope” that followed the February revolution in France.96
For Duffy and O’Brien, the French rising showed that moderate reformers, such as Alphonse
de Lamartine (1790-1869), might govern in the wake of a popular rising, and the Confederation
sent O’Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher (1823-67) to Paris with an address praising the
revolutionaries’ respect “for religion, private property, and public order.”97 Others drew more
radical lessons. The revolution announced itself as an alliance between those with and those
without property, and addressed issues such as the right to work. This mood echoed through
Dublin, and the Confederation, “as a deliberate gesture to the new democratic spirit, included
a working man in the delegation which was to go to Paris.”98 By March, many Irish nationalists
had persuaded themselves that revolutionary France would be such a threat to Britain that, in
order to retain its mainforce for continental battles, Her Majesty’s government would be forced
to offer significant concessions to any concerted Irish demands.99 The rhetoric of Duffy and
O’Brien became more insurrectionary as they struggled to remain at the head of a movement that
anticipated imminent revolution. Meagher presented the Confederation with a green, white and
orange tricolor that had been sent by sympathetic French republicans.100 Mitchel was ecstatic:
“Oh! my countrymen, look up, look up! Arise from the death-dust where you have long been
lying, and let this light visit your eyes also, and touch your souls. Let your ears drink in the
blessed words, ‘Liberty! Fraternity! Equality!’ which are soon to ring from pole to pole.”101
Unlike Lalor, the Confederation held the greatest chance of success to lie in an urban rather
than rural revolution. This was where they had organized clubs, thirty in Dublin alone, each with
between two hundred and five hundred members but “not one club in the agricultural districts.”102
Mitchel was brought to trial and on 27 May 1848 was sentenced to fourteen years transportation to
a penal colony in Australia for the newly created crime of treason-felony, effectively the preaching
of civil war. Meagher and Richard O’Gorman (1826-95) inspected the Dublin clubs to see if they
might affect Mitchel’s rescue but found them “unprepared, unorganised, unarmed, and incapable
of being even roughly disciplined.”103 After the sentencing, Mitchel asked the court if he might
promise continued defiance from the others present. He “was then removed, and great confusion
ensued from the efforts of his friends to shake hands with him.”104 As Doheny recalled: “Men
stood in affright, and looked in each other’s faces wonderingly.”105 No rescue was attempted and
the guilt felt by his friends tightened still further the revolutionary spring: “The transportation
of a man as a felon, for uttering sentiments held and professed by at least five-sixths of his
countrymen, seemed to me so violent and insulting a national wrong, that submission to it must
be taken to signify incurable slavishness.”106 The suppressed United Irishman was replaced by the
equally inflammatory Irish Tribune and Irish Felon. The latter was edited by John Martin (1812-75)
and had Lalor as a staff writer. Martin, Duffy and others decided to conspire in the procuring of
arms for a rebellion.107 Delegates were sent to the United States to raise money, and Confederate
clubs sprang up wherever Irish people lived in England and Scotland.108 In June 1847 Meagher
had addressed the Confederates of Liverpool among which were included Terence Bellew
MacManus (1811-61), whose transatlantic funerary rites would later be such a pivotal moment in
the development of Fenianism.109 In March 1848 Doheny, in company with the Irish-born Chartist
leader Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), spoke on the Irish cause to a meeting of fifteen-to-twenty
thousand Chartists at Oldham Edge, near Oldham.110 In April, a gun shop was opened for the
Irish in Liverpool, and in May one opened in Manchester.111 To intimidate the Liverpool Irish, a
military encampment was established in Everton, but the local John Mitchel Club continued to
142 Kearns
drill openly.112 Chartists came to Dublin from Manchester (Leech) and Glasgow (Kydd) to assure
the Confederates of cooperation “whenever a blow was struck.”113 From Dublin, Lalor begged
his brother to join him for the rising: “Come–even if father be dying.”114 When Habeas Corpus
was suspended, a supreme council of five was elected to direct the Dublin clubs. Lalor was not
chosen and set off for Tipperary to join O’Brien, but he was arrested on July 28 at Ballyhane,
kept at Nenagh jail and then sent to Newgate prison, Dublin, where his fragile health broke.115
In Newgate, Lalor was in daily contact with the many journalists of the Confederation who had
been arrested earlier in the month. Duffy was among them, and Lalor tried to convince him of the
need to launch another journal to take up again the revolutionary cause: “I acknowledged that
Ireland had a casus belli; but I denied that she had the power, or even the disposition, to prosecute
it in 1849.”116
The attempt to induce the gentry to lead a revolt of all the classes had failed. The urban
clubs set up by the Confederates were unarmed, only too well aware of the odds against them,
and reluctant to initiate the rebellion. Forced into the countryside, the urban rebels did indeed
find an underground culture of resistance. On the run after the failure of the rising directed by
O’Brien, Doheny found ready assistance in the countryside including a man who “taught me
the password of his clan which I was to use on certain contingencies.”117 Doheny had occasion
to be grateful for this secret bond of clan. When D’Arcy McGee returned to Ireland from an
aborted mission to secure arms in Scotland, he was landed at Sligo where he found that “there
never had been in Sligo or Leitrim any local Confederate or even ‘Repeal’ organisation. The only
local societies were secret–Molly Maguires and Ribbonmen.”118 Nevertheless, they promised to
muster two thousand men within a week once they were sure that the rising in the South had
truly begun: “On this agreement, a trusty messenger was despatched to Tipperary, by way of
Roscommon and Westmeath (through which the ‘Molly Maguires’ had established the agency
known among Canadians as an ‘underground railway’).”119 The respect for property among the
bourgeois nationalists ensured that they could not but fail to capitalize upon this insurrectionary
potential. Upon his release from prison, Lalor gathered about him a group of rebels who were
unafraid of conspiracy, including several such as John O’Leary (1830-1907) who were later
prominent Fenians. Together with Thomas Clarke Luby (1821-1901), Lalor went to visit Kenyon
in August of 1849 in order to test the revolutionary temperature in north Tipperary but, and it
would seem unbeknownst to them, Kenyon had already promised his bishop to lead no such
rising.120 On 16 September 1849, they attempted revolution in Tipperary and Waterford. Among
others, John O’Mahony (1816-77) returned from exile in Paris to help.121 In Tipperary the attempt
was abandoned for want of support. In Waterford a police station was taken at Cappoquin, but
Lalor and Luby were soon arrested and the leaders of the raid on the police station, Joseph Brenan
(1828-57) and Savage, fled to the United States. Lalor was soon out of prison, in time to die of
bronchitis on 17 December 1849.
By directing their attention to rural revolution, Lalor had put nationalists in touch with the
traditions of rural resistance, a development that shaped the tactics of the Fenians thereafter. At
the same time, by showing the organic connection between economic and political sovereignty,
Lalor exposed the class basis of many nationalist hesitations and reservations, and he laid the
groundwork for a dialogue between socialism and nationalism around questions of land reform
and colonialism which dominated, for example, the theoretical works of James Connolly. Most
important, perhaps, by concentrating on the land question, Lalor invited serious speculation
about the social order it was hoped to implement after independence. This utopian ambition is
perhaps the most significant of Lalor’s legacies.
A revolution in theory
Lalor was an avid reader of the Nation. From the writings of Thomas Davis, he took an
emphasis upon the history of conquest and, from John O’Donovan’s historical studies, he retained
an image of a communal, democratic, pre-conquest island. Like Davis, he saw the fertility of
the land as guarantor of the viability of a self-governing nation. Like Davis, he saw the social
structure of the country by light of the conquest.122 For Lalor, though, the crucial question was
not the evocation of a pluralist people but the construction of a just economic order out of the
exploitative despoliation of occupation by foreign powers. Lalor was not in thrall to a political
compact with landlords and did not see the rights of property as absolute. The propertied basis
of class relations was basic to his understanding of the social structure of rural Ireland in a way
that was not true of Davis. In the abstract, he held that “a secure and independent agricultural
peasantry” was the essential and only firm “foundation” for a nation.123 For any country, food was
the “first want” and even manufacturing relied upon “the support of a numerous and efficient
agricultural yeomanry.”124 From observation, Lalor concluded that the lot of the small farmer in
Ireland was much better than that of the wage laborer.125 In his opinion, a serious, but unnoticed,
consequence of the Famine was the derangement of rural class relations with small tenant
farmers being reduced to wage labor.126 The poor law acted in the same direction. The English
poor law from 1834 aimed at confining aid to the wholly destitute, seeking thereby to reduce
the dependence of the able-bodied upon the dole of out-relief. These principles were introduced
progressively into the Irish system. During the Famine, farmers were refused aid as long as they
had any grain to sell. This meant that they could not retain seed to sow for next year’s crop: “This
was to declare in favor of pauperism, and to vote for another famine. [...] To me it seems it would
have been safer to incur the risk of pauperizing their feelings than the certainty of pauperizing their
means; and better even to take away the will to be independent than to take away the power.”127
His understanding of the rural class structure made Lalor even more suspicious than Davis of
a version of Repeal that would merely empower the Irish landlords since this would be to set a
new group of Irish tyrants in place of their English predecessors.128 True nationalism implied a
concern for the common good. The good faith of the Irish gentry was subject to one simple test.
If the landlords sided with English oppression against peasant resistance they would be guilty
of treason.129 By supporting the Coercion Act in December 1847 the gentry announced itself an
enemy of the people. In clearing their estates, the landlords were trying to abolish Ireland, to
eliminate the Irish people. Lalor hoped that the people would not stand for it.130
Lalor brought together two strands in his treatment of the land question. The first was the
injustice of the conquest. The second was a defense of a sort of moral economy, which had been
undercut by the conquest and was further menaced by the political economy of capitalism. The
anti-modern moral critique of capitalism was common to Lalor, to Davis and to groups such as
the Ribbonmen: “The secret societies practiced a kind of preservative violence. Their goal was
less revolution than the restoration of a customary moral economy which the forces of capitalist
modernization were gravely jeopardizing.”131 Lalor’s synthesis of these historical and economic
themes was achieved through an account of the social contract as legitimizing resistance and
with a sketch of the ethical basis of a new dispensation. The prevailing property relations in rural
Ireland were subject to the historical criticism that they were unjust and to the economic criticism
that they failed to keep alive the Irish people. In Ireland, property relations could not be justified
on the grounds of first occupancy because the land had been stolen from the Irish people by the
occupying British forces.132 Nor could landowners appeal to the argument that the productivity
of the soil was their own creation. Lalor argued that the soil bore fruit by god’s leave alone. As a
gift from god, earth’s bounty was entrusted to humanity as a whole and no individual could use
144 Kearns
or own it except by the consent of all other men.133 Private property in land, then, was a collective
decision taken for the greater good. Land was distributed among individual owners because this
had been found to be the most effective way of maximizing the social good of food production.
The division of lands should result in an economy of small peasant farmers: “When it is made
by agreement there will be equality of distribution, which equality of distribution will remain
permanent within certain limits. For under natural laws, landed property has rather a tendency
to divide than to accumulate.”134 In the original position, then, individuals would agree to private
property because this made farming efficient but they would hardly agree to any gross inequality
in the distribution of land. In contrast, the property arrangements imposed by the British involved
just such a gross inequality and shored up this inequality by making partible inheritance illegal.
The social contract maintained by force of British occupation was unjust. It was also a failure.
Lalor found plenty that was rotten in the state of Ireland. The people were starving.
The farmers were being thrown off the land. Landlords exported grain. Land was being given
over to cattle while people were being given over to the high seas or the graveyard. The British
government aided and abetted this immiseration. By direct act of god or indirect act of nature,
Irish society stood condemned:
When society fails to perform its duty and fulfil its office of providing for its
people; it must take another and more effective form, or it must cease to exist.
When its members begin to die out under destitution–when they begin to perish
in thousands under famine and the effects of famine–when they begin to desert
and fly from the land in hundreds of thousands under the force and fear of deadly
famine–then it is time to see it is God’s will that society should stand dissolved,
and assume another shape and action; and he works his will by human hands
and natural agencies. This case has arisen even now in Ireland, and the effect has
already followed in part. Society stands dissolved.135
The abject failure of the social order meant, in Lalor’s view, that “a clear original right returns
and reverts to the people–the right of establishing and entering into a new social arrangement.”136
The granting of property rights, then, is a conditional matter subject to the test of being found to
be in the public interest: “I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to
the people of that country, and is the rightful property not of any one class, but of the nation at
large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will on whatever tenures, rents, services,
and conditions they will.”137 The people of Ireland had a permanent right to review such matters
as the tenure of their lands: “I rest it on no temporary and passing conditions but on principles
that are permanent and imperishable, and universal; available to all times and to all countries, as
well as to our own.”138 The British occupation denied this right to the Irish, for those who control
the land end up making the laws:
A people whose lands and lives are thus in the keeping and custody of others,
instead of in their own, are not in a position of common safety. The Irish famine
of ’46 is example and proof. The corn crops were sufficient to feed the island. But
the landlords would have their rents in spite of the famine, and in defiance of those
who raised it. They took the whole harvest and left hunger to those who raised
it. Had the people of Ireland been the landlords of Ireland, not a single human
creature would have died of hunger, nor the failure of the potato been considered
of any consequence.139
According to Lalor, the Irish people were subject to “slavery, with all its horrors, and with
none of its physical comforts and security.”140 It is for this reason that he urged nationalists to move
beyond the political goal of Repeal to the economic goal of “full and absolute independence,”
meaning “[t]he soil of Ireland for the people of Ireland.”141 The Irish had the right to defend
their lives: “The present salvation and future security of this country require that the English
government should at once be abolished, and the English garrison of landlords instantly expelled.
Necessity demands it–the great necessity of self-defense. Self-defense–self-protection–it is the first
law of nature, the first duty of man.”142 The new social contract must meet the test of sustaining
life. Tenants should assert immediately their claim “to a full and sufficient subsistence out of the
crops they have raised, and to a sufficiency of seed for next year’s crops,” before they made any
payment of rent.143 If rent came before food or seed, it starved the people this year or next, and as
such was unjust.
Lalor’s revolutionary strategy sprang from the same considerations. In the face of the
famine, “I selected as the mode of reconquest, to refuse payment of rent and resist process of
ejectment.”144 To achieve this the farmers needed to be organized in a sort of militia, an armed and
disciplined peasant army that Lalor saw as the basis for open rebellion. Lalor criticized Mitchel’s
preference for a spontaneous urban insurrection, dismissing the proposed putsch: “I want a
prepared, organized and resistless revolution. You only have an unprepared, disorderly and
vile jacquerie.”145 Lalor wanted to see developed a parallel set of institutions in Ireland through
which the people would learn the discipline of self-government.146 A “moral insurrection” in the
countryside, based on resisting evictions, would draw the British army out of urban barracks into
a diffuse rural war in which they would stand clear as the aggressors.147 The British army could
be hindered in its aggression through the destruction of roads, bridges and railway lines.148 These
forms of passive resistance would postpone but might not avoid the necessity for armed conflict
but the British would be forced to initiate the violence and the Irish could appeal to the claims of
justice implicit in the defense of life and land.
Lalor saw this as the start of a European movement as significant as that which rippled
out from the French Revolution of 1789: “The right of the people to make the laws–this produced
the first modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even now, are heaving in the heart of the world.
The right of the people to own the land–this will produce the next.”149 It was not enough that
nationalists such as those in the Confederation should seek an alliance with landlords in pursuit of
the breaking of the Union: “They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They chose to consider
them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to
preserve an Aristocracy. They desired not a democratic but a merely national revolution.”150 The
goal for the Irish should be “[n]ot to repeal the Union, then, but to repeal the Conquest.”151 It was
for these reasons that Lalor spoke of the political claims of Repeal as “a petty parish question”
whereas the economic demands of land reform might be asserted by the Irish on behalf of all
the conquered peoples of the world. “[H]eading all the nations,” Ireland would be “the lodestar
of history.”152 Connolly noted the cosmopolitan dimension of this appeal: “Lalor [...] advocated
his principles as part of the creed of the democracy of the world, and not merely as applicable
only to the incidents of the struggle of Ireland against England.”153 Only this sort of universal
and expansive goal could animate an effective revolution. Lalor asserted that “a petty enterprise
seldom succeeds.”154 On this basis, the Irish might pursue a principled and not merely a tactical
alliance with the Chartists. Indeed, Lalor argued that the Irish Felon should appoint to its editorial
board at least one of the English Chartists who were sympathetic to the Irish cause.155
Lalor had travelled quite some distance from the religious inflection of the tithe war
and the social economy of Conner’s land reform. The crucial innovation was to insist on the
interdependence of landlordism and colonialism. His analysis of the injustice of Irish property
146 Kearns
relations came back to the original theft of the land from the people of Ireland and its gifting
instead to an alien class, a class which thereafter could extort rents from Irish people even at the
peril of Irish lives. In face of the Famine, any social contract was dissolved, having failed the test
of sustaining life. Independence, then, was needed in order to set aright the Irish social contract.
This new social order required that control over Irish affairs be retained within the island of
Ireland and anticolonial nationalism is made prospective and not merely retrospective. This was
the meaning of Lalor’s appeal to Duffy that the Confederation adopt a broad understanding of
nationality: “full and absolute independence.”156
Yes! Ireland shall be free,

From the centre to the sea;
Then hurra for Liberty!
Says the Shan Van Vocht.157
NOTES
1 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London:
Verso, 2007).
2 Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World
History 19, no. 3 (2008): 251-274, 255.
3 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990).
4 Grant Dorfman, “The Founders’ Legal Case: ‘No Taxation Without Representation’ versus
Taxation No Tyranny,” Houston Law Review 44, no. 5 (2007-8): 1377-1414, 1380.
5 Anthony D. Smith, “Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the
Reconstruction of Nations,” Nations and Nationalism 1, no. 1 (1994): 3-23, 18.
6 John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation
of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Hutchinson, “Re-Interpreting
Cultural Nationalism,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 3 (1999): 392-407, 398,
400.
7 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-14.
8 Hutchinson, “Re-Interpreting Cultural Nationalism,” 404.
9 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” [1852], trans. Saul K. Padover, in
David Fernbach (ed.), Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile (London: Penguin, 1973), 143-249, 143.
10 Gerry Kearns, “Time and Some Citizenship: Nationalism and Thomas Davis,” Bullán: An
Irish Studies Journal 5 (2001): 23-54.
11 L. Perry Curtis, “Moral and Physical Force: The Language of Violence in Irish Nationalism,”
Journal of British Studies 27, no. 2 (1988): 150-189.
12 “Loyal National Repeal Association of Ireland,” Freeman’s Journal (29 December 1840): 2-4,
3.
13 Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845-49 (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin,
1883), 192.
14 Loc. cit.
15 “Conciliation Hall,” Freeman’s Journal (14 July 1846): 2-3, 3.
16 John Savage (1828-88) quoted in, C. O’Shannon, “James Fintan Lalor,” in Michael J.
MacManus (ed.), Thomas Davis and Young Ireland (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1945): 68-70, 69.
17 James O’Connor, “James Stephens, the Head Centre: Personal Recollections,” Southern Star
(6 April 1901), 2.
18 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of
Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page, 1920
[1872]).
19 J.J., “James Fintan Lalor,” Skibbereen Eagle (13 October 1900), 6.
20 Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or The Story of the Land League Revolution
(London: Harper and Brothers, 1904), 58.
21 David N. Buckley, James Fintan Lalor: Radical (Cork: Cork University Press, 1990), 91.
22 Ibid., 56.
23 Ibid., 92.
24 John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York: Chase D. Young, 1929), 17.
25 Pádraig Pearse, “Ghosts” [1915], in idem (ed.) Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Political
Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing, 1924), 219-250, 239.
26 Ibid., 246.
27 James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel, 1914 [1910]), 185-6.
28 Connolly, Labour in Irish History, 188.
29 John Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
30 British Parliamentary Papers [BPP] 1831-2 (663) xxii, 181, Second Report from the Select
Committee of the House of Lords, Appointed to Inquire into the Collection and Payment of Tithes in
Ireland, 62.
31 “Tithes! Tithes! Tithes!” Freeman’s Journal (12 September 1836): 1.
32 Buckley, Lalor, 14.
33 Quoted in Lilian Fogarty, James Fintan Lalor: Patriot and Political Essayist (1807-1849) (Dublin:
Talbot Press, 1919), xviii. Fogarty suggested that Charles Gavan Duffy, as editor of the
Nation, was reporting on Patrick Lalor’s disenchantment with Daniel O’Connell, but I think
she strained too hard in assimilating the father’s to the views of the son, particularly given
the many evidences of father trying to discipline son for hostility to O’Connell and for
proclivity towards insurrection.
34 BPP 1831-2 (663), 64.
35 BPP 1831-2 (508), xxi, 245, Second Report from the Select Committee on Tithes in Ireland: 376
36 BPP 1831-2 (271), xxii, 1, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House
Lords Appointed to Inquire into the Collection and Payment of Tithes in Ireland: 29.
37 BPP 1831-2 (663), 68.
38 “The Repeal Movement in the Queen’s County,” Freeman’s Journal (17 February 1843): 3.
39 BPP 1845 [657], xxi, 1, Evidence taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the
State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part III: 329.
40 BPP 1835 (547), viii, 1, Select Committee on Preventing Bribery, Corruption and Intimidation at
Elections: 285.
41 Loc. cit.
42 Ibid., 286-7.
43 Ibid., 533.
44 BPP 1845 [657], 334.
45 Ibid., 607.
46 Loc. cit.
47 Loc. cit.
48 Noneen Clare [pseud.], “Tenakill: James Fintan Lalor’s Home,” Kilkenny People (21
November 1936): 8. This was probably someone known to the family since this is the earliest
known publication of quotations from letters of James Fintan Lalor to his family.
148 Kearns
49 Loc. cit.
50 Thomas P. O’Neill, James Fintan Lalor [1962], trans. John T. Goulding (Dublin: Golden
Publications, 2003), 27.
51 Ibid., 30.
52 William Conner, The True Political Economy of Ireland: Or, Rack-Rent the One Great Cause of All
her Evils, with its Remedy (Dublin: Wakeman, 1835), iii.
53 George O’Brien, “William Conner,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 12, no. 46 (1923): 279-
289.
54 O’Neill, “The Irish Land Question, 1830-50,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 44:175 (1955):
325-336.
55 O’Neill, Lalor,
56 Patrick Maume, “William Conner,” in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of
Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); http://dib.cambridge.org.
57 O’Neill, Lalor: 17.
58 Ibid., 39.
59 Ibid., 38.
60 Ibid., 39.
61 These data on crimes are from monthly returns made by the Irish constabulary: BPP 1843
[460] li, 49, A Return of Outrages Reported by the Constabulary in Ireland During the Years 1837,
1838, 1839, 1840, and 1841; a Like Return of Outrages During Each Month of the Year 1842; and
for the Months of January, February, and March, 1843: 9-20; BPP 1843 (276) li, 169, Outrages
(Ireland). A Return of Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office, Dublin Castle, During the
Month of April 1843: 3-4; BPP 1843 (352) li, 173, Outrages (Ireland). A Return of Outrages in
Ireland Specially reported to the Constabulary Office, Dublin Castle, During the Month of May
1843: 2-3; BPP 1843 (419) li, 177, Outrages (Ireland). A Return of Outrages in Ireland Specially
Reported to the Constabulary Office, Dublin Castle, During the Month of June 1843: 3-4.
62 BPP 1843 [460], 3-4; BPP 1846 (217), xxv, 451, Outrages (Ireland). A return of outrages Specially
Reported to the Constabulary Office in Ireland, During the ear 1842, 1843, 1844 and 1845. Abstract
Return of Total Number of Persons in Ireland Appearing by the Returns of the Clerks of the
Crown and Clerks of the Peace of the Several Counties, &c. to Have Been Committed for Trial, or
Discharged, &c. in the Years 1844 and 1845: 1.
63 Tom Garvin, “Defenders, Ribbonmen and Others: Underground Political Networks in Pre-
Famine Ireland,” Past and Present 96 (1982): 133-155.
64 O’Neill, Lalor: 36-7.
65 Ibid., 39.
66 Buckley, Lalor: 63.
67 O’Neill, Lalor: 47.
68 National Library of Ireland [NLI] MS 340/59, “To the Landowners of Ireland,” 10 January
1844: f. 46.
69 O’Neill, Lalor, 150.
70 William J. Smyth, “The Longue Durée–Imperial Britain and Colonial Ireland,” in John
Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (eds) The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-
52 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 46-63, 49
71 James S. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2001).
72 Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and
Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
73 Fogarty, Father John Kenyon: A Patriot Priest of Forty-Eight (Dublin: Whelan, 1921), 57.
74 Ibid., 26.
75 Ibid., 54.
76 Ibid., 100.
77 Ibid., 88.
78 Lalor, “To Charles Gavan Duffy, Editor of the ‘Nation’” [11 January 1847] in O’Neill, Lalor:
133-6, 134.
79 Loc. cit.
80 Ibid., 135.
81 Quoted in Kevin B. Nowlan, “The Political Background,” in Robert Dudley Edwards and
Thomas Desmond Williams (eds), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish history, 1845-52 (Dublin:
Lilliput Press 1994 [1956]), 129-206, 171.
82 Fogarty, “Biographical Note,” in Idem., Lalor: ix-xlx, xxiii. In the eighteenth-century
folksong, “Shan Van Vocht,” the old woman who is the personification of Ireland asks if
Ireland will be free when the French come to support a nationalist uprising. The reply can be
heard echoing in Lalor”s phrasing: “Yes! Ireland shall be free, | From the centre to the sea; |
Then hurra for Liberty! Says the Shan Van Vocht”; “Shan Van Vocht,” trans. Thomas Kinsella,
in Kinsella (ed.) The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986),
256-7, ll 53-6.
83 Kearns, “‘Educate that Holy Hatred’: Place, Trauma and Identity in the Irish Nationalism of
John Mitchel,” Political Geography 20, no. 7 (2001): 885-911.
84 Letter of 22 April 1847, quoted in: William Dillon, The Life of John Mitchel, Vol. I (London: K.
Paul, Trench, 1888), 157.
85 Ibid., 184.
86 Quoted in Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 168.
87 Ibid., 169.
88 Letter of 21 June 1847, quoted in Steve Knowlton, “The Enigma of Charles Gavan Duffy:
Looking for Clues in Australia,” Éire-Ireland 31 (1996): 189-208, 200.
89 Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 178.
90 Fogarty, “Biographical Note,” xxix.
91 Nowlan, “Political Background,” 183.
92 Quoted in Fogarty, Lalor, 120.
93 On Mitchel’s motion that the Confederation should abandon constitutionalism, there were
188 ayes and 317 noes: Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 186.
94 Mitchel, “Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)” [1850], in Idem., The Crusade of the Period; and
Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (New York: Lynch, Cole and Meehan, 1873), 96-324, 259.
95 Duffy claimed that Lalor rejected the position because he found the salary derisory: Duffy,
Four Years of Irish History, 186.
96 Ibid., 190.
97 Ibid., 201.
98 Nowlan, “Political Background,” 191. The working man selected was a silk-weaver named
Edward Holywood: Duffy, Four Years of Irish History: 201; Arthur Griffith, “Contemporaries
Mentioned in ‘The Felon’s Track,’” in Michael Doheny, The Felon’s Track, or the History of the
Attempted Outbreak in Ireland, Embracing the Leading Events in the Irish Struggle from the Year
1843 to the Close of 1848 (Dublin: Gill, 1914 [1849]), 302-316, 307.
99 Nowlan, “Political Background,” 189. In the event, the one thing the young French republic
wanted to avoid was a confrontation with Britain. Lamartine, the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, was lobbied by the British before the Irish delegation arrived and the Irish were told
that France would not interfere in Britain’s internal affairs.
150 Kearns
100 John Mitchel, The History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time: Being a
Continuation of the History of the Abbé MacGeoghegan, Vol. II (Glasgow: Cameron Ferguson,
1899 [1867]), 227, 231.
101 United Irishman, 4 March 1848, quoted in John Newsinger, “John Mitchel and Irish
Nationalism,” Literature and History 6 (1980), 182-200, 189.
103 Loc. cit.
104 John G. Hodges, Report of the Trial of John Mitchel for Felony, Before the Right Honourable Baron
Lefroy, and the Right Hon. Justice Moore, at Commission Court, Dublin, May, 1848 (Dublin:
Alexander Thom, 1848), 98.
105 Doheny, Felon’s Track, 138.
106 John Martin, quoted in Mitchel, “Last Conquest,” 296.
107 Duffy, Four Years, 218.
108 Ultimately £10,000 was raised in the North America but it arrived too late to be used for the
insurrection for which it was intended. The money was returned: Ibid., 249.
109 John Denvir, The Irish in Britain from the Earliest Times to the Fall and Death of Parnell (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 134.
110 Ibid., 138.
111 Ibid., 139.
112 Ibid., 141-2.
114 Letter of 17 July 1848 to Richard Lalor, quoted in Fogarty, Lalor: 119. Richard joined the
Confederation: Fogarty, “Biographical note,” xxx.
115 Fogarty, “Biographical Note,” xxxiii-xxxv; Duffy, Four Years of Irish History: 229, 235; Cecil
Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-9 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), 417.
117 Doheny, Felon’s Track, 256.
118 “Thomas Darcy McGee’s narrative of 1848” [1850] in Ibid., 289-97, 294. McGee had been
spotted in Edinburgh, which explained his hasty return to Ireland via Whitehaven.
120 Fogarty, Kenyon, 119-20.
121 John Rutherford, The Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy; Its Origin, Objects, and
Ramifications, Volume I (London: C.K. Paul, 1877), 48. O’Mahony repaired later to Paris and
went on to found the Fenian movement in the United States. Luby and Savage were also to
become leading Fenians.
122 Kearns, “Time and Some Citizenship.”
123 Lalor, “A New Nation” [1847], in Fogarty, Lalor: 7-25, 21.
124 Ibid., 22-3.
125 Lalor, “Tenant’s Right and Landlord Law” [1847], in Fogarty, Lalor, 26-37, 28.
126 Lalor, “A New Nation,” 9.
127 Lalor, “Tenant’s Right,” 35. This article was published in May 1847. Throughout the
year, the British parliament debated reforms to the Irish poor law with the London Times
supporting from March onwards, the proposal of the Dublin M.P., William Gregory (1817-
92), that no farmer with more than a quarter acre of land should be entitled to relief. This
was included in the Act passed that November and the proletarianising of the tenant
farmers proceeded apace: O’Neill, “The Organisation and Administration of Relief, 1845-
52,” in Edwards and Williams, Great Famine, 207-259, 253.
129 Ibid., 17.

130 Ibid., 24-5.
131 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995),
84.
132 Lalor, “The Faith of a Felon” [1848], in Fogarty, Lalor, 92-105, 99.
133 Ibid., 100.
134 Ibid., 101.
136 Quoted in Nowlan, “Political Background,” 172.
137 Lalor, “Letter to the Irish Felon” [1848], in Fogarty, Lalor, 52-66, 61.
138 Lalor, “Faith,” 98.
139 Lalor, “Letter to Felon,” 62.
140 Loc. cit.
141 Ibid., 57.
142 Lalor, “The First Step–the Felon Club” [1848], in Fogarty, Lalor, 84-8, 85.
143 Lalor, “Tenant Right Meeting in Tipperary” [1847], in Fogarty, Lalor, 47-51, 48.
145 Quoted in Priscilla Metscher, Republicanism and Socialism in Ireland: A Study in the
Relationship of Politics and Ideology from the United Irishmen to James Connolly (Frankfurt-am-
Main: P. Lang, 1986), 99.
146 “To the Confederate and Repeal Clubs in Ireland” [1848], in Fogarty, Lalor, 67-83, 75. Davis
had been sympathetic to this intention and had hoped that the local Repeal clubs could be
used for the purpose. O’Connell’s wish to keep distance from the insurrectionary language
of Young Ireland hindered this development but the idea of a sort of unofficial parliament of
three hundred remained a fond hope of many.
147 Ibid., 76.
149 Quoted in Connolly, Labour in Irish History, 188.
152 Lalor, “Letter to Duffy,” 3.
153 Connolly, Loc. cit.
155 Lalor, “What must be done?” [1848], in Fogarty, Lalor, 89-92: 91.
157 “Shan Van Vocht,” ll, 53-6.
Race, Space, and Politics in Mid-Victorian Ireland:
The Ethnologies of Abraham Hume and John McElheran
Diarmid A. Finnegan
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology
Queen’s University Belfast
ABSTRACT: There has been much scholarly debate about the significance and influence
of racialist thinking in the political and cultural history of nineteenth-century Ireland.
With reference to that ongoing historiographical discussion, this paper considers
the racial geographies and opposing political motivations of two Irish ethnologists,
Abraham Hume and John McElheran, using their racialist regimes to query some of
the common assumptions that have informed disagreements over the role and reach
of racial typecasting in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. As well as examining in
detail the racial imaginaries promulgated by Hume and McElheran, the paper also
argues for the importance of situating racialist discourse in the spaces in which it was
communicated and contested. Further, in highlighting the ways in which Hume and
McElheran collapsed together race, class, and religion, the paper troubles the utility of
a crisp analytical distinction between those disputed categories.
T
he racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century has long been a topic of scholarly
investigation and debate. The work of Perry Curtis on caricatures of the Irish in British
periodicals was among the earliest examinations of the influence of racial typecasting on
the construction of Irish identity in the nineteenth century.1 In his Apes and Angels: The Irishman in
Victorian Caricature, Curtis argued that from the 1840s, images of the Irish in comic newspapers
increasingly drew on physiognomy and racial science to portray their subjects as under-developed,
misshapen, and dangerous Celtic Calibans. According to Curtis, such portrayals subsequently
fed into debates about Home Rule in the 1880s, providing a ready resource for those who wished
to argue that the Irish were not capable of self-government.
These claims were quickly challenged by those skeptical of “race” as an explanatory
category for understanding Irish political history. Among others, Roy Foster and Sheridan Gilley
queried the representativeness of negative portrayals of the Irish in the Victorian period.2 Class
and religion, rather than race, were argued to be of greater importance for understanding British
attitudes towards Ireland. It was noted, too, that those attitudes varied considerably and were a
dynamic mélange of positive and negative judgments of Irish character and the Irish situation.
Responding to these criticisms, other scholars have issued revised statements of Curtis’s
arguments, insisting that racialized representations were indeed an important part of Irish
political reality in the nineteenth century. In his extensive study of nineteenth-century depictions
of the Irish in the British press, Michael de Nie argued that negative stereotypes of the Irish
in Britain were remarkably persistent and culturally potent.3 Luke Gibbons, too, reformulated
Curtis’ arguments and suggested that the form of racism experienced by the Irish, while not
the same as the virulent kind meted out against African Americans, was analogous to attitudes
towards Native Americans. For Gibbons, this “softer” form of racism nevertheless abetted
extraordinarily harsh programs of exclusion and extermination.4 These refashioned versions of
Curtis’ thesis have, in turn, been strenuously challenged. In a 2005 article, for example, Gary
Race, Space, and Politics in Mid-Victorian Ireland 153
Peatling questioned again the influence or “throw” of racial depictions of the Irish on political
decision-making and queried the adequacy and accuracy of comparisons drawn between the
treatment of, and attitudes towards, Irish and non-white races during the nineteenth century.5
Much of this historiographical debate has centered on the relative importance of racialist
conceptions of the Irish by “outside” observers. A related body of work on the construction
of racial identity among an Irish diaspora has helped to bring into view Irish self-perceptions.
Noel Ignatiev’s controversial thesis that “the Irish,” rather than identify with African Americans
or other marginalized communities, “became white” to secure better employment and social
standing in nineteenth-century America, has attracted considerable attention.6 John Belchem’s
study of Irish Catholics in Liverpool during the long nineteenth century has highlighted some
of the negotiations around race that shaped the development of a distinct and dynamic ethnic
identity.7 Attitudes in Ireland towards what were taken to be distinctive racial groups have also
been given some attention in recent work examining the anti-imperial rhetoric employed by
the Irish nationalist press.8 This work has demonstrated that sympathy for subjugated peoples
elsewhere in the world was an important, if inchoate, component of Irish nationalist discourse.
This paper offers a different and neglected entry point into nineteenth-century discussions
about Ireland and race by examining two little-studied Irish ethnologists for whom race was a
central explanatory category for understanding Irish culture, society, and politics. Writing in
the 1850s, Abraham Hume and John McElheran, although guided by dramatically different
scientific and political convictions, argued that Ireland’s population was composed of distinct
racial groups. Among other things, their work demonstrates the difficulties involved in assessing
the relative importance of a “racial” component in political and cultural debates about Ireland in
the mid-Victorian period. Although race was given an analytical priority in the projects pursued
by Hume and McElheran, it was inextricably tied to judgments about class and religion.
As well as advancing our understanding of the nature of racial thinking in mid-Victorian
Ireland, this paper underlines the importance of geography for comprehending racialized
accounts of Ireland, and does so in at least two ways. First, for both racial theorists, constructing
a vividly imagined geography of racial difference was a crucial concern. Hume in particular
was aware of the methodological and conceptual kinship between mid-Victorian geography and
ethnology, and mapping the distribution of racial groups was a key part of his ethnological
project.9 McElheran, by contrast, did not make use of cartography, but he similarly aimed to
produce a graphic account of racial difference at a local, regional, and global scale.
Questions of geography are argued to be important in a second sense. Rather than
rushing to position the ethnological interventions of McElheran and Hume within a general
narrative of the cultural politics of race in nineteenth-century Ireland, care is taken to situate
those interventions in the specific intellectual, cultural, and political spaces where they were
first articulated and discussed. This is not necessarily to deny the possibility or importance of
working towards more general claims. It is to suggest, however, that the historical geographies
of nineteenth-century discussions about the racialization of the Irish have to be taken seriously.
Doing so will prevent the recalcitrant and radically contingent character of racial discourse from
being smoothed over in the heat of historiographical debate.
The paper proceeds by reconstructing in turn the ethnological proposals made by Hume
and McElheran. Following this, a closing section will reflect on the differences and similarities
between the racialist views of the two ethnologists and highlight the ways in which their projects
disrupt some common assumptions about the nature and influence of racialist thought in
nineteenth-century Ireland.
154 Finnegan
Establishment ethnologies: the racial politics of Abraham Hume

Abraham Hume (1814-1884) was born in Hillsborough, County Down and was educated
at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Glasgow University, and Trinity College, Dublin.
In 1836, he was appointed Head of the English School at Belfast Academy. Five years later he
moved to Liverpool, taking up a position at the Mechanics’ Institution and then, from 1843 at
the Collegiate Institution. In the same year, Hume graduated with a BA from Trinity College
and went on to take holy orders in the United Church of England and Ireland, and in 1847 he
was appointed Vicar of the Parish Church of Vauxhall, Liverpool.10 Within his own family, his
commitment to the Established Church was a matter of serious concern. His grandfather had
been a Presbyterian minister in Hillsborough and his family remained resolutely committed to
that tradition.11 Whatever the impact of this private disagreement, Hume became an outspoken
advocate of the Anglican Church in England, Ireland, and beyond.
Hume’s interest in science developed early. He excelled in scientific as in other studies
while a pupil at the Belfast Academical Institution and was involved as a young man in the Belfast
Natural History and Philosophical Society. He gained “first honours” in the science department
at Trinity College, Dublin on several occasions and, on moving to Liverpool, became a leading
member of the town’s Literary and Philosophical Society.12 During his first few years in Liverpool,
Hume also became enmeshed in controversies over the anonymously authored evolutionary tract,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.13 For Hume, the book represented a distinct threat to the
vital alliance between the Established Church and science, and it contravened scientific principle
by propagating inferences not based on fact. The danger of the book also lay in its novel-like
qualities, a literary genre that, in Hume’s view, encouraged mental atrophy.14 The same appeal to
“bare facts” marked Hume’s subsequent work on ethnology and social statistics. These projects
also represented the practical outworking of Hume’s commitment to consolidating the influence
of the Church through scientific study.
Hume’s commitment to facts and disavowal of speculative science was a typical rhetorical
posture, not least among enthusiasts for what were known as moral statistics. As Theodore Porter
has argued, statistics was “in many ways the characteristic social science of the mid-nineteenth
century,” and its emphasis on the empirical rather than theoretical made it especially attractive
to urban reformers.15 Hume’s interest in the statistical analysis of social change, particularly with
reference to race and religion, first emerged in 1847 on his appointment as incumbent of “the new
district of Vauxhall,” a particularly impoverished area of Liverpool. Hume’s survey of thousands
of households was designed to demonstrate the need for further church extension and additional
resources for densely populated urban areas.16
In 1852, Hume turned his “eye for facts” back to Ireland and to ethnology. In a paper
delivered in Belfast to Section E (Geography and Ethnology) of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Hume charted the “origin, characteristics and dialect of the people of
the counties of Down and Antrim.” Hume’s presentation ranged widely, but at its heart was
an attempt to demonstrate that the counties under study had been a vital influence on the “the
destinies of the human race” in both Britain and Ireland. The main agents of this influence were
the Anglo-Saxons, which Hume divided into two distinct, because long-separated, branches: the
English and “Scotch.” Creed, “habit,” and surnames were all used to map the distribution of
these two sub-racial groups. The English were Episcopalian, the Scottish, Presbyterian. In English
districts there was “more comfort and tidiness,” and while the “Scotchman” was “often more
intelligent than his English neighbour he rarely excelled him in weight of character.” It was these
two groups that had shaped and civilized Ireland’s northeast corner. The third racial element, the
“native Irish,” was by implication of little consequence in the illustrious history of Antrim and
Down.17
Hume’s paper formed the basis of several articles that appeared in the Ulster Journal of
Archaeology (UJA) between 1853 and 1859. As Hume noted, the UJA had been launched after
the British Association’s meeting in Belfast and on the back of an exhibition of Irish antiquities
organized for that occasion. Edited by the Belfast antiquarian Robert Shipboy MacAdam, it was
“open to the discussion of all disputed subjects in Irish archaeology,” and ethnology was very much
on its agenda. The journal’s prospectus noted that “distinct races of men [...] effected settlements
in the district, whose lineal descendants remain.” It noted, too, that Ulster was distinctive in
being, “the last part of Ireland which held out against the English sway,” a phrasing that sat
uncomfortably with Hume’s views of the special significance of Ireland’s northern province.18
The first of Hume’s articles, a much-expanded version of the opening sections of his paper
to the British Association, appeared in serial form in the first volume of the UJA. In it Hume set
out to describe the topography, physical geography, and social conditions that characterized the
counties of Down and Antrim before and shortly after the plantation of Ulster.19 His detailed
chorographical descriptions served a larger purpose and the over-riding aim was to show that
Antrim and Down were, like the biblical Canaan, regions of plenty, which had been barren and
uncivilized before the arrival of Anglo-Saxon colonizer. The customs and laws of the “native
Irish” had prevented any significant development, making the influx of Anglo-Saxon settlers both
desirable and necessary. The long-term effect of the plantations, and the later “numerous Protestant
accessions,” was a province that was no longer Irish in any sense except “geographically.” Ulster,
in ethnographic terms, had become a “parish” of “Anglo-Saxondom.” As a result, “every rood of
land” had risen in “moral importance and commercial value.”20 Hume’s original intention had
been to “show the peculiar locality for each set of people, native and foreign” after the first wave
of colonists had arrived and settled. As it turned out, he restricted the final third of his account
to English settlements.21 This, as will become clear, reflected his own concerns to demonstrate the
central and civilizing role that the Anglican Church had played not just in Antrim and Down, but
also in Ireland as a whole.
In an article published in the UJA three years later, Hume did map in more detail all
three of the major racial groups that he believed made up the population of Antrim and Down in
the seventeenth century (see Figure 1). Hume’s racialist chorography of Antrim and Down was
strongly colored by the environmentalism that typified much mid-nineteenth-century ethnology.
Racial traits were a function of climate and “circumstance,” a fact that made necessary an inquiry
into the relation between people and “the districts which gave them birth.”25 That did not mean
that race was essentially transient or plastic. Racial character, along with education and society,
were “powerful operating causes” in human history. The history of the peopling of Ireland also
suggested to Hume that some racial groups were more permanent than others. Echoing a widely
held view, Hume noted that certain immigrants to Ireland had become “more Irish than the
Irish.” Others like the “Saxons in England made the name, the language and the institutions of
the country their own.” The “native Irish,” like the Saxon, also seemed to have become a fixed
and permanent variety. Hume suggested that living in boggy tracts had “poisoned their energies”
and made them little different from “mere animals.”26 Yet it seemed, following Hume’s allusions
to Ireland’s “bog trotters” and “back-of-the-hill folk,” that they had become permanently mired
in their own inferior state.27
Hume’s close attention to the ethnology of Down and Antrim later widened out into a
consideration of Ireland as a whole. In a long pamphlet published in 1864, Hume analyzed the
results of the 1861 census of Ireland in part to defend the record and relevance of the Irish branch
of the Established Church. The pamphlet was dedicated to the “advanced radical” MP Lewis
Dillwyn in the conviction that Dillwyn’s knowledge of the Church in Ireland was not equal to
his “zeal [...] for alleged reform.”28 In order to mount a defense against Dillwyn-style calls for
156 Finnegan
Figure 1. Abraham Hume’s Ethnological Map of Antrim and Down. Published in Ulster Journal of
Archaeology 4 (1856) between p.155 and p.156. The green tint represents “native possessions”;
the blue tint, “lines of Scottish immigration”; the pink tint, “English settlements”; and the yellow tint,
“debatable and un-appropriated.”
disestablishment, Hume catalogued the relative distribution of Ireland’s three main religious
groupings: Roman Catholics, members of the Established Church, and Presbyterians. This
demonstrated that, while Roman Catholics were by far the largest group, the Established Church
was best placed to “leaven” Irish society, given its presence across the entire island. To remove
it, or to lessen its influence, would be to abandon Ireland to social decay and wholesale political
rebellion. The epigraph chosen for Hume’s pamphlet—lines from Thomas Moore’s poem “Erin,
oh Erin”—was not ironic despite the enthusiasm for Moore’s verse among Irish nationalists.
Hume clearly believed that Ireland would indeed “shine out when the proudest shall fade,” due
to the civilizing influence of the Established Church.29
For all the importance of religion in Hume’s analysis, it is clear that race, too, played a
significant role. As we have seen, it had long been Hume’s conviction that in Ireland race and
religion were interchangeable.30 The English Saxons were members of the Established Church,
the Scottish Saxons were Presbyterians, and the Irish Celts were overwhelmingly Roman
Catholic. It was the Celtic Catholics—or “the wretched kerne of the south and west”—who were
an “impediment to improvement,” and not simply because they owed allegiance to a “foreign
potentate.”31 In racial terms, they were constitutionally unsuited to occupations much beyond the
unskilled and menial. To illustrate this, Hume constructed from census results a “social pyramid”
that demonstrated, to his satisfaction, that “in Ireland there are vocations which are specially
Roman Catholic or Celtic.”32 Ireland’s Protestant Saxons, on the other hand, were singularly suited
to occupations concerned with property, law, and government. The English Saxons in particular
were the “cream of the Irish milk pot” and had retained the “emerald gem” for the crown of Great
Britain.33 Hume summarized his findings as follows: in Ireland “ethnology and creed on the one
hand illustrate and are illustrated by occupation and social grade on the other.”34
Hume’s racial analysis surfaced more strongly still in his conclusion. There, he attacked
advocates of the “equality of human nature” (which, he announced, “only had to be distinctly stated
to be universally denied”) and, by analogy with the unthinkable idea of “surrender[ing] supreme
power” to the slave populations of South Carolina and Mississippi, argued against acceding to
Irish demands for self-rule. Like emancipated slaves, the Irish—though not “negroes”—were
just as far from the moral, intellectual, and social maturity exhibited by Protestant Saxons.35 The
demanding task at hand was, “as far as possible,” to bring them up to the Saxon level.36
Hume’s argument that the Celtic race in Ireland was not beyond improvement but
remained far from the Saxon stage of development made him note, further, that the “great
difficulty” in Ireland for the English Church and State was not the “mild, docile and gentle”
Celt but “Romanized Normans exported from England” who had been “perverted” from their
original Protestant faith.37 Racially superior to their Celtic co-religionists, such converts to Roman
Catholicism could mount a substantial challenge to the Anglo-Saxon clergyman intent on winning
Ireland back to the ancient and “ante-papal” (even anti-papal) faith of Saint Patrick.38
Among other things, Hume’s racially charged religious geography of Ireland highlighted
the pivotal role of Anglican outposts in otherwise Celto-Catholic areas. This ethno-religious
vision, buttressed by the cartographic rhetoric of double spread maps, provided the basis for a
religious geopolitics readily mobilized to serve a more global remit. The parishes of many parts of
Ireland were, for Hume, more like remote mission stations than the settled and secure benefices of
England. Reflecting on the challenges to “clerical labour” in ten parishes in western Connaught,
Hume brought to mind “a foreign land” and, to find an equivalent example, pointed to the work
of the government chaplain of Lima, Peru.39
As it turned out, the allusion to South America was particularly appropriate. Three
years after his analysis of the 1861 census, Hume acted as a “surveyor” for the South American
Missionary Society. His “tour” of South America mapped out a moral geography of religious
158 Finnegan
toleration with Chile proving to be the most receptive to Anglican missions and the establishment
of Protestant communities. The explanation lay in a long history of interaction with Europeans
in general and “the English” in particular. 40 As well as mapping the relative receptivity of the
continent to Protestant mission, Hume’s survey also helped determine “centres for action” most
suitable for basing communities of English missionaries.41
Although Hume imported his racialist views into his work on Christian missions, it is
important to note that he did not do this consistently or in a sustained way. Strikingly, his many
studies of the religious geography of Liverpool make little or no reference to racial concerns.42
This was in spite of the fact that Hume was more aware than most of the large numbers of Irish
Catholics residing in Liverpool. Whatever the reasons for this silence, it is clear that Ireland
remained for Hume the geographical pivot for his ethnographical inquiries. Ireland, not England,
provided the ethnological facts on which to base a defense of the Established Church of England
and, especially, Ireland.
John McElheran and the transcendental Celt
On the same day in September 1852 that Abraham Hume delivered his paper to the
Geography and Ethnology Section of the British Association on the peoples of Antrim and Down,
a Belfast surgeon, John McElheran (d. 1859), penned a letter addressed to the Association’s
ethnologists. In it he attacked the “popular theory that England is Anglo-Saxon, and therefore
great.” The premise that England was Anglo-Saxon was, McElheran insisted, entirely mistaken.
The Saxon invasion did not exterminate the Celtic Britons but was, instead, absorbed by the
indigenous and superior Celts. Over the subsequent centuries “Celtic men,” far from remaining
“cooped up in corners,” became the backbone of Britain. Shakespeare, it turns out, was a “good
specimen” of the Celtic character. The only pure Saxons left were the miners of the North-East
of England, set apart by their “complexions, features and general structures.” The rest of the
population shaded towards the Celtic type. These claims were made on the back of a “complexion
census” McElheran had undertaken over a period of ten months in various British towns and
cities. Admitting the small sample size of his own surveys, McElheran ended his epistle by calling
the Association to sponsor an inquiry into Britain’s racial makeup. The end result would not only
be a boon for ethnological science, but would also “break down the prejudices and invidious
distinctions of race.”43
McElheran’s letter appeared several days later in the pages of the Northern Whig, a leading
Belfast newspaper dedicated to liberal and reformist causes. It was also reprinted in the Dublin-
based and politically nationalist Freeman’s Journal. Beyond that, however, it attracted little attention,
and less than a month later McElheran tried again to garner public interest in his subversive
ethnological theories. In a letter published in the Times, McElheran launched a stinging assault
on the “Saxon lie” promulgated by the newspaper at the expense of the downtrodden Celt. Once
again, McElheran announced that Saxons were in a diminishing minority. Against a dominant
view, McElheran asserted that “the greatest men who adorn English and Scottish history had
Celtic characteristics.” What was more, the “god-like Anglo-Saxon” that the Times had “hawked
around the world as an object of worship” was the product of an “infidel material theory of
race” that was to blame for “assassinations and oppression in Ireland” and for sectarianism
everywhere.44
On this occasion, McElheran’s views prompted widespread discussion. The Times
responded at length to McElheran’s “black and thick” abuse, dismissing the accusation that it
had ever promoted the idea that the English were Saxon. It was, in fact, the mixed character of the
English–born cosmopolites that made them versatile, practical, and virtuous. If the term “Saxon”
had been employed by the Times writers, it was for the “settlers in Ulster” or “importations
from the Lowlands of Scotland.” In the final analysis, it was only the “average Irishman” who
approached racial purity, being “by universal admission a Celt.”45
Other publications picked up on the exchange and pronounced their own judgments.
Punch reprinted choice quotes from McElheran’s letter, illustrating them with sketches of a
“small-brained, prowling Anglo-Saxon” and a “true Tipperary man”(see Figure 2).46 For the
Punch writer and artist, no further comment was needed—McElheran’s reversal of stereotypes
was patently absurd. The Belfast Newsletter, a paper sympathetic to the Protestant Establishment,
dismissed McElheran’s imagined “triumph over the anti-Celtic ethnologists of the London press”
and presented him as “the most fatal specimen of the Celt that the enemies of that race could
possibly seize upon as an illustration of his arguments.”47 In complete contrast, a number of Irish
nationalist newspapers trumpeted McElheran’s letter as a glorious triumph. The Freeman’s Journal
declared that the letter had “hit the raw” and forced from the Times a “pettifogging” denial that it
had ever suggested that the English were Saxon, despite the “thousand living evidences in type
of his own columns against him.”48 The Tipperary Free Press called the Times response a “snivelling
apology” made from a “lying lip” and praised McElheran’s matchless rhetorical prowess.49
McElheran’s letter to the Times and the responses to it have been previously noted and
discussed. Conor Carville describes McElheran’s ethnological interventions in 1852 as evincing a
“spectral ethnicity” that combined a “realist” or scientific posture with a “gothic” (but manifestly
not, for McElheran, Gothic) fascination with the unreal. Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha,
Carville presents McElheran’s text as a hybrid discourse uneasily moving between the real and
unreal and containing within its own insistence on an essentialized Celtic identity an “occult”
recognition of a more contingent and non-essential account of cultural difference.50 Although
Carville’s reading of McElheran’s pamphlet is provocative and suggestive, it entirely neglects
the scientific racialism that provided McElheran with the material and methods to construct his
hybrid and serial texts on racial identity. Robert Young’s account, less preoccupied with subtle
postcolonial inflections, sets McElheran’s racialism in scientific context and reconstructs in detail
his dispute with the Times.51 What is missing from both Young and Carville’s analysis is any
reference to McElheran’s political allegiances. Arguably, it was these more than anything else that
motivated and molded his ethnological enunciations.
McElheran’s place of birth and early education are not known.52 What is known is that he
was educated in Edinburgh and gained a license from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh
in August 1845.53 It is likely, then, that it was in Edinburgh that McElheran first encountered the
racial theories of the maverick anatomist, Robert Knox.54 But wherever the encounter occurred, it
is clear that Knox was the primary influence on McElheran’s understanding of racial difference.
For McElheran, as for Knox, races, once formed by a process of degeneration and divergence from
an original type, became permanent. Such degeneration was not induced by the environment
but rather by the interplay between material and “vital” causes that produced all animal forms.
Although McElheran emphasized the original unity of the human races—a scientific fact that
for McElheran confirmed the scriptural fact of an original and perfect human couple—this
monogenism did not move him far from Knox’s radical racial theory. In emphasizing an anti-
progressivist and anti-environmentalist account of racial development and in stressing race as
a fixed and fundamental feature of human history, McElheran cleaved closely to the theoretical
claims and core categories of Knox’s racialism.55
The incongruity of McElheran’s enthusiasm for Knox’s racialism is, on first examination,
striking. It is often noted that Knox was virulently anti-Celtic.56 But he could also be scurrilously
anti-Saxon. Knox, for all his apparent championing of Saxon supremacy, disavowed a progressive
and hierarchical understanding of race. Knox’s outbursts against Celtic despotism and militarism
and his encomiums on the superior qualities of the Saxon were frequently followed by contrasting
160 Finnegan
Figure 2. A sketch in Punch satirizing McElheran’s racial schemata. The “Anglo-Saxon”

resembles commonplace caricatures of the Irish. The “Tipperary man” is depicted as a miner
and an ethnologist, doubly disrupting McElheran’s claim that the most degraded racial type was
found among English colliers. Among other things, the sketches rendered McElheran’s “reverse
ethnology” as itself akin to caricature.
evaluations that destabilized the presumption of hierarchy. One example is Knox’s arresting claim
that his own racial theory, based as it was on the Naturphilosophie of German “Slavonians” such
as Oken, Goethe, and Spix, could never have been “imagined” or even understood by a Saxon.57
More relevant for McElheran was Knox’s highly unstable and paradoxical account of the Celt and
the Saxon.
Not surprisingly, McElheran took full advantage of Knox’s strategic reversals by quoting
at length his teacher’s descriptions of a rapacious and brutally selfish Saxon race. McElheran
also exploited the political convictions that informed Knox’s reflections on racial types. Knox’s
republicanism and radicalism—along with his mordant and magniloquent style—were readily
turned against the British imperial system that McElheran blamed for Ireland’s misfortunes.
Indeed, Knox’s work supplied pithy descriptions of Saxon misrule in Ireland. The island, Knox
noted, had long suffered from political enslavement and the “see-saw, diverting buffoonery
and deplorable hypocrisy” of English rule.58 For Knox, that was fully to be expected. Saxons
were, by nature, cold, calculating, and mercenary.59 For that reason, it was inevitable that the
Saxon, driven by an insatiable appetite for accumulating territory, would drive out the Celts from
Ireland. Knox’s discourse was, then, rabidly dialectical, even eristic, and it provided a deliciously
quotable resource for pursuing opposite political and ethnological programs.60
McElheran’s career as a political agitator began shortly after he established a surgical
practice in Hercules Place, a quarter of Belfast better known for its concentration of Catholic
butchers and cattle traders.61 By his own admission, McElheran’s practice was not particularly
successful and, in any case, he spent a good deal of time away from Belfast. In 1848, McElheran
lent some support to the failed rebellion mounted by the Young Irelanders, but his political
involvement and public profile dramatically increased after his letter to the Times.62 Thereafter, it
was Dublin rather than Belfast that became the main center of his politicking and lecturing. As well
as speaking at the Dublin Mechanic’s Institute, McElheran involved himself in the Irish Tenant
League, the Religious Equality Conference, the labor movement, and Robert Cane’s Celtic Union.
His lecturing took him to Tuam (where he banqueted with the patriot Archbishop John MacHale)
and, later, to Liverpool.63 His championing of labor rights and universal franchise brought him
into contact with the Labour Parliament in Manchester and in March 1854, along with Karl Marx,
he was elected an honorary member of that short-lived “alternative parliament.”64 Perhaps most
significantly, however, in January 1854 McElheran presided over a “national banquet” in Dublin
to celebrate the safe arrival to New York of the exiled Young Irelander, John Mitchel, a public act
that caused the Belfast Newsletter to declare that “the mantel of Mitchel has surely fallen […] on
the shoulders of McElheran […] the quondam Belfast surgeon apothecary.”65
Even when adopting the posture of a detached observer of human racial variety, McElheran
closely aligned his ethnological descriptions with his political predilections. In a paper published
in the UJA in 1854, McElheran presented an ethnological sketch of the Claddagh, a small fishing
community near Galway. McElheran’s choice of field site for his ethnographical investigations
was carefully considered. The Claddagh had been frequently described by travel writers on
Irish tours and was widely regarded as an ethnological curiosity. Interpretations varied, with
some observers describing the villagers of the Claddagh as self-sufficient, industrious, and well
ordered, even if primitive and superstitious.66 Others painted an altogether darker picture of
a backward and recalcitrant population resistant to progress and living in filth and squalor.67
McElheran shared the view of the villagers as primitive but regretted the gradual disappearance
of their superstitions, finding in them echoes of noble (if not yet Christian) ancient beliefs and
practices. Against the dominant view that the Claddagh residents were of Spanish or mixed
descent, McElheran insisted that they were of “the most ancient Celtic type.” He also was careful
to note that the reported indifference to progress was now on the ebb and that the people of the
162 Finnegan
Claddagh were on the cusp of making a signal contribution to the advance of modern civilization.
McElheran opened his paper by reminding his readers that the Claddagh was the “projected
site of the American packet station,” thus connecting his observations to long-standing efforts
to transform Galway into a major port city for transferring American exports to Europe. The
current “primitive inhabitants” of the village may, McElheran surmised, be the forebears of the
“merchant princes” of a “great commercial city connecting the old and new worlds.”68 Their
physical appearance was in contrast to that of the “Saxon slaves,” who were marked out by their
“heavy gait, blurred features, and dark eye.”69 McElheran’s conclusion was that the Claddagh
fishing folk “had within them the elements of a great people” and were of the “same race as are
found in Belfast and Glasgow.”70
McElheran’s career in Ireland as an ethnologist and Mitchelite nationalist was cut short in
May 1854 with his move to New York.71 It is likely that his outspoken support for Mitchel was, in
part at least, behind his move, but he may also have been at risk of conviction, under the Treason-
Felony Act (1848), for remarks in a lecture on “loyalty” to the Dublin Mechanics’ Institution
shortly after the visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland in September 1853.72 Whatever the reasons for
his relocation, McElheran continued to use ethnology to further an Irish nationalist cause.
A little over two years after his arrival in New York, McElheran addressed the city’s
Academy of Medicine on the subject of the “comparative anatomy of the human crania.”73 The
paper later appeared in full in the New York Journal of Medicine, and here McElheran’s reliance on
the “transcendental doctrines” of Robert Knox came to the fore.74 Following Knox, McElheran
asserted that human racial varieties were caused by “permanent arrestments of development.”
Even so, he gave Knox’s transcendental racialism his own idiosyncratic formulation arguing
that the “original unity” of the human type diverged and degraded towards “herbivorous” and
“carnivorous” varieties. More decisively, he argued against Knox that the Celtic race exhibited the
“highest range of development.” This meant it was possible to observe within Celtic populations
“forms analogous to the types of all other races.” For all that, the “lowest Celts retained their
superiority over the highest Goths and Negroes” due to “differently formed brains.” 75 To lend
authority to his revised hierarchical ordering, McElheran summarily dismissed the work of the
noted ethnologists, Samuel George Morton, Petrus Camper, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
According to McElheran, the crude measurements of a Morton, Camper, or Blumenbach could
not capture the subtle “lines of difference” that marked out different racial varieties. Using his
own more discerning eye, McElheran had examined Morton’s skulls collections more than “fifty
times,” a laborious exercise contrasting with that of the “Anglo-Saxon theorists who found their
own superiority in five or six skulls.”76 Through the course of his lecture, McElheran redefined
the meaning of the term “Celtic” from one that described a discrete and locatable population
to a human type distinguished by brain anatomy and the fine details of cranial morphology.
The conclusion of McElheran’s lecture, if not his article, was to persuade his audience that the
“true American type is [...] a pure bred Celtic race” as testified by “their language, their physique
and impulsive, versatile genius.” In a final flourish, McElheran used his own sketches of Celtic
types to demonstrate that the “typical American, such as Washington, Jackson, Taylor, Webster,”
resembled them exactly.77
As well as presenting his anti-Saxon message to learned audiences, McElheran made the
most of more popular media. In a series of articles published in the Irish-Catholic newspaper,
the Boston Pilot, McElheran launched an all-out assault on the “Anglomania” of the scientific and
public press in Britain and North America.78 These articles formed the mainstay of his book, The
Condition of Women and Children among the Celtic, Gothic and Other Nations, published in Boston in
1858 by Patrick Donahoe, the Pilot’s proprietor and leading sponsor of Catholic literature in North
America. The book’s condemnation of Saxonism was, if anything, more shrill and sensationalist
than McElheran’s previous proclamations. The thesis that “nations were and are barbarous and
unjust, and cruel to woman in proportion to their distance from the Celtic group” was pursued
relentlessly and at the expense of the “Anglo-Saxon” or “Gothic” race, descended as it was from
“the outer rind of humanity in Northern Europe.”79 McElheran made the most of the surrounding
disputes over race, slavery, and the American future to drive home his anti-Saxon message. In
McElheran’s makeshift racial hierarchy, “the Negro surpasses the Saxon in all the attributes that
distinguish the man and the brute.” Without defending the actions of American slave owners,
McElheran suggested that “the negro woman and child under Celtic control in America is superior
to the Saxon woman and child under the English poor law guardian.” That ranking remained
true despite the fact that the “Negro” was “naturally slavish and feeble-minded.” McElheran
also detected Saxon influence behind the hypocrisy of British abolitionism, motivated as it was
by a desire to secure “a monopoly of slave labor in India.”80 Moreover, Americans, unlike British
employers of female mineworkers or child laborers, “did not mock their slaves by telling them
they were free.”81 All of this simply confirmed for McElheran that the root cause of Ireland’s
distress and disadvantage was the brutal history of Saxon misrule and the influence of Saxon-
inspired political economy, “the practical expression of the cold-blooded, rationalistic […] instinct
of the Gothic race.”82 The only solution for Ireland was “separation from beastly, perfidious
Albion.”83 The only hope for America lay with the “talent and energy” of the virtuous, freedom-
loving Celtic race.84
Two very different reviews of McElheran’s book illustrate its political bearings and
unstable meanings. The first appeared in the Dublin-based Nation, in November 1858. The review
rehearsed the pre-history of McElheran’s latest and longest dissection and deconstruction of Saxon
supremacy. McElheran, “a quiet professor of medical science in the busy town of Belfast,” had
applied his scalpel to “this wonderful demi-god,” the Saxon, and exposed his real qualities.85 The
“superstructure of prejudice” erected and defended by the Times had fallen to the ground “on the
first volley of hard facts.”86 Six years later, McElheran had produced a book that provided “ready
weapons” against gross Saxonism. For the Nation’s reviewer, every sentence of McElheran’s book
stood “perfect, round and ready to be taken with scarcely diminished force as a stone to […]
demolish for ever some Anglo-Saxon falsehood or another.”87 Among the most important effects
of McElheran’s text was to decenter and demote the Saxon-centric account of world affairs that
lay behind England’s empire. In the long view provided by McElheran, the idea that London
lay at “the centre of the inhabitable earth” and that it was the destiny of the English race to
“rule the world” was declared preposterous. It was, instead the “Celtic centre,” which in ancient
times stretched “from Asia Minor, along the northern shores of the Mediterranean into Erin,”
that would, in time, guide and bless all nations with “light, and power and law.” Everything,
announced the reviewer, “in history, in geography and in ethnology tends to the same point.”88
The second review appeared some months later in the pages of Brownson’s Quarterly
Review, a periodical edited by the leading American Catholic apologist, Orestes Augustus
Brownson. McElheran’s book—which Brownson judged “not even worth the labor of a serious
refutation”—provided a useful foil for defending Brownson’s own views on the connections
between race, religion, and American politics.89 What Brownson found particularly bothersome
about McElheran’s argument was the assumption that the Celtic race was naturally inclined to
be Catholic whereas the propensity of the Saxon race was towards Protestantism and its more
heretical offshoots. For Brownson this was, in its practical and political import if not theoretical
pretensions, rank polygenism, a doctrine that he deemed utterly incompatible with Christianity
and American democracy.90 Brownson’s primary concern was to persuade his fellow American
citizens that Catholicism was neither an enemy of free states nor a friend of despotism. McElheran,
he argued, militated against this aim and reduced American Catholics to a “foreign colony” cut
164 Finnegan
off from the task of building a great nation. In making these judgments, Brownson sharpened a
tension that McElheran constantly negotiated throughout his work on the Celtic race. On the one
hand McElheran’s argument, following Knox, was based on the premise that “no race ever changes
its radical character.” The Celtic race was the “least fallen,” the Saxon the most degenerate. On
the other hand, the “divine mission” given to the Celtic race was to “save the rest of mankind” by
spreading the Christian message. McElheran, in a bid for consistency, nowhere denied that this
was possible but, at the same time, stressed that “no converted nation made slower progress in
Christianity than the Anglo-Saxons.”91
Brownson’s review marked the end of McElheran’s career as the champion of the Celtic
race. A few months after McElheran’s book was published, notices recording his death in London
of heart disease appeared in the Belfast Newsletter and the Freeman’s Journal.92 His legacy within
British ethnology was slight. The Scottish ethnologist Daniel Wilson briefly referred to his work
only to dismiss it as “embittered by the narrowest spirit of national prejudice,” a criticism he
was equally keen to level at the “Teutonic partisan” John Pinkerton.93 In contrast, ten years after
his death, the Nation found confirmation for McElheran’s thesis that the majority of Britain’s
population had Celtic origins in the ethnological observations of Thomas Henry Huxley. Yet
unlike Huxley, but in keeping with McElheran, the Nation’s editorialist insisted that the Irish,
in being purely Celtic, were “ethnologically different from England.” The Irish thus required
a different form of government and, under the sway of English rule, remained a “Prometheus
in chains,” a superior race bound by political slavery.94 This provided a neat summary of the
aggressively polemical “ethno-nationalism” that McElheran had championed for nearly a decade
in Ireland, Britain, and North America.
Intimate ethnologies and global imaginaries
In early September 1852, Hume and McElheran were both in Belfast to witness the meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Hume, on the committee of Section
E, was formally involved. McElheran did not participate in an official capacity but addressed
members of the Association via the pages of the Northern Whig. Over the next few years, both
men published on Irish ethnology in the pages of the Ulster Journal of Archaeology. Such proximity
in space and in print did nothing to ameliorate the intense oppositions found between Hume’s
environmentalist racialism and McElheran’s “transcendental” account of racial difference. Yet for
all those evident differences, it is worth noting that Hume and McElheran shared certain deep-
seated sensibilities and intellectual habits of thought.
In the first place, the ethnologies of both Hume and McElheran were intimately related to
their own self-perceptions. In 1845, Hume had laboriously put together an “illustrated pedigree”
of his own family that traced their ancestry back to a Saxon King and to nobility resident in
the Scottish border region.95 According to an influential theory promoted by a number of British
ethnologists, being a descendent of the lowland Scots placed Hume within a pure Saxon line.96
Hume was aware of this, noting in a later article that “rich Saxons” had fled north into the Scottish
border region during the reign of William the Conqueror and thoroughly Saxonized the district.97
Notably, among the groups that McElheran placed on the “outer rind” of humanity was
the “lousy” Saxon race of the Scottish lowlands, “a very filthy people” who shared none of the
virtues of the Celtic Highlander.98 Not surprisingly, then, McElheran—self-described as a “rough
northerner”—worked to establish his own distinctly Celtic pedigree. Though he did not, as far
as we know, conduct the kind of painstaking genealogical research carried out by Hume, he did
confirm that his surname connected him directly to “his Irish speaking friends in the Glens of
Antrim.” His “honourable patronymic,” pronounced, he suggested, “M’Gil Kerin” by native Irish
speakers, placed his ancestry close to the ruins of St. Kerin’s chapel in north Antrim.99 This rooted
him to a Celtic and Catholic past and linked him with a living community widely acknowledged
to be composed of “native Irish.”100
In the second place, Hume and McElheran both scaled up their ethnological theories
to produce a global racial geography and, in so doing, provided a basis for a form of ethnic
colonialism. McElheran, for example, pictured the populated earth as,
composed of realms, one Mediterranean, nursing the original [Celtic] tree, bearing
the loveliest flowers, and producing the finest fruits; each of the other realms bears
a slip of the old tree, transplanted and grown into a tree, with its branches, and the
great tree of each realm is weaker and coarser the farther it has been transplanted;
but, being transplanted, its new growth or type is permanent. But the old tree
still grows on, and increases, and casts its branches over the earth, killing out the
weaker trees—in other words, the original old race is encroaching upon all other
races.101
In sketching this appropriately biological, but also biblical image, McElheran licensed a version
of the “anti-colonial colonialism” of Robert Knox with the Celt settling in other parts of the world
not to annex them for Ireland, but to create independent nations animated by the “spark” of
Celtic genius.102 Certainly, there was little space in McElheran’s globalized racial geography for
ethnic groups such as the “red men of America,” except as “savages” akin to the degraded Saxon
and unlikely to survive the inexorable growth of a transnational “Celtica.”103
Hume, too, projected his racialist geography of Ireland onto global spaces. In his descriptions
of South America he evoked a global region that, at a continental scale, paralleled Ireland in being
over-shadowed by a “corrupt Christian faith” (Roman Catholicism) and populated, in the main,
by benighted “natives.” His reports of his trip to South America suggest that he saw the hope of
the continent resting in the hands of well-constituted missionaries who could, like the Saxons
in Ireland, resist the “relaxing effects of the climate” and avoid the vices of idleness and apathy
that beset the “natives.”104 Hume also made clear that these primitive peoples of South America
were in a much earlier stage of human development. In keeping with this traditional stadial
understanding of human history and geography, Hume suggested that innate racial differences
had been exaggerated. The whole world was, after all, “kin.”105 Even so, tellingly imagining the
globe as a “single country,” Hume found within its borders human inhabitants like the “Digger
Indians” of California who lived in “artificial structures scarcely more pretentious than that
constructed by the gorilla.” Such groups were on “the lowest round in the ladder which conducts
to platform of civilization.” 106 It was this “softer” racialism that underwrote Hume’s global vision
of strategically located “centres of action” that he took to be essential for advancing religious and
economic enlightenment.
However the similarities and differences between Hume and McElheran are parsed, it
is clear that neither is easily placed within scholarly debates about the racialization of the Irish.
It might be suggested, for example, that McElheran’s racialist tracts were a classic form of
mimicry, aping and reversing the more virulent representations of the Irish race found in British
ethnological and popular discourse and thus confirming the prevalence and influence of those
damaging depictions. Whether or not that is a plausible way to read McElheran’s racialist tracts,
it hardly tells the whole story. McElheran found in Knox’s “transcendental” racialism habits of
thought and political sentiments useful for constructing ethnological descriptions that cannot
be easily reduced to an act of intellectual mimicry. McElheran’s transcendental Celticism lent
support to an “ethnic” nationalism and a “diasporic imperialism” that was warmly received in
166 Finnegan
certain Irish nationalist circles. This suggests that more attention needs to be given to the ways in
which Knox-style racialist thought was utilized in support of a form of Irish (trans)nationalism
that has sometimes been styled “civic” rather than “ethnic.”
Hume, too, disrupts certain common assumptions. His monogenism and
environmentalism—two connected intellectual convictions that are frequently aligned with a
critique of racialist thinking—were combined with an understanding of race that, in its political
implications, differed little from more “innatist” and polygenist accounts of racial difference. That
he used this vigorous form of racialism for political purposes sits uncomfortably with suggestions
that race was a category of little importance in Irish Protestant and unionist discourse. Hume’s
conservative unionism and, more particularly, his unyielding support for the Established Church
did not make him atypical even if it set him apart from the more liberal strands of unionism that
found significant support among Ulster Presbyterians. Hume’s case suggests that more needs to
be done to track the importance of race as an explanatory or descriptive category within different
strands of unionist thought in mid-Victorian Ireland.
Taken together, the ethnological interventions of Hume and McElheran form a rather
unpalatable episode in the “racialization of the Irish” during the nineteenth century. Neither
provides ready material for scoring historiographical points. But both point to the “cross-
party” allure of racial categorization in mid-Victorian Ireland, and both highlight the influence
of contingent geographical circumstances in shaping the lineaments and unedifying legacies of
racialist discourse.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Livingstone and Jonathan Wright for comments on an earlier version of
this article. I would also like to thank Libby Mulqueeny for reproducing Figure 1. The research
was carried out while in receipt of an AHRC research grant [Grant no. AH/J004952/1].
NOTES
1 L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971).
2 Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen
Lane, 1993); Sheridan Gilley, “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900,” in
Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. Colin Holmes (London: Allen and Unwin,
1978): 81-110.
3 Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Edward G. Lengel, The Irish Through British Eyes:
Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era (Westport, CT: Praeger Publisers, 2002). For a different
perspective, see second reference.
4 Luke Gibbons, “Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History,” in Cultures of
Empire: A Reader, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 207-
23.
5 Gary K. Peatling, “The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union,” Journal of British
Studies 44 (2005): 115-133.
6 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Peter Kolchin,
“Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89
(2002): 154-73. For a critical review of the claims and methods that underwrite Ignatiev’s
thesis, see second reference.
7 John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool Irish, 1800-1939
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
8 Matthew Kelly, “Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s,”
Past and Present 204 (2009): 127-54; Gerry Kearns, “‘Educate that Holy Hatred:’ Place,
Trauma and Identity in the Irish Nationalism of John Mitchel,” Political Geography 20, no. 7
(2001): 885-911.
9 Arnold Horner, “Representing Cultural Divides in Ireland: Some Nineteenth- and Early-
Twentieth-Century Mappings of Variation in Religion and Language,” Irish Geography 43
(2010): 233-47. See reference on Hume’s innovative use of cartographic techniques.
10 Fionnuala Carson Williams, “Hume, Abraham, (‘Billy M’Cart’)” in Dictionary of Irish
Biography, eds. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a4153.
11 George Hume to Abraham Hume, January 27, 1844, in Letters of Abraham Hume, vol. 3,
PRONI, ref. D2765/A/2/2, f. 5. The sharp disagreement between Hume and his brother
George is recorded in numerous letters held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
(PRONI). See reference, for example.
12 Belfast Newsletter, November 6, 1838, 2.
13 [Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844).
14 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret
Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 199-221. On Hume and the debate over Vestiges in Liverpool, see reference.
15 Theodore M. Porter, “Genres and Objects of Social Inquiry from the Enlightenment to 1890,”
in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences, eds. Theodore M.
Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 28; Felix Driver,
“Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
England,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13, no. 3 (1988): 275-87. See second
reference also.
16 Abraham Hume, Missions at Home, or a Clergyman’s Account of a Portion of the Town of
Liverpool (London: J. and F. Rivington, 1850).
17 Hume, “The Origin, Characteristics and Dialect of the People in the Counties of Down and
Antrim,” Report of the Twenty-Second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (London: John Murray, 1853): 89-90.
18 Art J. Hughes, Robert Shipboy MacAdam (1808-1895), His Life and Gaelic Proverb Collection
(Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1998), 51; MacAdam to John Windele,
8 July 1853, in Royal Irish Academy, Windele MSS, 4 B 13/87.
19 Hume, “Origins and Characteristics of the Population in the Counties of Down and
Antrim,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 1 (1853): 129. Hume believed that Antrim and Down
were, de facto, included in the plantations of the early seventeenth century.
20 Ibid., 26.
21 Ibid., 246-54.
22 Hume, “Ethnology of the Counties of Down and Antrim,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 4
(1856), 158.
23 Ibid., 160.
24 Ibid., 162-3.
25 Hume, “Origins,” 9 (see n. 19).
26 Ibid., 9.
27 Hume, “Ethnology,” (see n. 22, p. 162).
28 Abraham Hume, Results of the Irish Census of 1861 (London: Rivingtons, 1864), 1.
29 Thomas Moore, “Erin, Oh Erin” (1810) in The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Vol. III,
Thomas Moore (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841): 261, l.12.
168 Finnegan
30 Hume, “The Elements of the Population of Down and Antrim, Illustrated by the Statistics of
Religious Belief,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 7 (1859): 130.
31 Hume, Results of the Irish Census, p. 19; p. 27.
32 Ibid., 52.
33 Ibid., 16.
34 Ibid., 51.
35 Ibid., 46.
36 Ibid., 60.
37 Ibid., 39
38 Ibid., 29.
39 Ibid., 39.
40 Hume, Report Respecting a Recent Missionary Tour on the West Coast of South America
(Liverpool, 1867), 4.
41 Ibid., 36.
42 William F. S. Pickering, “Abraham Hume (1814-1884): A Forgotten Pioneer in Religious
Sociology,” Archives de Sociologie des Religion 33 (1972): 33-48. On Hume’s Liverpool surveys,
see reference.
43 John McElheran, Celt and Saxon: Address to the British Association on the Ethnology of England
(Belfast: R. and D. Read, 1852), 3-8.
44 “Irish Impudence,” Times, October 7, 1852, 5.
45 Times, October 7, 1852, 4.
46 “An Elegant Extract,” Punch, October 16, 1852, 165.
47 Belfast Newsletter, November 1, 1852, 1.
48 “The Celt and the Saxon,” Freeman’s Journal, October 8, 1852, 2.
49 McElheran, Celt and Saxon, (see n. 41, p. 21).
50 Conor Carville, “Spectral Ethnicity: Writing Race in Victorian Ireland,” Irish Review 36, no. 7
(2007): 67-77.
51 Robert Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (London: Blackwell, 2008), 112-119.
52 It is likely that McElheran, or his family, was from the area around Cushendall in North
Antrim. According to the 1901 census, virtually all those with the same surname resided in
that locality.
53 I am grateful to Marianne Smith, College Librarian, Royal College of Surgeons of
Edinburgh, for providing this information.
54 McElheran, “Comparative Anatomy of Human Crania,” New York Journal of Medicine 2
(1857): 100; Robert Knox, “New Theory of Race: Celt v. Saxon,” The Lancet 70, no. 1774 (1857):
218-20. McElheran later described Knox as his “friend and teacher” and Knox referred to
McElheran as his “friend and former student.”
55 Evelleen Richards, “The ‘Moral Anatomy’ of Robert Knox: The Interplay between Biological
and Social Thought in Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” Journal of the History of Biology 22
(1989): 373-436. On Knox’s anti-progressivism and transcendental anatomy, see reference.
56 Cora L. Kaplan, “White, Black and Green: Racialising Irishness in Victorian England” in
Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901, ed. Peter Gray (Dublin: Four Courts,
2004): 51-54.
57 Robert Knox, Races of Men (London: Henry Renshaw, 1850), 20.
58 Robert Knox, “Lectures on the Races of Men,” Medical Times 19 (1849): 18, 50.
59 Knox, Races of Men, (see n. 55, p. 61).
60 Julie M. Dugger, “Black Ireland’s Race: Thomas Carlyle and the Young Ireland Movement,”
Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 461-85. There are similarities between McElheran’s enthusiasm
for Knox and the unlikely friendship of some Young Irelanders with Thomas Carlyle. On the
latter, see reference.
61 Anthony C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast (Belfast: Ulster
Historical Foundation, 1996), 1.
62 “Escape of John Mitchel,” Freeman’s Journal, January 24, 1854, 2. See McElheran’s remarks in
reference.
63 “Surgeon M’Elheran in Tuam,” Freeman’s Journal, November 23, 1853, 3. Liverpool Mercury,
April 21, 1854, 1.
64 “The Labour Parliament,” Nation, March 11, 1854, 430.
65 “Mitchelism in Ireland,” Belfast Newsletter, January 27, 1854, 2.
66 Samuel C. Hall and Anna M. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery and Character, vol. 3 (London: Jeremiah
How, 1843), 456-9.
67 Harriet Martineau, Letters from Ireland (London: John Chapman, 1852), 84-6.
68 McElheran, “Ethnological Sketches No.1: The Fishermen of the Claddagh, at Galway,”
Ulster Journal of Archaeology 2 (1854): 160.
69 Ibid., 161.
70 Ibid., 166.
71 “Surgeon M’Elheran,” Freeman’s Journal, May 22, 1854, 2.
72 “Lecture on Loyalty,” Freeman’s Journal, September 7, 1853, 3; William Lewis, “The Queen’s
Visit–Loyalty,” Freeman’s Journal, September 13, 1853, 3; McElheran, “To the Editor of the
Freeman,” Freeman’s Journal, September 14, 1853, 3. See second reference also.
73 McElheran, “Comparative Anatomy,” (See n. 54, p. 99).
74 “Lecture on Ethnology,” New York Tribune, November 11, 1856, 3.
75 McElheran, “On the General Development of the Human Frame from an Ethnological Point
of View,” New York Journal of Medicine second series, 2 (1857): 32.
76 Ibid., 37.
77 McElheran, “Comparative Anatomy,” (See n. 54, p. 100-101).
78 Oscar Handlin, Boston Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1959), 145-6. Brief details can be found in reference.
79 McElheran, The Condition of Women and Children Among the Celtic, Gothic and Other Nations
(Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1858), 24, 57.
80 John F. Quinn, “Expecting the Impossible? Abolitionist Appeals to the Irish in Antebellum
America,” New England Quarterly 82 (2009): 667-710. McElheran’s anti-abolitionist views
were not uncommon among Irish Americans in 1850s Boston and elsewhere. See reference.
81 McElheran, Condition, (see n. 75, p. 153-9).
82 Ibid., 257.
83 Ibid., 305.
84 Ibid., 26.
85 “The Civilizers,’” Nation, November 20, 1858, 10.
86 Ibid., 10.
87 Ibid., 10.
88 Ibid., 10.
89 Orestes A. Brownson, “Romanic and Germanic Orders,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review third
series, 7, no. 4 (1859): 493.
90 William J. Astore, “Gentle Sceptics? American Catholic Encounters with Polygenism,
Geology and Evolutionary Theories from 1845 to 1875,” Catholic Historical Review 85 (1996):
59-63. On Brownson and polygenism, see reference.
91 McElheran, Condition, (see n. 75, p. 167).
92 “Deaths,” Freeman’s Journal, June 1, 1859.
93 Daniel Wilson, “Inquiry into the Physical Characteristics of the Ancient and Modern Celt of
Gaul and Britain,” Anthropological Review 3 (1865): 53.
170 Finnegan
94 “The Celt and the Saxon,” Nation, January 22, 1870, 12.
95 “Illustrated Pedigree of Hume Family from Anglo-Saxon Times to 1845,” Public Record
Office of Northern Ireland, D3366/H/3A.
96 Colin Kidd, “Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780-1880,” Scottish
Historical Review 74 (1995): 45-68; Colin Kidd, “Race, Empire and the Limits of Nineteenth-
Century Scottish Nationhood,” Historical Review 26 (2003): 873-92.
97 Hume, “Ethnology,” (see n. 22, p. 158).
98 McElheran, Condition, (see n. 75, p. 316).
99 McElheran, Celt and Saxon, (see n. 41, p. 60).
100 Hume, “Ethnology,” (see n. 22). See, for example, Hume’s ethnological map of Antrim and
Down, an insert in reference.
101 McElheran, “General Development,” (see n. 73, p. 50).
102 Young, English Ethnicity, (see n. 49, p. 86). On Knox’s “anti-colonial colonialism,” or
“diasporic imperialism,” see reference.
103 McElheran, Condition, (see n. 75, p. 19-26); McElheran, Condition, (see n. 75, p. 17). For
references to the similarities between “red Indians” and “Saxons” see first reference. On
“Celtica” see second reference.
104 Hume, Report, (see n. 38, p. 25; n. 36).
105 Abraham Hume, “Illustrations of British Antiquities Derived from Objects Found in South
America,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1868): 318.
106 Ibid., 219.
Erin’s Hope, Irish Blood and Indefeasible Allegiance:
Reconfiguring Citizenship and Nationalism
in an Era of Increased Mobility
Adrian N. Mulligan
Bucknell University
ABSTRACT: In the wake of the 1867 Rising—a failed attempt to establish an Irish
Republic by force—a ship named the Erin’s Hope delivered to Ireland a number
of Irish-American officers whose objective was to continue the fight. They were
arrested immediately, and despite their protestations, charged as British subjects with
treason-felony against the Queen. This paper illuminates their plight, the manner
in which they attempted to reframe their predicament, and how the UK and the US
responded legislatively to such troublesome mobility during a period when Ireland
was governed in a draconian fashion and Irish nationalism was stronger amongst the
Diaspora overseas. This case study is considered as historical evidence not only of
how such concepts as subjecthood, citizenship, expatriation, and naturalization were
reconfigured in an era of increased mobility, but also of how Irishness came to be
determined by descent, the latter of which is a legacy of colonialism in need of redress
in the postcolonial present.
I
n 2004, a citizenship referendum was passed in the Republic of Ireland in which an
overwhelming majority voted in favor of the removal of the constitutional entitlement of
persons born on the island of Ireland to become Irish citizens. The resulting amendment to
the Constitution ensured that from January 1, 2005, citizenship could be conferred only if at least
one parent was either an Irish or British citizen, or determined to be legally resident in the island
of Ireland for at least three of the four years preceding the birth. Meanwhile, Irish citizenship
also continues to be conferred to adults who are of good character and who meet lengthy legal
residency requirements; however, discretion with regards to the latter is exercised by the Minister
for Justice and Equality in the case of non-national relatives of Irish citizens and asylum seekers
in particular.
Additionally, while it is quite possible to reside on the island of Ireland, to be an Irish
citizen and yet not be in possession of an Irish passport (this being more likely among the
population of the Republic of Ireland in particular), for those individuals living abroad and who
consider themselves Irish, the acquisition of an Irish passport is the principal means by which
Irish citizenship can be attained. While Irish citizenship is no longer automatically guaranteed
to persons born on the island of Ireland, it continues to be conferred therefore by way of the
issuing of passports to individuals around the world, including those not born on the island–so
long as either one parent is an Irish citizen at the time of birth, or it can be proven that a parent
or a grandparent was born on the island. Once the necessary documentation is validated by the
nearest embassy or consulate and all applicable fees paid, the birth is subsequently entered into
a Foreign Births Register, and an Irish passport issued to the person in question. So long as this
occurs before the birth of the next generation, an Irish passport (and therefore citizenship) can
conceivably be passed down in perpetuity according to descent, with said persons never being
172 Mulligan
resident on the island of Ireland.1 Determining how many such individuals exist is difficult,
certainly the fourteen percent of all Irish passport holders who were not resident on the island
in 2012 would not all fall into this particular category, yet the fact that the category exists at all–
that descent is an official means by which citizenship is unproblematically granted–is arguably a
significant issue given the reality of modern Irish society.2
Significantly, the citizenship referendum passed amidst a period of unprecedented
immigration into Ireland. For example, between 2002 and 2006, the number of non-Irish nationals
living in the state increased from 7 percent to 11 percent of the population.3 Its passing was
associated with concerns in particular over “citizenship tourism,” in other words a perceived
threat to the state posed by pregnant foreign national women initially seeking asylum, only to
subsequently seek “leave to remain” in the state, following the birth of their Irish citizen child.
In their extensive discussion of the recent changes to Irish citizenship law, Alan White and Mary
Gilmartin argue that they illustrate how dominant understandings of the relationship between a
people and a place are articulated in the legal realm, with citizenship wielded as a tool of inclusion
and exclusion by those harnessing the power of the state.4 As Gilmartin points out, Ireland is not
unique in this regard, especially in perceiving mobile migrant bodies to be a threat to the state,
with those bodies subsequently becoming key sites in the articulation of national identity.5 In the
case of Ireland, however, White and Gilmartin argue that these recent developments are just the
latest episode in a longer struggle concerning female reproductive rights, and of the state seeking
to control the movement of pregnant women at its borders, although in the past the concern
was with citizens leaving to seek abortions rather than non-citizens arriving to give birth.6 While
this is an important insight, in this paper I seek instead to explore that deeper understanding of
Irish national identity that the citizenship referendum arguably drew upon and subsequently
enshrined in law; namely the belief that Irishness is determined by descent or, in other words, by
the blood flowing in one’s veins–whether at home or abroad. This is something I suggest must be
understood as a legacy of colonialism now impacting the postcolonial present.
In his discussion of how the sovereign right of a certain people to a certain territory is
commonly justified, the geographer Gerry Kearns points to the crucial role of nationalism and
in particular the fact that most nationalisms are “an awkward mixture of both civic and ethnic
elements;” in other words delimiting citizenship according to both residency and descent.7
Citizenship, therefore, can be described as highly uneven, inherently geographical and involving
processes that differentiate not only between “us” here and “them” there, but also–as is arguably
the case with Ireland–between “us” there and “them” there, and now increasingly between “us”
here and “them” who are now here.8 The geographers Jen Dickinson and Adrian J. Bailey succinctly
capture the contemporary situation when they comment, for example, that “it is widely recognised
that the symmetries between territory and identity, and the idea that society and its citizenry are a discrete
governable entity contained within the territorial boundaries of the national state, have been progressively
fractured by the international movement of people.”9 This is certainly the case in Ireland, where there
is an urgent need for scholars (and especially geographers) to consider the implications of these
shifts; a point made by Gilmartin and White who state that “instead of the fixed certainties of the past,
the complexity, dynamism and speed of contemporary international migration demands nothing less than a
new theoretical paradigm.”10
A useful move in that direction, applicable not only in Ireland but also elsewhere, would be
to consider–as the geographers Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell suggest–how citizenship
is formulated over the longue durée; in other words, unfolding, expanding and contracting in
specific contexts and in response to changes in the global system.11 Such thinking draws upon the
influential work of the geographer Doreen Massey, insofar as it conceptualizes citizenship (and
its attendant spatiality) as being a process rather than a “monolithic social category” developed in
isolation according to traditional principles.12 As a result, citizenship can instead be re-envisioned
Erin’s Hope, Irish Blood and Indefeasible Allegiance 173
as an institutional means of articulating degrees of acceptance and community, and therefore a

device that is open to being recreated, refashioned and retooled by a range of agents.
While the increased interconnectedness of the contemporary period cannot be denied, nor
the impacts that associated processes are clearly having on notions of citizenship, nationalism,
and territorial sovereignty, this is not necessarily unprecedented. States have longer histories of
dealing with “outsiders” deemed problematic, including not only mobile migrants but also it
should be noted, those considered “internal others” according to their race, ethnicity or religion
for example, as political communities are forged temporally and spatially through processes of
both inclusion and exclusion. Adopting such an approach–which considers citizenship formation
over time and is not necessarily bound by state borders–might enable a better understanding of
how notions of citizenship, nationalism, and territorial sovereignty were fashioned in the first
place, again so as to open up possibilities for their retooling, given the challenge of today forging
more tolerant and inclusive multicultural societies.
Interestingly, geographers have been reticent to interrogate mobility, perhaps because
it is hard to pin down as a bounded category; a point made by Tim Cresswell, who studies
mobility in the modern era and who argues that states in particular have played an enormous
role in assigning meaning to its various forms and in controlling it.13 Drawing from Cresswell,
this paper seeks to illuminate how notions of British subjecthood were asserted territorially and
mobilized legislatively in Ireland during the 1867 Fenian Rising, in particular to illegitimize the
Irish nationalist political agenda of a small band of highly mobile Irish-American revolutionaries
captured in Ireland, at a time when the colonial state was struggling to cope with a sense of
Irishness that was not territorially bound. Subsequent developments, it is argued, contributed
greatly to an important shift occurring in how citizenship would come to be determined by
the United Kingdom and the United States; with British subjecthood giving way to republican
citizenship, and an “imperial form of belonging” being eclipsed by one that privileged the
individual over the state, and autonomous thought over tradition and religion.14 Furthermore,
what this shift also arguably represented was a major transformation in how states would come
to determine national identity; revising such principals as jus sanguinis (right of blood) and jus soli
(right of soil)–and it occurred in a context of increased time-space compression triggered by new
technologies of mobility that were moving millions of people like never before, in particular the
Irish.15
In order to better understand the origins of today’s dominant sense of Irishness, I therefore
argue in this paper that it is necessary to return to this colonial period and the conditions in which
it developed. Crucially, the nineteenth century in particular was a period in which the majority
of the Irish people were themselves considered in racial terms by a colonial state and denied
political representation on the island, and during which they were forced to emigrate in their
millions. In the process this global diaspora would forge a common sense of Irishness that relied
upon descent and blood ties, and as I have discussed elsewhere, a particularly strong transatlantic
nationalist axis dedicated to realizing an independent nation state.16 In considering this colonial
context, the work of Kearns is again useful, in particular his utilization of the theorizing of the
Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben.17 Here, Kearns argues that Ireland can then be considered
a “state of exception” and the majority of its inhabitants a form of “bare life” who were considered
to exist biologically by the colonial state, but to whom the full rights of British subjecthood did not
apply.18 Building upon Agamben’s thinking, however, Kearns suggests that the exceptionalism of
the Irish was not only a product of their location but also embodied in racial terms; since they were
considered in effect a primitive species, with inherent characteristics making them unreasonable
and ungovernable. Consequently, Ireland was governed during the nineteenth century especially
174 Mulligan
in an almost constant state of emergency, with the British utilizing a range of draconian powers
of coercion, in particular the frequent suspension of habeas corpus.19 As Kearns points out, “the
Irish colonial body was territorialized, marked, constrained, exiled, or placed outside the normal
regime of liberal justice,” and its safeguards did not apply to Irish bodies.20 In this paper therefore,
I suggest that only by better understanding this colonial context, and how it arguably produced
an exclusive ethnic sense of Irishness still dominant, might it be possible to forge a more inclusive
civic sense of Irishness (articulated through passport and citizenship laws for example) that is
better suited to the challenges faced in Irish society in the twenty-first century, rather than those
that were faced in the nineteenth.
The Fenian Fleet
With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of Irish in America

keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side
of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen of the seas rises,
threatening and more threatening, the young giant Republic:
Acerba fata Romanus agunt

Scelusque fraternae necis.21
On an April evening in 1867, an eighty-one foot brigantine named the Jacknell slipped
down the East River and out of New York City. In its hold, reputedly concealed in sewing boxes,
piano cases and wine barrels, was some of the most innovative in modern weaponry, including
thousands of breech-loading rifles, Spencer repeating rifles, Enfield and Austrian rifles, in addition
to at least three pieces of light artillery in the form of six-pounder field guns, and over a million
and a half rounds of ammunition.22 The shipment was bound for Ireland and had been organized
by an Irish nationalist organization named the Fenian Brotherhood. In the recent American Civil
War, an estimated one hundred fifty thousand Irish-born men had fought in the ranks of the
Union Army and a further forty thousand for the Confederacy.23 The Fenian Brotherhood had
close ties with the Union Army, but after the war it had become largely a social organization,
organizing weekend picnics and rousing speeches while becoming increasingly factionalized.
It nonetheless maintained close ties with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Ireland,
contributing funds and military experience to a transatlantic Irish nationalist movement that was
then termed Fenianism, and to an attempted revolution in Ireland in 1867. Poorly organized,
riddled with British informers, and heavily outnumbered by Crown forces, the 1867 Fenian
Rising was an abject failure in which hundreds of individuals were arrested and imprisoned
indefinitely under coercive measures, including an act suspending habeas corpus.24 One member
of the Fenian Brotherhood who evaded capture however, was an Irish-American officer named
Captain Thomas James Kelly, who from his hiding place in Dublin on 13 March 1867, wrote to his
comrades in New York city, begging them to send reinforcements; in his letter stating “it is war to
the knife, only send us the knife.”25
The Jacknell was the only knife that could be mustered and, after rendezvousing with a
steamship just off Sandy Point, NY, to receive on board forty battle-hardened veterans of both
the Union and Confederate armies, it set sail for Ireland. Nine days later in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean, these men reputedly celebrated Easter Sunday together; standing to attention on
deck to receive their commissions and to witness the raising of the Fenian flag and the ship being
rechristened the Erin’s Hope amidst the deafening sound of ceremonial cannon-fire.26
Figure 1. The “Erin’s Hope” saluting the green flag (source: Timothy D. Sullivan, The Dock and the Scaffold:
The Manchester Tragedy and the Cruise of the Jacknell [Dublin: A.M. Sullivan, 1868], 4).
It was late May by the time the Erin’s Hope arrived at Sligo Bay, and the men were
disheartened to discover that their prearranged signals–“a certain type of light by night and a
furled jib during the day”–solicited no response from land.27 After five days, they were finally
approached by a small boat and boarded by a fellow Irish-American officer, who duly informed
them that the revolution had failed, and that hundreds of suspected Fenians were now imprisoned,
but if they sailed south, they might still rendezvous with a small band still engaging colonial
forces in County Cork.28 Despite some internal disagreement, they did just this, sailing south
while managing to avoid the suspicion of British naval frigates, possibly because brigantines
were then a common sight in coastal trade. Off the coast of County Cork, however, again they
received no response to their repeated signaling and so it was decided to go ashore in nearby
176 Mulligan
County Waterford.29 Subsequently, on 1 June 1867, approximately twenty-eight men landed

near Helvick pier, south of Dungarvan, in a small fishing boat so heavily weighed down that it
grounded; forcing the men to wade ashore carrying only what small arms and ammunition they
could on their person.30 The men immediately split up into small parties, but a nearby coastguard
station witnessed their landing and notified the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), a well-armed
paramilitary police force that served the Crown. Conspicuous by their wet American clothing and
the unfamiliarity of most with the locality, the majority were quickly arrested and detained under
the coercive measures then in effect.31 Two of the men however, Patrick J. Keane and Frederick
Fitzgibbon, reportedly made it as far as Cork before being captured, the latter of whom was
described in the press as having “served all through the American war, and is literally covered
with scars.”32 Meanwhile, the Erin’s Hope avoided detection and returned to New York with the
remainder of the Irish-American officers and its cargo intact.
“You are an Irishman; your goose is cooked”
On the same day that these men set foot on Irish soil, some for the first time and others
not since they had fled as children, an editorial in the Times of London argued that individuals of
their ilk (many of whom had been captured earlier in the year) be treated exceptionally; in other
words, not as British subjects with any legitimate political grievance, but rather as soldiers of
fortune or “filibusterers” who deserved the severest of punishments:
[I]t is material to observe that several, if not most, of the Fenian leaders are not
“insurgents” in any proper sense of the term. If they are Irishmen at all, they have
long ceased to be Irish subjects of HER MAJESTY, and, instead of being driven
into rebellion by oppression, either real or imaginary, they have come over from
America on a filibustering errand and with filibustering objects. This makes a
very great difference, and entirely deprives them of whatever extenuation may be
pleased on behalf of a “political offence.” Filibustering is not a political offence,
but piracy on a grand scale,33
Responding to the argument that these imprisoned Irish-American officers be considered

foreigners, an editorial in Dublin’s Weekly News (an Irish nationalist newspaper not yet suppressed)
described this “pretence” as “silly and ridiculous,” pointing to the fact that the Irish nation was
not territorially contained on the island and instead consisted of “two great sections of the Irish
race in Ireland and America.”34 Given the fact that it was then evident that the Irish Executive
to the British Government intended to bring a number of these individuals to trial, the editorial
proceeded to level charges of hypocrisy against the British, asking pointedly: “Will the privilege
of foreigners be then accorded to them? Nothing of the kind. They will be taken as subjects of the
Queen, taken in insurrection.”35
That summer of 1867, the Attorney General for Ireland assembled the case for the Crown
against the Erin’s Hope prisoners. Already their fate had attracted controversy, for example the
spectacle of their being publically marched in chains from one County Waterford jail to another
had triggered stone-throwing from onlookers directed at accompanying members of the RIC,
who responded with a bayonet charge that killed one man and seriously injured another.36
Furthermore, two of the men, William J. Nagle and John Warren, penned letters from their jail cells
that were subsequently published widely across the transatlantic Irish world. In these letters, the
men claimed that their only crime had been to espouse American principles while in the United
States, that their rights as American citizens had been violated, and that the US ambassador to
Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, had failed in his duty to protect them and their fellow
American citizens incarcerated in Ireland.37 For example, writing on July 9, 1867, Nagle stated
Dear Father: I was arrested on the 1st of June, in company with Colonel J. Warren,
on the bridge crossing the Blackwater from Waterford into Youghal. We were
kept in the Youghal Bridewell until the morning of the 14th, when we were sent
to this place, marched through the streets of both places hand-cuffed like felons.
We are now held under a warrant from the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and will
remain prisoners so long as the fears and purposes of the government may require
the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, unless some action is taken by the
authorities or government of our country. This is not exclusively an individual
case, but becomes a question of right involving the liberty of every American
citizen that sets foot on this soil. I ask the government of my country, which I have
faithfully served, whose laws I have never violated, to secure to me that liberty
which is my birthright, and of which I am now deprived without any cause or plea
of justification by an authority I do not recognize –a government to which I owe no
allegiance, and whose laws I have in no way infringed upon….38
On August 31, 1867, a letter written by Warren was published in Dublin’s Weekly News
entitled “A voice from the dungeon–a question for the American people,” in which he addressed
“the Irishmen in the United States” and stated the following:
In proof, on your arrival here you may be supplied with a passport, and consider
yourself perfectly safe: but be careful –you may have brought an Irish bond […].
Well, you arrive: you wear a good coat and a villainous moustache, and you have
acquired a habit of standing erect and dashing ahead, swinging your hand, and,
your republican barbarism, if you meet a lord you don’t take your hat off: you look
him right in the face: you don’t get nervous: in fact, you care as little about him
as about a common man. You wear the murdering square-toes… all go to prove
that your education is dangerous; that you don’t worship monarchy; that you’re
a republican–a freeman. You’re pounced on; you get indignant; what right have
the mercenaries of England to interfere with you, an American citizen? But now
you have spoiled it. If you had kept your mouth shut you might have had some
chance. A little of the brogue is left; you are an Irishman; your goose is cooked.39
Nagle and Warren here both contend that they are being treated exceptionally by the colonial
state on the basis of their being Irish according to descent and that this was superseding their
Americanness, even in the case of Nagle who could prove he was American-born. Endorsing the
men’s reframing of their predicament–as being one in which their rights as American citizens
were being violated–while nonetheless maintaining that such individuals were unquestionably
Irish, an editorial in the Weekly News subsequently posed the question: “If the Government of
America does not protect its citizens according to the law of nations, let us ask why does it give
them the empty name of citizenship?”40
While the United Kingdom had not supported the Confederacy, in the wake of the Civil
War the United States did seek reparations from the United Kingdom for the damage done to the
Union navy by Confederate ships built in British dockyards. It was this diplomatic discord that
Nagle and Warren, who might be considered interstitial actors operating in the cracks between
the two states, no doubt hoped to exploit to secure their release. The publication of their letters
consequently had the desired effect, triggering a great deal of public clamor especially among
Irish Americans and veterans of the Union Army, so much so that the US Secretary of State,
William H. Seward, eventually bowed to political pressure and instructed Adams to intervene on
the men’s behalf. Despite the fact that Ireland was then ostensibly part of the United Kingdom
178 Mulligan
(following the Act of Union in 1801), Adams nonetheless wrote to the British Foreign Secretary,
Lord Stanley, to seek clemency for the men; asserting that they had committed no crime in Ireland,
and suggesting that “time served” might be considered punishment enough.41
Adams received no reply, however; an incident having taken place in the north of England
now making clemency much more difficult to attain. On September 18, 1867, a man armed with a
revolver in each hand had stepped brazenly into the path of a horse-drawn prison van on a busy
Manchester city street, and aiming both barrels at the driver, ordered him to pull up. Witnessing
one of his horses shot from beneath him, the driver and his accompanying police escort fled,
where from a safe distance they witnessed the van being broken open while a number of armed
men maintained a perimeter. Locked inside was Captain Kelly and in a neighboring compartment
another Irish-American officer and his chargé d’affaires, Captain Timothy Deasy; the two men
having been recently apprehended in the vicinity and subsequently positively identified in court
by an informer.42 Also inside the van however, was a police sergeant who refused to unlock the
door and was consequently killed instantly when a bullet was reportedly fired into the lock so as
to gain entry.43 With the van open and the dead sergeant dragged out, the two released prisoners
and members of their rescue party fled through a crowd of angry bystanders, and while Kelly and
Deasy managed to evade recapture and subsequently returned to the United States, a number of
individuals were apprehended amidst the melee.
The following day, the London Times described the rescue as an outrage “characteristic of
Irish-Americans” and called for such “audacious practices of American rowdyism” to be treated
severely.44 Later it proposed that:
There are two elements in this precious plot-one American and the other Irish, and
they are combined in the most desperate of characters with which we are brought
into contact. To Irish wildness and inconsequence is added the familiarity with
danger and bloodshed acquired in the American war.45
The Special Commission and its aftermath

Events in Manchester cast a pall over the trial of the Erin’s Hope prisoners, the first three
of whom–William J. Nagle, John Warren, and Augustine Costello–appeared before a Special
Commission convened in Dublin in late October, presided over by the Lord Chief Baron of Ireland
David Richard Pigot and the Right Honorable William Keogh.46 Here they were charged as British
subjects with being treasonably engaged in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the rule of Queen
Victoria in Ireland and to establish an independent Irish republic, their crimes adjudged to have
taken place in County Sligo where they had originally intended to come ashore. Added to the
docket was a fourth individual named William Halpin, allegedly a Fenian General who had been
arrested aboard a steamship in County Cork earlier in the year, bound for New York City.47
The three Erin’s Hope prisoners were represented by counsel provided by the American
Consul at Dublin, namely Mr. Heron QC, who in an audacious move on the opening day of
proceedings demanded that, as American citizens, his clients should each be tried by a jury de
mediatate linguae, an ancient legal precedent that afforded non-British subjects a half non-British
jury.48 The justices granted Mr. Heron’s request in the case of Nagle, who was American born, and
subsequently adjourned his trial. They denied it, however, in the case of Warren and Costello on
the basis that they had been born on the island of Ireland–the Lord Chief Baron firmly asserting
the “Doctrine of Indefeasible Allegiance,” and stating for example:
I cannot allow that proposition to be put forward without meeting it with a prompt
and unhesitating denial. According to the law of England, a law which has been
administered without any variation or doubt from the very earliest times, he who
once is under the allegiance of the English sovereign remains so forever.49
Quoting from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, he expanded:
Natural allegiance is such as is due from natural born subjects. This is a tie which
cannot be severed or altered by any change of time, place, or circumstance, nor by
anything but the united concurrence of the legislature […]. Indeed the natural born
subject of one prince, to whom he owes allegiance, may be entangled by subjecting
himself absolutely to another, but it is his own act that brings him into these straits
and difficulties of owing service to two masters; and it is unreasonable, that, by
such voluntary act of his own, he should be able at pleasure to unloose those bonds
by which he is connected to his natural prince.50
As the first man in the dock, Warren immediately protested, “as a citizen of the United States,
against being arraigned, or tried, or adjudged by any British subject.”51 After being informed that
only his solicitors could address the court on his behalf, Warren then dramatically abandoned all
legal defense, asserting: “I instruct my counsel to withdraw from the case, and I place it in the
hands of the United States Government; which Government has now become the principal.”52
Figure 2. Colonel John Warren (source: Sullivan, The Dock and the Scaffold, 73, 82).
180 Mulligan
He would plead not guilty, but over the course of the following week the prosecution
presented the case for the Crown against him, included including the testimony of an informer who
swore that Warren was a member of the Fenian Brotherhood and damning evidence provided by
various fellow members of the Erin’s Hope expedition, obtained in return for their release. Before
sentence was passed, Warren took full advantage of his opportunity to address the court, pointing
out that he was not in Ireland for the Rising, that being a member of the Fenian Brotherhood in
the United States was not illegal, that he had been tortured in custody, and again that he was not
a British subject but an American citizen. On November 2, 1867, he was nonetheless found guilty
of treason-felony, but in a sign that his line of defense had perhaps proven somewhat successful,
his sentencing was postponed.53
Appearing next in the dock, Costello also alleged that he had been mistreated in custody,
while disputing the jurisdiction of the court on the basis of his being a naturalized American
citizen; stating:
I did forswear allegiance to all foreign potentates, and more particularly I forswore
all allegiance to the Crown of Great Britain. Your lordships say that the law of the
land rules that I had no right to do anything of the kind. That is a question for the
governments to settle. America is guilty of a great fraud if I am in the wrong.54
Figure 3. Captain Augustine Costello (source: Sullivan, The Dock and the Scaffold, 73, 82).
Unlike Warren however, he did not direct his counsel to withdraw, and after the Crown had
presented much the same case against him, Mr. Heron QC pointed to the number of soldiers,
policemen and detectives in the courtroom, and to events taking place simultaneously in
Manchester–to argue that his client was not receiving a fair trial.55 He was nonetheless found guilty
of treason-felony, but only after his trial was aborted and a second one begun anew, following the
discovery of incriminating letters in his jail cell –evidence which Costello alleged the prosecution
had forged.56
The last man to appear in the dock was William Halpin, who also immediately asserted
that he too was an American citizen, before proceeding to conduct his own defense, according to
some press reports quite expertly. In his final statement before verdict was passed, he defiantly
espoused his American republican principles, much to the consternation of the seated Justices:
You are now trying a man who has lived all his life-time in a country where
freedom is venerated and adored. You may believe, gentlemen, that you have the
spirit of freedom here; but I claim, gentlemen, that the real spirit of freedom has
fled these shores many a century ago–has sped across the Atlantic, and perched
upon American soil… Perhaps you have read the Declaration of American
Independence. In that declaration, drawn up by one Thomas Jefferson, it is stated
that every man born into this world is born free and equal; that he has the right–
the inalienable right–to live in liberty and the pursuit of happiness.57
Halpin was nonetheless also found guilty of treason-felony, and in mid November he and Warren
were sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude each, while Costello was sentenced to twelve years
on account of his younger age. On being informed of their sentencing, Halpin boldly proclaimed
that he would take “fifteen years more for Ireland any day,” while Warren sarcastically commented
that he “would not take a lease of this kingdom for thirty-seven and a half cents.”58 The three men
might have considered themselves lucky to have escaped the death penalty, however, especially if
they had received word of the fate awaiting the five men found guilty of murdering the police
sergeant in Manchester. These men were Phillip Allen, Michael Larkin, Thomas Maguire, Edward
O’Meagher Condon and Michael O’Brien, all of whom had professed their innocence to no avail,
while the last two were American citizens who had also disputed the jurisdiction of the court.59
Unlike in Dublin however, counsel was not provided to the American citizens, so convinced
was US Ambassador Adams of their guilt.60 After Maguire was granted a dramatic “eleventh-
hour” full and unconditional pardon (a victim of mistaken identity apparently), Adams finally
intervened to secure a commuted sentence for Condon on the basis that he was American-born,
however he did not intervene in the case of O’Brien who was a naturalized American citizen. On
23 November, O’Brien was subsequently executed by hanging alongside Allen and Larkin; the
three men soon immortalized in Irish nationalist mythology as the “Manchester Martyrs.”61
The execution of an American citizen whose appeals to his own government went
unanswered, and the sentencing of a host of others had raised a number of important issues
between the United Kingdom and the United States in need of resolution, concerning subjecthood,
citizenship, expatriation and naturalization. Meanwhile in November 1867, another attempt
to rescue an Irish-American officer from British custody went terribly awry at Clerkenwell in
London, when an explosion not only destroyed the wall of a prison but also a part of a working-
class neighborhood, killing twelve people and seriously eroding what British public sympathy
there was with the Fenians in the wake of the Manchester executions.62 Realizing that there had to
be a better way of dealing with the threat posed to the British state by these mobile Irish nationalist
actors, a prominent lawyer named Vernon Harcourt –with close ties to the British Liberal Party
182 Mulligan
that would come to power the following year –wrote a series of letters to the editor of the London
Times under the pseudonym of Historicus. In his first letter, entitled “Who is a British subject?,”
Harcourt argued that it was untenable in an era of mass migration to continue to advocate the
principal of jus soli (right of soil), in other words to claim indefeasible allegiance from British
subjects who had renounced that subjecthood in the process of becoming naturalized citizens
elsewhere.63 What’s more, he argued that to also combine that with the principle of jus sanguinis
(right of blood) was outdated and should be abolished, in other words to extend the doctrine
of indefeasible allegiance to individuals born overseas and argued to be of British descent by
virtue of their parentage.64 Drawing from various legal authorities, Harcourt argued that the laws
concerning subjecthood, citizenship, expatriation and naturalization therefore required revision,
in particular so that members of the Fenian Brotherhood could no longer hope to escape justice
on a technicality, or cause further diplomatic discord by claiming that their rights as American
citizens had been ignored. He wrote that: “The more clearly the men are recognized as American
citizens the more directly responsible the American Government would be for their conduct
abroad.”65 And the accompanying editorial agreed: “We admit that, on grounds of policy not to
say commonsense the argument for revision is irresistible. We see, then, no good reason why the
British Government should decline any friendly overtures that may be made by the United States
with a view to its amendment.”66
Having read this, that very same day US Ambassador Adams telegraphed Secretary of
State Seward, suggesting that they make a “friendly overture” to the British Government on the
subject. The two men were anxious to remedy the incongruence which clearly existed between the
two states regarding these matters; an incongruence that individuals such as Nagle and Warren
had attempted to exploit, and which was still contributing to a rising tide of Anglophobia in the
U.S., increasingly drawing American politicians into the fray. Writing to Seward on December
11 he proposed, therefore, that they take advantage of this unique moment to improve Anglo-
American relations:
The mode in which this difficult matter is treated by both writers, affords
encouragement to the belief that something may be done to harmonize the rule as
well here as at home into one system. In my opinion nothing is more desirable in
order to remove amicably the cause for future collisions on this subject.67
Over the course of the following year, US government officials would continue to press
their British counterparts for a naturalization treaty, the issue bound up not only with the US
presidential election of that year, but also entangled with American demands for reparations for
damage inflicted by a British-built Confederate warship named the Alabama.68 After some initial
foot-dragging by the Conservative Government on the issue, the two governments effectively
agreed to a number of principles proposed by Secretary of State Seward in March 1868. At this point,
a Royal Commission was charged with investigating the legal parameters of the proposals; the
British in effect conceding the principle of expatriation and beginning the process of abandoning
the Doctrine of Indefeasible Allegiance as gracefully as possible.69 In December 1868, the British
Liberal party under the administration of William Gladstone replaced that of the Conservative
Benjamin Disraeli, and in May 1870, the necessary naturalization legislation was finally signed
at the Motley-Clarendon Convention and ratified later that year. Here the British agreed to treat
all British subjects who had become naturalized American citizens as if they were American-
born citizens, in return for the Americans agreeing to act likewise with British subjects in similar
circumstances. Meanwhile, as a result of continuous pressure from the US government, combined
with the campaigning of an Amnesty Association and the receptiveness of this Gladstonian
administration, the vast majority of imprisoned Fenians had been freed by 1870––including all
of the Erin’s Hope prisoners, who were shipped back to the United States as a condition of their
parole.70
Conclusions
John Warren had asserted in court that “the present cases would form a great and
momentous epoch in the history of these times,” and this historical chapter does serve as an
exemplary illustration of the manner in which mobile migrant bodies (such as his own) were
deemed threatening to states, resulting in their becoming key sites in the articulation of national
identity.71 In the case of Warren and his fellow Erin’s Hope prisoners, however, that national
identity being articulated was a complex thing.
From an Irish perspective, for example, these men were members of a transatlantic Irish
community and possessed a sense of Irish nationalism that had developed overseas and which
they subsequently sought to reterritorialize on the island of Ireland, aided in no small part by their
political voice, their money, weaponry and expertise.72 Who were the Irish in Ireland to question
the motives of such men as William J. Nagle; American-born and Irish by descent perhaps, but
nonetheless prepared to die advancing the cause of Irish nationalism? Over the course of the
late-nineteenth and into the early-twentieth century, such individuals would play key roles as
Irish nationalists, arguably culminating in a New-York-born son of Irish and Cuban immigrants
becoming the first president of an independent Irish Republic––namely Éamon de Valera. While a
state-endorsed, territorialized Irish nationalist narrative would subsequently come to downplay
the crucial role that the diaspora played, the proof that they did can arguably still be found in
Irish citizenship law and the privileging of descent.
From a British perspective on the other hand, men such as those captured off the Erin’s
Hope were argued to be British subjects according to the Doctrine of Indefeasible Allegiance. In
this regard, while the geographer Lynn Staheli points out that “the politics of inclusion may
require exclusionary acts,” this is arguably an example of the opposite being true: that the politics
of exclusion may sometimes require inclusionary acts. Subsequently, these men become the focus
of questions of what it meant to be British. Could that, for example, be passed down according
to descent? Did it even apply to the Irish who were arguably conceptualized as ‘bare life’ and
only really considered to be subjects somehow in a court of law, not to mention the question of
whether such legal arguments could even continue to be made in an era of increased mobility,
expatriation and naturalization?73 Consequently, British laws of subjecthood were redefined;
shifting in the direction of a republican notion of citizenship more civic than ethnic, although
it should be noted, still excluding the majority of the inhabitants of the island of Ireland. Such a
development, however, nonetheless illustrates that citizenship is far from the monolithic social
category that state actors might imagine it to be, but rather something that evolves over time––
expanding and contracting in response to the threat arguably embodied in individuals deemed to
be “out of place” at the scale of the state, for example the Erin’s Hope prisoners.74
Today, approximately one hundred fifty years later, the Irish people utilize the legislative
power of the state to privilege descent in citizenship law and passport applications, considering
as exceptional those born on the island of Ireland who do not share that descent; their mobility
interpreted as a threat to an essence of Irishness still based upon blood. Defining Irishness in this
manner, however, is arguably a legacy of colonialism, a means by which diasporic nationalism
was mobilized and the racial ascription of the colonizer repurposed as a source of strength. Given
the challenges of today forging a more tolerant and inclusive multicultural sense of Irishness on
the island, the question is whether it still makes sense to remain shackled to this colonial legacy,
to continue to drag this ball and chain around.
184 Mulligan
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gerry Kearns for going through an earlier draft of this paper with a
fine-tooth comb, and for his generous editorial support and engagement.
NOTES
1 All information provided by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service, Department
of Justice and Equality: Irish Citizenship through birth, descent and by Naturalisation.
http://www.inis.gov.ie/en/INIS/Pages/WP11000022 (accessed 1 April 2014).
2 When asked on 19 January 2012 about the number of Irish passports in circulation in
Ireland and around the world, the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Minister for
Foreign Affairs and Trade, Eamon Gilmore, informed Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament) that
the number was approximately 4.5 million, of which 3.85 million were held on “the island
of Ireland.” http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.
nsf/takes/dail2006051600173?opendocument (accessed 1 April 2014). It should be noted
however, that the number presented does not differentiate between Irish passport holders
resident in the Republic of Ireland and those resident in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom)
for Irish nationalistic reasons, even though a sizable proportion of the population of
Northern Ireland would never consider applying for an Irish passport.
3 Mary Gilmartin and Bettina Migge, “European Migrants in Ireland: Pathways
to Integration,” European Urban and Regional Studies OnlineFirst (2013): 1–15, doi:
10.1177/0969776412474583, published online 7 February 2013.
4 Alan White and Mary Gilmartin, “Critical Geographies of Citizenship and Belonging in
Ireland,” Women’s Studies International Forum 31, no. 5 (2008): 390–399.
5 Mary Gilmartin, “Migration, Identity and Belonging,” Geography Compass 2, no. 6 (2008):
1837-1852.
6 White and Gilmartin, “Critical Geographies of Citizenship.”
7 Gerry Kearns, “Time and Some Citizenship: Nationalism and Thomas Davis,” Bullán: An
Irish Studies Journal 5 (2001): 23-54, 24.
8 Hilda Kurtz and Katherine Hankins, “Guest Editorial: Geographies of Citizenship,”
Space and Polity 9, no. 1 (2005): 1-8; Joe Painter and Chris Philo, “Spaces of Citizenship: An
Introduction,” Political Geography 14, no. 2 (1995): 107-120.
9 Jen Dickinson and Adrian J. Bailey, “(Re)membering Diaspora: Uneven Geographies of
Indian Dual Citizenship,” Political Geography 26, no. 7 (2007): 757-774, 759.
10 Gilmartin and White, “Revisiting Contemporary Irish Migration: New Geographies of
Mobility and Belonging,” Irish Geography 41, no. 2 (2008): 143-149, 144-5.
11 Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell, “Citizenship Formations in Space and Time,” in
Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation,
eds. Clive Barnett and Murray Low (London: Sage, 2004), 93-112.
12 Ibid., 110.
13 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2006).
14 Keith McClelland and Sonya Rose, “Citizenship and Empire, 1867-1928,” in At home with
the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, eds. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose,
S (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 275-297, 278; Daniel Gorman, Imperial
Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
15 Ibid., 20.
16 Adrian N. Mulligan, “A Forgotten ‘Greater Ireland’: The Transatlantic Development of Irish

Nationalism,” Scottish Geographical Journal 118, no. 3 (2002): 219-234; Mulligan, “Absence
Makes the Heart Grow Fonder: Transatlantic Irish Nationalism and the 1867 Rising,” Social
and Cultural Geography 6, no. 3 (2005): 439-454.
17 Kearns, “Bare Life, Political Violence and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland,”
in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence, eds. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 7–35.
18 Ibid., 14.
19 Virginia Crossman, “Emergency Legislation and Agrarian Disorder in Ireland, 1821-41,”
Irish Historical Studies 27, no. 108 (1991): 309-323.
20 Kearns, “Bare Life,” 21.
21 Karl Marx. Capital, Volume 1. A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]),
871.
22 The Times, 4 November 1867, 10.
23 Wilf S. Neidhardt, Fenianism in North America (State College PA: Penn State University Press,
1975).
24 Mulligan, “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder”; Shin-ichi Takagami, The Dublin Fenians
after the Rising, 1867-79 (Hosei University, Ireland-Japan Papers, no. 7, 1992).
25 Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World
(New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 478.
26 Timothy Daniel Sullivan, The Dock and the Scaffold: The Manchester Tragedy and the Cruise of
the Jacknell (Dublin: A.M. Sullivan, 1868). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12961/12961-
h/12961-h.htm (accessed 1 April 2014).
27 Sylvester Murray, “The Fenian landing at Helvic,” Waterford County Museum, Historical
Articles, 2003. http://www.waterfordmuseum.ie/exhibit/web/Display/article/323/4/
The_Fenian_Landing_At_Helvic_The_Erins_Hope_Arrives.html (accessed 1 April 2014).
28 William D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement in the United States: 1858-1886 (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1971).
29 Sullivan, Dock and the Scaffold.
30 William G. Chamney, Report of the Trial of John Warren for Treason-Felony at the County
Dublin Commission (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1867). https://archive.org/details/
reporttrialjohn00warrgoog (accessed 1 April 2014).
32 Manchester Times, 15 June 1867, 5.
33 The Times, 1 April 1867, 9.
34 Weekly News, 13 April 1867, 2.
35 Ibid.
36 Manchester Times, 15 June 1867, 5.
37 D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement; Brian A. Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations During
Reconstruction (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).
38 US Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Volume 1 (U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1868), 112-3. http://books.google.com/
books?id=eSsWAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_
summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 1 April 2014).
39 Ibid., 134.
40 Weekly News, 31 August 1867, 4.
41 D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement; Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations.
186 Mulligan
42 R.V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848-82 (Dublin: Wolfhound
Press, 1998); Robert Kee, The Green Flag, Volume Two: The Bold Fenian Men (London: Penguin
Books, 1972).
43 Manchester Times, 12 October 1867, 2; The Times, 20 September 1867, 10.
44 The Times, 19 September 1867, 6.
45 The Times, 1 October 1867, 6.
46 James Wills and Freeman Wills, The Irish Nation: Its History and its Biography,
Volume IV. (Dublin: A. Fullarton and Co., 1876). http://books.google.com/
books?id=YvBMAAAAMAAJ (accessed 1 April 2014).
47 Weekly News, 9 November 1867, 1.
49 Chamney, Report of the Trial of John Warren, 17.
50 Ibid., 17-18.
52 Chamney, Report of the Trial of John Warren: 20.
54 Sullivan, The Dock and the Scaffold, 48-9.
55 The Times, 18 November 1867, p.6.
56 Murray, “The Fenian Landing at Helvic.”
57 Timothy D. Sullivan, Alexander M. Sullivan and Denis B. Sullivan, Speeches From the Dock:
With Introductory Sketches and Biographical Notes (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1968), 225.
58 Chamney, Report of the Trial of John Warren, 132, 133.
59 Manchester Times, 12 October 1867, 2.
61 Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland: From the United Irishmen to Partition (Belfast: Beyond the Pale
Press, 1994); Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Bernard Rose, The Fenians in England 1865-1872: A
Sense of Insecurity (New York: Riverrun Press, 1982); Oliver P. Rafferty, The Church, the State
and the Fenian Threat, 1861-75 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
62 Curtis, The Cause of Ireland; Quinlivan and Rose, The Fenians in England; Rafferty, The Church,
the State and the Fenian Threat.
63 The Times, 11 December 1867, 6.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations. 258.
68 Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882 (Madison WI:
Univeristy of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
69 Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations; Murney Gurlach, British Liberalism and the
United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age (New York: Palgrave, 2001)
70 Leon O’Broin, Fenian Fever; an Anglo-American Dilemma (New York: New York University
Press, 1971); Murray, “The Fenian landing at Helvic.”
71 Chamney, Report of the Trial of John Warren, 127.
72 Mulligan, “A Forgotten ‘Greater Ireland’”; Mulligan, “Absence makes the heart grow
fonder.”
73 Kearns, “Bare Life,” 14.
74 Cresswell, On the Move, 20.
Creating “A Great Ireland in America:”
Reading and Remembrance in
Buffalo, New York, 1872-1888
William Jenkins
York University
ABSTRACT: Recent writing on diasporas has encouraged a shift away from viewing
them as either quantifiable entities or as inevitable outcomes of international
migration. Scholars now seek to highlight the ways in which diasporic identities are
actively made and remade, and the connections forged both within and between
places from such efforts. This paper addresses two dimensions of the process as
they related to individuals of Irish birth and ancestry in Buffalo, New York, in the
late nineteenth century. The first dimension relates to print culture and the role
of the weekly Catholic Union newspaper in structuring and circulating a diaspora
nationalism with a strong anticolonial identification, the second to the process
of performing public acts of Irish nationalist memory that were simultaneously
declarations of American loyalty. In the latter case, Robert Emmet (1778-1803),
organizer of the 1803 rebellion in Dublin, became the pivotal figure around which
a culture of commemoration took shape from the mid-1880s onwards. Together,
these two dimensions of reading and remembrance offer examples of how
diaspora-related cultural creativity was fashioned and articulated in one place
and how it could be used to project a distinct Irish-American community while
mobilizing opinions about Ireland’s political future.
R
ecent writing on diasporas has encouraged a shift away from viewing them as either
quantifiable entities or as inevitable outcomes of international migration. In 2005, Rogers
Brubaker observed a somewhat chaotic spread of usages of the term “in semantic,
conceptual, and disciplinary space” as scholars moved beyond the classical “victim/refugee”
notion of diaspora.1 His was far from a lone critique, and in questioning prevalent assumptions
about the coherence, condition, and stability of diasporas, scholars have come to ask how they are
brought into being, come alive, or simply “happen.” For Brubaker, diaspora is to be treated as “a
category of practice, project, claim, and stance, rather than as a bounded group.”2 In a related vein,
Martin Sökefeld writes that diaspora is “not simply a ‘given’ of migrants’ existence” but rather
something that “has to be effected time and again by agents who employ a variety of mobilizing
practices.”3 Migrants thus negotiate not only the particularities of settlement destinations within
various national contexts (their “becoming” as Americans, Canadians, Argentinians, and so
forth); their attention, and that of their descendants, may become drawn in various ways to those
currents of transnational geopolitics that continue to affect their place of origin.
The flight of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from famine-scarred
Ireland in the late 1840s has been recognized as a formative moment in the making of a modern
diaspora.4 If a more considered deployment of the term includes a return to the notion of a forced
188 Jenkins
migration, or a migration that was at least popularly believed to be an involuntary one of “exile,”
evidence relating to Ireland can be found in sources such as immigrant correspondence and the
rhetoric of nationalists, and nowhere more abundantly than in the United States in the second
half of the nineteenth century.5 Matthew Jacobson uses the vivid phrase “special sorrows” to
summarize the general shape of the “diasporic imagination” of the American Irish in a study
that also discusses Polish and Zionist nationalism.6 Narrations of displacement and the historical
injustices of English colonialism, communicated in speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, and letters,
were effective in creating not only a coherent picture of an Irish homeland but also a fervent
belief in Irish nationhood and a desire that the Irish be free to govern their own affairs. At the
same time, the popular idea of a worldwide “Irish race” that was “liberty-loving” wherever they
went became reified to the point of being commonsensical. Not only was a primordial sense of
ethnicity structured and promoted by a class of educated leaders and publishers, it was also
becoming strongly aligned with the majority religious denomination in Ireland and that of the
majority of post-famine Irish-born in America: Catholicism.7
If the diaspora-related aspects of Irish-American settlement experiences are therefore best
seen not simply as a “special case of ethnicity” but also as ongoing works in progress, what
merits closer investigation is how they were actively made and remade within and between
places.8 Kevin Kenny recommends that light be shed on “the connections migrants form abroad
and the kinds of culture they produce” in words, images, and material objects; such an approach
thus treats diaspora-related “projects,” and their associated geographies, as experimental in
nature.9 As Elizabeth Mavroudi notes, however, an increased focus on the fluid, malleable and
complex reality of diasporas should not neglect how essentialist arguments about their collective
“sameness,” including consensus notions of “homeland,” were dynamically and strategically
produced in different historical and geographical contexts.10
This paper addresses two dimensions of the process by which an Irish diaspora culture
was fashioned in one particular corner of the United States, Buffalo, New York, between the
early 1870s and late 1880s. The first dimension relates to print culture and the role of the so-
called “ethnic press,” the second to the role of popular memory and the active promotion of
those elevated as heroes of Irish nationalism in particular. As we shall see, these two dimensions
of Buffalo’s Irish diaspora culture were integrated to an important degree by the coordinating
activities of a small but influential network of male middle-class activists who, bound by a series
of overlapping associational ties, remained dedicated to furthering the causes of Catholicism and
Ireland at both local and wider scales.
The ethnic press was, and still is, an important component of the making of modern
diasporas, and the term invites speculation about not only the content, geographical reach/
circulation and audience relating to these newspapers, but also about what makes them “ethnic.”
Although a number of Irish journals were available in the United States before the mid 1840s, the
famine immigration and the exile of the leaders of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 kick-started
a new era in Irish-American journalism with New York and Boston emerging as the principal
publishing centers.11 While Patrick Meehan’s Irish American (New York) left no doubt about its
intended audience, the Pilot, official organ of the Catholic archdiocese of Boston, was the widest-
circulating “Irish”-American weekly circa 1870.12 The ownership and content of these weeklies
also illustrated the division of opinion about what dimension of identity the American Irish
should emphasize most in the 1850s, their Irishness or their Catholicism.
The fact that newspapers such as the Pilot reached into many Irish communities across
the United States brings into focus the possibility of Irish households in Buffalo and elsewhere
having access to more than one “ethnic” newspaper and how these could have been influential
in creating a diasporic sensibility in a way that was more continuous than sporadic. It also invites
Creating “A Great Ireland in America” 189
more consideration of how an Irish-American reading public was being created not only in
second- and third-tier American cities and towns in which the Irish were numerous, but also
in much-understudied rural districts. Catholic diocesan newspapers written in English could,
outside the main Irish hubs of Boston, New York, and Chicago, cater to an audience of primarily
Irish birth or ancestry without seriously challenging the circulation figures of the Pilot. It is in
this context that Buffalo’s Catholic Union, the focus of the first part of this paper, became a weekly
where an Irish ethnic and diasporic identity was interpellated and cultivated in the 1870s and
1880s, not least under the influential editorship of Rev. Patrick Cronin.13
The second dimension of a diaspora-oriented culture examined here concerns the symbolic
and ideological uses of what might be termed “diasporic heroes.” The principal hero, and martyr,
in this case was Robert Emmet (1778-1803), sometimes referred to as “Bold” Robert Emmet.
Although Emmet’s rebellion against the British administration in Ireland, staged on the streets of
Dublin in 1803, was a failure, and for which he paid the price with his life, his “celebrity status”
reached a peak in the final decades of the century when the staging of annual commemorations of
his birthday (March 4) became something of a staple across Irish America to the point of rivaling
St. Patrick’s celebrations in many places.14 Marianne Elliott has demonstrated how the “Emmet
legend” grew in strength over the course of the century, appealing as it did to the romantic and
revolutionary imagination within Irish nationalism.15 Here was a comparatively young man, a
Trinity College student born into a middle-class Dublin Anglican family, who was executed for
his continued belief that Ireland should govern itself separately as a republic, five years after the
failed United Irishmen rebellion of 1798. An anticolonial identification thus became a central
ingredient of Irish diasporic identity, fed by the textual and performative remembrances of figures
such as Emmet, amongst other means.16
For all of his seeming suitability as a Great Man, and the exile of members of his family to
the United States, the rise of Emmet in Irish America nonetheless had its experimental elements
more than fifty years after his death. Heroes, for Geoffrey Cubitt, are those whose existences and
reputations receive not only fame and honor in their own lifetime or later, but also “a special
allocation of imputed meaning and symbolic significance – that not only raises them above others
in public esteem but makes them the object of some kind of collective emotional investment.”17
Discourses of heroic reputations are in turn “products of imaginative labour through which
societies and groups define and articulate their values and assumptions, and through which
individuals within those societies or groups establish their participation in larger social and
cultural identities.”18 The key word here is labor; if the ethnic press in the United States was
responsible for bringing a pantheon of Irish mythical, literary, and political heroes to the attention
of audiences in multiple places in the second half of the nineteenth century, selecting a small
number of these “national assets” to actively commemorate was made to varying degrees by a
nexus of national and regional media operators and lower-level activists in places such as Buffalo.19
Such labor not only upheld a diasporic Irish nationalism but also secured a sense of belonging to
the American nation. While Emmet’s deeds and death marked moments in an era when attempts
to attain Irish independence foundered, the memory of his heroic failure acted as a reminder of
the potential still remaining for the achievement of that goal after centuries of colonialism.
The performances enacted at these “ethnic events” in honor of Emmet thus supplied
an important affective complement to the stories and opinions related in newspapers, all the
while facilitating the collective consumption of narrated self-images of what it meant to be Irish
and American. Together, these two dimensions of reading and remembrance offer compelling
examples of how diaspora-related cultural creativity was forged in one place and how it could
be used to mobilize political opinions about Ireland’s future. They also enable us to picture
“a series of continually re-emphasised diasporic political and emotional connections” within
190 Jenkins
communities.20 This calendar of diasporic “happenings,” operating at different levels of intensity

over time, ultimately mattered when the time came to contribute money to the cause of Ireland.
And as nineteenth-century Irish political leaders from Daniel O’Connell in the 1840s to Charles
Stewart Parnell in the 1880s well knew, financial support from the American Irish, buoyed up by
waves of anticolonial sentiment, could do a great deal of good.21
The period from the early 1870s to late 1880s is important for several reasons. In the wake
of unsuccessful border raids on Canada in 1866 and 1870 by the most recent champions of Irish
republicanism, the Fenian Brotherhood, a new movement for constitutional nationalism took
shape in Ireland that sought the return of a Dublin parliament or “Home Rule.” By the late 1870s,
the agitation entered a more activist phase with the rise of the charismatic Parnell, the beginning of
the Irish “Land War,” and the formation of Land League branches in Ireland and North America.
These political developments in Ireland were paralleled by an emerging accommodation in the
Irish-American press between proponents of Catholicism and nationalism, as political news from
Ireland continued to matter.22 At the same time, the centenaries of the birth of Daniel O’Connell
(1775-1847) and Robert Emmet provided Irish America with opportunities to measure its depth
of interest in, and evaluations of, the political contributions of two heroes from the homeland.
In the United States, and despite sacrifices made in the Civil War, the combination of
lowly economic status, increased political participation, and a steadfast religious loyalty meant
that Irish Catholics’ struggle to be accepted as fellow (white) Americans had anything but ended.
In local politics, the Irish entered the fray in most big cities and received blame for the rise of
the “ex-plebe” ward politician whose dubious moral standards corrupted the rational course of
municipal decision-making.23 The American Catholic hierarchy, meanwhile, continued to face
domestic political and media opposition to its push for state-funded education, and those Catholics
looking to Europe were repulsed by the invasion of Rome by the Italian Army in September 1870
against the opposition of Pope Pius IX. The construction of a Catholic infrastructure in dioceses
and parishes nevertheless continued from the 1870s onward, one that included not only churches,
schools, colleges, and other institutions, but also associations and societies that fostered devotional
patterns of worship and a press that defended Catholic values. Modest degrees of economic
mobility in Irish communities across the republic enabled the emergence of a lay middle-class
energy that in turn spearheaded projects of social uplift. In an era of continued anti-Catholic
hostility at several levels, it was the defense of not only Catholic pride that was at stake, but also
Irish pride. It was in this context that organs such as the Catholic Union appeared.
Buffalo, a border city located at the eastern edge of Lake Erie in western New York State, is
one into which large numbers of Irish migrated during the nineteenth century, especially between
the 1840s and 1860s. By 1880, 10,310 Irish-born residents lived in a city of 155,134, and they,
alongside Buffalo’s two other principal socio-cultural groups, Anglo-American “Yankees” and
Germans, occupied distinctive positions in the city’s labor market as well as its social geography. In
comparative cultural terms, however, Buffalo was quite German; almost half of the population was
of this background by the mid 1870s, clustering mostly on the city’s east side, and they possessed
a mix of not only middle- and working-class occupations but also religious denominations.24 Of
the twenty Catholic churches in the city identified by Bishop Steven Ryan in 1879, ten served
German congregants.25 The vast majority of those of Irish birth and ancestry, on the other hand,
were working-class Catholics and their south-side concentration close to the waterfront was,
in the mind’s eye of many Buffalonians, their primary locality of residence. A Catholic Union
editorial complained in 1876 that contrasting representations of “the drunkenness of the Celt and
the sobriety of the Teuton” had long been “thrown up into our face.”26 But the Irish in Buffalo
became known to their neighbors not only for their capacity for alcohol consumption or local
political activism; their ability to respond to efforts to right Ireland’s wrongs was also observed
and acknowledged during the era of Fenian border raids.27 With immigration from Ireland at a
low ebb, Buffalo’s Irish-American community had reached a level of multi-generational maturity
by the 1870s that makes it an appropriate place to study the ongoing cultivation of Irish diasporic
sensibilities.
Bishop Steven Vincent Ryan was the prime mover behind the formation of what would
become Buffalo’s new “Irish” paper, the Catholic Union. Ryan was Canadian-born and of Irish
ancestry and was consecrated the second bishop of Buffalo in November 1868. Top of his agenda
was to continue the work of his Irish-American predecessor, John Timon, in building a solid
institutional apparatus for the diocese to serve the coming generations of American Catholics.
Upon arrival in the city, Ryan would have noted the existence of a German Catholic Young Men’s
Association, established in 1866 (re-organized as the Buffalo Catholic Institute in 1870) as well
as a weekly newspaper for that section of his congregation, Die Aurora, founded in 1851. His
Irish section likely caused him greater worry, not simply because of problems relating to alcohol
and underemployment, but also because of the support for violent revolution in Ireland among
sections of the community, something fervently opposed by Timon, in the aftermath of the 1866
raid. Ryan’s key windows into this mentality, if he had occasion to consult them, were a series
of locally produced and short-lived newspapers such as the Buffalo Globe, Fenian Volunteer, and
United Irishman.28
Sections of Buffalo’s Irish community thus received regular schooling in anticolonial
discourses that pitted the unfortunate Gael against the oppressive Saxon. The three above-
mentioned papers were financed by Patrick O’Day, an auctioneer who used his premises to
store arms for the local Fenian regiment in the summer of 1866, while James McCarroll, an
Irish-born Canadian who supported the William Roberts wing that planned the Canadian raids,
participated in the production and editing of at least the Globe and Fenian Volunteer after arriving
in Buffalo in early 1866. The Fenian Volunteer, the only one of the O’Day-financed papers with
extant issues, invited its readership to form Fenian branches or ‘circles’ in their communities that
would, among other things, help “an oppressed people” to “assimilate themselves more readily
to American institutions, customs and manners, than any other on the face of this earth.”29 But
while Irish immigrant children could then “be taught to love and honor the principles of American
freedom,” so too would they learn “to regard with abhorrence the name of England, associated as
it has always been, with famine, sword and flame, as well the thousand nameless cruelties which
have been practiced upon the Irish race from time immemorial.”30 The issue of 4 January 1868
claimed that the paper’s “city list” contained “two or three thousand names” though this wide
interval was used not to boast but rather complain that the numbers of Irish origin in Buffalo
merited a potential readership of between ten and fifteen thousand names.31 In an effort to drum
up advertising revenue, the paper also stated that it was circulating “widely through New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and various other parts of this Union, as well as through Canada.”32
The Fenian Volunteer matters because it not only attempted to bolster a diaspora-oriented
awareness among Buffalo’s Irish that was revolutionary in nature, but it also sought to capture
the attention of Irish communities within a wider region of the northeastern United States.
Correspondence trickled in from towns and counties across New York State and beyond with
descriptions of progress in circle formation. Poems such as “The Trust of the Gael,” “Erin’s Dead,”
“God Save Ireland,” “Remember Allen” and “Song of the Fenian Soldier” combined with articles
on the lives of Brian Boru, 1798 Rebellion general Joseph Holt, and the histories of ancient Irish
landmarks to present a picture of past Irish glories alongside current dramas. The paper does
not appear to have lasted much more than one year, however; the latest extant issue is dated
September 5, 1868.33
192 Jenkins
In the wake of the second Fenian raid on Canada in 1870, and despite an all-round feeling
of dejection and disappointment, those in Buffalo who sought a new outlet for advanced Irish
nationalist rhetoric could find it in imported copies of Toronto’s Irish Canadian (established in
1863) as well as a new weekly founded in New York, the Irish World, edited by Patrick Ford. But
they would also come to find some acceptable material in the diocesan newspaper founded by
Bishop Ryan. Given that the city’s Germans were well-served by at least three daily newspapers
in their own language in the late 1860s besides Die Aurora, Ryan’s undertaking could not ignore
the diocesan population of Irish birth and ancestry as a distinctive portion of the prospective
reading public.34
The first issue of the Catholic Union appeared on April 25, 1872 with J. Edmund Burke as
editor. Burke was Argentinian-born, Long Island-raised, and spent twenty years in the journalistic
business in New York before arriving in Buffalo.35 His opening editorial declared the paper’s
mission to act “as a defender of Catholic principles, an expositor of Catholic truth; or an adherent
to and counselor in the cause of justice and of right.”36 Money was critical to the venture’s success
and it was published by the Buffalo Catholic Publication Company (BCPC; see also Figure 1),
an entity organized under the auspices of Bishop Ryan.37 The early cohort of readers was told,
for example, of how, “promptly and generously, both Clergy and Laity responded to the call of
their Bishop, subscribing the Capital necessary to place the enterprise on a firm and permanent
basis.”38
There was, for Burke, no guarantee that a paper geared to specifically Catholic interests
would succeed. As he opined unsubtly in the fourth issue, “Catholics do not take such an
interest in supporting the journals devoted to defending them from attacks by Protestants and
Infidels.”39 Thus, the question of capturing an audience within and beyond a largely working-
class urban community must have been seriously considered alongside the question of how much
theologically focused discussion to include. Burke was not short of ideas; he had worked for the
Catholic Freeman’s Journal in New York, long-time rival of Patrick Meehan’s Irish American and
now the Irish World, and experienced stints at the Herald and Times as well.40 Despite the wording
of the opening editorial, there was more to the Catholic Union than the mere cultivation of Catholic
pride. The editor and his advisors were acutely aware of the largely Irish-American audience they
were likely to attract in Buffalo and western New York, and Burke recognized that the literary and
political histories of Ireland, as well as its current affairs, were important and legitimate items of
entry. The maiden issue included an “Irish News” section, and over the first months, this section
took up an average of 1.5 columns per eight-page issue. Readers could learn about everything
from land sales in County Meath to the building of new churches and convents, the deaths of
priests, public appointments, and the occasional murder. They were also kept informed about
developments in the movement for Home Rule and the performances of Irish representatives in
the British House of Commons. Burke was more revealing about his Irish reading public in his
farewell editorial of April 2, 1874. After reflecting on the newspaper’s aim to defend “Catholicity
from the attacks, open or covert, that are constantly being made upon it,” Burke stated that an
additional objective was:
[T]o defend, especially, the Irish race from the venomous and malign slanders
which a spirit of bigotry, by no means extinct among non-Catholics, frequently
utters against them. I have endeavored to show that the Irish people, whether
in their native land or as American citizens, have done nothing that should be
counted to their disparagement; that they are as honest in their dealings as upright
in their lives, as commendable in their daily walk and conversation, as patriotic
in their acts and intentions, as any other class of men who go to make up our
American community, and that they have political rights co-equal with other
citizens of whatever name, class or degree.41
Some prominent local Irish Americans were also heavily invested in the Catholic Union. Besides
Bishop Ryan, two of the three lay members of the board of directors of the BCPC, George Chambers
and John McManus, were influential figures in Buffalo’s Irish world. Chambers had served as
alderman of the most Irish ward in the city (the south-side first ward) as well as in the state
assembly, while McManus was a well-known banker and real estate agent. Both were wired into
the local networks of the Democratic Party and served also as executive members of the Buffalo
Circle of the Catholic Union, whose aims included the promotion and maintenance of “a spirit of
devotion to the Holy Father,” the sustenance of “Catholic rights” and the promotion of “just and
fair legislation in relation to the Church in America.”42
Another organization that brought Chambers and McManus into contact with other young
Irish-American men, however, was the Young Men’s Catholic Association (YMCA). Through
lectures, excursions, debates, and other entertainments, the object of the YMCA was to produce
among the members “a wise, harmonious, and well-regulated public opinion or rather judgment
on all matters, temporal or spiritual, affecting the interests of the Church of God, dearer to us than
our lives.”43 While this also reflected the sort of readership the Catholic Union sought to mold,
Bishop Ryan’s expressed hope that the YMCA would become an outlet “where the young men of
all nationalities and from the different parishes could congregate” was medium-run thinking at
best. McManus served as YMCA president in 1872, and when the association’s headquarters of St.
Stephen’s Hall was completed in 1875 with plans to feature a portrait of famed Irish poet Thomas
Moore in the center of a Renaissance-style fresco on its ceiling, its cultural stamp was clear.44
Published lists of officers in city directories as well as that of the 112 members involved in an 1876
excursion committee offer further indications of a body of men of mostly Irish birth or ancestry.45
It was scarcely surprising, then, that when a need for enlarged facilities arose, the Catholic Union
moved its headquarters to St. Stephen’s Hall in April 1875.46 Its president that year, Irish-born
James Mooney, would be an important generator of Irish diasporic nationalist energy in Buffalo
in the early 1880s; he was also a subscriber to Patrick Ford’s Irish World.47
When J. Edmund Burke stepped down as editor of the Catholic Union for family-related
reasons in April 1874, Bishop Ryan did not have far to search for a replacement. Over the
coming years, Rev. Patrick Cronin (1835-1905) would establish himself as not only a formidable
commentator on church-related issues but also a fiercely patriotic defender of Ireland’s right to
realize its dream of national independence. Unlike Burke, Cronin was Irish-born, spending his
early years in Pallaskenry, County Limerick.48 Having lost his mother at an early age, Cronin
departed Ireland with his father during the height of the famine at fourteen years old. After
being ordained and serving as a priest in Missouri, Cronin’s talents at oratory and the written
word were recognized when he was offered the Chair of Rhetoric at the Seminary of Our Lady of
Angels at Suspension Bridge, New York (present-day Niagara Falls) in 1870. Cronin’s memories
of his early years in Ireland were no doubt dominated by the experience of famine in the vicinity
of Pallaskenry. The district suffered a population loss of between 20 and 50 percent between 1841
and 1851, while County Limerick as a whole experienced above-average rates of agrarian and
famine-related protest.49 Who knows the extent of the stories related to the young Cronin about
the departure of other families from the district besides his own, or other tales of eviction or
confinement to overcrowded workhouses? Workhouses were built in not only nearby Limerick
City but also regional towns such as Rathkeale, Newcastle West, and Glin.50
As an expert on rhetoric, Cronin was more than capable of formulating his own anticolonial
laments for Ireland. Those reading a Catholic Union account of his 1874 St. Patrick’s Day sermon,
delivered at a solemn high mass in Detroit, could not have failed to be impressed; some were
194 Jenkins
likely also amused by his melodramatic style. His introductory remarks invited listeners to
let their “hearts wander back over the sea” and “dream over the grey ruins of crumbled cross
or convent turret,” to think of “King Brian, whom a hundred harps hailed wildly at Clontarf,
but who returned to know no more” and then “float down the azure waters of the Shannon
to Limerick” while being “proud of Sarsfield’s sword that flashed within its ancient walls.”51
Cronin’s conclusion, however, positioned Catholicism as a central inspirational force in the long-
run survival of a distinctive and separate Irish identity, and provides important insight into his
editorial policy and his later participation in U.S.-based activism on behalf of Ireland:
The days of an ancient Erin have long since fled. Her sceptre, like that of Judah,
is wielded by another. She hath wept and her tears are of her cheek. Her laws are
gone. Her dwellings are desolate. Her children cry for bread all the day long, and
the gems she once wore round her fair and youthful brow now adorn the crown of
a stranger. But oh! There is one thing they could never tear from her – one which,
in her darkest hour, she clings to with all the endearments of affection rendered
more tender by sorrow, and that is her faith!52
If Burke had effectively woven Irish affairs into the pages of the Catholic Union, Cronin took this
editorial policy to a new level. Within two months of his maiden editorial, readers were treated
to a continuous stream of writings about the history and geography of Ireland sourced from the
Dublin Nation and other like outlets. One article with the headline “The Island of Saints: Most
Picturesque Land on the Globe” discussed ancient Irish monuments such as the Rock of Cashel,
Monasterboice, and St. Kevin’s Monastery in Glendalough.53 About a month later, a full-length
piece on Glendalough appeared.54 Articles on the city of Cork and the “wilds of Donegal” were
also published during these months alongside pieces on eighteenth-century orator and politician
John Philpot Curran, writer William Carleton, and Young Irelander Thomas Davis.55 Poetry
ranged from “The Death of Connor Macnessa – Monarch of Ireland” by T.D. Sullivan to “Evicted”
by Daniel Connelly.56 In later years, readers would be reminded of the wish of Curran’s colleague,
Henry Grattan, first expressed in 1780, “but to breathe, in this our island, in common with my
fellow-subjects, the air of liberty” in addition to his resolution to never be satisfied “so long as the
meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags.”57 The cultural idea
of an Irish nation, summoned by landscape, poetic, and folkloric imagery, became coupled with a
desire for a reassertion of political sovereignty and statehood that, beyond the return of a Dublin
parliament, remained quite vague in content.
As the Irish Home Rule movement gained momentum in the mid 1870s, speeches from its
leader, Isaac Butt, and others were published in the Catholic Union (Figure 1). Readers’ awareness
of the physical-force tradition in Irish nationalism was revived occasionally, however, and the
paper was unimpressed with Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s appeal for “skirmishing” funds in
the early months of 1876, for example. Though the Irish World notably took up Rossa’s cause,
and some funds from Buffalo became channeled to Patrick Ford’s paper, Cronin agreed with
the recently deceased Young Irelander John Mitchel in taking a dim view of Fenianism and “the
new scheming devices of irresponsible adventurers.”58 Yet when news broke about the rescue
of six imprisoned Fenians in Western Australia and their transportation to the United States
aboard the whaler Catalpa, Cronin’s editorial asked: “Is there anyone–any Irishman at least–who
does not heartily rejoice at the recent escape of the Fenian prisoners? We believe not; and we do
no [sic] wish to believe that there is.”59 A story about gallant Irishmen defying Britain and its
navy was too good to resist, and not long after, accounts of the rescue and escape featured in the
newspaper. Though the Catholic Union rejoiced of there being “noble manhood still in Ireland’s
sons,” its editorial also urged prayers that “good God may guard them from the claws of the
corrupt blatherers.”60
Figure 1. News on Irish Home Rule on the front page of the Cathlic Union, 16 April 1874.
The Catholic Union continued to give wide coverage to the course of nationalist agitation
in Ireland, and as circumstances changed there, so too could Buffalonians count on Cronin for a
lucid interpretation of events. There was doubtless much discussion of Ireland within the ranks
of the YMCA as well, of which Cronin served as moderator in 1877. An editorial of October 1878
expressed not only the view that Isaac Butt’s cautious leadership style was “not fully in harmony
with the more active leaders of the Home Rule movement” but also a general disenchantment
with the movement itself.61 Ireland, it then appeared, would have to wait until the next “crisis
in English history” for political reform to materialize, and when it did, be “prepared to demand
independence instead of Home Rule.”62 Unimpressed by Butt’s charting of too moderate a
course to too little avail, Cronin’s own anticolonial passions burst forth on this and several other
occasions. It was important to him that Buffalo’s Irish reach a certain depth of interest in Ireland’s
past, present, and future, while simultaneously recognizing that their destiny lay in becoming
good Catholic citizens of the American republic.
By the late 1870s, a network of Catholic Union agents covering more than twenty towns
in western New York State was in place, with priests assuming this role in several localities.63
An 1877 advert in the Buffalo City Directory described the paper as “the acknowledged medium
of address to Catholics” throughout “Middle and Western New York.”64 Lists of remittance
submitters published in various issues throughout the first half of 1879 suggest the circulation
to be approximately two thousand; one wonders what the figure might have looked like were it
not for the economically depressed years endured since 1873. More than one third of subscribers
came from Buffalo and more than 40 percent of these in turn lived on the streets of the city’s
southern wards where a recognizably Irish stamp was present (Table 1).65 An analysis of subscriber
surnames provides further evidence of a largely Irish readership. Not only is there a near-absence
of German names in the lists, but the most common surnames (with ten or more individual
entries) are Sullivan, Smith, Ryan, Murphy, and McCarthy.66 The “Irish News” column became
subdivided by county after August 1876, though this did not mean that all of Ireland’s thirty-two
counties featured in this section in every issue.
196 Jenkins

Source Number Percentage
Buffalo 314 35.0

Southern “Irish” wards (1,2,3,13) 130 14.5
Elsewhere in city 184 20.5
Rochester 55 6.1
Lockport 37 4.1
Batavia 26 2.9
Elsewhere in New York State 396 44.2
Other U.S. states 31 3.5
Canada 6 0.7
Unknown 31 3.5
Total 896 100.0

Table 1. Sources of subscribers to the Catholic Union, January 1-June 30, 1879 (Catholic Union, various
issues, January-June 1879).
The paper’s circulation field within western New York included Rochester while covering
the numerous small communities on the southern Alleghany Plateau bordering Pennsylvania. In
small settlements such as Belfast, Cuba, and New Ireland (dubbed “Ireland” in the subscription
lists), Irish men and women received copies of the Catholic Union as well as those residing in towns
such as Lockport, Batavia, Medina, Le Roy and South Byron, on the plain between Buffalo and
Rochester. Ten years earlier, reports on the progress of local Fenian “circles” in places like Batavia
appeared in the pages of the Fenian Volunteer; while the consumption of Irish news, history and
culture had continued in such localities, changes in their readers’ attitudes toward advanced
Irish nationalism are harder to track.67 Beyond this core hinterland, other readers lived in New
York City, Brooklyn, Boston, San Francisco, towns in Midwestern states, and Canadian cities such
as Ottawa and Halifax.68 While the vast majority of subscription remittances were reported at
the scale of the individual, newspapers circulated not only within, but also frequently between,
households. There were also institutional subscribers such as branches of the Catholic Mutual
Benefit Association and the Sisters of Mercy. While subscribers were mostly male, 160 were either
individual women or orders of nuns. The transmission of nationalist ideas was never simply
the domain of men. In the wider scheme of things, however, the circulation of the Catholic Union
paled when compared to heavyweights such as the Irish World and Boston Pilot.69 The World’s
circulation had grown to more than twenty-five thousand in less than ten years, while the Pilot’s
was at least fifty thousand.70
Although the Catholic Union’s opening editorial proclaimed its place within the process of
building the infrastructure of a Catholic English-speaking community in Buffalo, what emerged
within the first eight years was a newspaper largely oriented to the Irish in the city and its region,
one whose editorial policy kept them informed of social and political issues in the homeland
while educating them on its history and people. All in all, a vision of Ireland as an island in the
eastern Atlantic whose ancient laws, traditions, and landscapes had been all but destroyed by
seven centuries of colonialism had become fortified. The paper was locally produced and had
a largely regional field of circulation, but it became drawn into both national and transatlantic
geographies of press and political activity. Its readership was regularly encouraged to think, and
to then presumably talk, about the Irish nation as a legitimate cultural and political phenomenon.
Cronin’s intervention into the question of Ireland’s future reached new heights, however,
as it became clear that his country of birth was suffering a major agricultural and humanitarian
crisis in the autumn of 1879. Within eighteen months, Cronin would spearhead committees to
host the new face of Home Rule, Charles Stewart Parnell, administer the collection of funds for
Irish relief, occupy a vice-presidential position in the Irish National Land League of America
(INLLA), and promote the formation of branches of that organization within “Irish” parishes
in Buffalo.71 The visit of Parnell in January 1880 momentarily elevated the level of diasporic
engagement among those of Irish origin. Parnell’s months in the United States and Canada took
in more than sixty cities and was cut short only by the calling of a general election in the United
Kingdom. Though the rural depression of 1879 and the possibility of renewed famine framed
his mission, Parnell nonetheless reminded his listeners in Buffalo and elsewhere of the wider
political struggle for Irish nationhood and the ending of the estate system of land ownership in
Ireland. He also notably celebrated the fact of how in traveling across the Atlantic, he had come
to find “a great Ireland in America.”72
The consequences of a shared Irishness within the YMCA ranks also became apparent
when prominent members came to the fore in committees struck to collect relief funds and
establish Land League branches. James Mooney was the most notable in this regard, but he was
also a member of the Clan na Gael, a North American organization supportive of revolution
in Ireland whose mission was to ensure a presence if not a dominance within the expanding
network of American Land League branches.73 Clan na Gael also took the lead in organizing
Parnell’s itinerary, and the resolutions and reception committees struck to welcome Parnell in
Buffalo, moreover, included one Patrick O’Day, very likely the old Fenian Volunteer publisher.74 In
1882, as if to illustrate the Clan’s success at infiltration, Mooney became president of the INLLA.
Cronin, meanwhile, ensured that each new development across the Atlantic was given coverage
in the newspaper and, when appropriate, editorialized with his usual fire. For months after the
Parnell visit, the paper faithfully recorded individual and group contributions to the Parnell Irish
Relief Fund by city ward, published the views of nationalist writers such as the Nun of Kenmare
on the state of Ireland, and covered in detail the founding of Land League branches in the city
the following year.75 With both Cronin and Mooney influential in the organization, the first
annual convention of the INLLA took place in Buffalo in January 1881 where St. James’ Hall “was
decorated with emerald banners and the stars and stripes.”76 No less than twelve columns were
devoted to a mass meeting held in the city the following month to protest what would become
the Protection of Person and Property Act. This enactment of the latest coercion bill in Ireland
prompted a familiar first resolution that reminded those assembled of “eight hundred years of
merciless persecution.”77
By 1885, Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory designated the circulation of what was now
the Catholic Union and Times to be not greater than ten thousand, putting it on a par with the Irish
Canadian but still in the second division compared to the World and Pilot.78 Through the previous
decade and more, the newspaper had played an important role in framing and structuring a
diasporic nationalism among sections of the Buffalo Irish. While supporting constitutional efforts
to find a solution to the Irish question, it retained interest in, and at times sympathy for, men
who had preferred more violent responses. An important element within the popular anticolonial
nationalism it promoted, however, was the selection and glorification of Irish heroes. By the
second half of the 1880s, one hero in particular had acquired special status – Robert Emmet.
Many Irish Buffalonians, and certainly their literate middle-class leaders, were aware
of the narrative of Emmet’s life and sacrifices by the time of his centenary in 1878. The small
Irish elite had long toasted him at St. Patrick’s Day dinners and, as mentioned, a portrait of his
boyhood friend Thomas Moore was planned to occupy the center of the ceiling of St. Stephen’s
198 Jenkins
Hall. From the era of the famine immigration until the late 1850s, at least nine separate editions
of three different Emmet biographies were published in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Charleston, South Carolina, and some of this material likely made its way to Buffalo.79 In at least
one extant issue of 1868, the Fenian Volunteer, dutiful to the last, printed Emmet’s famous final
words where he forbade his epitaph from being written “until Ireland takes her place among
the nations of the earth.”80 By the mid 1870s, a so-called Emmet Benevolent Association was
in existence in the city, likely the creation of local Clan na Gael members or supporters, and it
periodically organized entertainments and lectures to raise funds to aid the Fenians rescued from
Australia.81 Emmet had potential to serve not only as a point of reference for how the Buffalo Irish
(and their sympathizers) thought about Irish independence but also for how the Irish were to be
(favorably) placed within the American polity through the parallels drawn between him and that
other well-known anticolonial, George Washington. If the project of mobilizing Irish pride was to
remain vital, Emmet was a more than useful symbol.
The visible elevation of selected Irish heroes above a general pantheon was less
straightforward than it may seem, however. In August 1875, Buffalonians of Irish origin were
invited to acknowledge the centennial of Daniel O’Connell, and the Catholic Union reported
enthusiastically on the “world-wide celebration” honoring the man known as Ireland’s
“Liberator.”82 Uncertain weather conditions seemingly put paid to the possibility of an outdoor
celebration, and so a pontifical mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral was combined with a lecture in St.
James’ Hall by Rev. P.N. Lynch, the Bishop of Charleston. The latter was a decidedly respectable
affair, with Bishop Ryan present on the platform alongside the Mayor, a number of judges, a
local Irish-born alderman, and other dignitaries.83 While those assembled appreciated Bishop
Lynch’s reminder that “the penal code was like a dark cloud” in Ireland at the time of O’Connell’s
birth, the clergyman’s discussion of O’Connell’s achievements concentrated largely on Catholic
Emancipation. Lynch had nothing to say about O’Connell’s efforts to secure the repeal of the
Act of Union binding Britain and Ireland since 1801, and summed O’Connell up as “one who
appealed to reason and logic, and not brute force and bribery.”84 The contrast to the violent
approach advocated by the Fenians and Young Irelanders was doubtless not lost on listeners
and readers. Although Rev. Cronin was not present to hear Lynch (he spoke at the corresponding
celebration in Detroit), a subsequent Catholic Union editorial concluded with an expression of
surprise and pain “at the ungrateful apathy displayed by our countrymen in this city on the
occasion of the centennial anniversary of [O’Connell’s] birth.”85
Three years later, the centenary of Emmet’s birth was marked by the YMCA through a
recreation of his infamous trial. In what may have been a dry run of sorts, a performance of the
trial was staged in St. Stephen’s Hall the previous July 1877 and was attended by “a very large
audience” though the reenactment was felt by the Catholic Union correspondent to have “many
defects.”86 On this occasion, the role of Emmet was played by ex-president John McManus, who
was joined by no less than thirty-two other cast members, all men. The primary defect was the
evident (and somewhat ironic) failure to sufficiently capture “the true appearance of a British law
court” within the hall; the journalist mocked “the gathering together of all the lawyers both for
crown and accused at one small table in left centre, as thought they were playing a game of poker
on the sly” and described the costumes (the judge’s excepted) as “farcical.”87 Such language, if
nothing else, points to the experimental aspects associated with the production of a diasporic
spectacle. If, as Paul Connerton argues, habit is a vitally important component in the production
of collective memory, these Irish activists were not yet habituated enough in facing the challenge
of publicly commemorating Emmet beyond the toasts of St. Patrick’s Day dinners.88 Though the
subsequent attempt to recreate the trial at St. James’ Hall in March 1878 was judged to have “passed
off quite creditably,” the diocesan organ felt that it would have attracted “a larger audience” but
Figure 2. Depiction of the execution of Robert Emmet on the front page of the Irish World, 8 March 1879.
200 Jenkins
for “the lack of sufficient advertising.”89 McManus did not return in the role of Emmet; he now
acted as one of Emmet’s two counsels with the role of the Great Man assumed by YMCA financial
secretary James Murphy.90 Onstage participation was also stripped down somewhat, with only
fourteen men taking part.
The St. James’ Hall event did not spell the end of Emmet-related activities in Buffalo in
his centenary year, however. While American lithographers were busy producing at least three
different images of Emmet at this time, his execution was pictured in prints sold by the Buffalo-
based Gies and Company.91 Also, in November 1878, the Forrest Dramatic Company presented
a three-act play about Emmet for the benefit of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. This
was the play written by James Pilgrim and produced in New York on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of Emmet’s death in 1853.92 It is not known how accepting Buffalonians were of a
play in which Emmet’s love interest was not Sarah Curran but “his wife” Maria, and those now
critically attuned to representations of the “stage Irishman” may well have winced at the sight of
“Darby O’Gaff, a sprig of the Emerald Isle.” And though the play did at least close with Emmet’s
final words to stir the blood of the audience, the force of his language was likely soon diluted by
the “laughable farce” of “The Widow’s Victim” that followed on to close out the evening.
Some Irish households in Buffalo received their understandings of Emmet’s legacy from
more than just the Catholic Union, local lithographers, and travelling stage companies, however.
The Irish World was a rapidly rising star in the Irish-American press and had a readership in
Buffalo as in many other American places. The image of Emmet’s execution it published in
1879 (Figure 2), crude as it is, likely paralleled what Gies and Company was offering, and the
paper also characteristically exaggerated the sense of an Irish America rising simultaneously in
celebration of Emmet’s 101st. Aside from the largest cities, the World reported on celebrations in
Newark, New Haven, St. Louis, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Charleston, and many other places.
The levels of participation at these affairs did not always merit “mass meeting” status, however.
In Buffalo, for example, the Irish Rifles and Emmet Benevolent Association celebrated Emmet’s
101st birthday in the city’s downtown armory at which “Emmet’s speech was recited with much
force and vigor by Mr. M.J. Sullivan of Company A, I.R.”93
The Irish World also clarified to its readership why Emmet was a worthier figure of
celebration for supporters of Irish nationhood than O’Connell. Whereas George Washington
and William Tell were honored for their respective rebellions against tyranny, the World declared
O’Connell to be “an avowed British subject and not an Irish Nationalist; and during the fifty years
he was on the political stage, he never once expressed a contrary wish. Not once!”94 O’Connell’s
pacifism did not hold him in good stead in this account, and his movement to repeal the Act of
Union was argued to leave the Irish still “fast bound to the throne of England.”95 Defining a nation
as “the unity of a people inhabiting a common country, and owing allegiance to and protected by
one government under a common flag,” Emmet was in contrast lauded by the Irish World as “the
fittest type of the principle of Irish Nationality known to the men of this generation.”96 Unlike
Emmet, O’Connell did not fit comfortably, if at all, within the ranks of anticolonial Irishmen.
It was no surprise, for example, that a precursor to the Fenian Brotherhood, formed in New
York in early 1855 by ex-Young Irelander Michael Doheny, was named the Emmet Monument
Association, or that the twenty men arrested in Cincinnati in January of the following year for
planning a filibustering mission to Ireland were members of a “Robert Emmet Club.”97
Public commemorations to Emmet in Buffalo were not especially marked for some years
after his 101st birthday. A lecture and concert took place in 1880, though the recent Parnell visit
likely concentrated most peoples’ attention; the early months of 1881 witnessed the formation
of Land League branches in the city, and in 1883, the anniversary was overshadowed by a Land
League meeting held to raise money for the alleviation of hunger in southern and western
Ireland.98 Although “exercises” had been prepared “in honor of Emmet’s birthday” by the branch,
the length of the meeting precluded them from being undertaken.99 In 1884, Bishop John Ireland
of Minnesota passed through the city at the same time as John Redmond, a member of Parnell’s
Irish Party in Westminster, though it was the former whose message commanded widespread
coverage in the Catholic Union and Times. In 1885, attempts to collect for Parnell’s recently-
launched Parliamentary Fund to pay the salaries of Irish Party members in Westminster seem to
have preoccupied Cronin and his lay activist colleagues. These efforts paid dividends on a wider
scale; as Michael Keyes has recently claimed, “the 1885 election, with its unprecedented eighty-
six seats for the Irish Party, was funded more or less exclusively by American money.”100
The first Emmet commemoration of any significance in Buffalo since 1880 does not,
therefore, seem to have taken place until March 1886 when the Irish Party held the balance of
power at Westminster and a bill concerning Home Rule was imminent. The affair, held at St.
Stephen’s Hall, was organized by the local branch (403) of the Irish National League of America
(INLA), the successor of the INLLA now focused on the return of a Dublin parliament rather
than land reform, and proceeds were again to be donated to Parnell’s parliamentary fund. Cronin
chaired the entertainment committee, one of several struck to organize the event.101 A Catholic
Union and Times editorial was unambiguous in its message that Emmet “stands first in the gloried
ranks of Ireland’s patriot martyrs who […] yielded up his golden life, with Spartan fortitude, for
his enslaved and buffetted Motherland.”102 No amateur attempt was made to reconstruct Emmet’s
trial on this occasion. Among the evening’s attendees were Mayor Philip Becker, diplomat James
Putnam, and local intellectual Rowland B. Mahany. The program opened “with a medley of Irish
airs, beautifully played by Professor Poppenburg’s superb orchestra” with the eulogies to Emmet
delivered by Mahany and Putnam, both of whom were American born and of the belief that the
recent successes of the Home Rule and Land League movements, for which they praised Parnell
and British Prime Minister William Gladstone, would speed the writing of Emmet’s epitaph.103
Mahany chose language familiar to his listenership: “For Ireland the battle of freedom is well-
nigh won. The struggle of centuries is drawing to a close, a struggle illumined on the one side by
undying and heroic patriotism, and on the other darkened by oppression so merciless and fearful,
that philanthropy might well seem banished from a world quiescent in the perpetration of such
crime.”104 When seen from the distance of an American republic increasingly comfortable in its
diplomatic relations with Britain, this sense of the speedy arrival of self-government in Ireland
was optimistic, even if its supporters were aware of the House of Lords veto. Yet the bill was
defeated in the House of Commons in June, precipitating a split in Gladstone’s Liberal party.
Political setbacks on the eastern side of the Atlantic did not spell the end of diasporic
engagement among Buffalonians of Irish origin, but it remained incumbent upon the small
network of leaders headed by Cronin and Mooney to keep this going. They did so, and retained
Emmet anniversaries for the purpose. Branch 403 of the INLA assumed organizational duties
once more in 1887 and 1888, having elected Civil War veteran Anselm J. Smith as president. Born
in Toronto, Smith had taken part in the production of the Emmet trial in 1878, acting as one of the
accused’s lawyers.105 In 1888, Buffalo attorney P.W. Lawler took to the podium at St. Stephen’s
Hall for that year’s commemoration where a “handsome oil painting of Emmet hung over the
platform” and his final words were “spread upon a white banner extending the width of the
hall.”106 While Lawler was sure to use these words in a speech in which he positioned Emmet
as “the guiding spirit” in Ireland’s struggle for “national independence,” he also structured his
narrative so as to juxtapose the persistence of British colonialism in Ireland alongside the progress
made by the Irish in America.107 With the Plan of Campaign against landlords ongoing in Ireland,
Lawler related how the purpose of rackrenting was “to accomplish the people’s ruin […] their
little homes, the last refuge from the piercing winter’s blast, are razed to the ground, while the
202 Jenkins
aged and hoary sire struggling in the grasp of death is begging, praying that he may be permitted
to die beneath the roof where he was born, or dragged upon the wayside to breathe his last on
earth.”108 Cronin could hardly have written it better. At the same time, Lawler reiterated Irish
contributions to the American Revolution and Civil War, arguing that “their love and duty to
the land of their adoption are none the less true because they cling with fond and endeering [sic]
recollection to the land of their nativity. They are a fixture here, they are a part and parcel of this
country, they have contributed materially to its development as they have to the preservation
of its institutions.”109 That passage was not far from the words chosen by J. Edmund Burke in
his final editorial for the Catholic Union in 1874, but it would not have been out of place in the
Fenian Volunteer either. The Emmet commemorations of these years, then, offered spectacles of
Irish-American diaspora nationalism where intergenerational (and mostly male) bonds were
strengthened in such a way that ensured, at the very least, the active transfer of ideas about
Irish ethnic exceptionalism in Buffalo. The Irish remained a distinctive group in America, and
appreciable numbers of them, including the American born, continued to take an active interest
in the course of Anglo-Irish politics as well as aspects of Irish culture, past and present.
Public remembrances of Emmet in Buffalo continued into the 1890s and early 1900s,
organized for the most part by newly formed divisions of the Irish Catholic fraternal order, the
Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Audiences and stage performers alike were indeed becoming
habituated to the practice of remembering Emmet. The 1903 centennial of Emmet’s final year was,
however, marked by rival events in the city, as the moderate Home Rule-supporting resolutions
passed at the AOH event were countered by the militant “Irish Nationalists” taking their cues
from the recently-reunited Clan na Gael.110 The AOH and Nationalists continued to honor Emmet
in the years leading up to the First World War as the political situation in Ireland became more
fraught. In the aftermath of the 1916 Rising in Dublin and the execution of fifteen of its leaders,
however, a new set of martyrs who had laid down their lives for Irish freedom were now set to
be recognized and commemorated.111 In this latest phase of diaspora-making in Buffalo and other
American places, the Irish nationalist pantheon was reconfigured.
In seeking to elucidate how projects aimed at shaping an Irish “diaspora consciousness”
were undertaken in Buffalo in the 1870s and 1880s through the lens of material culture and public
events, this paper has argued that the regular circulation of ideas about Irish-related things
depended upon the time and money of a small group of promoters and activists, spiritual and
lay, whose concerns often extended to other areas, such as the ongoing cultivation of a respectable
public Catholicism and loyalty to American institutions. In its depiction of how the webs of
interaction between committed individuals in this social field served to structure and underline
a group-level consciousness in one place, the paper has also sought to show how a local picture
connected to wider geographies. The patterns of reading and remembrance discussed in Buffalo
were paralleled in other North American cities in ways that provided the foundations of a network
within which Irish diaspora nationalism could retain vitality after the death of Parnell in 1891 and
the onset of lean years in the Irish nationalist movement. This network that shaped a coherent Irish
diaspora consciousness thus contained within it a series of creative and experimental projects that
also possessed local, regional, and inter-city dynamics. Within its Buffalo node, the YMCA, the
Catholic Union, and Robert Emmet all played important roles at different times in the projection
of an Irish-American community that, although largely focused on its immediate situation in
the United States, continued to cast its eyes at varied levels of intensity on the affairs of the
homeland. This mattered to the ongoing construction of what Charles Stewart Parnell regarded
as a “great Ireland in America” not least because, for all of his efforts and the hope they generated,
Ireland’s political dilemmas remained unresolved. It also mattered that, despite the presentation
of Protestant Irish heroes such as Emmet, Parnell, Henry Grattan, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel,
and others in text and performance, the consuming and approving audience was largely Catholic.
NOTES
1 Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 1-19,
1.
2 Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 13.
3 Martin Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space,” Global Networks 6, no. 3 (2006): 265-
284, 277.
4 See, for example, the chapters in Section VI “The Scattering,” in Atlas of the Great Irish
Famine, eds. John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2012), 492-567. For a critical take on the use of the term diaspora in historical
writing on Irish emigration, see Donald Harman Akenson, “Diaspora, the Irish, and Irish
Nationalism,” in The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present, eds. Allon
Gal, Athena S. Leoussi, and Anthony D. Smith (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 169-217.
5 See Kevin Kenny, Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013). The classic study of an “exile motif” within Irish emigrant correspondence is Kerby
A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
6 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish
Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995).
7 See Timothy J. Meagher, “Irish American Nationalism,” in Meagher, The Columbia Guide to
Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 198-213.
8 Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space,” 266.
9 Kenny, Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction, 12.
10 Elizabeth Mavroudi, “Diaspora as Process: (De)Constructing Boundaries,” Geography
Compass 1, no. 3 (2007): 467-79. For other geographical perspectives, see Caitríona Ní
Laoire, “Introduction: Locating Geographies of Diaspora,” International Journal of Population
Geography 9, no. 4 (2003): 275-280.
11 See William Leonard Joyce, “Editors and Ethnicity: A History of the Irish-American Press,
1848-1883,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974, 19-73.
12 Cian T. McMahon, “Did the Irish ‘Become White’? Global Migration and National Identity,
1842-1877,” Ph.D. dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 2010, 291. The Pilot’s circulation
was circa forty-five thousand, that of the Irish American circa thirty-five thousand.
13 The concept of interpellation emanates from Louis Althusser, but its application here draws
from Gerry Kearns “Nationalism and the Public Sphere: The Nation Newspaper and the
Movement for the Repeal of the Union,” in At the Anvil: Essays in Honour of William J. Smyth,
eds. Patrick J. Duffy and William Nolan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2012), 393-419.
14 See Charles Fanning, “Robert Emmet and Nineteenth-Century Irish America,” New Hibernia
Review, 8, no. 4 (2004): 53-83.
15 Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London: Profile Books, 2004).
16 For a discussion of attempts made by Irish and Irish-American nationalists, possessed of
such anticolonial sentiment, to influence U.S. diplomatic relations with Britain between the
1840s and 1880s, see David Sim, A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations
in the Victorian Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
17 Geoffrey Cubitt, “Introduction: Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives,” in Heroic
Reputations and Exemplary Lives, eds. Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester, United
Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3.
18 Cubitt, “Introduction: Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives,” 3.
19 The term “national assets” is taken from Cubitt, “Introduction: Heroic Reputations and
Exemplary Lives,” 18.
204 Jenkins
20 Donald M. MacRaild, “’Diaspora’ and Transnationalism: Theory and Evidence in

Explanation of the Irish World-Wide,” Irish Economic and Social History 38, no. 1 (2006): 51-58,
55.
21 See Michael Keyes, Funding the Nation: Money and Nationalist Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2011).
22 Joyce, “Editors and Ethnicity,” 154.
23 The term “ex-plebe” is taken from Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an
American City (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1961), 32-51.
24 Andrew P. Yox, “Bonds of Community: Buffalo’s German Element, 1853-1871,” New York
History (April 1985): 141-163.
25 “Bishop Ryan,” Catholic Union, 5 March 1879: 5. For more on the background of Irish
settlement in Buffalo, see William Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion: the Irish in Buffalo and
Toronto, 1867-1916 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
26 “A Native of the German Empire,” Catholic Union, 30 March 1876: 5.
27 For more on these raids, see Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada: the Fenian Raids
1866-1870 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991) and Peter Vronsky, Ridgeway: The American Fenian
Invasion and the 1866 Battle that made Canada (Toronto: Allen Lane Canada, 2011). The Buffalo
Irish response is discussed briefly in Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion, 183-4.
28 See History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County, Volume 2, ed. H. Perry Smith (Syracuse:
D. Mason & Co., 1884), 350. I am also grateful to Michael Peterman of Trent University for
information on the O’Day-McCarroll partnership.
29 “Formation of ‘Circles,’” Fenian Volunteer, 24 August 1867: 2. For more on McCarroll, see
Michael Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan to Terry Fenian: The Truncated Literary Career
of James McCarroll,” in Irish Nationalism in Canada, ed. David A. Wilson (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 140-59. Extant copies of the Fenian
Volunteer are available at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
30 “Formation of ‘Circles,’” Fenian Volunteer, 24 August 1867: 2.
31 “Our City Circulation,” Fenian Volunteer, 4 January 1868: 3.
32 “Important to Advertisers,” Fenian Volunteer, 15 February 1868: 4.
33 See http://www.nli.ie/en/NewspapersDetails.aspx?IndexNo=10554 (accessed 28 June
2014).
34 These were the Demokrat (established 1837), the Freie Presse (1855), and the Volksfreund
(1868). See George P. Rowell & Co’s American Newspaper Directory (New York: George P.
Rowell and Co., 1879), 220.
35 See “What They Think of Us,” Catholic Union, 13 June 1872: 4, and “Death of J. Edmund
Burke,” 18 January 1877: 4.
36 “Salutatory!,” Catholic Union, 25 April 1872: 4.
37 “The Catholic Union, A Weekly Journal,” Catholic Union, 20 March 1873: 1.
38 “The Catholic Union, A Weekly Journal,” Catholic Union, 20 March 1873: 1.
39 “The Duty of Catholics to Support a Catholic Press,” Catholic Union, 23 May 1872: 4.
Original emphasis.
40 “Death of J. Edmund Burke,” Catholic Union, 18 January 1877: 4.
41 “Valedictory,” Catholic Union, 2 April 1874: 4.
42 “The Buffalo Circle of the Catholic Union,” Catholic Union, 16 May 1872: 4.
43 “St. Stephen’s Hall – Young Men’s Excursion,” Catholic Union, 22 June 1876: 4.
44 “Fine Frescoing,” Buffalo Courier, 26 October 1875: 2.
45 For Bishop Ryan’s sentiments, see “Bishop Ryan,” Catholic Union, 5 March 1879: 5; excursion
data is provided in “Young Men’s Excursion,” Catholic Union, 22 June 1876: 8.
46 “Our New Volume - Ourselves,” Catholic Union, 22 April 1875: 4.

47 Mooney is listed as a subscriber in Irish World, 19 February 1876.
48 The following details of Cronin’s early life are taken from Grace Carew Sheldon, “Buffalo of
the Olden Time,” Buffalo Times, 30 November 1909.
49 William J. Smyth, “The Province of Munster and the Great Famine” in Atlas of the Great Irish
Famine, eds. John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2012), 359-370, 368.
50 Glin was an auxiliary workhouse housing between 400 and 800 inmates; the Limerick City
and Newcastle West workhouses housed between 2000 and 4250 people in contrast. See
Figure 5 in Smyth, “The Province of Munster,” 363.
51 “St. Patrick’s Day in Detroit – Sermon by Rev. Fr. Cronin of Buffalo,” Catholic Union, 26
March 1874: 5.
52 “St. Patrick’s Day in Detroit – Sermon by Rev. Fr. Cronin of Buffalo,” Catholic Union, 26
March 1874: 5.
53 “The Island of Saints: Most Picturesque Land on the Globe,” Catholic Union, 21 May 1874: 2.
54 “Glendalough,” Catholic Union, 18 June 1874: 3.
55 These articles appeared in the Catholic Union in the following order: “The City of Cork,”
30 April 1874: 3; “The Wilds of Donegal,” 28 May, 1874: 3; “John Philpot Curran,” 23 April,
1874: 6; “William Carleton,” 25 June, 1874: 6; and “Thomas Davis,” 7 May 1874: 2-3.
56 T.D. Sullivan, “The Death of Connor Mac Nessa – Monarch of Ireland,” Catholic Union, 16
April 1874: 2; and Daniel Connelly, “Evicted,” Catholic Union, 23 April 1874: 2.
57 “Henry Grattan on the Duty of Irishmen,” Catholic Union, 6 April 1876: 7.
58 “Salutary Home Truths,” Catholic Union, 13 April 1876: 4. Cronin admired Mitchel and
serialized the latter’s Jail Journal in the paper in the spring and summer of 1875 following
his death. For more on Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund and the Irish World, see Niall Whelehan,
“Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire, 1876-86,” Eire-Ireland, 42, nos. 1-2 (Spring-
Summer 2007): 180-200; and Adrian N. Mulligan, “A Forgotten ‘Greater Ireland’: The
Transnational Development of Irish Nationalism,” Scottish Geographical Journal, 118, no. 3
(2002): 219-34.
59 “The Escaped Fenians,” Catholic Union, 22 June 1876: 4.
60 “The Escaped Fenians,” Catholic Union, 22 June 1876: 4.
61 “Irish Home Rule,” Catholic Union, 23 October 1878: 4. For a later critical editorial, see “Dr.
Butt’s Leadership,” Catholic Union, 24 December 1878: 4.
62 “Irish Home Rule,” Catholic Union, 23 October 1878: 4.
63 For a sample list, see “Local Agents,” Catholic Union, 4 January 1877: 8.
64 Buffalo City Directory for the Year 1877 (Buffalo, New York: Courier Co., 1877), 215.
65 All of the subscribers to the Catholic Union listed in issues between the beginning of January
and the end of June were entered into a database. A total of 925 entries was recorded,
and when repeat subscribers were omitted, the revised total was 896. Rowell’s American
Newspaper Directory (1879), 220, indicates a circulation of not more than three thousand. The
southern “Irish” Buffalo wards 1, 2, and 3 are mapped in Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion,
83. Ward thirteen is a suburban extension of ward 1 and although largely rural in 1879,
contained a social mix comparable to the other southern wards.
66 Other prominent subscriber surnames were Brennan, Carroll, Collins, Kelly, Mahoney,
Maloney, O’Brien, O’Connor and Sheehan.
67 “Fenianism in Batavia,” Fenian Volunteer, 15 February 1868.
68 See, for example, the columns headed “Remittances” in Catholic Union, 29 January; 12
February; and 26 March 1879.
206 Jenkins
69 Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory (1879), 220.

70 Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory (1879), 238, 146.
71 See Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion, 204-7.
72 “Parnell!,” Catholic Union, 29 January 1880: 4.
73 See Michael Funchion, “Clan Na Gael,” in Irish-American Voluntary Organizations, ed.
Funchion (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), 74-93. The Clan had largely
superseded the Fenian Brotherhood by the early 1870s and organized the Catalpa rescue; see
Sim, A Union Forever, 133, 138.
74 “Parnell!,” Catholic Union, 29 January 1880: 4.
75 For the Nun of Kenmare’s views, see “The Nun of Kenmare on ‘The Irish Question’,”
Catholic Union, 3 and 10 March 1881: 5.
76 “Irish Land League,” Catholic Union, 20 January 1881: 5.
77 “No Coercion!,” Catholic Union, 24 February 1881: 4.
78 George P. Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory (New York: George P. Rowell and Co., 1885),
352, 603, 376, 227.
79 Fanning, “Robert Emmet,” 59.
80 “Last Words of Robert Emmett,” Fenian Volunteer, 4 January 1868: 1.
81 Irish World, 11 November 1876.
82 “O’Connell’s Day,” Catholic Union, 5 August 1875: 5.
85 “O’Connell and George Francis Train!,” Catholic Union, 12 August 1875: 4.
86 “The Critique,” Catholic Union, 19 July 1877: 4.
87 “The Critique,” Catholic Union, 19 July 1877: 4.
88 For a discussion of the element of “habit-memory” within the wider concept of social/
collective memory, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 25-36.
89 “Robert Emmet,” Catholic Union, 7 March 1878: 5.
90 “Robert Emmet,” Catholic Union, 7 March 1878: 5. Murphy was also the recording secretary
for the aforementioned Catholic Union, Circle of Buffalo, in 1878, with McManus acting as
its corresponding secretary,
91 Fanning, “Robert Emmet,” 65.
92 “Dramatic Presentation,” Catholic Union, 20 November 1878: 5; Patrick M. Geoghegan,
Robert Emmet: A Life (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 269.
See also James Pilgrim, Robert Emmet: The Martyr of Irish Liberty, A Historical Drama in Three
Acts, rev. by Charles Townsend (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1903), available at www.
archive.org (accessed 4 June 2014). Sarah Curran was the youngest daughter of John Philpot
Curran (mentioned in the main text) and was the great love, though never the wife, of
Robert Emmet.
93 “The Day in Buffalo,” Irish World, 22 March 1879.
94 “Robert Emmet,” Irish World, 8 February, 1879: 4. Original emphasis.
95 “Robert Emmet,” Irish World, 8 February, 1879: 4. For more on the American context of
O’Connell’s repeal campaign, see Sim, A Union Forever, 11-38.
96 “Robert Emmet,” Irish World, 8 February, 1879: 4.
97 Elliott, Robert Emmet, 178; Sim, A Union Forever, 74-84.
98 See “Robert Emmet,” Catholic Union, 4 March, 1880: 5, where the report declares: “If ever
there was a time when the memories of Emmet should be kept green it is now.”
99 “The Land League,” Catholic Union and Times, 8 March 1883: 5.
100 Keyes, Funding the Nation, 163.

101 “Irish National League,” Catholic Union and Times, 18 February: 5, and “An Enthusiastic
Meeting,” Catholic Union and Times, 4 March 1886: 5.
102 “Emmet’s Day,” Catholic Union and Times, 4 March 1886: 4.
103 “Emmet’s Day!,” Catholic Union and Times, March 11 1886: 5.
104 “Emmet’s Day!,” Catholic Union and Times, March 11 1886: 5.
105 “Emmet’s Day,” Catholic Union and Times, 10 March 1887: 4; “The Critique,” Catholic Union,
19 July 1877: 4.
110 Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion, 312.
111 Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion, 352.
Creating Citizens from Colonial Subjects:
Reforming Local Government
in Early Twentieth Century Ireland
Dr. Arlene Crampsie
School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy
University College Dublin
ABSTRACT: Despite the incorporation of Ireland as a constituent component of the

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through the 1801 Act of Union, for much
of the early part of the nineteenth century, British policy towards Ireland retained
its colonial overtones. However, from the late 1860s a subtle shift began to occur as
successive British governments attempted to pacify Irish claims for independence
and transform the Irish population into active, peaceful, participating British citizens.
This paper examines the role played by the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 in
affecting this transformation. The reform of local government enshrined in the act not
only offered the Irish population a measure of democratic, representative, local self-
government in the form of county, urban district, and rural district councils, but also
brought Irish local government onto a par with that of the rest of the United Kingdom.
Through the use of local and national archival sources, this paper seeks to illuminate
a crucial period in Anglo-Irish colonial relations, when for a number of years, the
Irish population at a local level, at least, were treated as equal imperial citizens who
engaged with the state and actively operated as its locally based agents.
“Increasingly in the nineteenth century the tentacles of the British Empire were
stretching deep into the remote corners of the Irish countryside, bearing with them
schools, barracks, dispensaries, post offices, and all the other paraphernalia of the
… state.”1
Introduction
T
he Act of Union of 1801 moved Ireland from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan
core, incorporating the island as a constituent part of the imperial power of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. With elected representatives taking their seats in
the imperial parliament in Westminster, it could be imagined that Ireland would have embarked
immediately on a period of decolonization and that Ireland’s postcolonial era would have begun.
Indeed such arguments have been put forward to explain the lack of colonial discourse discernible
in the academic literature relating to Ireland in the nineteenth century.2 However, this was a
merger born of coercion not desire. In the wake of French collusion with the United Irishmen
in the 1798 rebellion, it was clear that, from the British point of view, Ireland required more,
not less, supervision. This supervision could best be achieved if Ireland was wholly subsumed
into the United Kingdom, thereby allowing the metropolitan center increased opportunities for
oversight and control. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as suggested in the opening
quotation, the state gradually increased its control over Ireland through the introduction of a
range of legislative innovations that deepened the uneven relationship between state and citizens,
Creating Citizens from Colonial Subjects 209
reflecting the typical patterns of encounters between the colonizer and the colonized.3 As Andrews
stated, Ireland began “to look more colonial than when it had really been a colony.”4 Further, in
spite of some concessions towards the majority, but oppressed, Roman Catholic population after
the granting of Catholic Emancipation, the character of state relief during the Great Irish Famine
underlined the colonial nature of relations between the two territories.5
After the famine, however, it is possible to detect a shift in relations between the state and
the landed ascendancy class. Up to this point the landed class, descendants of the initial colonizers,
were viewed as the representatives of the colonizing state in Ireland. By the 1850s, the inefficiency,
poor management and inability to pay for famine relief exhibited by a portion of the landlord
community, combined with wholesale land clearances, evictions and the ruthless implementation
of the Gregory Clause by a further portion, reduced the British government’s sympathy for the
Irish landlord class. The famine itself and the illumination of these shortcomings increased the
state’s understanding of the role played by the Irish landholding system in fomenting civil unrest
in Ireland, while the incompetence they displayed in local administration convinced the British
government to further increase centralized state control. As the state began to tackle these issues,
a decoupling took place between the state and the landed class in Ireland. Through the reform
of landholding, the transfer of local administration from the landlord-dominated grand juries to
the partially elected boards of guardians and the overall increase in central state supervision, the
state began to stand apart from its colonial partners.6 From the 1870s, a newfound interest in the
arts, rationalities and techniques of government replaced the mediation of landed interest and
the state began to focus on resolving “the Irish question” by pacifying Ireland. In doing so, the
gradual process of incorporating colonial subjects as active participating citizens of the empire
was begun.
This paper examines the culmination of these efforts in the pioneering and yet little-
studied legislation enacted as the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898. The act introduced
the first form of democratic, representative self-government for the citizens of Ireland, while
simultaneously giving the Irish population equal parity with their imperial counterparts in
England, Scotland and Wales. The sources utilized in this discussion range from parliamentary
debates and legislation at a macro-level to local newspaper accounts at a micro-level. This
combination of macro- and micro- level sources allows for an illumination of the complexities
inherent in the everyday operation of local government and the alterations that occur when
legislative reforms are actualized at a local level. More importantly, from the point of view of
this special issue, this investigation of an overlooked aspect of the state’s Irish policy offers an
additional lens through which to nuance our understanding of the relationship between the two
territories. The discussion which follows will outline the ambiguous position of Ireland in the
late nineteenth century before examining the rationale behind the reform of local government
and providing an overview of the provisions enacted by the legislation. This investigation will
allow for an examination of the extent to which the introduction of the act can be considered
a watershed marking the true transition in the treatment of the Irish population from colonial
subjects to citizens of the imperial state.
An ambiguous position – imperial core or colony
The Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 was part of the second of two markedly
different approaches taken by successive Liberal and Conservative governments in addressing
“the Irish question” and which defined the state’s Irish policy from the late 1860s into the early
twentieth century. Both parties sought to complete the incorporation of the Irish population into
the state, a process that had begun with the Act of Union, through a systematic engagement with
Irish grievances and demands that were seen as barriers to peaceful co-existence between the
210 Crampsie
two territories. Conversely, coincident with this was the increasing strength of the nationalist
movement in Ireland which campaigned for independence, much to the consternation of the
government and the unionist population across Ireland. This contest for supremacy between
the juxtaposing ideals of nationalism and imperialism formed the basis of relations between
Ireland and Great Britain up to the creation of the Free State in 1922, threatening and eventually
undermining the imperial center. Further, the uniquely ambiguous position of Ireland as neither
entirely subsumed within the core nor sufficiently distanced to be considered a colony ensured
that “Irish nationalism posed a direct challenge to the integrity of two spatial units to which
British loyalties were addressed: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the British
Empire of Great Britain and its colonies.”7
In discussing the Home Rule movement and the eventual partition of Ireland, Anderson and
O’Dowd examined the conflict arising from the competing ideals of nationalism and imperialism
in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.8 Their work situated the Irish question in its
wider, international context as part of the growth of nation-states and the demise of imperialism.
Crucially, however, they highlighted the interdependent nature of these two differing political
viewpoints, drawing attention to the facts that imperial cores were themselves nation-states
who often practiced “a form of schizophrenia, ‘nationalist’ at home, ‘imperialist’ abroad” and
that the interactions between imperialism and nationalism have shaped the modern states and
nations which emerged.9 This interaction and negotiation between imperial and national ideals is
clearly identifiable in the Irish context from the 1870s onwards. The introduction to Westminster
of a united group of Irish-nationalist MPs in the form of the Irish Parliamentary Party not only
brought nationalist demands directly to the imperial center but also, through the political tactics
they implemented, forced the imperial center to engage to some extent with these demands, if
only to allow the ordinary business of government to continue.10
For the imperial core, these tactics represented a direct threat to the stability and smooth
running of the empire and necessitated the state’s engagement with new techniques to manage
the Irish situation and to further the aim of the full assimilation of the Irish population as imperial
citizens. For Foucault, this focus on population and the security of the state is typical of the
evolution of the arts of government he outlined throughout his lecture series entitled Security,
Territory and Population delivered at the Collège de France in 1978.11 Initially envisioned as a
furtherance of the discussion of biopower introduced in the earlier series Society Must be Defended,
this series experienced a shift in focus in the fourth lecture when Foucault’s attention turned to the
issue of governmentality. Indeed, by the end of this lecture Foucault wished to change the name
of the series to “a history of ‘governmentality’.”12 Throughout the course, Foucault examined the
changes that had occurred in the style and arts of governing populations: from sovereignty, in
the sixteenth century, as illustrated by Machiavelli’s The Prince, through political economy (which
he also refers to as discipline), depicted by Rousseau’s Encyclopedia article, to the development
in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries of governmentality. He dismissed the idea of a
distinct break between one art of government and another, suggesting instead the existence of
a triangle encompassing sovereignty, discipline and government, “which has population as its
main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.”13 It was this shift in focus
from the individual to the population which Foucault viewed as the key innovation, necessitating
the formulation of new governmental techniques. In order to control a body of people, the state
required knowledge about that body, thereby introducing a new impetus to the collection of
“statistics”– meaning the science of the state. With the development of statistical techniques, the
population became a quantifiable object, revealing that populations have their own patterns of
disease, scarcity, wealth, and poverty, which must be understood before any new methods can be
“employed as the state both represents and intervenes in the domains it seeks to govern.”14
These ideas have proven hugely influential within geography, as evidenced by the
substantial corpus of texts which utilize and invoke Foucault as a theoretical basis, particularly
in studies investigating the complex interrelationships between space, place and territory and
power, knowledge and government.15 Indeed Foucault recognized the importance of geography
within his work when he stated, “Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my
concerns.”16 Given this admission, a major gap in Foucault’s work–the lack of meaningful analysis
of colonialism and colonial power relations–is all the more surprising. In this context, Foucault’s
Eurocentrism and lack of engagement with the colonial context has led to much criticism of his
work. Nevertheless, as Stoler has pointed out, this has in no way prevented the saturation of
the field of colonial studies with research that draws on and develops Foucault’s writings as an
analytical framework.17 Legg’s examination of the “absent presence of colonialism in Foucault”
offers a nuanced critique of Foucault’s engagement with colonial and postcolonial contexts,
drawing out the passing references which Foucault made to these issues for more detailed study
and examination.18 However, as he outlines, it is the work of others in applying Foucault to
different colonial contexts that has been most fruitful. Ireland has only recently become the object
of such foucauldian colonial studies through the work of Morrissey and Nally and it is to these
works that this study seeks to add.19
The collection of statistics became a major feature of state policy in Ireland in the nineteenth
century as the state refocused its attention from the territory of Ireland to its population. This
effort has bequeathed “a comprehensive array of government-sponsored topographic maps,
inventories of property valuations, statistical databases of population and demography,
inventories of placenames and administrative units, surveys of bogs and mineral resources, and
scores of parliamentary reports on a diverse range of social, economic and development issues.”20
The knowledge thus gathered was then fed into legislative innovations designed to govern, in
Foucault’s terms, the “conduct of conduct” of the Irish population, which also included additional
mechanisms for knowledge gathering and surveillance.21 As Legg has outlined in the case of
India, this form of government allows the state to attempt “to shape, guide or affect personal
action without the use of physical force.”22 Armed with sufficient knowledge about a population,
Foucault argued that the population then becomes an object in the hands of the government,
“aware of what it wants and unaware of what is being done to it.” 23 Indeed, this might well be
the case in a country where the legitimacy of the state is uncontested, however, in late nineteenth-
century Ireland, the legitimacy of the state was very much contested. As such, every new legislative
development was subjected to detailed examination and investigation, if not by everyone then
certainly by their elected representatives in Westminster. In addition, the existence of a physical-
force nationalist tradition ensured that outright violence was an ever-present threat challenging
state authority. In this way, Foucault’s comment that “there is no power without potential refusal
or revolt” holds particular resonance in the context of nineteenth-century Ireland.24
This active and potentially violent opposition to state aims and techniques, alongside
the presence of Irish elected representatives in Westminster, challenges the imposition of a thin
colonial narrative over Ireland in the nineteenth century. In the early years under the Union,
instances of oppression and inequality were rife and it is fair to state that the Irish MPs were
members of the colonial ruling class and entirely unrepresentative of the wider population. Ruane
defines colonialism as:
[T]he intrusion into and conquest of an inhabited territory by the representatives

(formal or informal) of an external power; the displacement of the native inhabitants
(elites and/or commoners) from resources and positions of power; the subsequent
exercise of economic, political, and cultural control over the territory and native
population by the intruders and their descendants, in their own interests and in
the name and interests of the external power.25
212 Crampsie
By these parameters, it would be fair to conclude that Ireland in the early nineteenth century
was indeed more a colony than a properly integrated part of the core. Economic relations also
support this assertion as outlined by Slater and McDonough, who use Marx’s analysis of the Irish
question to argue that there was an enforced feudalization of Irish agriculture and a maintenance
of Ireland’s colonial status through economic dependency.26 However, their discussion ends in
1867 before the radical changes in land ownership and tenant rights of the later part of the century.
In addition, the aforementioned reforms in religious equality, the increase in the franchise and the
introduction of the secret ballot act ensured that by the 1870s Irish representatives in Westminster
were more properly representatives of the native population, if not necessarily natives themselves.
Any discussion of the colonial status of Ireland under the Union must consider this evolution of
relations between the territories and should consider this later part when Liberal and Conservative
governments alike actively sought to pacify and assimilate the Irish population with concessions
to Irish autonomy.
This stage in colonial relations began in December 1868, when newly confirmed Prime
Minister William Gladstone stated, “my mission is to pacify Ireland,” a phrase which became
synonymous with his leadership of the Liberal government in Westminster.27 This was not solely
a statement of conciliatory intent, as it came in the immediate aftermath of the abortive Fenian
Rising of 1867, which saw Fenian attacks on English soil for the first time. Gladstone initiated his
policy with the introduction of religious equality through the disestablishment of the Church of
Ireland in 1869 and an attempt to tackle the land question through the Land Act of 1870. However,
the land question would not be so easily solved. The agricultural crisis of the late 1870s led to the
onset of the Land War in Ireland and the emergence of a united nationalist movement melding
together for the first time all shades of Irish nationalism.28 This proved a powerful combination
as the strength of the mass movement forced the state to address the grievances expressed. The
state was naturally unwilling to bow to the threat of violence and engaged in a two-fold process
of coercion and conciliation. This allowed the state to maintain its integrity, while also engaging
with and meeting some of the most significant demands of the population, including more far-
reaching land reforms. While the negotiation and eventual compromise with nationalist demands
can be seen as evidence of the colony being brought ever further into the core, the coercion
legislation equally stands as evidence of the continued use of oppressive colonial powers.
Within Ireland, the Land War simply added momentum to the campaign to distance
Ireland from the imperial core through the establishment of a Home Rule parliament in Dublin.
The movement received an additional boost when Gladstone and the Liberals entered into
coalition with the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1886, with Irish Parliamentary Party support
conditional on the introduction of a Home Rule bill. This bill was ultimately and unsurprisingly
unsuccessful, but the speed with which it had almost become a reality shocked the unionist
population in Ireland, who sought out the support of the Conservative Party and mobilized their
own counter-campaign. The Liberals’ pragmatic approach to Home Rule was not shared by the
Conservatives, who viewed any attempt to reduce the strength of the Union as a direct attack on
the empire. For their part, from the 1880s onwards the Conservative Party engaged in a policy
designed to conciliate nationalists to their position within the imperial center by addressing
each particular grievance and improving living conditions in Ireland more generally. This policy,
known as constructive unionism or “killing home rule by kindness,” saw the introduction of a
further range of Ireland-specific legislation including additional land reform measures, funding
for the provision of light railways and the establishment of the Congested Districts Board in
1891.29 These measures, combined with the split of the Home Rule movement (as a result of the
Catholic hierarchy’s rejection of party-leader Parnell once his extra-marital affair became public),
the failure of a second Home Rule bill and Gladstone’s retirement, ensured that there was little
in the way of a Home Rule threat left to kill when the Conservative Party returned to power
in 1895. It would appear that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was solid and
secure as it approached the twentieth century, but nevertheless the constructive unionism policy
continued unabated with further measures to appease, incorporate and create citizens of the Irish
population. These further measures included the reform of local government.
Reforming local government
The policy of constructive unionism was initially overseen by Chief Secretary Arthur
Balfour and continued by his brother Gerald. Gerald for his part was responsible for the Land Act
of 1896, the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 and an act establishing the Department of
Agriculture and Technical Instruction in 1899.30 At first glance, this continuity of policy appears
merely as a seamless transition of power and politics from one political figure to another. However,
a more detailed examination poses several questions concerning the real reasons for the hurried
introduction of a far-reaching measure of local government reform in 1898.
The lack of a united parliamentary movement campaigning for improvements in Irish
conditions ensured that by the late 1890s, Ireland began to slide off the main political agenda.
MPs begged Gerald Balfour to return to the business of running the empire – “Give us a little of
England and never mind Ireland.”31 Even if there had been a strong Irish national movement, local
government reform would have been low on its list of priorities. There had been some calls for the
reform of Irish local government in the early 1880s before “the revolt of the tenantry,” as a result
of the Land War, saw the Catholic middle classes grasping political opportunities on the boards of
guardians.32 With the reform of local government in England, Scotland and Wales in 1888, it was
expected that a measure of Irish local government would follow, but the measure proposed by
Arthur Balfour in 1892 was considered “so weighted with safeguards” that nationalists attacked
it as insulting, humiliating and unworkable.33 From then on, local government seemed to slip
from the radar of Irish reformists and there was certainly no groundswell of public opinion in
Ireland clamoring for reform or equal status in this regard in 1898.
Rather it was the imminent failure of Gerald Balfour’s own pet project, the creation
of an agricultural board for Ireland, which forced the government to tackle local government
reform. The creation of an agricultural board seemed like a straightforward piece of constructive
unionism that would lead to the rejuvenation of the Irish economy, but it was introduced just
as evidence of financial inequalities between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom were
brought to light. Ireland had been overtaxed since the Act of Union to the sum of around £2.5
million per annum.34 This revelation united all shades of political opinion across Ireland against
the government, particularly when combined with the fact that the Irish representatives were
already reeling from the government’s earlier refusal to extend the agricultural rating grant to
Ireland.35 If, as O’Hearn argued, the suppression of economic activity is one of the key markers
of colonialism in nineteenth-century Ireland, then the above fact highlights that this was still
the case entering the twentieth century.36 For the Irish population and their representatives, it
further served to strengthen arguments about the dependent and subsidiary position of Ireland,
reinforcing the fact that despite political rhetoric they were indeed unequal members of the
union. If the government wished to introduce any further measures, they would first have to
deal with these financial grievances. This necessitated the reform of local government, and it was
announced that a measure would be introduced during the 1898 parliamentary session.37
The introduction of the Local Government (Ireland) Bill, therefore, not only provided
a means for Balfour to avoid a political stalemate; it also paved the way for the introduction
of the legislation that caused the stalemate with the creation of the Department of Agriculture
and Technical Instruction in 1899, albeit after a short delay. Further, through the introduction
214 Crampsie
of democratic, local self-government for Ireland, the Conservatives did intend to reduce the
clamor among the Irish population for Home Rule, aiming to redress imbalances in the legislation
between Ireland and the rest of Britain allowing for the further pacification of a country that had
up to now responded well to the policy of constructive unionism. Balfour and his cabinet, then,
were not only attempting the “conduct of conduct” of the Irish population, but also the conduct of
the British and Irish MPs who were preventing them attaining their legislative goals.38 In this way
the actual rationale behind the introduction of local government reform carries little in the way
of colonial overtones. Rather, as Horace Plunkett remarked, it was “‘a masterstroke of state-craft’
[…,] a purely English necessity’ for an English crisis.”39
In spite of the rationales of governmentality inherent in the timing of the introduction of
this legislation there is little doubt that this reform was necessary if the Irish population were to
be finally subsumed as equal citizens of the United Kingdom. In the early nineteenth century,
Irish local government was composed of two main strands: grand juries which operated at a
county level; and municipal authorities which managed the day-to-day running of urban areas.
Both these strands were dominated by the Protestant, landed ascendancy and were viewed as
corrupt, inefficient, outdated and sectarian, not just by the population they were supposed to
serve, but also by the state. The grand jury was selected by the high sheriff from the largest
landowners in each county, resulting in public representatives who had varying degrees of
interest in local administration, while the municipal corporations “flagrantly neglect[ed] town
services,” concentrating instead “on the important political function of returning members of
the right persuasion to parliament” and furthering unionist political dominance.40 The need for
reform was tackled in a piecemeal fashion in the mid-nineteenth century most notably through the
Municipal Corporation (Ireland) Act of 1840, which simply dissolved fifty-eight of the sixty-eight
town corporations that were in existence, while the introduction of the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act
of 1838 by-passed the extant local authorities, creating an entirely new local authority system.41
The Irish Poor Law system was based on the British version and as such introduced a new
model for local authority administration with the oversight of a central state authority in the form
of the Poor Law Commission. This central state supervision was considered necessary to ensure
uniform standards and the efficient operation of the new boards of guardians, more especially
because the act introduced an elected element to these boards.42 This central supervision also
acted as a form of surveillance as the returns from local bodies to the commission increased the
state’s understanding of local patterns and idiosyncrasies. In addition, the nature of the territorial
coverage of the poor-law unions introduced by the act extended state power and knowledge-
gathering networks to even the furthest periphery of the island.43 As the only form of local
authority with central state supervision, the boards of guardians accrued an increasing range
of functions throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century while the “former recipients of
fresh functions, the grand juries and the magistracy, made no further advances after 1837 […,]
within a generation a mass of legislation […] had fallen to some degree or other, to the guardians
to administer.”44
In 1872, in recognition of their increasing functions, the Irish Poor Law Commission was
reconstituted as the Local Government Board. However, the ad hoc addition of functions to the
boards of guardians was unsustainable and generally unworkable. Boards that had been set up
with only the administration of the poor law in mind had become responsible for a wide range
of diverse functions, which they had neither the funds nor the resources to properly implement.
As a result, the boards were selective about the implementation of their new functions, and many
measures of social reform and government surveillance were neglected. Thus in addition to the
need to place Irish local democracy on an equal footing with the rest of United Kingdom, by 1898
it was clear that reform was vital to ensure the proper operation of legislative innovations and also
to remove the tangled, overlapping and dysfunctional nature of the Irish local authority system.
It was against this backdrop, in 1898, that the reform of Irish local government was undertaken,
rationalizing the existing system of local government, to create a highly centralized yet totally
democratic form of local government that finally separated the state and Irish landed interests in
local administration.
The Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898
There is little in the above rationale that is suggestive of a colonial relationship. Measures
were being implemented to ensure equality for all the citizens of the United Kingdom and to
improve the operation of local government in one territory. If the intended outcome was to
further pacify the Irish population and remove the threat of Home Rule, then this is certainly
suggestive of a government formulating policies for its population and improving the security of
the state rather than reinforcing any dependent or inferior status between the imperial center and
the periphery. This fact is further reinforced from a reading of the local government act and the
measures it introduced.
“An Act for amending the Law relating to Local Government in Ireland, and for the other
purposes connected therewith” was signed into law on 12 August 1898.45 The new legislation
was based largely on measures of local government reform enacted for England, Scotland and
Wales in 1888 and 1894, but it did contain a number of provisions that were unique to Ireland.46
The act provided for the creation of a two-tier system of local government in Ireland, setting up
county councils and both urban and rural district councils. As the name suggests, county councils
would operate at a county level, replacing the grand juries as administrators of all fiscal and local
administration.47 The rural and urban district councils were established to operate at a sub-county
level, providing local functions at a much more local level. Towns with a population of over
fifteen hundred, which had earlier been designated as urban sanitary authorities, would become
urban district councils, while smaller towns and those which had not been granted sanitary status
would retain their town commissioners. Towns which had never had town commissioners would
simply come under the control of the local rural district council. The rural district councils’ areas
of operation were generally coterminous with the local poor law union, except where the union
spanned a county boundary.48 These district councils assumed all the non-curative healthcare
functions from the boards of guardians, separating once more local administration and healthcare
into two distinct areas of administration. This two-tiered system differed slightly from the
composition of the local authority network in England and Wales, where an additional tier of
parish councils existed. Gerald Balfour explained this discrepancy as arising not from a desire
to create inequalities, but from the advantage of building local government reform within “the
existing law and practice in that country,” suggesting that as parish administration would be new
to Ireland, this extra tier would “add a superfluous difficulty to our scheme.”49
In terms of the functions that these new councils would administer, the county councils
were made responsible for the financial administration of local government, in particular the
levying of rates to pay for county services. Under the new act the old county cess and poor rate
were amalgamated into the county rate, from which the majority of local authority spending
would be financed. The county councils also assumed responsibility for county-wide functions,
including the administration of county infirmaries and district asylums and the development
and maintenance of all main roads. As the fiscally responsible tier, the county councils also had
responsibility for the supervision and approval of work undertaken by the district councils. The
district councils, for their part, would be responsible for the proper administration of a wide range
of local functions. The most important of these were the creation and maintenance of district
infrastructure; the provision of social housing in the form of laborers’ cottages and artisans’
216 Crampsie
dwellings; and the administration of public health and sanitation legislation–covering everything
from nuisance removal, the inspection of dwellings, lodging houses, dairies and factories to the
prevention of the spread of infectious diseases and the provision and maintenance of sewerage
and water supply schemes. In addition, they were given powers relating to the provision of public
lighting, fairs and markets, the administration of compulsory school attendance regulations and
the most controversial measure to be retained by the Local Government (Ireland) Act, the defence
of malicious injuries.
The defence of malicious injuries had been introduced to Ireland under the Malicious
Damage Act of 1861.50 The Act stated that if it could be proved that destruction or damage to
an individuals’ property was maliciously caused, then that individual could take a case for
compensation against the area’s local authority. If the claim was successful, the costs awarded were
levied off the county cess of the area where the injury occurred. When this Act was introduced,
Ireland was in a state of widespread political unrest; attacks against landlords, the Royal Irish
Constabulary and even against lesser English or Protestant landowners were rife. The rationale
behind the Act was that by making local people responsible, they would be less likely to engage
in, or support those involved in, such activity. Given the relatively settled state of Ireland in 1898,
there were strenuous objections to the continuation of this legislation. The Irish MPs were vocal
in their opposition, with John Dillon claiming that the whole code was “a most iniquitous law,”
which was used by the state “in a most unfair and unjust spirit […] as an instrument of direct
vengeance and oppression” and as “a code of coercion against the people of Ireland.”51 However,
in spite of such serious misgivings on the part of many Irish MPs, the government refused to
relent, and the provisions were transferred to the new local authorities.52 This represented one
of the few aspects of the legislation in which significant colonial overtones could be identified.
This was a uniquely Irish provision for an Irish situation of unrest, an attempt to control the
Irish population in a way that differed substantially from the measures included for the other
constituent territories of the United Kingdom.
In spite of this, the most noteworthy feature of the act was not the creation of the new
authorities nor the functions that they would eventually administer, but rather the fact that these
new local authorities would introduce the first form of truly democratic local government to
Ireland. The act extended the principle of universal suffrage (as far as it was enshrined in the
parliamentary franchise) to Ireland, giving all occupiers, lodgers and qualified women a vote,
while also abolishing all property qualifications which had hitherto prevented members of the
lower classes of the population standing for election.53 The sole requirement to stand for election
to the newly created councils was that candidates had to be local government electors in the
electoral division in which they stood. This move paved the way for female representation on the
district councils, although they were prevented from standing for county and borough councils
positions until 1911.54 This opened the field of local government to all classes in Ireland for the
first time, presenting local populations with the opportunity of governing their own affairs and
removing the final vestiges of landlord power from local administration.
Of course, the potential of this act was not greeted with enthusiasm by the landlords,
who constituted the largest ratepayers and therefore the people who bore the heaviest burden of
financing local services. Concerns that had been voiced in 1892 resurfaced, addressing the issue
of the £4-valuation threshold for the payment of rates. The wealthy claimed that this provision
made it possible for local representatives who paid none of the rates to vote for expensive local
public works and building schemes. These concerns were shared by a majority of British and
Irish MPs and the chief secretary, who therefore proposed altering the rating structure as part of
the act. The new act removed the £4-valuation limit, reconstituting all occupiers as ratepayers. In
this way, both electors and elected representatives would be impacted by any unnecessary rising
of the rates, while landlords would at least share the burden with their fellow citizens. Indeed, it
was hoped that this measure would encourage a desire to introduce frugality and economy into
local administration as ratepayers would be unlikely to re-elect representatives who had placed
too heavy a rate burden on the local population.
It was, however, also recognized that removing the rate burden off the landlords threatened
the financing of local services, as in many areas the level of local poverty would prevent many
from meeting their rate demand, creating a deficit in local authority budgets. As a result, the
agricultural grant (which could finally be extended to Ireland with the reform of local government)
was to be used to compensate the new local authorities for the loss of landlord contributions.55
The amount to be granted was calculated based on half the average amount of the poor rate
and county cess levied over the three years preceding 1897, estimated to total approximately
£730,000 annually.56 This piece of statecraft won over the landlords to the new measures, while
simultaneously ensuring the viability of the new bodies as functional entities. In this way, the
legislation did make special allowances for the descendants of the colonial settlers in Ireland;
however, this provision did little to privilege them or allow them further dominance.
There were however, circumscriptions to this newfound local self-government, which
could be interpreted as the remaining vestiges of a colonial legacy. These took the form of
conservative safeguards such as the compulsory inclusion of three former local authority members
for the first three years of the councils’ existence and, more importantly, the reconstitution of
the Local Government Board as the superintending and controlling authority over the county,
urban district and rural district councils. The short-term inclusion of former local authority
members was designed to alleviate conservative and landed interests’ fears centering on the
wholesale handover of local government to new, inexperienced, potentially uneducated and
nationalist local representatives. Even nationalist MPs agreed that as the Irish population had
been so entirely excluded from local administration, the inclusion of experienced representatives
would be beneficial, and the measure met with little opposition. The supervisory role of the Local
Government Board however, did raise a number of issues. Concerns about the family and class
background of the board’s members were raised with serious reservations expressed as to the
suitability of the Local Government Board to act as a superintending authority over the new
democratic, nationalist councils and the potential for gerrymandering of the political balance to
allow for the representation of the minority landlord class.57 However, in debates on the lunacy
provisions within the bill, the Irish MPs actively campaigned to have the Local Government Board
and not the Lord Lieutenant made responsible for the administration of the lunatic asylums. They
claimed that it was better to have a board that was answerable to the House of Commons and
therefore subject to investigation and examination by the elected members, than a member of the
House of Lords.58 This suggests that despite serious reservations about the biased nature of the
Local Government Board, it was nonetheless viewed as the lesser of two evils.
The position of the Local Government Board was improved in the eyes of Irish MPs with
the inclusion of the highly respected nationalist member of the Congested Districts Board, W. L.
Micks, as an additional commissioner in May 1898.59 This decision was not supported by some
of the more prominent members of parliament. Lord Cadogan, then Lord Lieutenant, wrote to
Balfour confirming Micks’ appointment but conveying his disappointment at Balfour’s decision
stating:
I have signed the appointment as you wish. I am sorry about Micks, as he is I

believe [?] a Home Ruler and a Radical and I do not think it is a good policy
offending the loyalists in Ireland. However the thing is done and the less we say
about it the better.60
218 Crampsie
The inclusion of Micks successfully negated arguments from the Irish MPs in relation to the
biased composition of the Local Government Board, while it simultaneously appeased public
opinion through the inclusion of a well-known and respected official.61 There could be no further
complaints that the act introduced limits to the freedom of nationalist, democratic local authorities
in the form of a solely protestant, unionist supervisory board.
In colonial terms, Crossman has argued that the Local Government Board exercised a
much greater level of supervision over Irish local government than its British counterpart, citing
the close involvement of local government inspectors in day-to-day administration and the
landed background of the board members.62 The former assertion is not borne out in accounts
provided by Ogborn and Bellamy, which show that similar levels of surveillance and supervision
operated across Great Britain. Ogborn has examined the close supervision exercised by the British
Local Government Board in relation to its production of knowledge about diverse territories,
allowing the state to develop strategic policies shaped by local specificities.63 Bellamy, for her
part, posits the existence of what she terms local possessive pluralism, highlighting that there
are local factors at play which must be negotiated in any attempt to introduce state legislation. In
doing so, she describes the importance of the dual role held by local authorities as simultaneously
representatives of the central state and of the locality.64 The difference in the Irish case, then, is
not the level of contact, but the fact that the Irish Local Government Board viewed itself more
as the direct guardian of the state’s legislative plans and therefore engaged in less mediation of
local possessive pluralist interests and more coercion of local authorities through financial and
other sanctions. Given the contested nature of the state in Ireland and the inexperience of the new
authorities created under the 1898 act, this more heavy-handed and less conciliatory approach
may have had some justification.
Taken as a whole, the legislation enshrined in the Local Government (Ireland) Act
represents a significant step towards equality for the Irish population. Democratic elections would
allow for the creation of fully representative local authorities with wide-ranging powers to enact
social and environmental reforms, while the traditional stranglehold of the landlord class on local
administration was broken. Central-state supervision was maintained, but the composition of the
board undertaking that supervision had at least been altered to include one representative of the
majority population. Circumscriptions to the new powers did exist, there was some mediation of
landlord interests, and certain provisions did still contain colonial overtones. However, this new
act more represented techniques of governmentality employed by a state in an attempt to govern
its population and ensure the security of the state, than a state undertaking the administration
of a colonial other. This act stands as a key point in relations between Great Britain and Ireland,
marking the first large-scale attempt to decolonize Ireland, not in the creation of a separate nation-
state, but as a full member of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Nevertheless, the
success of that aim was entirely dependent on the extent to which the Irish population grasped
the opportunity for immersion within the state.
Imperial citizens or nationalist-separatists
In order to gauge the level of engagement by the Irish population with that opportunity,
it is necessary to examine the implementation of the legislation at a local level. This section offers
a case study of the election process and the early meetings of one of the new local authorities
created under the act–the rural district councils.65 With the passing of the act, the stage was set for
the first democratic local-authority elections to be held across Ireland. Each of the newly created
rural districts was divided into a number of district electoral divisions for which two district
councillors would be elected.66 However, despite the momentous nature of this event, not every
electoral division required an election to select their representatives. Elections were expensive
and the population in many divisions sought to avoid this expense by holding informal local
selection meetings. Thus the Local Government Board’s claim that on 6 April 1899 over four
thousand elections were held “without the slightest hitch or disturbance of any kind” is somewhat
exaggerated.67 Of the 146 electoral divisions in Donegal, there were contests in eighty-four or
fifty-eight percent, while the records from four rural districts in Meath show a slightly higher
contest rate at sixty-seven percent.68 If these figures are taken as an average for the country, they
reduce the Local Government Board’s total by almost a third, to around twenty-four hundred, an
impressive feat for one day nonetheless.
The bypassing of the new legislation in this way did of course pose problems for the
democratic nature of local government. In several areas, the meetings were run by one or other
of the nationalist factions, and before potential candidates would even be put forward for
consideration, they had to agree to the nationalist pledge which stated:
We hereby agree to attend, sit, act and vote at Council meetings with the Nationalist
party on all occasions on which a party vote is taken, or otherwise resign our seat
if called upon to do so by a majority of the electors. And further, that we will adopt
and by every legitimate means promote the principles of the United Irish League.69
In other instances, however, the all-party nature of the meetings was celebrated as an indication
of progressive and inclusive communities moving forward into the new century. For instance:
[T]he Catholics of Gartan Electoral Division, who had a large majority on the
register, selected as one of their District Councillors Mr. Armour, a Protestant …
simply because in addition to his always being a Home Ruler, and a man of the
people, Mr. Armour was the best and most capable man they could find in the
district.70
The lack of state control over these meetings did also offer a platform for the one group
excluded from local administration, the clergy. As leaders of the Catholic community, priests were
often invited to chair selection meetings and, even when they were simply in attendance, they
tended to be vocal in their opinions. In Oldcastle Rural District in Meath, a Protestant ex-grand
juror was selected by the crowds but was “vehemently opposed” by a Father Smith, who swore that
he would canvass the Catholics against him.71 In the main, however, the clergy’s main role was to
make some statement about the opportunity presented by the reform of local government. Their
speeches opening selection proceedings were replete with prophesies of the great opportunities
that lay ahead for Ireland and outlined their vision as to how the new bodies could be utilized to
pave the way towards Home Rule. One clergyman, in Lettermore electoral district, encouraged
the local meeting to develop a strong desire to do “what is best and most expedient in turning
this weapon, which the parliament of Britain had placed in their hands to the best advantage.”72
While in Killybegs, the local priest summed up the hopes and expectations for this new form of
local government claiming that:
The county […] was on its trial and was about to undertake a great responsibility.
… If they made the working of the new Act a failure they could hardly expect
further concessions in the time to come; but on the contrary, if they proved
themselves wise legislators in local matter[s] they might not only expect, but they
could demand still more important measures.73
Orations such as these suggest that while the state might hope that local self-government would
finally allow the incorporation of the Irish population into the state, the Irish population very
220 Crampsie
definitely had different ideas. They also show that despite being “under a disqualification,” that
“it would take more than a mere Act of Parliament to separate the priests and the people of
Ireland.”74
Of course these selection committees were successful only when the chosen candidate
was the preferred candidate of the entire population. Any person or group of ratepayers who
were unhappy with the decision could of course nominate an alternative representative and force
a contest to be held. Unsurprisingly, the landed class was not necessarily in agreement with the
decision of these selection meetings and, in many cases, former representatives put themselves
forward, forcing an election contest. Several of these were responding to a plea by Balfour, issued
in his introduction to the local government bill, for the continued participation of the landed
classes in local government despite the rebuffs that they were initially likely to meet. He assured
them that if they did not “stand aside in silence” and played “the more manly part” that they
would ensure that the changes resulting from the Local Government (Ireland) Act would “carry
with them a healing power rich in blessings for the future of Ireland.”75 This rather optimistic
assertion was certainly a factor in encouraging the old local authority members to partake in the
election process, while still others believed that their experience as longstanding local politicians
would be beneficial to the new local authorities.
As already outlined, these attempts were not always in vain, even in rare cases where the
landlord was not a supporter of nationalism. In addition to the Oldcastle candidate, a Mr Doherty
of Whitecastle in County Donegal was selected simply because he was the largest ratepayer in the
area and had, in the past, always proven himself the staunch friend of the local population.76 In
contrast, the more common reaction is aptly illustrated in the candidacy of a unionist landlord in
the Letterkenny area of the county, who offered himself for election, without the backing of a local
selection meeting.77 His campaigning met with an abrupt end with the printing of a statement in
the local newspaper claiming that “having no personal desire to serve on the county or district
councils, and their being evidently no desire on the part of the electors that I should do so, I take
this opportunity of intimating that I withdraw my offer to stand.”78
The extent to which this reform of local government impacted on the average citizen
can be ascertained both by the column-inches devoted to discussing the elections in the local
newspapers, but also from the turnout of the local population at polling stations. An initial report
for Donegal suggested that turnout had not been as high as expected, with a report that in one
electoral division by three o’clock only one-tenth of those registered had voted, none of which
were women.79 This report was in direct contrast to numerous reports carried by a later paper,
which also alluded to a slow morning in the polling stations, but stated that numbers increased
steadily as the evening wore on. In Graffy electoral district, in Glenties Rural District, all but
two of the electors voted, both of whom, it was reported, were sick. The high turnout there was
achieved by the car owners of the district conveying the old and infirm to and from the polling
stations, while in another electoral division, people returned home from as far afield as Scotland
to vote. As regards the extent to which women made use of their new right to vote, the fact that
more than one polling district reported a full turnout of voters suggests that the women voters
were as energetic as their male counterparts in casting their votes. Several electoral divisions
reported a high turnout of the women voters, while in one electoral division a “very old woman”
insisted on being carried into the polling station in order to cast her vote.80 Such determination
on the part of male and female local government electors alike highlights the excitement that the
new legislation sparked across the country. This was a form of local government that local people
could really influence, and they were determined to play their part from the outset.
Similar opinions were also discernible in the first meetings held by the rural district
councils on 15 April 1899 when “the councils generally dealt in a proper and business like manner
with questions coming before them,” allowing for the successful inauguration of the new system
of Irish local government.81 The format of these first meetings was prescribed in advance through
circulars issued by the Local Government Board and involved the signing of the councillors official
declarations, the co-option of the ex-officio former representatives and the election of the council
chairman, vice- and deputy vice-chairman. With these appointments complete, the council could
embark on the work of representing the local population and ensuring the smooth operation of
local services. It is important to note that for the majority of councils across Ireland, their first
representative function was a statement of intent relating to not local but national politics, in
a move which was to become commonplace during the lifetime of the rural district councils.
The councils passed a number of resolutions castigating the government for the injustice of the
financial relations between Britain and Ireland, demanding the provision of a Catholic University,
calling for the teaching of Irish to be made a remunerative subject, and demanding a new land act
with more favorable terms. Most importantly these resolutions called for Ireland to be allowed
self- government in the form of Home Rule, which one council described as the “natural right of
all civilized nations,” pledging themselves to “continue our best efforts in the cause of Home Rule
till the aspirations and labours of the Irish people be crowned […] by having restored to them
their Parliament in College Green.”82 In so doing, these first meetings in nationalist-dominated
areas gave credence to the opinions professed by a host of opponents of the new legislation, that
the new councils would be utilized to further a nationalist separatist agenda. Naturally, in areas
with unionist majorities or where the councils were reasonably evenly split, these nationalist
resolutions were absent.
Conclusion
The Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 then only partially succeeded in its aims.
In attempting to bring parity to all citizens of the United Kingdom in terms of local self-
government, the act was a success. The small inequalities which remained were discernible but
posed insufficient grounds for complaint, as evidenced by the lack of negativity voiced towards
the operation of local government once it had been established. In fact, as a measure of local
government reform, one contemporary commentator went so far as to state that the act was:
[A] model of accuracy, fullness and clearness when compared with many of a
much less ambitious scope. The whole of Ireland–topographical, municipal, rural,
judicial, political and social seems to have been clearly and constantly before the
mind’s eye of the draftsman, and the various clauses display a minute and accurate
knowledge of every phase of Irish life.83
An examination of the operation of the local authorities created under the act lends further credence
to the success of the reforms. Under the care of the local authorities, a raft of social reforms were
introduced and administered so that, by the onset of the War of Independence, the lowest class
of social housing had been almost entirely removed, replaced instead by sanitary social housing;
sewerage and water supply schemes had been extended across the island; environmental
standards had been transformed and as a result of these public health and sanitation efforts,
deaths due to infectious diseases had declined substantially. The successful administration of
local functions bestowed on local communities by the state illustrates the extent to which local
representatives engaged with and enacted state legislation. Local authorities grew increasingly
adept at ensuring local compliance with state policies and, in time, the relationship between the
Local Government Board and the local representatives became more akin to that in Britain. From
a purely practical viewpoint, these were local authorities acting as agents of the state in local
222 Crampsie
communities, receiving cooperation from the local population. In this way, the techniques and
rationales of governmentality inherent in the legislation succeeded in creating imperial citizens
operating on an equal par with their fellow citizens in Britain and within the confines established
by the state.
On the other hand, however, as the preceding section has illustrated, the Irish population
showed themselves equally adept at circumventing legislative restrictions and, through their
choice of representatives and the resolutions passed at the first meetings of nationalist councils,
they issued a clear and direct warning about their plans for their new-found local autonomy. The
platform provided for local populations to elect local representatives reflective of their political
perspectives was used to great effect, and these local authorities became the training grounds for
many who later became nationalist politicians. That the provision of local government reform
was utilized by the local population in a way directly opposing its intended aims is reflective
of Whelan’s findings, which outline the political role carved out by the nationalist-dominated
Dublin Corporation, particularly through its creation of a nationalist Dublin streetscape in
the late nineteenth century.84 Thus, the reform of local government in 1898 did little to alter
the ambiguous position of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From
the state’s perspective, the legislation offered a distinct opportunity for decolonization and
imperial integration, while from the Irish nationalist perspective it offered an opportunity for
decolonization through separation and national autonomy. These two opposing ideals eventually
imploded between 1919 and 1921 in the War of Independence. Ultimately, however, and despite
the rumbling nationalist overtones, at a local level the Irish population did engage as orderly
citizens with the administration of local government between 1899 and 1918. This period then is
unique in that it is the one point in Irish history when the Irish population engaged fully at a local
level with the rationales of the British state as imperial citizens and agents of that state.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and
Social Sciences who provided funding towards my PhD research, upon which some of the material
in this article is based. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable critical comments received
from the editor of this special issue, Prof. Gerry Kearns and the continued support and input
provided by Dr. Mark Hennessy, TCD.
NOTES
1 Kevin Whelan, “The Catholic Parish, the Catholic Chapel and Village
Development in Ireland,” Irish Geography 16, no. 1 (1983): 1-15, 4-5. http://dx.doi.
org/10.1080/00750778309478868
2 This gap was eventually addressed by the publication of Terrence McDonough, ed., Was
Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2005). Although, as one reviewer commented, “the majority of the essays
accept Ireland’s colonial status as unproblematic, and as such present an overly simplified
picture of nineteenth-century Ireland.” John McLean, “Review of Terrence McDonough,
‘Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,’”
The Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 440-441. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/504219
3 The majority of legislative innovations involved increasing state centralization of the
everyday administration of Ireland. In the period up to the passing of the Catholic Relief
Act in 1829, legislative reform was piecemeal, but included the amalgamation of the
Treasuries and the centralization of the supervision of lunatic asylums in 1817; the creation
of a centralized Board of Health in 1820 and the reform of the prison system in 1826. The
period between 1830 and 1845 saw a more sustained engagement with the reform of Irish
administration witnessing the establishment of a Commission of Education, the Board
of Works and the Poor Law Commission. For a more detailed discussion, see Robert B.
McDowell, The Irish Administration, 1801-1914 (London: Routledge, 1964); chapter 2 in
Virginia Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1996); and Oliver MacDonagh, “Ideas and Institutions, 1830-45”, in A New
History of Ireland, V. Ireland under the Union, 1. 1801-70, ed. William E. Vaughan (Oxford,
United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1989), 206-225.
4 John Andrews, Shapes of Ireland: Maps and Their Makers, 1564 – 1839 (Dublin: Geography
Publications, 1997), 248.
5 The most significant concession in this regard was the creation of the boards of guardians
under the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of 1838. Under this legislation, three-quarters of the
board’s membership was elected by local ratepayers, marking a major departure from the
landlord-dominated and -selected local bodies which existed up to this point. The colonial
nature of relations during the famine is clearly illustrated throughout the Atlas of the Great
Irish Famine, ed. John Crowley, Michael Murphy, William J. Smyth (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2012) but particularly in Willie Smyth “The longue durée: Imperial Britain and Colonial
Ireland,” 46-63, and David Nally “The Colonial Dimensions of the Great Irish Famine,” 64-
74. See also Christine Kinealy, “Was Ireland a Colony? The Evidence of the Great Famine,”
in Was Ireland a Colony?, ed. McDonough, 48-65.
6 The elected element of the boards of guardians was later reduced to half, as compensation
for the transfer of the burden of the poor rate to those who owned property valued at over
£4. A detailed account of the legislation and financing provided by the state to revolutionize
landownership in Ireland is provided in: Terence Dooley, The Big Houses and Landed Estates
of Ireland: A Research Guide (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 97-105; and William Nolan,
“Land Reform in Post-Famine Ireland,” in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, eds. Crowley,
Murphy and Smyth, 570-579. Details of the wave of legislative innovations introduced from
the 1870s onwards is provided in Robert B. McDowell, “Administration and the public
services, 1870-1921,” in A New History of Ireland, VI. Ireland under the Union, II. 1870-1921, ed.
William E. Vaughan (Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1996), 579-585.
7 Gerry Kearns, “Nation, Empire and Cosmopolis: Ireland and the Break with Britain,” in
Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century, eds. David Gilbert,
David Matless, and Brian Short (Oxford UK: Blackwell, 2003), 204-228, 204.
8 James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd, “Imperialism and Nationalism: The Home Rule
Struggle and Border Creation in Ireland, 1885-1925,” Political Geography 26, no. 8 (2007): 934-
950. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262980700128X
9 Anderson and O’Dowd, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” 938, 935.
10 The obstructionist policy of the Irish Parliamentary Party was aimed at disrupting the daily
business in the House of Commons in order to force the House to deal with Irish issues.
The policy involved the party’s MPs giving long speeches on every issue brought before the
House of Commons, many of which had little or no relevance to the question at hand.
11 These lectures have been translated into English and are available as Michel Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [2004]). Foucault’s lecture four from this
series was previously published in several works as “Governmentality” including in The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel
Foucault, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104 and The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 – 1984: Power, Vol. 3, ed
James Faubion (London UK: Penguin, 2002), 201-222.
224 Crampsie
12 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108.

13 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108. These ideas are expanded through deeper
historical analysis in the subsequent The Birth of Biopolitics lecture series, which have been
translated into English and are available as Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the
Collège de France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
[2004]).
14 Jonathan Murdoch and Nkil Ward, “Governmentality and Territoriality: The Statistical
Manufacture of Britain’s ‘National Farm’,” Political Geography 16, no. 4 (1997): 307-324, 308.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629896000078
15 Of particular note are Blake’s discussion of pastoral power in British Columbia, Lynn
Blake, “Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century
British Columbia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 1 (1999): 79-93.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/623341; Hannah’s examination of the expansion of the nation
state in West America, Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in
Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press,
2000); Jones’ investigation of the legitimation of the English state in early modern Wales,
Rhys Jones, “Practising State Consolidation in Early Modern England and Wales,” Political
Geography 23, no. 5 (2004): 597-624. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S0962629804000253; Legg’s discussion of population management in colonial India, Stephen
Legg, “Foucault’s Population Geographies: Classifications, Biopolitics and Governmental
Spaces,” Population, Space and Place 11, no. 3 (2005): 137-156. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.
com/doi/10.1002/psp.357/abstract; Crampton and Elden’s edited collection providing an
overview of Foucault’s engagement with geography and geography’s engagement with
Foucault, Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault
and Geography (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2007); Elden’s development of a history of the
concept of territory, Stuart Elden, “Government, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and
Planning D. Society and Space 25, no. 3 (2007): 562-580. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.
cgi?id=d428t; and Kearns’ forthcoming analysis of geopolitics and biopolitics in relation to
the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and the Global War on Terror, Gerry Kearns, “Governing
Vitalities and the Security State,” Environment and Planning D. Society and Space (in press).
16 Foucault, 1980 quoted in Cole Harris, “Power, Modernity and Historical Geography,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 671-683, 674. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/2563429
17 Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things, (London UK: Duke University Press, 1995), 1.
18 Stephen Legg, “Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism,” in Space,
Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, eds. Crampton and Elden, 265-289.
19 John Morrissey, “Foucault and the Colonial Subject: Emergent Forms of Colonial
Governmentality in Early Modern Ireland,” in At the Anvil: Essays in Honour of William J
Smyth, eds. Patrick Duffy and William Nolan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2012), 135-
150; David Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); David Nally, “That Coming Storm:
the Irish Poor Law, Colonial Biopolitics and the Great Irish Famine,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 98, no. 3 (2008): 714-741, doi:10.1080/00045600802118426. In
addition, see contributions by Nessa Cronin and Kevin Lougheed in this issue.
20 Patrick Duffy “‘Nearly all that Geography can Require’: The State and the Construction of a
Geographic Archive in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in At the Anvil, eds. Duffy and Nolan,
371-391, 372.
21 Quoted in Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self” [1993], in
Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, eds.
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nicholas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996), 19-36, 19.
22 Legg, “Foucault’s Population Geographies: Classifications, Biopolitics and Governmental
Spaces,” 137-156, 147. See also Margo Huxley, “Geographies of Governmentality,” in Space,
Knowledge and Power, eds. Crampton and Elden, 185-204, where a wide range of Foucault’s
writings are drawn together to offer a detailed consideration of the “conduct of conduct.”
23 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 105.
24 Foucault, 1981 quoted in Clive Barnett, “Culture, Geography, and the Arts of Government,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 1 (2001): 7-24, 16. In this article Barnett
teases out the existence of references to resistance and dissent in the work of Foucault,
drawing on Gordon’s work outlining the implementation of governmental techniques in the
context of the liberal, laissez-faire state. See Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An
Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect, eds. Burchell, Gordon and Miller, 1-52.
25 Joseph Ruane, “Colonialism and Irish Historical Development,” in Approaching the Past:
Historical Anthropology through Irish Case Studies, eds. Marilyn Silverman and Philip H.
Gulliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 293-323, 295.
26 Eamonn Slater and Terrence McDonough, “Marx on Nineteenth-Century Colonial Ireland:
Analysing Colonialism as a Dynamic Social Process,” Irish Historical Studies 36, no. 142
(2008): 153-172. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20720271
27 John Morley (1903) quoted in Barbara Solow, The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870 –
1903 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 16.
28 Tom Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 77-
98.
29 Gailey outlines how the tag name for constructive unionism–Killing Home Rule With
Kindness–resulted from a quotation of Gerald Balfour’s that was widely misconstrued by
contemporaries. He stated that the Conservatives would “be glad enough, no doubt, to kill
home rule with kindness if we could but, whatever may be the result of our efforts, our
intention is do our utmost to introduce and pass such measures as will really promote the
interests of the material prosperity of Ireland,” quoted in Andrew Gailey, “Unionist Rhetoric
and Irish Local Government Reform, 1895-9,” Irish Historical Studies 24, no. 93 (1984): 52-68,
58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30008026. The promotion of this tag name oversimplified
an intricate Conservative Party policy towards Ireland, which stood independent of this
aim.
30 Several studies, however, have mistakenly credited all these developments to Arthur.
31 Gailey, “Unionist rhetoric,” 55.
32 Crossman, “Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in Was Ireland a Colony?, ed.
McDonough, 102-116, 110; William Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of
Local Government in Ireland, 1872-1886 (Boston MA: Northeastern University Press, 1984).
33 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 53, 21 February 1898, 1244. For more see: Robert
B. McDowell, “Administration and the Public Services, 1870-1921,” in A New History of
Ireland, VI, ed. Vaughan, 579-585.
34 For this figure, how it was calculated and how such an inequity came about, see two papers
by N.J. Synott: “Some Features of the Over-Taxation of Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical
and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 10, no. 77 (1897): 251-268; and “Over-Taxation and
Expenditure in Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 10, no. 79
(1899): 404-432.
226 Crampsie
35 The agricultural rating grant was a fund that had been issued to alleviate agricultural
distress across the United Kingdom in 1895. Ireland’s share of this grant had still not been
produced by 1898 on the grounds that the local government system in Ireland was not fit for
purpose.
36 Denis O’Hearn, “Ireland in the Atlantic Economy,” in Was Ireland a Colony? ed. McDonough,
3-26.
37 Gailey, “Unionist Rhetoric,” 61.
38 Foucault, quoted in Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self,” 19.
39 Letter from Plunkett to Cadogan, 12 September 1899; quoted in Gailey, “Unionist Rhetoric,”
63.
40 Richard Haslam, “The origins of Irish Local Government,” in Local Government in
Ireland, Inside Out, eds. Mark Callanan and Justin F. Keogan (Dublin: Institute of Public
Administration, 2003), 14-40, 18.
41 Haslam, “The origins of Irish Local Government,” 19. New Town Commissioners were
eventually introduced in 1854 under the Towns Improvement Act.
42 The state had little cause for concern about the elected element of the boards initially.
The property qualification for representatives, the cumulative voting enshrined in the act,
deference to local landlords and the public nature of the ballot all ensured that there was
little in the way of a shift in local control until the 1880s.
43 Poor law unions were established as rational administrative units based on approximately
a ten-mile radius around a central market town. For more see: Arlene Crampsie, “Impacts of
the Workhouse Network and Poor Relief: A Donegal Case Study,” Geographical Viewpoint 32
(2004): 42-50.
44 MacDonagh, “Politics, 1830-1845,” in A New History of Ireland, V, ed. Vaughan, 169-192, 180.
The Medical Charities Act of 1851 removed the subsidization of dispensaries from the grand
juries and placed the creation, maintenance and day-to-day running of these in the hands of
the boards of guardians, with the administration of fever hospitals. The guardians became
responsible for the control of burial grounds in 1856, and in 1863 they were granted the
power to register births and deaths. They also gathered a range of functions relating to all
aspects of social life including the building of laborers’ cottages, the supply of seed, and the
prevention and removal of nuisances. They gained powers relating to the notification and
prevention of infectious and contagious diseases, in both animals and humans, under the
Public Health Act of 1878, which made the board of guardians the rural sanitary authority in
their union, and in 1896 they were made responsible for making legislation in relation to the
speed and design of motor cars; see: McDowell, The Irish Administration, 189.
45 This is the full title of the act, commonly referred to as the Local Government (Ireland) Act,
which was passed into legislation as 61&62 Vict. c. 37. All the information in this section,
unless otherwise stated is taken from the provisions of the act.
46 51&52 Vict. c. 41; 56&57 Vict. c. 73.
47 The legal functions of the grand juries were retained right up to the creation of the Free
State in 1922, although in practice they were largely ignored from the foundation of the Sinn
Féin courts during the War of Independence.
48 In these instances, the poor law union could be split into two or three district councils
provided each portion was of sufficient size to function as a local authority. Where the
portion divided would be too small, a redrawing of county boundaries was necessitated.
49 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 53, 21 February 1898, 1228.
50 24&25 Vict. c. 97.
51 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 56, 28 April 1898, 1487, 1502.
52 61&62 Vict. c. 37, clause 5.
53 The only group actively excluded by the legislation was the Irish clergy in an attempt to
keep sectarian and religious tensions off the newly created local bodies.
54 This occurred under the Local Authorities (Ireland) (Qualification of Women) Act 1&2 Geo.
V c. 35
55 61&62 Vict. c. 37, Clause 49 (3)
56 Twenty-Seventh Annual Report under “The Local Government Board (Ireland) Act”, 35 and 36 Vic.
c.69, Year Ending 31st March 1899, 1899, c.9480, xxxix, 35; Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th
Series, 53, 21 February 1898, 1241.
57 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 56, 27 April 1898, 1299-1308.
58 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 57, 2 May 1898, 95-123.
59 W. Micks to Gerald Balfour, 2nd May 1898; the UK National Archives, Balfour Papers,
PRO/30/60/24.
60 Lord Cadogan to Gerald Balfour, 30th April 1898; the UK National Archives, Balfour Papers,
PRO/30/60/24. Cadogan’s request was duly granted as the next appointee to the Local
Government Board was Robert Bagwell, D.L., a member of a leading Dublin unionist family,
Twenty Seventh Annual Report under “The Local Government Board (Ireland) Act”, 99.
61 This move was also reflective of a more general trend at the top level of the Irish
administration. The gradual process of greening Dublin Castle has been documented by
Lawrence McBride, The Greening of Dublin Castle: The Transformation of Bureaucratic and
Judicial Personnel in Ireland, 1892-1922 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 1991); and Fergus Campbell, “Who Ruled Ireland: The Irish Administration,
1879-1914,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): 623-644. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/
S0018246X07006280
62 Crossman, “Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.”
63 Miles Ogborn, “Local Power and State Regulation in Nineteenth Century Britain,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 17, no. 2 (1992): 215-226. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/622547
64 Christine Bellamy, Administering Central-Local Relations, 1871-1919: The Local Government
Board in its Fiscal and Cultural Context (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 1988).
65 The material used in the remainder of this section is taken from a comparative study
conducted on the rural district councils of Donegal and Meath in Crampsie, Governmentality
and Locality: An Historical Geography of Rural District Councils in Ireland, 1898 – 1925 (PhD
Thesis: Trinity College Dublin, 2008).
66 There was a substantial amount of debate over whether the divisions should elect one or
two members. One-seat divisions were passed in the House of Commons, but the Lords
inserted the two-seat dictum in the hope that the extra seat would allow for minority
representation on the councils. The district electoral divisions had been laid down during
the establishment of the Poor Law. The commissioners had tried to ensure that they were
almost uniform in terms of population density and area, with a maximum of twenty in
each union, while the drawing up of their boundaries was to avoid, as much as possible,
the division of estates (Sixth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1840, c.245,
xvii.397). In practice many unions and therefore districts, particularly in the West, had
significantly more. Glenties Rural District had an elected membership of sixty before co-
options took place.
67 Twenty-Seventh Annual Report under “The Local Government Board (Ireland) Act”, 32.
228 Crampsie
68 The Derry Journal, 8 March 1899, 8. The details in the Meath Chronicle for this period are quite
poor and as a result many of the examples here are taken from The Derry Journal, the only
paper covering Donegal in the period in question.
69 The Derry Journal, 1 February 1899, 3.
71 Meath Chronicle, 4 February 1899.
73 The Derry Journal, 18 January 1899, 3.
75 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 21 February 1898, 1248-1249.
79 The Derry Journal, 7 April 1899, 8.
80 All of the above accounts are taken from The Derry Journal, 10 April 1899, 7-8.
81 Twenty Eighth Annual Report under “The Local Government Board (Ireland) Act”, 35 and
36 Vic. c.69, Year Ending 31st March 1900, 1902, Cd.338, xxxv, 20.
82 The Derry Journal, 17 April 1899, 7.
83 W.J. Johnston, “The Coming Changes in Irish Local Government,” Journal of the Statistical
and Social Inquiry Society 10, no. 78 (1898): 366-378, 368.
84 Yvonne Whelan, “Monuments, power and contested space – the iconography of Sackville
Street (O’Connell Street) before Independence (1922),” Irish Geography 34, no.1 (2001): 11-33.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00750770109555774
The Elephant in the Room:
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Northern Ireland1
Bryonie Reid
Independent Writer and Artist
ABSTRACT: In this paper I address the position of Northern Irish Protestants

within (or without) discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism on the island of
Ireland. I contend that this position is a problematic one, which calls into question
certain assumptions about the colonial or postcolonial nature of Ireland historically
and in the present day. Further, I suggest much theory on the subject neglects the
complexities of the relationship between contemporary Northern Irish Protestants
and the seventeenth-century colonization of Ulster. This is a pity, because it limits
understanding of the historical and ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland, as well as
concepts of identity and place. I use an autobiographical methodology as a means
of reflecting on the multiplicity of individual stories, and the role they might play
in opening out discussion of colonial legacies and postcolonial contexts in Northern
Ireland and Ireland today.
I
n 2010 and 2011, I worked on a project called Troubling Ireland. Conceived by Danish
curators Kuratorisk Aktion, its aim was to explore the operations of capitalism, colonialism
and postcolonialism in contemporary Ireland. The project unfolded through a series of
workshops attended by a group of artists and curators and held over the course of a year in
Dublin, Manorhamilton in County Leitrim, Belfast and Limerick. The Manorhamilton workshop
addressed the reproduction of colonial patterns of thought and behavior within global capitalism.
Acknowledging the town’s plantation history, artist Anna Macleod shaped the workshop around
the town’s forgotten histories and contemporary currents of politico-religious conflict. She asked
me to speak from my research as a cultural geographer, including work I had done on lived
experiences of the Irish border.
Kuratorisk Aktion have undertaken significant work on Nordic colonialism.2 Danish
colonialism in Greenland, they insist, has affected identity and society in both countries, despite
the fact that its “legacy […] has remained structurally invisible on the map of global postcolonial
studies.”3 Having extensive knowledge of the operations of colonialism in international contexts,
they were interested in its ongoing effects in Ireland and made that a central theme of the project.
I had studied postcolonial theory previously in relation to Ireland and found it both illuminating
and frustrating. My frustration stemmed from the neglect of the problematic positioning of
contemporary Northern Irish Protestants within theories defining Northern Ireland as colonial or
postcolonial “depending on how you perceive the implementation of the Belfast Agreement.”4
In my presentation for Troubling Ireland, I suggested–following Stephen Howe’s Ireland
and Empire–that Ireland cannot be spoken of as straightforwardly postcolonial, since there are
reasons for denying it was ever a colony at all.5 Tone Olaf Nielsen of Kuratorisk Aktion pointed out
that colonialism is not and never was one thing only, and that even if Ireland’s experience of rule
by another nation was unique, it could still be called colonialism, with reason and productively.
What I had (wrongly) thought to be a relatively unreflective use of the adjective ‘postcolonial’ for
Ireland in the project documents had raised my academic and emotional hackles, but Nielsen’s
230 Reid
response to my arguments stayed with me. I was asked to join Troubling Ireland, and throughout
the following year and three further workshops I thought about why talk of Ireland as colonial
and postcolonial induced a revisionist impulse in me. As Gerry Kearns notes, revisionism is in
itself a postcolonial legacy, revealing anxiety about the colonial past.6
In the light of my rethinking process, I am taking this opportunity to look at the issues
once more. In the paper I discuss some ways in which Ireland is defined as a former colony, and
how postcolonial theory is applied to Ireland and to a lesser extent, to Northern Ireland. Much of
this will be familiar ground. Then I look at the position of Northern Irish Protestants in relation to
this theory. In what I have read, they–we–appear only sporadically, and when we appear, analysis
of our position can be superficial and sketchy.
I use this “we” with caution. The reason I was–am, sometimes–uncomfortable with how
“postcolonial” is used to describe Ireland is because I grew up in a Protestant community in
Northern Ireland. As I hope to show later, this does not mean one thing, and I am cautious about
identifying myself as a Northern Irish Protestant because Protestant and Catholic identities
often are perceived in simplistic and sectarian terms in public discourse. Nonetheless, despite
my reservations with labelling myself as such, I am shaped in some very meaningful ways as a
Protestant, outside of private religious practices, and especially in the context of a still-divided
Northern Ireland.7 Therefore I am unable to read or talk about postcolonialism in Ireland without
placing myself in relation to those theories, which tend to suggest I am a colonist, an ill-defined
“problem” or nothing at all.
Because of this personal investment in the academic working out of what postcolonialism
means for Northern Irish Protestants, I have chosen to frame the body of the paper through an
autobiographical methodology. I believe that acknowledging subjective entanglements with
academic theory is important. Within feminism, such tactics are employed to help researchers
sidestep the pretence to neutrality, objectivity and separateness from the research subject once so
pervasive in a patriarchal and phallocentric academy. Donna Haraway explains her commitment
to personal involvement in research so:
Following an ethical and methodological principle for science studies that I adopted
many years ago, I will critically analyze, or “deconstruct”, only that which I love
and only that in which I am deeply implicated.8
I avail myself of this principle, which underlies everything I write and make, and in this paper
plays a major and explicit part. I also believe that stories of individual lives can contribute–at
the very least–to complicating dangerously basic perceptions of the “other” in Northern Ireland
(and elsewhere). Following from my discussion of colonialism and postcolonialism in Northern
Ireland, and what these histories and theories mean for Northern Irish Protestants, I examine
the notion of autobiography–its uses, its pitfalls and its application in academic work. I go on to
outline my autobiography, including family history, with reference to how that intersects with my
earlier arguments.
Colonialism in Ireland
Ireland’s troubled relationship to the neighboring island has–notoriously–some eight
hundred years’ pedigree. The Anglo-Normans arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century and
established a number of colonies across the island, including one centered on Dublin, later
called the Pale, and others in east Ulster. The Anglo-Normans are the people for whom the term
“more Irish than the Irish themselves” was coined, and by degrees those who stayed in Ireland
assimilated with the surrounding Gaelic population. The English made further organized attempts
The Elephant in the Room 231
at colonization during the sixteenth century, in Counties Monaghan, Armagh, Down and Antrim,
but each of these failed in the face of resistance by local Gaelic lords. More successful small-scale
plantations were carried out in Laois and Offaly. However, English power took effect principally
in the Pale, comprising present-day County Dublin and parts of Counties Kildare, Meath and
Louth. Repeatedly over the centuries, the English Crown made the use of Irish dress, customs,
social structures and language illegal, but these laws were enforced unevenly and sporadically,
and did not succeed in eroding Gaelic culture and society to any great extent.9
The plantations of the early seventeenth century constitute a turning point in the
relationship between Ireland and England, Wales and Scotland. Generally this is agreed to
have been a colonial period, however untidy, partial and ambiguous the colonial nature of that
enterprise may seem. In an Ulster socially and economically devastated by the Nine Years’ War,
having suffered environmental ravages and significant population loss, the impact of settlement
was profound and lasting. Plantation attempted the replacement of one social, political, economic
and cultural system with another, with variable success. Many Irish were dispossessed, most
of whom were probably chiefs and lords and their soldiers. Many others stayed where they
were but lost their social structures and status and were made to pay higher rents for their lands
than their new English and Scots neighbors. As the century wore on, and particularly after the
anti-plantation uprising of 1641, the Irish were further disenfranchised, and their landholdings
dwindled. Crucially, as many scholars agree, one of the most divisive factors in this plantation
was that it happened during the Reformation. As well as laws penalizing Gaelic language, dress,
social customs and land use, laws dictating adherence to the Established Church and directing
religious practices were also introduced.10 Historian A.T.Q. Stewart notes that because of this:
The general opinion is that the Ulster plantation added a new and unassimilable
element to the Irish population… [And] from that point on, the population was
sharply divided into planters and Gaels.11
The subsequent history of what began as plantation and colonization and developed into
a complex colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain can be understood in many different
ways. Some facts are clear: Irish resources were decimated for (largely) English and Scots profit
during the initial decades of the plantation; Catholics in Ireland (mostly but not exclusively
descended from the Gaelic Irish) were discriminated against to greater or lesser extents, formally
and informally, from this time until independence was achieved in 1921, and continued to be
discriminated against by the state in Northern Ireland until very recently;12 British attitudes to,
and exploitation of, Ireland at the very least exacerbated the Great Famine in the mid-1840s; and
land in Ireland was concentrated in the hands of a very few from the eighteenth century until the
Land Acts of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These are just a few examples.
Such historical facts alone, of course, do not account for many other important considerations,
including the specific extents to which planters and natives were ethnically, culturally and socially
different; the varying social and economic positions of Protestant planters within early modern
Ireland and down through the centuries; levels of intermarriage and cultural cross-fertilization
between planters and Gaels; the common ground perceived between Protestant and Catholic
working-class communities at certain points in history; and the participation of Protestants in
Irish cultural revivals. Again, just a few examples.
However, Joseph Ruane gives a definition of colonialism that chimes with the précis of
plantation and list of historical injustices appearing above:
232 Reid
Colonialism as a process refers to the intrusion into and conquest of an inhabited

territory by representatives (formal and informal) of an external power; the
displacement of the native inhabitants (elites and/or commoners) from resources
and positions of power; the subsequent exercise of economic, political and
cultural control over the territory and native population by the intruders and their
descendants, in their own interests and in the name and interests of the external
power.13
Each of these phenomena has been invoked (either to be affirmed or challenged) in the debate
among advocates and opponents of postcolonial theory over whether Ireland was a colony at all.
From here I move to look at some arguments on both sides.
Postcolonialism in Ireland
Joe Cleary believes that the idea of colonialism as a past event in Ireland was superseded
in the late 1970s and early 1980s by postcolonial theory, which suggests that colonialism continues
in its effects into the present day.14 Postcolonial theory attracts argument and debate on varied
grounds; Cleary identifies a pervading concern with what is perceived as “an unwelcome
politicization of Irish cultural studies.”15 Some reject the implication that Ireland’s experience is
identical, or at least closely comparable, with those of so-called Third World countries like India,
because of course the Irish were able to participate as colonists, administrators, missionaries
and governors within a British imperial framework, which positioned them at times and in
places very differently from other colonized subjects. Others point to specific characteristics of
the relationship between England (later Britain) and Ireland that differentiate it from England/
Britain’s relationship with every other colony, including the Act of Union in 1801, when Ireland
was subsumed into the United Kingdom. Howe indicated in 2000 that many postcolonial analyses
of contemporary Ireland related to literature and culture and not to economy or politics.16 This lack
has since been addressed. Cleary, in fact, gives an economic definition of colonialism: it was, he
indicates, “an international process through which different parts of the globe were differentially
integrated into an emergent world capitalist system.”17 Howe also criticized the neglect of “settler
colonialism” as a distinct category pertaining to a particular historical period. Further objections
stem from the desire to have the Irish economy viewed within a European framework rather
than, again, a “Third-World” framework; postcolonial theory invoked comparative economic
development in Africa and Asia in order to explain Ireland’s recession in the 1980s and 1990s.18
Counter-arguments to all these objections abound. Clare Carroll argues that to deny
Ireland’s contemporary postcolonial status is to deny that early modern Ireland was ever a
colony, and there are many reasons for continuing to consider England/Britain’s relationship to
Ireland a colonial one even after the Act of Union and up until independence.19 These include the
particular structures of local government and the position of the police, unlike those elsewhere
in the United Kingdom, the existence of the Lord Lieutenancy until independence was gained,
the repeated constraints put on the Irish economy to make it subservient to the wider British
economy, and British responses to Irish famine.20 Cleary insists that the assumption that “there is
such a thing as a standard colonial experience” is “untenable,” and making Ireland exceptional
in this regard is both inaccurate and unproductive.21 Likewise, Kevin Whelan cautions against
“reinserting nationalist exceptionalism under the guise of complexity” in analyses of Ireland’s
colonial (or non-colonial) status.22 However, David Lloyd points to the crux of these debates when
he states that “to assert that Ireland is and has been a colony is certainly to deny the legitimacy
of British government in Northern Ireland.”23 Howe believes that postcolonial theorists risk
intellectual irresponsibility if they ignore “the strong contemporary political consequences which
follow from a belief that Northern Ireland is a settler colonial regime.”24 This is a clear echo of the
revisionist debate in Irish historiography, in which “a pervasive anxiety not to give historical aid
and comfort to the Provisional IRA” is attributed to those revisionists who challenged received
(often perceived as nationalist) versions of Irish history.25
Northern Irish Protestants, colonialism and postcolonialism
I do not deny that Ireland once was a colony. Neither do I downplay historical (including
recent) injustices and oppressions visited on Irish people by, or in the name of, England and Britain.
However, I do not believe that all revisionism, in history or in postcolonial theory, is grounded
only (or mainly) in anxiety about the contemporary political repercussions of acknowledging an
often-terrible colonial history. Some of it reiterates history’s multifaceted and complex nature. I
do believe theorists must consider the effect of statements on Northern Ireland’s colonial status
on its present populations. When Kevin Whelan writes that “Ireland was England’s oldest colony,
as well as its first postcolony; Northern Ireland was its last colony,” this declaration is in some
senses simply factual, but in others partial, and (potentially) ideologically loaded.26 Likewise,
Terry Eagleton’s assessment of the situation in Northern Ireland seems to allow for, yet actually
denies, historical change and development:
[S]ettler colonialism… is when they do not only suppress your language and
plunder your resources but actually have the impudence to come and live with
you. Why is it plausible not to see Northern Ireland as a colony? [... One] reason is
the colonial settlers there form the majority, and have been there long enough to
feel quite as much at home as Celts in Kerry.27
He thus recognizes that “colonial settlers” have come to feel at home in Northern Ireland, but
to call present-day Protestants “colonial settlers” is, I contend, dangerously ahistorical. If (as I
presume) he is referring to Protestants, or perhaps unionists, these groups are neither identical
nor exclusively the descendants of English, Scots and Welsh colonial settlers in Ireland in the
period between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. With this in mind, and given the four
centuries that have elapsed since the plantation, in what sense can either Protestants or unionists
in Northern Ireland today as a group be called ‘settlers’? Eagleton’s statement demonstrates what
Sandra Scham terms “a persistent lack of nuanced examination” evident in postcolonial studies.28
Any nuanced examination of colonialism and postcolonialism in Ireland must dwell on
its planter communities and their descendants. The notion of “settlers” is given some space in
postcolonial theory, but according to Pamela Clayton, not much, and that relatively recently; she
contends that “Ulster’s position as a settler colony […] was, for most of the twentieth century,
completely overlooked in the academic literature.”29 In the twenty-first century, Clare Carroll
acknowledges that postcolonial theory can fail “to distinguish between different kinds of
colonialism–between that in settler and non-settler countries[, for example].”30 Whelan refers to
(but does not expand upon) “the intractable ‘settler’ problem of the unionist population of the
North,” again, ignored in much of postcolonial studies.31 Lorenzo Veracini traces the history of
the concept of “settler colonialism,” pointing out that “building settler colonies and the exercise of
colonial domination, while different, should be seen as inescapably intertwined.”32 He considers
settler colonialism to be: “[A]bout turning a place and a specific human material into something
else, and, paradoxically and simultaneously, about a specific human material that remains
true to itself in a place that is ‘other.’”33 Veracini makes the further point that “where it is most
triumphant, settler colonialism effectively covers its tracks.”34 Settler colonialism in Ulster has
failed, singularly, to cover its tracks, because it never was complete.
234 Reid
Cleary’s analysis allows for settlers as a distinct “independent third factor” in the
imperial relationship between the “mother-country” and the colonized natives, noting that
unlike administrators, settlers’ investments in a colony were land- and property-based, therefore
rooted, and likely to be vigorously defended when threatened. He also recognizes that the initial
distinctions between settlers and natives were not fixed for all time:
It has been suggested [that] neither ethnic descent nor culture but religion became
the major index that distinguished between colonizer and colonized in early modern
Ireland… Because colonial processes change over time, however, it may also be the
case that the indices that distinguished between colonizer and colonized changed
also, and that the ways in which religion, culture and ethnicity were articulated
with each other to demarcate the divide varied from one conjuncture to the next.35
This, I believe, is a crucial point. At some points in history there have been “settler” populations,
as opposed to “native” populations, in Ireland. Certain features made them distinct from
each other. These features were not then, and are not now, immutable. From that time to this,
broadly speaking, there have been two “distinct” and often at-odds communities in the north
of Ireland, one of which has been dominant and more or less oppressive until recently. But the
people comprising each community are likely to have a substantial amount in common, socially,
economically, even culturally, and certainly ethnically, if not religiously. Archaeologist Audrey
Horning proposes that material culture from the early modern period gives the lie to any idea of
“a binary opposition between colonizer and colonized,” and she advocates “models which […]
allow for the fluid dynamism of identity and interactions precipitated by the colonial experience”
as offering “an alternative of real social relevance” in Northern Ireland today; especially
important in a place where “perceptions of colonialism remain paramount to the construction of
contemporary identities.”36
Albert Memmi writes of colonialism “manufactur[ing]” colonists as well as colonized.37
Tadhg O’Keeffe refers to the idea that “both ‘natives’ and ‘colonists’ are transformed (and therefore
become postcolonial?) at the very moment of contact.”38 And Robert Young, touching on the
performance of sameness over time characteristic of both nationalist and unionist Ireland, notes
that “fixity of identity is only sought in situations of instability and disruption, of conflict and
change.”39 These formulations all contribute to our “consideration of historical human subjects
and their social relations as subjects and objects” within colonial and postcolonial contexts.40
However, just as simple models of colonizer/colonized relationships based on absolute and
enduring difference are irresponsible and unsustainable, so uncritical notions of interaction and
mutual transformation are also problematic, where they deny real operations of power between
two groups.
This brings me to my foundational concern with colonial contexts and postcolonial
legacies in Northern Ireland and Ireland–is it possible to acknowledge colonialism, and recognize
and condemn its injustice, while simultaneously insisting that, in the present, it is inaccurate and
inappropriate to define Protestants in Ireland as colonizers? Is it possible, as a Northern Irish
Protestant today, to admit to a sense of shame and guilt at ancestral land-grabbing (and possibly
numerous other exploitative and oppressive acts), to point to its wrongness, while simultaneously
insisting that I am neither a settler nor a colonist, and at this stage in history have as much right
to belong where I was born as an Irish Catholic?41
Autobiographical approaches
In 2000 a publication called Bear in Mind appeared, compiled by an organization called An Crann
The Tree and published in Belfast. Its purpose was to give some people affected by the Troubles a
platform from which to tell their stories, and Northern Irish poet John Hewitt was quoted in the
introduction by way of explanation:
Bear in mind these dead

I can find no plainer words.
The careful words of my injunction

are unrhetorical, as neutral
and unaligned as any I know:
they propose no more than thoughtful response.42
The telling of individual stories is not unproblematic in Northern Ireland, as in any post- or
mid-conflict society. Not all stories are considered equal, and indeed some elicit active offence or
deep hurt; there is then the question of whose stories are heard, and when, where and by whom.
Nonetheless, personal stories can be powerful. Listening to stories from the “other” side, when
that is possible, can make what has been unknown and threatening become human and legible,
if not shared. John Hewitt’s measured words resonate with Kevin Whelan’s notion of “ethical
witness,” achieved when a person establishes a certain distance between what she is born to and
what she aspires to, thus enabling her to “address [her]self to [her] culture.”43
I believe this applies to colonial contexts and postcolonial legacies too. The potential
political (and human) consequences of continuing to apply provocative labels like “native”
and “settler” in Northern Ireland are grave. Individual lives and family histories always offer a
more complex story of negotiated identities, interdependence and integration, mixing, exchange
and ambiguity, as well as difference, conflict and hostility, than that which is evident in public
narratives. Horning points to what she calls “the potentially subversive impact of a deeper
historical understanding;” while history may be seen as the cause of contemporary conflict in
Northern Ireland, some also see it as mitigating, if used differently.44
For this reason, I have chosen to be explicit about my personal position in relation to the
issues discussed in this paper, and to make use of autobiographical information in framing them.
I aim to tell something of my own story as a contribution to complicating sectarian simplicities,
and as an attempt at offering a form of Whelan’s “ethical witness.” I hope that in telling this story
I can show movement from that to which I was born towards that to which I aspire, and then a
(somewhat uneasy) settling between the two.
Autobiography is–unsurprisingly–not a simple process of using “I” and “me” and
recounting one’s life story, or bits of it. Matthew Hollow refers to the use of life history in academic
writing as an “autobiographical performance;” this performance can be one of unity, coherence
and the inevitability of destiny, or it can be about multiplicity, ambiguity and the stumbling way in
which life unfolds.45 Hollow acknowledges arguments about whether it is a valid strategy to insert
personal stories into academic texts but contends that “the personal” is always already in these
texts, whether or not by the explicit intention of the author.46 Further, the autobiographical subject
may assume a “label” (such as “woman”), and in this case, autobiographical content may position
the author as representative of a group. As Hollow suggests, the subjective voice “becomes less
about the individual who is performing than on whose behalf the individual is performing.”47
Regardless of the motivation for including autobiography, and the purpose to which it is put,
Hollow believes that the most successful uses evidence “a self-critical style of self-writing,”
admitting ambivalence, memory gaps and other disruptions to personal narratives.48 Jaume
Aurell too approves “experimental autobiographers” who “narrate within an epistemologically
sceptical frame.”49
236 Reid
Nancy Miller considers the use of autobiography to have roots in “an earlier feminist
critique of universal values.”50 She recognizes that openly personal content in academic writing for
some is “an occasion to mourn the loss of literary standards, critical objectivity and philosophical
rigor.”51 Miller, however, believes that autobiography–in this case, memoir–is “a democratic form,
giving voice to minority experience,” and its unenthusiastic reception in some quarters may be as
much to do with women’s “predominance” within the genre as anything else.52 Rocío G. Davies
indicates that in feminist terms, autobiography can be a political catalyst because “private stories
support the articulation of public histories.”53 Telling complex private stories may, therefore,
support the complication of crude public narratives.
I appropriate two definitions to frame my own autobiographical experiment here:
first is Miller’s idea of memoir as “the record of an experience in search of a community.”54 As
I have explained, one of my difficulties with postcolonial theory on Ireland is the absence, or
one-dimensional presence, of Irish and Northern Irish Protestants. Where “unionists” are dwelt
upon, as in F.C. McGrath’s paper on Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory, I generally do not
recognize myself (nor all those Protestants I know who are not unionists).55 My hope is that one
brief but nuanced portrait may elicit recognition (and possibly identification) in others identifying
themselves as Protestant, and contribute to disrupting sectarian certainties and simplifications.
The second definition is Jaume Aurell’s notion of academic autobiography as “an intentional
and creative positioning of oneself in history, geography and culture.”56 My academic interests in
place and identity are driven by my personal attachment to, and difficulties with, those concepts:
the difficulties arise in part from my historical, geographical and cultural position as a Northern
Irish Protestant. Therefore, I think of all my work, visual and academic, as ways of engaging with
this history, geography and culture; what amounts to an ongoing struggle to unfold, understand,
interrogate and critique. In my work for Troubling Ireland, and in this paper, I have made the
personal nature of that engagement explicit.
My autobiography
I was born in 1978 and brought up in Holywood, in County Down. Both parents’ families
had been living in Holywood for a few generations. My mother’s father, Derek Eves, traced his
descent from seventeenth-century planters. A John Eves was born to planter parents in Wicklow
in 1641, and the Irish branch of the family grew from there, bringing in O’Briens, Caugheys,
O’Neills, Webbs, MacGregors, Simmses, Greeveses and Munsters among others. The Eveses
were, in the twentieth century, members of the Exclusive Brethren church, a strict sect verging on
the cultish; most of the family left in the 1950s.
My grandfather’s family was involved in a number of businesses that had generated
substantial wealth through the nineteenth century and continued to do so in the twentieth
century. These included a timber import firm, set up in 1810 by a Norwegian-Danish forebear
called Paul Løvenørn Munster and, later, linen mills. Derek Eves directed an engineering
company called Munster Simms. His work entailed frequent international travel, and I remember
my grandparents’ house as being filled with exotic ornaments, books and clothes, and giving the
impression of wealth and sophistication.
These factors probably contributed to the Eves family’s location somewhat outside the
mainstream of Protestant culture in Northern Ireland. Members of the Exclusive Brethren church
separate themselves as rigorously from other Protestants as from Catholics, and in my family
their overwhelming preoccupation with religious practices did not leave much room for political
engagement. Wealth too can act as a political insulator, at least in terms of politico-religious conflict,
if not in terms of class privilege. My grandfather was at least culturally nationalist, according to
my mother: in turn she communicated to me some sense of being Irish, or Northern Irish, but as
an ambivalent identity, one among many, and not the most important.
My father’s grandfather, Henry Reid, came from the Lowlands of Scotland to settle in
Belfast in the early twentieth century. He is supposed to have fled an abusive and very religious
father, a story invoked in the family to explain their prevalently atheist attitude. He married a
Belfast woman, Martha McIntosh, and they had three sons and a daughter. Henry was a cabinet-
maker at the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and Martha ran a shop. Their eldest son, Ernest, was
my grandfather. He went to university and became a civil engineer.
Ernest had a tumultuous and deeply unhappy family life. His first wife left him and their
three children, and he had three more children with his second wife, including my father. He
was an alcoholic and a gambler, and when he died of stomach cancer at 42, the family wealth
evaporated. Although the Reids were positioned culturally as Protestants in Northern Ireland,
they avoided religious practices, and politically were not only outside of, but actively hostile to,
the Protestant and unionist mainstream. Ernest put himself forward as an independent (socialist)
candidate for Holywood council in the 1950s.
My father grew up in the same social milieu that my sisters and I would occupy thirty
years later–in Holywood’s Protestant middle class, educated at the local state-funded grammar
school. He left school with almost no qualifications, due to undiagnosed dyslexia and the
overwhelming dysfunction of his home life, and moved into low-paid work, unlike most of his
Holywood peers, who were becoming doctors, solicitors and engineers. My father found stability
and belonging through the then-emerging house church movement and was not particularly
interested in politics. Nonetheless, having no strong pre-existent sense of himself as a Northern
Irish Protestant and/or unionist, he was open to engaging with nationalism. He worked and
lived in Derry in the late 1960s, and with Derry friends once visited a Dublin republican who had
been involved in the Easter Rising. He told me that he felt then he would have fought for Irish
independence in the same circumstances.
By the time I was six, we as a family were attending a so-called charismatic church that
had arisen from the house church groups my parents attended in the 1970s. The charismatic
movement tended to sidestep the issue of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland by claiming to
be non-denominational, although culturally it was often Protestant in all but name. I went to
a state grammar school in Holywood, ostensibly neutral but again effectively Protestant. All
of my friends were from Protestant backgrounds and most were middle-class. My own family
were middle-class in all respects apart from the crucial matter of income–although my parents’
families were wealthy, they were emphatically not. We were able to live in what was considered
an exclusive part of Holywood because my grandparents owned the house, but my parents’
income was very low. Living in this area, and generally in Holywood, insulated us from some of
the horrors of the Northern Irish conflict, and my sisters and I did not directly experience actual
violence.
From the perspective of adulthood, and in trying to understand the emotional
underpinnings of my academic and art practice, I offer these stories by way of explaining a sense
of being always-already outside in Protestant middle-class Holywood. As a family we were
culturally and socially Protestant, but historically and contemporarily positioned on the margins
of Protestant religious practice. Further, we had a heritage of skepticism about church derived
from my mother’s family’s experience of the Exclusive Brethren, and my father’s family’s atheism.
I fully subscribed to the notion that charismatic Christians were neither Protestant nor Catholic,
and would have argued myself not to be Protestant at all until the age of about 20. Further, I had
not lost any family members to republican violence. Although by the time I was in my mid-teens
I knew that my grandfather and uncle in particular had been in danger from the IRA, I had no
visceral sense of being threatened by an “other.” And despite the fact that we were middle-class,
and on my mother’s side upper-middle-class for generations, I had a sense of the precariousness
of that status once I became aware of how little money my parents earned.
238 Reid
Also of great importance to me during childhood and adolescence were our family
holidays in north Donegal. We visited a particular site each summer, to which we were introduced
by family friends from Holywood. We could not afford our own caravan, and my parents always
arranged to borrow one or another from their friends. Most caravan owners there when I was
a child were from Holywood and members of High Street Presbyterian Church. I developed
an intense attachment to this place, for many reasons, one of which was its siting in the “real”
Ireland. At a certain point–I cannot remember when, but probably in my early teens–I decided
that Holywood and north County Down were too urban, too industrialized, too domesticated,
and above all, too unionist and Protestant, to be Irish. I wanted to be Irish, so I identified with
this part of Donegal and the west of Ireland in general, and determined that I would move there
as soon as I possibly could and distance myself from my roots in north Down. I ignored the fact
that my attachment to Donegal was asocial, about my relationship to a landscape, not people,
and firmly and romantically identified with nationalists in Irish history and in the contemporary
struggles in Northern Ireland.
Conclusion
I consider what I have described up to this point to relate to Kevin Whelan’s notion of
filiation and affiliation, and I mentioned earlier that I have since settled somewhere between my
filiation and affiliation points, although not comfortably. When I was eighteen or so I realized
that urban, middle-class Protestants are neither always accounted for, nor always welcome,
in nationalist discourse. Further study in Irish history and cultural studies turned me into
something of a revisionist, although greater understanding of revisionism itself leaves me where
I am now–attempting to be both skeptical and sensitive towards all identity claims. I have given a
necessarily partial version of my family and personal history, and because I have an end in view–
demonstrating a few facets of the multiplicity behind the label “Protestant” in Northern Ireland–I
may be shaping memories and impressions to suit that end. It is difficult to determine how the
sum of all my thinking on identity inflects my current sense of myself as a child and teenager. My
idea of what I have inherited from my parents and grandparents is subjective and may be more
about what I wanted to receive than what they had to pass on. Nonetheless, that idea is there.
I recognize too that I am implicitly claiming to be representative of a group in this paper. My
argument is that because I am not simply a Northern Irish Protestant in the public and popular
sense (which allows for a few models–middle-class, working-class, moderate, extreme–but not
much complexity), therefore nobody is “simply” a Northern Irish Protestant. The same argument
applies to Northern Irish Catholics, and indeed, any identity label. I accept that such labels can
be necessary and strategic, but sometimes they are put to problematic use, and exploring the
individual stories behind them helps to mitigate that.
In relation to colonial contexts and postcolonial legacies, I intend my autobiography to
reinforce my argument that “Protestant” in Northern Ireland does not mean “colonist.” As my
family history suggests, Protestants in Northern Ireland may or may not be descended from
ancestors who were colonists, but certainly will not be exclusively descended from them. That
descent, where it applies, does not mean one thing. Further, though I am not certain of the point
at which colonists become natives, I am certain that it happens. I am certain too that the continued
use of the terms “colonist” and “native” to refer to two religiously, politically and culturally
defined groups in Northern Ireland is at best problematic. I hope I am on my way to achieving
sufficient distance from my filiation and affiliation points to bear witness in the way described by
Whelan. Invoking that concept and Hewitt’s idea of bearing in mind, I suggest that it should be
possible to attest to my position as a Northern Irish Protestant at the same time as attesting to the
history and legacy of Protestant plantation and domination in the north of Ireland.
NOTES
1 I came to this title following Audrey Horning’s identification of Northern Ireland as the
elephant in the room where Irish postcolonialism is concerned; Audrey Horning, “Cultures
of Contact, Cultures of Conflict? Identity Construction, Colonialist Discourse, and the Ethics
of Archaeological Practice in Northern Ireland,” Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5 (2007).
2 See http://www.rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org for a survey of one of their major
projects.
3 Kuratorisk Aktion, Tupilakosaurus: an Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and
Practice (Copenhagen: Kuratorisk Aktion, 2012), 8.
4 F.C. McGrath, “Settler Nationalism: Ulster Unionism and Postcolonial Theory,” Irish Studies
Review 20, no. 4 (2012): 463-485, 464.
5 Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford UK:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
6 Gerry Kearns, “Historical Geographies of Ireland: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial
Legacies,” Historical Geography 41 (2013): 22-34, 23.
7 I use the term “Protestant” rather than “unionist” throughout because they do not mean the
same thing, and for me, “Protestant” can be an unsolicited identity, while “unionist” refers
to a chosen political identity.
8 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_
OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge: 1997), 151.
9 James Stevens Curl, The Londonderry Plantation, 1609-1914: the History, Architecture and
Planning of the Estates of the City of London and its Livery Companies in Ulster (Chichester UK:
Phillimore, 1986).
10 Curl, The Honourable the Irish Society and the Plantation of Ulster, 1608-2000: a History and
Critique (Chichester UK: Phillimore, 2000). See also R.J. Hunter, The Ulster Plantation in
Armagh and Cavan, 1608-41 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2012).
11 A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press,
1997), 23.
12 Presbyterians too were subject to discrimination in the seventeenth century in particular,
but also in the eighteenth century. They were reluctant to acknowledge the monarch as the
head of the church, and therefore to take the Oath of Supremacy. For the state, this called
their loyalty into question.
13 Quoted in Terrence McDonough, “Introduction,” in Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics
and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Terrence McDonough (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 2005), vii-xiv, xiv.
14 Joe Cleary, “‘Misplaced Ideas’? Colonialism, Location and Dislocation in Irish Studies”,
in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Notre Dame IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 16-45.
15 Ibid., 18.
16 Howe, Ireland and Empire.
17 Cleary, “‘Misplaced Ideas’?” 43. See also Denis O’Hearn, “Ireland in the Atlantic Economy,”
in Was Ireland a Colony, ed. McDonough, 3-26; and Virginia Crossman, “Local Government in
Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in Was Ireland a Colony, ed. McDonough, 102-116 for example.
18 Cleary, “‘Misplaced Ideas’?” 43.
19 Clare Carroll, “Barbarous Slaves and Civil Cannibals: Translating Civility in Early Modern
Ireland,” in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Carroll and King, 63-80, 63.
240 Reid
20 See chapters in Carroll and King, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory and McDonough, Was
Ireland a Colony.
21 Cleary, “‘Misplaced Ideas’?” 25.
22 Kevin Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial Memory,” in
Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Carroll and King, 92-108, 97.
23 David Lloyd, “After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies,” in Ireland and
Postcolonial Theory, eds. Carroll and King, 46-62, 48.
24 Howe, Ireland and Empire, 140.
25 McDonough, “Introduction,” viii.
26 Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation,” 94.
27 Terry Eagleton, “Afterword: Ireland and Colonialism.” in Was Ireland a Colony, ed.
McDonough, 326-333, 327.
28 Sandra Scham, “Colony or conflict zone?” Archaeological Dialogues 13, no. 2 (2006): 205-207,
205.
29 Pamela M. Clayton, “Two Kinds of Colony: ‘Rebel Ireland’ and the ‘Imperial Province,’” in
Was Ireland a Colony, ed. McDonough 235-246, 235.
30 Clare Carroll, “Introduction: the Nation and Postcolonial Theory,” in Ireland and Postcolonial
Theory, eds. Carroll and King, 1-15, 8.
32 Lorenzo Veracini, “‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept,” Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (2013): 313-333, 314.
33 Loc. cit.
34 Ibid.: 325.
35 Cleary, “Misplaced Ideas?” 32.
36 Horning, “Archaeology, Conflict and Contemporary Identity,” Archaeological Dialogues 13,
no. 2 (2006): 183-200, 188, 187.
37 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan Publications, 1965), 122.
38 Tadhg O’Keeffe, “Starting as We Mean To Go On: Why We Need a Theoretically Informed
Historical Archaeology in Ireland,” Archaeological Dialogues 13, no. 2 (2006): 206-211, 209.
39 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge:
1995), 4.
40 Lloyd, “After History,” 51.
41 I ask the question in this way in light of the fact that many Northern Irish Catholics feel
out of place too–for generations given to understand themselves as second-class citizens
in a Protestant statelet, and both claimed and rejected (and misunderstood) by their co-
religionists in the Republic of Ireland.
42 Quoted in Cathie McKimm, “Introduction,” in Bear in Mind: Stories of the Troubles, ed. An
Crann The Tree (Belfast, Lagan Press: 2000), xi.
44 Horning, “Cultures of Contact, Cultures of Conflict,” 116.
45 Matthew Hollow, “Introducing the Historian to History: Autobiographical Performances in
Historical Texts,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 13, no. 1 (2009): 43-52,
43.
46 Ibid., 45.
47 Ibid., 48.
48 Ibid., 51.
49 Jaume Aurell, “Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author,”
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 10, no. 3 (2006): 433-449, 435.
50 Nancy K. Miller, “But Enough About Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale
Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 421-436, 421.
51 Ibid., 422.
52 Ibid., 431.
53 Rocío G. Davies, “Academic Autobiography as Women’s History: Jill Ker Conway’s True
North and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage,” Rethinking History 13, no. 1 (2009): 109-123, 110.
54 Miller, “But enough About Me,” 432.
55 McGrath, “Settler Nationalism.”
56 Aurell, “Autobiography as Unconventional History,” 439.
Exhibiting Maritime Histories:
Titanic Belfast in the Post-Conflict City
Nuala C. Johnson
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology
Queen’s University Belfast
ABSTRACT: The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 represents one of the most
infamous maritime disasters in the history of shipping. Yet despite it entering the
public imagination in the decades after its sinking, until recently it has all but been
erased from the collective memory of the people of Belfast, the city in which it was
built. In a post-conflict context, however, Belfast has begun to re-imagine the role of
the ship in the city’s history, most particularly in the re-development of the docklands
area and its designation as the Titanic Quarter, and through its landmark project the
Titanic Belfast museum. This paper will trace the economic, social, and political context
from which the Titanic was built, and the role that this played in silencing any very
public commemoration of its sinking until after the signing of the Belfast Agreement.
The “story” told in the new museum will be analyzed from this perspective and will
illustrate how the wounds of the Troubles continue to inform the interpretation of the
city’s divided past.
O
ne hundred years after the sinking of the Royal Mail Ship (R.M.S.) Titanic, the tragedy
continues to captivate the imaginations of millions of people around the globe. Since the
loss of over 1,500 lives on the ill-fated night on April 15, 1912, when the ship sank on its
maiden voyage about 350 miles from the Newfoundland coast, the Titanic’s stories have almost
continually been rehearsed through books, films, documentaries, and museums. Five weeks after
the ship went down, Universal Pictures released the first movie about the tragedy, starring the
real-life survivor Dorothy Gibson whose affair with the film studio’s founder, Jules Brulatour,
brought her on the voyage across the Atlantic in the first place.1 During the Second World War in
1943, Goebbels’s commissioned a propaganda film using the sinking of the Titanic as a metaphor
for Britain’s ill-judged sense of its superior seafaring skills and its arrogant pursuit of profit at the
expense of safety.2 Its sole purpose was to portray Britain in a negative light and hence made no
pretense towards accuracy. It was the film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 classic book A Night
to Remember that laid the foundation for all future movie representations of the ship’s destiny.3
Released in 1958, this British film proved a huge commercial success and was followed by several
other movie versions, including The Unsinkable Molly Brown, starring Debbie Reynolds as the lead
as one of the ship’s most well-known first-class survivors, and James Cameron’s 1997 direction of
the multiple academy award-winning epic Titanic, grossing over $2 billion worldwide. Moreover,
the ship’s sinking has generated a huge number of academic as well as popular texts, many
published in 2012 to mark its centenary.4 Its demise on the eve of the First World War in part may
explain its longevity in the collective memory of generations after the war, as a cruel foreboding
of the slaughter that took place in the trenches two years after its sinking, and as a salutary
symbol of the seeming end of a century of human progress.5
Today it is through exhibitions and museums that the story of the Titanic has become part
of an ever-burgeoning heritage industry. RMS Titanic, Inc., a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions,
Exhibiting Maritime Histories 243
Inc., obtained exclusive rights to the artifacts salvaged from the wreck when it was located and
excavated in 1985. Visitors can view the spoils of the wreckage at “Titanic: The Experience,” beside
Disney World in Orlando, Florida and through the multi-venue “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,”
one of whose locations is the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The twenty-five million people
who have paid to see and who have additionally purchased the myriad of replica artifacts sold at
the exhibition confirm the popularity and profitability of this exhibition. Florida and Las Vegas may
seem geographically remote from the origin, route, or destination of this ship and its passengers,
and suggests that heritage production and reception is sometimes only loosely connected to the
spatial settings in which the past takes place. But those places more closely connected to the
ship’s history have also incorporated its story into their material and heritage landscape. While
Southampton, the port from where the ship began its voyage westward, has a modest display of
artifacts in its maritime museum, it is Belfast Northern Ireland—the city in which the ship was
built—that has recently invested most heavily in preserving the memory of the city’s role in the
ship’s construction, through the opening of the Titanic Belfast museum in April 2012 to mark the
centenary of its demise. In a ceremony of remembrance held at the City Hall, to unveil a memorial
to those who died and as part of wider efforts to demonstrate the shared history of the people of
Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin Lord Mayor, Niall O Donnghaile, claimed that it took so long to erect
a memorial because the “memory [was] too painful, the loss too personal.”6 Others have queried
such an interpretation, arguing that the collective amnesia surrounding the ship arose from a
sense of failure and shame about the city’s Harland and Woolf shipyard that built the vessel
and the sectarian geography of employment at the shipyard in the early twentieth century. But
in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict context, R.M.S. Titanic’s history and the role of Belfast in that
narrative has become part of a wider effort to economically regenerate the city and to positively
capitalize on the commercial possibilities of heritage and cultural tourism in achieving that end.7
The Titanic Belfast museum, forms part of a larger regeneration of the docklands area
of the city where the shipyard is located, re-named the Titanic Quarter, and includes hotels,
apartments, and a new building that houses the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
[Figure 1]. The site covers 185 acres, formerly part of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and the
re-development proposal was born in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. It is, of course,
part of the wider global effort of selling cities as cultural capital.8 The rejuvenation of former
docklands areas into retail, housing, and leisure spaces, begun initially in projects in Boston, San
Francisco, and Baltimore has diffused much more widely across the globe to historic waterfronts,
in what Atkinson refers to as “maritime kitsch.”9 At the cornerstone of the development in
Belfast has been the building of the Titanic Belfast museum, located on Queen’s Island, an
area of land beside Belfast Lough where Harland and Wolff constructed slipways and graving
docks to build the R.M.S. Titanic and other ocean-going luxury liners. On this space lies the new
museum, whose angular construction appears as a glittering shard of innovative architecture,
clad with several thousand three-dimensional, silver-anodized aluminum plates, and projecting
five ship prows in its facade jutting towards the sky and built at the exact same height (126 ft.)
as the original ship [Figure 2]. The exterior of the building, designed to reflect the past that is
displayed inside, simultaneously represents a future aspiration that the city can be reinvigorated
as a center of commercial success and that the one hundred million pounds spent on it will do
for Belfast what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao.10 Inside the building, the exhibition, designed
over nine interpretive galleries, charts the history of the city from the late nineteenth century––
as a hub of industrial activity––in which shipbuilding formed a significant part, to the ship’s
design, construction, fit-out, launch, and ultimate sinking. The use of state-of-the-art techniques
to convey the story mirrors the narrative that projects Belfast as a hub of innovative engineering
and manufacturing one hundred years earlier. As one of the most expensive buildings in Europe,
the museum would have to attract 290,000 visitors per year to break even, and while skeptics
244 Johnson
have doubted the possibility of achieving this, 650,000 people visited in the first nine months,
making it the most visited heritage attraction in Northern Ireland, outstripping other top tourist
attractions like the Giant’s Causeway and the Ulster Museum.
Figure 1. The Titanic Quarter.

The story of the R.M.S. Titanic indicates how a particular moment in the past can enter
the collective consciousness and become part of the heritage industry in a postcolonial context.
From the heavily segregated city in which the ship was built to the myriad of places from where
its passengers/staff originated, this maritime disaster has achieved iconic status and it connects
to three areas of inquiry that have particularly animated geographers’ approach to investigating
the uses of the past in the present. First, it alerts us to the relationship between heritage sites and
history, and why some episodes from the past are mobilized for popular consumption. Second,
the story of the R.M.S. Titanic foregrounds the relationship between space, place, and identity
making. Geographers have been particularly interested in the connections between heritage
preservation and place-based identity politics, and in the context of Northern Ireland, the
disputed geographies of national allegiance are especially significant. Finally, for geographers,
understanding the symbolic as well as the material effects of heritage landscapes is of significant
import in their interpretation of these places. The remainder of this paper will address these issues,
beginning with an overview of the evolution of Belfast as an industrial hub in the nineteenth
century and its sectarian social and political geographies. This will be followed by a sketch of the
ideas underpinning the re-development of the city’s docklands as the Titanic Quarter. And finally
the story presented at the Titanic Belfast complex will be analyzed, with a view to situating it
within a broader discourse of the post-conflict city and the erasure of any conceptions of the city
as one with a distinctly colonial legacy. Yet one of the legacies of the Plantation of Ulster was the
replacement of populations from England, Wales, and especially Presbyterian Scotland into what
Figure 2. Titanic Belfast –– the museum.

246 Johnson
Kearns refers to as “the half-emptied nest of Gaelic Ireland,” and with that came religious and
political divisions that would leave indelible marks on Ulster’s society in general and in Belfast
in particular, that remain to the present day.11
Booming Belfast: The industrial city that built the Titanic
The Belfast that built the R.M.S. Titanic was developing as an industrial hub throughout
the second half of the nineteenth century, but this city’s growth began a hundred years earlier.
From a small town with a population of 8,549 in 1757, the city’s inhabitants numbered 386,946
in 1911 on the eve of the completion of the ship, making it, albeit briefly, larger than Dublin.
This growth was largely the product of rural migration from the surrounding countryside, as
employment opportunities expanded to correspond with the city’s widening industrial base. Its
maritime position in part accounted for this growth. Quays in the eighteenth-century city were
largely developed to facilitate trade and the city’s merchant class. Hanover Quay, for instance,
was erected in 1720 and this brought the city quays to the banks of the River Lagan for the first
time. It marked the beginning of a series of quay-building projects that would facilitate the trading
of goods between Belfast and ports around the globe. Moreover, accompanying the expansion of
docking facilities were efforts to improve direct access to the city along Belfast Lough. Straightening
and deepening the channel into the port would offset the need for larger vessels to offload their
cargo onto lighters to the city, and precipitated the development of the Ballast Board, responsible
for improving access and docking facilities for the town. In 1837, the board, under the Act for
the Formation of a New Cut or Channel and for Otherwise Improving More Effectually the Port
and Harbour of Belfast, engaged William Dargan, railway engineer and canal builder, to carry
out improvements. The first cut was made in 1839 and the spoil was dumped to form Dargan’s
Island, later named Queen’s Island, which although initially designated as pleasure grounds,
would eventually become a key site for shipbuilding and for the R.M.S. Titanic in particular. The
Belfast Harbour Commissioners, the new name for the old Ballast Board, undertook a second
cut of the channel in 1847, also under the watchful eye of Dargan, and this Victoria Channel
provided straight, deep-water access into the city. Land infill provided the developing port with
cargo handling areas, new arterial connections to the city, office space for private companies, and
the Harbour Commissioners, and a new Custom’s House erected in 1857. Such infrastructural
innovations aided the development of the city as a major trading and shipbuilding center.12
But it was not on the harbor’s development and the ensuing shipbuilding industry that
Belfast’s industrial might alone depended. Before the deepening of channels into the port, the
city had already been developing its textile industry and in particular its linen manufacture and
trade that would be exported around the globe. Originally Belfast had traded linen produced
in the surrounding countryside, particularly County Antrim. The Brown Linen Halls (1754 and
1773) and the White Linen Hall (1785) were established in the eighteenth century to facilitate this
trade in bleached linen. Cloth manufacture in the city itself initially involved the spinning and
weaving of cotton and it wasn’t until the enterprising Mulholland brothers began experimenting
with the weaving of linen in their new mill built in the late 1820s that the city began to focus
on linen manufacture. Steam-powered mills (as opposed to the water-powered mills used
in manufacturing cotton) and having investigated the latest innovations used in Leeds’ mills,
the Mulhollands step towards linen manufacture meant that others followed suit. The twelve
linen mills in existence in 1832 had increased to thirty-two by 1860, while only two cotton mills
continued to exist. This expansion into the production of textiles enhanced Belfast’s reputation
as a “Linenopolis,” and although it experienced the same fluctuation in market demand as
other centers of linen production as the century progressed, the production of high-grade linen
from the factories in Belfast ensured that it could retain its place in the international linen trade,
particularly across Britain’s empire and the Spanish Americas. The improvement of harbor
facilities also contributed to its success. With it came other industries, most notably foundries,
ironworks, bleachers, printers, and brick makers.13
Moreover, some new industries developed in tandem with the textile and shipbuilding
industries. For instance, Belfast’s Ropeworks produced ropes for the shipyards and became
one of the biggest global manufacturers of its kind, while other major concerns like Gallaher’s
tobacco factory had two thousand employees at its peak, and developed independently of linen
or shipbuilding. The industrialization of Belfast also meant the feminization of much of the
industrial labor force. Women worked particularly in the linen mills and tobacco factories and
by 1901 women formed 38 percent of the work force compared to 29 percent of Ireland as a
whole and 30 percent of Britain. In contrast to national trends only 20 percent of these women
were domestic servants, while 40 percent were in Britain. According to Connolly and McIntosh,
“women formed the backbone of the city’s linen industry, in both spinning and weaving sectors,
and were also crucial to other manufacturing enterprises such as Gallaher’s giant tobacco
factory.”14 These major manufacturing enterprises not only brought Belfast in closer contact with
Britain, and enhanced east-west links rather than north-south ones, but also brought the city in
much closer direct contact with Britain’s imperial markets and its overseas colonies.
While the city industrialized, its religious composition also changed. In 1834 31 percent
of the city’s population was Catholic, and this rose to 34 percent by 1861, as Catholic rural
migrants entered the city in search of employment, although by the beginning of the twentieth
century Catholic numbers had fallen again to 24 percent. The nineteenth-century French traveler
to Ireland Madame de Bovet wrote in her Three Months’ Tour in Ireland, published in 1891,
“Belfast is the battleground of religions, a Protestant stronghold in the midst of Catholic and
apostolic Erin and the zeal of both sides is quickened by contact.”15 While sectarian strife may
not have been characteristic of this urban settlement from the outset, particularly when the town
was overwhelmingly Protestant, from the nineteenth century onward, religious and political
antagonism heightened and openly violent exchanges often rotated around rituals like the
Orangemen’s Twelfth of July parades. In part, these conflicts were reproductions of animosities
between Catholic and Protestant rural societies, like the Defenders and Peep-of-Day Boys, carried
to Belfast through rural to urban migration.16 Although Protestants were numerically denominated
by the Church of Ireland (Anglicans) and Presbyterians, there were numerous others smaller
groups including Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, and Congregationalists, so that by 1900 there
were only nineteen Catholic churches and over two hundred non-Catholic places of worship.
As the nationalist movement gathered pace across nineteenth-century Ireland, antagonism and
sometimes-intense violence ensued in the microcosm of divided opinion that Belfast represented.17
And this found expression in the social geography of the city itself. Residential and, to a
lesser but also significant extent, employment segregation characterized the nineteenth century
and has continued into the twenty first century. By 1901 more than 60 percent of families lived
in streets where at least 90 percent of the occupants shared the same religion. And Catholic areas
tended to be more segregated than Protestant ones, reflecting the class composition of each group,
where Catholics worked as domestic servants within wealthy Protestant households. As Stephen
Royle has observed “segregation might be seen as a cause and an effect of sectarian strife.”18
Moreover street names became bywords for the religious composition of an area: “Mention of
Smithfield, Hercules Street or Pound Street (usually just called the Pound) identified Catholics,
whilst Sandy Row was synonymous with Protestants.”19 Overlaying the geographies of residential
segregation were divisions in employment, both in terms of particular industries but also with
respect to religiously based divisions of labor within specific industries or employers. While
Catholics were employed in good numbers in the linen industry, they formed a tiny minority of
248 Johnson
employees in the city’s shipbuilding sector and, in aggregate terms based on the 1901 Census,
“were significantly over-represented in unskilled and poorly paid occupations, while the
average ratable valuation of Catholic houses was two-thirds that of Protestant dwellings.”20 Such
inequalities, fuelled by periodic purges of Catholics from workplaces, for instance, as took place
in 1857, served to fuel the fan of political agitation and sectarian division and mapped onto to
a wider discourse across Ireland for Catholic emancipation, land reform, and ultimately moved
towards political reform that would rescind the Act of Union (1801) and lead to a path of political
independence for Ireland.21 It is within this context that the R.M.S. Titanic was built and would
fashion how the legacy of its sinking would be publicly forgotten or remembered within the city.
Samson and Goliath: Harland and Wolff
William Dargan had redeveloped the harbor in the 1840s, providing the deep-water
Victoria Channel and making the port accessible to even the largest ships of the day. Traffic to the
port increased significantly making it the biggest in Ireland, and creating a 30 percent increase in
ships coming into the port from mid-century to 1914. Even into the twentieth century, new docks
were erected to accommodate this expansion. These included, for instance, Spencer and Dufferin
Docks (1872), York Dock (1876), and Thompson Graving Dock (1911). In the early nineteenth
century there were a few shipbuilding enterprises constructing wooden vessels, and the first
steam-powered ship, the Belfast, left the docks in 1820 on its maiden voyage to Liverpool. These
early shipbuilding companies were located in the County Antrim side of the River Lagan, but
with the improvements of the 1840s, much shipbuilding activity moved to Victoria Island on the
Co Down side. A small company, Thompson and Kirwin established premises adjacent to the
patent slip on Queen’s Island, followed by Edward Hickson, who wished to extend his foundry
and expand his business of building iron ships. He employed Edward Harland from Yorkshire,
who had been an engineer on the Tyne and the Clyde and had served an apprenticeship with
the notable railway magnate Robert Stephenson. Hickson’s business floundered and he offered
the shipyard to Harland. In 1858 Harland accepted his invitation, bought the original shipyard
on Queen’s Island, and extended it by acquiring more land so that the entire enterprise covered
1.4 hectares. And so was born the Edward James Harland and Company shipbuilding firm. He
recruited staff from the Tyne shipyards in Newcastle as well as employing the nephew of his
friend, the Liverpool ship-owner Gustav Schwabe, Gustav Wolff as his assistant. Within three
years, Wolff was elevated to partner in the firm and the company was renamed Harland and
Wolff.22
From the outset, they specialized in building passenger ships, particularly for the White
Star Line shipping company, to coincide with the onset of mass migration especially from Europe
to North America. The Harbour Commissioners were also further expanding harbor facilities on
the Queen’s Island side of the river, opening the Abercorn Basin and Hamilton Graving Dock,
both close to Harland and Wolff’s premises in 1867. The success of the company continued and
by 1870 there were 2,400 men employed in the shipyard. The company continued to expand their
works, building new berthing and graving docks gantries to hasten production and re-equipped
engine and boiler works. They also hired William Pirrie as chief draughtsman and he became a
partner in 1874. Harland died in 1895, an occasion that was marked by a huge funeral in Belfast,
and Pirrie took over the Chairmanship of the company. By 1899 the shipyard had built the world’s
largest ship, the Oceanic.23 This was followed by the erection of the new Thompson Graving Dock
in 1911, from where the Olympic and the Titanic were built, each marking a watershed for being
the world’s largest ships ever built. The workforce had expanded to around fourteen thousand
employees, mainly men and primarily Protestant. And it was from this yard in 1912 that the
world’s most infamous ocean liner departed. This overview provides the historical framework
from which we can interpret the “story” of the city presented at the Titanic Belfast museum.
While the museum’s principal focus is on the making of the ship itself, this cannot be readily
separated from the deeper context that made Belfast the heartland of heavy industry in Ireland in
the latter decades of the nineteenth century and a hub for shipbuilding. The museum’s account is
inflected by this narrative, albeit it selectively.
Titanic Quarter and the re-making of Belfast’s Maritime Heritage
Since the 1970s with the decline of traditional heavy industries, particularly shipbuilding
and its associated trades, in the urban centers of the West, developers, city planners, and in
some instances conservationists, have seen these spaces as potential nodes for regeneration and
gentrification. Derelict dockland areas have been transformed into leisure, retail, and residential
areas and, in some instances, centers for new service industries.24 Early examples in San Francisco
and Boston illustrated the potential for these dockland locales to be transformed and revitalized
areas of the city, offering waterside vistas, historic building fabric, and a post-industrial chic that
would appeal to both to incoming residents and tourists.25 The success of these early examples
prompted other cities to follow suit, in what is sometimes referred to as a “waterfront Renaissance,”
and created what some commentators consider a uniform aesthetic of bland consumption.26
From the context of a very successful shipbuilding company on the eve of the First World
War with the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons in April 1912
and an Ulster characterized by heightened political tensions about the constitutional question
(leading to the signing of the Ulster Covenant in September 1912), the R.M.S. Titanic left Belfast
on its maiden voyage. In the intervening decades in Northern Ireland and up until the 1980s,
according to John Wilson Foster, the ship had been all but erased from public memory, “given
the fact that Harland and Wolff was the biggest single shipyard in the world for some decades,
and at the leading edge of passenger ship development and design, very little has been done,
even with the major figures involved, let alone the culture they both embodied and inhabited.”27
A variety of explanations have been offered for this absence, erasure, or omission about the city
and shipyard from where the famous ship emanated. Some suggest that Harland and Wolff itself
sought to avoid too much additional publicity about the shipyard in the wake of the disaster
and thus positively discouraged histories of the company being written. Others claim that the
ship’s sinking was a badge of shame for Belfast’s predominantly (but not exclusively) Protestant
shipbuilding workforce and consequently silenced the ship’s memory locally. Some also assert
that although Catholics might have secretly, at the time, regarded the disaster as a well-deserved
punishment for the city’s maritime industries and thus dismissed it, in a post-partition context
they increasingly came to see the shipyards in general, and Harland and Wolff in particular, as
representations of the sectarian character of employment practices in the industry and one of the
sources of their discontent. There is some merit in all these perspectives and the political context
of the decade immediately after the ship’s sinking, ultimately resulting in Ireland’s partition in
1921, all eclipsed the significance of R.M.S. Titanic’s demise in public’s consciousness.28 Everybody
wanted to forget about the sinking of this ship.
In the late 1990s however, after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, the Titanic Quarter
project was conceived. In part facilitated by the declining shipbuilding company’s desire to make
profit through land development, Harland and Wolff sold some of its land. The lead purchaser
in the transaction with responsibility for development of the Titanic Quarter was the Dublin-
based development company, Harcourt Developments. The concept architect appointed was the
Texas-born Eric Kuhne who was best know for his company’s development of the Bluewater
shopping center in Kent, England. The Northern Ireland Executive, Belfast City Council, and the
Northern Irish Tourist Board supported the Belfast project. Phase one of the project, titled “The
250 Johnson
Arc” began in 2007 and involved the building, through private financing, of over four hundred
seafront apartments, a hotel, and offices near the city’s entertainment venue, the Odyssey arena.
Corresponding, however, with the beginning of a substantial global and local downturn in the
economy, government-injected support was required to keep the project on track and thus the
Public Record Office Northern Ireland and the Belfast Metropolitan College were both relocated
to the area, with the state financing the leasing of the buildings from Harcourt Developments for
the next thirty years (Figure 3). The second phase of the development received outline planning
permission in 2007 and final permission in 2009, for a proposal that included the building of more
apartments, shops, restaurants, and offices. Moreover, to mark the then-upcoming centenary,
Titanic Belfast (or the Titanic Signature Project as it was called then) formed the epicenter of the
plan.29
Figure 3. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland located in the Titanic Quarter.
Wherever the explanation lies for the collective erasure of the Titanic’s history in the city
of its birth, the rejuvenation of the memory of the ship’s homeport has become part of the wider
post-conflict “peace” dividend. For some “the simplistic narrative of the ‘Titanic story’ being
promulgated by development interests rides roughshod over the more sensitive and profound
cultural imagination which Titanic should evoke in the city of its birth.”30 This, it is claimed,
accentuates the myth of the Titanic by de-coupling its history from debates about the safety
provisions on the liner built by Harland and Wolff, ignoring the general hostility of the company’s
management and owners to the Irish independence movement, and overlooking the fact that
the small number of Catholics employed in the shipyard periodically faced sectarianism in the
workplace.31 Examining the promotional literature of those responsible for developing the Titanic
Quarter, Etchart concludes that the language of “neutrality” which pervades this policy “can stir
the feeling of alienation and marginalization among the local communities.”32 While others, who
have observed the broader efforts at normalization projects within the city claim “the geopolitical
fault lines of the city are drawn ever tighter today than they were when I was growing up in
the upper north side of the city in the 1950s.”33 Moreover, the creation of a brand new building
on Queen’s Island has attracted criticism because one of the few remaining original structures
associated with the building of the ship, the company’s drawing offices, have lain derelict. As
Neill observes, “Acting as spatial aides to more mature personal and collective reflection and
memory work, the Drawing Offices [of Harland and Wolff] in their forlornness, decay and neglect
on the eve of the centenary of the Titanic disaster still bore visible and authentic witness to past
events.”34 While there are some plans to convert the offices into a themed five-star Titanic hotel
which would involve radically altering the building’s interior, it is certainly unfortunate that
the planners, government, and private capital did not see the potential of restoring the Drawing
Offices and opening them to the public as a museum space that would highlight the conditions
under which the ship’s design was conceived, planned and executed. However, let’s now turn to
examine how the new Titanic Belfast tells the story of the city’s infamous ship.
Not dark tourism: Titanic Belfast
Titanic Belfast, it is claimed, is designed as a visitor experience rather than as a museum
per se, and while the two are certainly not mutually exclusive kinds of space, a focus on experience
and the manner in which the space is organized encourages the viewer to take a chronological
“journey” through the exhibit where a linear narrative of events is portrayed and communicated.35
While the building encompasses a total area of 10,000 m2, the exhibition galleries themselves cover
around 2,500 m2, about a quarter of space available, while retail, catering, temporary exhibition,
conference space, corporate entertaining, and education/community spaces use the remaining
square footage (Figure 4). The exhibition is spread across nine galleries and over three floors,
and it spans more than one hundred years, although the main focus of the display centers on
the period from the 1890s to the 1910s. Rather than using material artifacts from this period of
Belfast’s industrial history, this experience-centered museum conveys its story mainly through
photographs, film footage, narration, text, reconstructions, music, and the very occasional original
artifact. Some authors claim that this approach to museum practice replicates “the current turn
away from ideas that particularize objects as the primary element to convey information towards
more experience-orientated thinking…The contemporary museum, with its focus on the primacy
of performance, sometimes finds itself in danger of adopting manipulative strategies.”36 However,
all museums involve processes of selection and interpretation, even those more overtly centered
on the display of “authentic” objects and artifacts. Unlike some of the tours provided by black
cab operators in the city that bring visitors along the zones of separation and the “peace walls”
that separate Catholics and Protestants in certain neighborhoods in the city, the museum is not
252 Johnson
attempting to project a “dark tourism” experience.37 In that sense the museum stands apart from
the political tensions that gripped the city during the “Troubles” and continue to reverberate in
the post-conflict environment.
The first gallery of the museum, “Boomtown Belfast,” charts the industrial base
underpinning the city’s economic success from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Using
projected images including maps and photographs; soundscapes including oral testimony; a few
original artifacts; and lots of text, the viewer is introduced to the social and industrial context of
the shipbuilding city. Its major industries and their factories––the linen mills, the Sirocco factory,
rope making––are presented in an atmosphere that attempts to convey something of the bustle
of the busy, industrial city. From the scale of the city, one then moves metaphorically into the
Harland and Wolff shipyard itself, some of the original gates to the premises are used, [Figure 5]
and into its drawing office, where some of the key players in the shipyard’s staff are introduced.
These include Thomas Andrews, the Titanic’s designer; Lord Pirrie, the Company Chairman;
John Arthurs, a Harland and Wolff cabinet maker; Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line Chairman;
and Mary Sloan as one of White Star Line’s stewardesses on board the Titanic. Early drawings
of the ship are presented. Overall, some flavor of the social composition of industrial Belfast is
conveyed, including the numbers of women employed in the linen factories and samples of wage
scales of workers employed in industrial labor in general. This section of the museum connects
most directly with the history of the industrialization of Belfast highlighted earlier. A time series
Figure 4. Entrance to Titanic Belfast.

of Belfast maps illustrates the city’s geographical expansion as its economic base deepens. Moreover,
a map of the British Empire with a voice-over commenting on its extent and global influence
gestures towards the wider context in which Belfast operated at the height of Britain’s overseas
empire. Although this links to some of the reasons why shipbuilding and ancillary industries
were so successful in Belfast in the second half of the nineteenth century, what is not addressed is
the complexity of the city’s and Ireland’s relationship with that empire.38 Acknowledging that not
all the city’s citizens were supporters of the empire or that some saw themselves as existing in a
colonial relationship with Britain would have added nuance to the presentation. Thus, while this
opening gallery does communicate a sense of a bustling and energetic industrial city and echoes
some merits of industrial and popular museums, it does little to translate much about the religious
divisions within the city more broadly or within the shipbuilding industry in particular.39 To that
extent, the narrative is generally de-politicized.
The second gallery, “The Shipyard,” is focused more directly on the literal nuts and bolts
entailed in building a major liner in the second decade of the twentieth century. A scaffolding to
replicate a third of the height of the Arrol Gantry, built specifically to aid the construction of the
Olympic and the Titanic, gives something of the scale of the operation. The visitor can then take a
“ride” through a re-creation of the ship’s hull to try to envisage and imagine the work involved in
building the ship. The labor-intensive and grueling nature of the working conditions is conveyed
through an explanation and display of the process of riveting. Moreover, this part of the tour is
Figure 5. Entrance gates to Harland and Wolff shipyard.

254 Johnson
also a soundscape, reproducing the endless clanging of hundreds of hammers constantly hitting
iron and the negative effect this had on the workers’ hearing. This section of the gallery attempts
to immerse the visitor into the intimate environment of building a major ship and the day-to-day
working conditions of the labor force involved.
The third gallery, “The Launch,” portrays the spring day in May 1911 when the Titanic
was launched into Belfast Lough, a scene witnessed by one hundred thousand spectators. This
part of the museum brings the exterior landscape of Belfast’s docklands into the gallery, as a
large picture window enables the visitor to view Slipway No. 3 directly from where the ship was
released. It also offers a panorama of the current docks and slipways as ships move up and down
the channel. Although the city no longer builds any ships, the view does convey the continuing
role of the port in the larger Belfast economy and allows the viewer to witness the redevelopment
taking place here in the twenty-first century.40
The fourth gallery, “The Fit-Out,” documents the interior fitting out of the ship. The
processes involved in making the ship suitable for voyage are highlighted from the heavy
engineering of boiler room and engine fitting, to the trades involved in the interior design of the
ship’s private and public rooms. This section of the museum, again, connects shipbuilding in
Belfast to the other industries in the city and in so doing broadens the narrative from the specifics
of the Titanic to the wider economic context. From the cabinet makers designing the furniture to
the textile workers and seamstresses providing the linen for the ship, the viewer is aided in
Figure 6. Titanic Launch – Slipway No. 3.

appreciating that there were many hands involved in the making of the Titanic and its economic
significance seeped into many different sectors of the city’s economy. Over three thousand
tradesmen and women were employed in the fit-out process that was completed in under a year.
This gallery also contains one-to-one reconstructions of First-, Second- and Third-class cabins,
which allow the viewer to observe how the different social classes were accommodated. The
display offers both an insight into the quality of the fittings in each class but also the surprising
“luxury” of the cabins even for Third Class passengers. There is also a scaled model of the ship
as well as a 3-D display that allows a virtual tour from the ship’s boiler room to the Captain’s
bridge. This section of the tour is more intimate in scale, although lots of the photographs used
to illustrate the interior decoration are drawn from other White Star liners, rather than the Titanic
itself. This part of the tour is also more feminine in focus, emphasizing the luxury travel that the
White Star Line sought to provide, and how this was translated through its interior design. What
this section fails to pay attention to were the safety features deployed in the ship’s layout and
provisioning. And this type of omission contributes to some of the mythology surrounding the
ship’s preparedness for any potential accidents.41
Gallery five, “The Maiden Voyage,” creates a celebratory atmosphere as the ship leaves
Belfast and staff/passengers board in Southampton. If the previous gallery focused on the huge
task of fitting out the ship to the standards demanded by the White Star Line, this gallery outlines
how the ship was provisioned and the quantities of food and beverages taken on board, for instance
forty thousand eggs and eight thousand cigars. The class contrasts between different types of
passengers are highlighted and one can glean a sense of how the social hierarchies of the ship
operated at the micro-scale. Food and supplies provisioning become representations for the class
divisions on the ship and serve a symbolic role for the visitor. The photographic images taken by
the Irish Jesuit priest, Fr. Frank Browne, who boarded at Southampton and disembarked at Cobh
(Queenstown), provide a rich visual record of everyday life on the ship, and the archive of these
images has supplied source material for many books and other interpretations of the Titanic’s
story.42 This section of the museum is upbeat in tone and provides no hint of the impending doom.
“The Sinking,” the theme of gallery six, is evoked through a staging of affect that challenges
senses other than the visual. A change in light conditions and a lowering of temperature in the
gallery, accompanied by a soundscape, presages the ship’s sinking. If Gibson’s observation that
tourism researchers “are now analyzing the other senses and how encounters are experienced
in an affective, embodied fashion,” is true, it’s also the case that museum designers are trying to
engage the visitor at a multisensory level.43 The ship’s log lists are reproduced, including weather
forecasts, ice warnings, and the Morse SOS messages sent to other ships as the Titanic began to
falter. There are also audio clips of survivors’ oral history of their experience and images of the
press reports that surfaced in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. This montage demonstrates
how news was transmitted and the divergent nature of the representation of the ship’s sinking
in the media’s haste to get their reports out into the public sphere. The ship’s final sinking is
depicted through the use of four hundred life jackets projected onto an image of the ship.
Gallery seven is devoted to “The Aftermath.” Two key themes anchor the story in this
gallery. Firstly, the two public inquiries into the disaster (one in the US and the other in UK) are
portrayed through text panels, voiceovers, and visual evidence, demonstrating the immediate
controversy surrounding interpretation of what happened and why the ship sank. Straddled
between the representation of the inquires is a full-size replica of one of Titanic’s life boats,
perhaps suggesting to the reader that the absence of a sufficient number of lifeboats on the ship
lay at the heart of the casualty lists produced by the accident. Secondly, there is an online database
provided where the visitor can investigate the statistics related to the disaster by searching the
passenger list. This is calibrated by gender, age, nationality, port of embarkation, occupation,
256 Johnson
and class of travel. This database provides the visitor with a wealth of interesting information
about the profile of the passengers and the survival rates of different groups. It is interactive and
enables the visitor to make decisions about the type of information they seek to retrieve.
The penultimate gallery, “Myths and Legends,” charts how the Titanic’s demise has
entered the public’s imagination through fiction, film, poetry, and drama, and allows the public
to explore how some myths about the ship have been portrayed and cultivated. The final section
of the museum is devoted to the Titanic Beneath, which opens with an introduction to Professor
Robert Ballard, the oceanographer and explorer who discovered the ship’s wreck in 1985. In a
projection theatre with screens 12 m by 9 m, visitors can observe the sunken ship based on the
thousands of photographs taken by Ballard and his team during their investigation. The final
two galleries are more centered on the ship’s afterlife and its role in contemporary academic and
fictional studies, and are consequently more removed from the city in which the ship was built.
Post-conflict and post-colonial legacies
The development of the Titanic Quarter in Belfast replicates many of the dockside
regeneration projects practiced in port cities across the globe. To that extent, it mirrors some of
the same design principles and evocations of a maritime past that literally anchor such waterfront
renaissance projects. Historical geographers, sociologists, and planning experts have highlighted
some of the shortcomings of such urban projects, particularly in relation to their effect on dockside
communities and the history they seek to project. A number of characteristics differentiate Belfast
from some of these other quayside developments, however. First, the redevelopment of Belfast’s
port area hinges on a historical reimagining of a maritime disaster that quickly entered the
public’s imagination and popular mythology as the most significant ship’s sinking in history.
Tying the city’s shipbuilding past and economic future so closely with what many would consider
a failed venture is both ironic and brave. Second, the erasure of the memory of the Titanic from the
public sphere in Belfast until at least the 1980s reinforces the extent to which this episode in the
city’s history is so closely tied to the political consequences of nineteenth-century conflict about
Home Rule, partition in 1921, and the subsequent Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Protestants
and Catholics in the city, the sinking of the Titanic represented much more than an engineering
failure or an unlucky collision with a North Atlantic iceberg, and thus, albeit for different
reasons, memorializing the Titanic was neglected. Third, the development of consociational
political arrangements under the terms of the Belfast Agreement provided the preconditions
to conceive of using the Titanic’s history as a cornerstone for promoting reconciliation through
the regeneration of the docklands. And this is embodied in Titanic Belfast. While the museum
shares many of the features of contemporary approaches to museum design, two aspects of the
story relayed are worth noting, even in a post-conflict context. At the macro-level although the
museum effectively focuses on the wider industrial context of the city from which Harland and
Wolff would emerge, the political and cultural framework are too hidden beneath the surface. The
links between the industrialization of Belfast, its own colonial history, and its deep connections
with Britain’s empire could have been highlighted in ways which would have enriched the story
and added to its complexity. To ignore the fact that nineteenth-century Belfast was a heavily
segregated city, where nationalist and unionist voices came into verbal and at times physical
conflict, and where differences over the “national question” often supplanted other points of
unity, especially among the city’s working class, is an opportunity missed. Like many other
post-conflict societies, there is a fine balancing act to be performed between remembering and
forgetting in an effort to circumvent any widespread return to violence.44 In Sierra Leone, for
instance, the erasure of Indigenous histories from heritage preservation policies may undermine
the fragile peace, while Winter warns in the context of Cambodia that “heritage and tourism risk
Cambodia once again trapping itself in a mono-cultural, mono-ethnic, nationalism.”45 The story of
the Titanic, therefore, could have been more critically tackled precisely because it has the potential
to embody some of the deep-seated differences of view and experience that have undergirded
the conflict, yet not directly resurrect memories of violence between unionist and nationalist.
In that sense the museum might have taken the “long view” and treated Belfast’s industrial
past as part of a wider debate about its status as kingdom or colony. And at the micro-level of
particular industries (especially shipbuilding, and Harland and Wolff in particular) the religious
composition of the workforce, sectarianism within the workplace, and political activism among
the employees, as well as employers, could have been more explicitly embraced in the narrative
that the museum projected. Acknowledging some of the divisive practices at the shipyards and
the ideologies underpinning them by those working and living in the docklands at the time of
the Titanic’s construction could have opened up the conversation and contributed to the dialogue
about how the past is dealt within a post-conflict society. The wounds of the Troubles have not
been obliterated from the Belfast landscape since the signing of the Belfast Agreement, and the
story of the Titanic could have been mobilized more explicitly as a vehicle through which highly
contested versions of the past could be addressed by the people living and working in the ship’s
birthplace.
NOTES
1 Étienne Arnaud, dir., Saved from the Titanic (USA: Universal Pictures, 1912).
2 Werner Klingler and Herbert Selpin, dirs., Titanic (Germany: UFA, 1943).
3 Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Holt, 1955); Roy Baker, dir., A Night to
Remember (UK: J. Arthur Rank, 1958).
4 Charles Walter, dir., The Unsinkable Molly Brown (USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1964);
James Cameron, dir., Titanic (USA: Paramount, 1997); Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of
the Titan (London: Hesperus, 2012); Richard Davenport-Hines, “Titanic” Lives: Migrants
and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew (London: Harper, 2012); Andrew Wilson, Shadow of the
“Titanic” (London: Simon and Shuster, 2012)
5 Thomas Laqueur, “Why Name a Ship after a Defeated Race?”, London Review of Books 35, no.
2 (2013): 3010.
6 Douglas Dalby, “Raising the Memory of the Titanic, and a City’s Role in Its Creation”, New
York Times, April 6, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/world/europe/belfast-
embraces-the-titanic.html?_r=0 (accessed March 28, 2014).
7 William J.V. Neill, “Return to Titanic and Lost in the Maze: The Search for Representation of
‘Post-conflict’ Belfast,” Space and Polity 10, no. 2 (2006): 109-120.
8 Gerry Kearns and Chris Philo, eds., Selling Places: City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present
(London: Pergamon, 1993); Brian Graham and Paul Howard, eds., The Ashgate Research
Companion to Heritage and Identity (London: Ashgate, 2008); Nuala C. Johnson, “Framing the
Past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland,” Political Geography, 18, no.
2 (1999): 187-207; Johnson, “Narratives of Nationhood and the Making of National Space,”
in Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, eds., Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge,
2003), 89-105.
9 David Atkinson, “Kitsch Geographies and the Everyday Spaces of Social Memory,”
Environment and Planning A 39, no. 3 (2007): 521-540.
10 Esther Addley and Henry McDonald, “Will Titanic Belfast do for the City What the
Guggenheim did for Bilbao,” Guardian, March 23, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
uk/2012/mar/23/titanic-belfast-guggenheim-bilbao (accessed March 28, 2014).
11 Gerry Kearns, “Irish Historical Geography: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Legacies,”
Historical Geography, 41 (2013): 22-34, 22.
258 Johnson
12 Jonathan Bardon, Belfast: An Illustrated History, (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1982).

13 Stephen A. Royle, Portrait of an Industrial City: “Clanging Belfast,” 1750-1914 (Belfast: The
Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in association with the Ulster Historical
Foundation, 2011).
14 S. J. Connolly and Gillian McIntosh, “Whose City: Belonging and Exclusion in the
Nineteenth-Century Urban World,” in Belfast 400: People, Place and History, ed. S. J. Connolly
(Liverpool UK: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 237-270, 256.
15 Quoted in Royle, “Workshop of the Empire, 1820-1914,” in Belfast 400, ed. Connolly, 198-235,
217.
16 Connolly and McIntosh, “Whose City.”
17 Bardon, Belfast; Connolly, Belfast 400.
18 Royle, “Workshop of the Empire,” 219.
19 Royle, Portrait, 88
20 Connolly and McIntosh, “Whose City,” 249.
21 Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988).
22 Michael Moss and John R. Hume, Shipbuilders of the World: 125 years of Harland and Wolff,
Belfast 1861-1986, (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1986).
23 Ibid.
24 B.S. Hoyle and David Pinder, eds., European Port Cities in Transition (London: Belhaven
1992).
25 Brian Graham, “Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture,” Urban Studies 39, nos. 5-6
(2002): 1003-1017.
26 Atkinson, “Kitsch Geographies.”
27 John Wilson Foster, “Titanic: History or Heritage,” in Relaunching Titanic: Memory and
Marketing in the New Belfast, eds. William J.V. Neill, Michael Murray, and Berna Grist
(London: Routledge 2014), 14-30, 15.
28 Ibid.
29 Neill, Murray and Grist, Relaunching Titanic.
30 William J.V. Neill, “The Debasing of Myth: The Privatization of Titanic Memory in
Designing the ‘Post-Conflict’ City,” in Relaunching Titanic, eds. Neill, Murray, and Grist, 63-
87, 63.
31 Moss and Hume, Shipbuilders of the World.
32 Joana Etchart, “The Titanic Quarter in Belfast: Building a New Place in a Divided City,”
Nordic Irish Studies 7 (2008): 31-40, 35.
33 Gerald Dawe, “The Revenges of the Heart: Belfast and the Poetics of Space,” in The Cities of
Belfast, eds. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 199-210, 199.
34 Neill, “The Debasing of Myth,” 79.
35 James Alexander, “Titanic Belfast––City of Experience: Belfast’s Titanic Signature Project,”
in Relaunching Titanic, eds. Neill, Murray and Grist, 88-97.
36 Pauline Hadaway, “Re-Imagining Titanic, Re-Imaging Belfast,” in Relaunching Titanic, eds.
Neill, Murray and Grist, 55-62, 60.
37 P.R. Stone, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related
Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions,” Tourism, 54, no. 2 (2006): 145-160.
38 Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004);
David Lloyd, “Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies,” in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory,
eds. Clare Carol and Patricia King (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 48-
49.
39 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London:
Verso 1996).
40 Frederick W. Boal and Stephen A. Royle, eds., Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century
(Belfast: Blackstaff, 2006).
41 Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street, eds., The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in
Visual and Literary Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
42 E.E. O’Donnell, Father Browne’s Titanic Album: A Passenger’s Photographs and Personal Memoir
(Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2011 [1997]).
43 Chris Gibson, “Tourism,” in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, eds. Nuala
Johnson, Rich Schein, and Jamie Winders (Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 465-477, 472.
44 Tim Winter, “Post-conflict Heritage and Tourism in Cambodia: The Burden of
Angkor,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 14, no. 6, (2008): 524-539.
45 Paul Basu, “Confronting the Past: Negotiating a Heritage of Conflict in Sierra Leone,”
Journal of Material Culture, 13, no. 2 (2008): 233-247; Tim Winter, “Post-Conflict Heritage and
Tourism in Cambodia: the Burden of Angkor,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14, no.
6 (2008): 524-539, 537.
West Coast Booms and East Coast Busts:
Methamphetamine Commodity Chains
of the 1970s and 1980s
Aaron H. Gilbreath
Department of Political Science and Global Affairs
City University of New York: College of Staten Island
ABSTRACT: This article attempts to explain the peculiar western distribution

of methamphetamine production and distribution from a commodity network
perspective. The author finds that the drug’s western bias dates back to the regulation
of a particular precursor, phenyl-2-propanone, in 1981. In reaction to that regulation,
producers on the West Coast developed a new method of producing the drug, which
resulted in a boom in both production and consumption in that region. East Coast
networks, on the other hand, partnered with traditional organized crime to smuggle
the precursor into the country. This resulted in increased persecution from police
agencies, and the eventual dismantling of East Coast methamphetamine networks.
I
n 2003 at the height of the national methamphetamine epidemic, Rogelio Guevara, the chief
of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), was called to testify before
Congress regarding the perceived boom in the drug’s availability. Law enforcement officials
had shut down 9,324 clandestine methamphetamine labs nationwide in 2002, and by the end of the
year in which Guevara was testifying, that total would be 10,332.1 Although methamphetamine,
or meth as it is often called, was certainly in the public consciousness, its presence was not evenly
dispersed across the country.2 In fact, the distribution of methamphetamine labs reflected what
an expert from the Office of National Drug Control Policy called a distinct “lack of uniformity.”3
The other major problem drugs in the United States—marijuana, cocaine, and heroin—
might show some variation in availability by region, but that variation is negligible compared
to the one exhibited by methamphetamine. A map of drug availability from the National Drug
Threat Assessment: 2003 reflects the truth in this observation (Figure 1). 4 Methamphetamine was
readily available west of the Mississippi, but largely absent from the rest of the country. In fact,
77.8 percent of methamphetamine labs seized in the country between 2000 and 2003 were found
in the West Central, Pacific, and Southwest regions designated by the Organized Crime Drug
Enforcement Taskforce Regions.5 However, when DEA Chief Guevara was asked to explain why
meth markets were so disproportionately encountered in the American West, he could not.6
The western concentration of methamphetamine in 2003, and to a lesser extent today,
is confounding on a number of levels. In the mid-twentieth century, the drug was available
in numerous over-the-counter and prescription preparations throughout the United States.7
Every part of the country had the opportunity to develop a taste for the stimulant. In fact,
methamphetamine was made a schedule II substance in 1971 precisely due to its being what an
editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine described as “perhaps the most serious drug of abuse
in the United States.”8 Data from the Client-Oriented Data Acquisition Program also showed
that amphetamine abuse in the 1970s was a nationally dispersed phenomenon, with no region
exhibiting a more significant predilection for abuse than any other.9
West Coast Booms and East Coast Busts 261
Figure 1. Drug availability by Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force region.10

Secondly, if demand was established everywhere, there is little apparent reason for there
to have been a lack of supply anywhere in the country. As a synthetic drug, meth can, theoretically,
be made anywhere. Meth labs have been found in houses, hotel rooms, trailers, car trunks, Igloo
coolers, back packs, and even soda bottles. The list of possible locations for production is almost
limitless. And yet, by 2003, a phenomenon (methamphetamine abuse) that was at one point
national in scale, had become strongly regionalized. Clandestine production showed a similar
distribution.
This article seeks to explain the processes behind the transition from national to regional
phenomenon through a historical analysis of methamphetamine commodity chains. Though rarely
presented in this manner, most of the illicit drugs consumed in the Unites States are commodities,
produced and distributed for profit like any licit good, though oftentimes by members of society
who have been deprived of access to other economic outlets.11 Gootenberg (2009) has summarized
how illicit drugs operate as commodities through an explanation of the heroin trade:
The again booming heroin trade can be seen as comprised of shifting patterns
of supply and demand, profit-seeking and risk-taking entrepreneurs, rationalized
labor and flexible-production schedules, extensive networks of middlemen and
retailers, transport and outsourcing dilemmas, product testing and product
substitution, all under crunching global competition.12
Economic geographers have long used commodity chain analyses. In an early explanation
of the technique, Gereffi et al. (1994) described how following a commodity through each
sequential stage of its life from raw material to consumed good could show “how production,
262 Gilbreath
distribution, and consumption are shaped by the social relations (including organizations) that
characterize the sequential stages of input acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, marketing,
and consumption.”13 More recently, geographers have begun to emphasize not just the actions
of producers and consumers, but also those of regulators whose decisions can create dramatic
changes in the institutional context within which firms operate, causing them to relocate both
production and sourcing.14
Few geographers have studied drugs at all, and very few have approached them from the
commodity chain perspective.15 Wilson and Zambrano (1994) produced the most significant study
of a single drug, analyzing the chains involved in the production and distribution of cocaine.16 In
doing so, they were able to demonstrate the manner in which legitimate chemical businesses in
the United States were implicated in the trade of cocaine through selling the chemicals that were
essential to the processing of coca leaves.
Since that seminal work, few geographers have taken up the gauntlet of drug chain
analysis. There have been geographical studies of drug markets and studies of the beginning of
the chains related to organically based drugs, but no one has undertaken a study of a chain in its
entirety since Wilson and Zambrano.17 Geographic analyses of methamphetamine have rarely,
if ever, taken a historical perspective, and have generally fallen into the category of statistical
analyses of lab seizures.18
This article applies the commodity chain perspective to methamphetamine networks
operating in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. The commodity chains associated with
methamphetamine are different from those of organically based drugs. Whereas cocaine is derived
from the coca leaf and heroin from the poppy, methamphetamine is produced in clandestine
laboratories without the need for organic ingredients. Its production, rather than relying on
particular environmental requirements, is dependent on a series of chemicals, the most important
of which are termed precursors, and are incorporated into the final product’s molecular structure
as a result of the production process.19 For the last three decades, federal and state governments
have attempted to disrupt illegal methamphetamine chains by limiting access to these precursor
chemicals.
Tracing the commodity chains associated with illicit drugs can be a difficult process.
Even licit firms often seek to obfuscate the chains associated with their products. Fortunately,
the chains that form around drugs are easier to trace from a historical perspective, after they
have been made visible through newspaper reporting, police action, and court cases. In the case
of methamphetamine, the chains often become visible at the moment of attempted precursor
acquisition, and it is possible to retrace them outward from those flashes of visibility.20
In analyzing the actions of actors in the commodity chains that formed around
methamphetamine after it was made a controlled substance in 1971, I demonstrate that the
peculiar geography of methamphetamine is a byproduct of decisions made by key actors in the
drug’s commodity chain in response to dramatic changes in the regulatory environment within
which they operated. Methamphetamine markets in the 1980s thrived in regions in which key
actors in the chain were able to adapt to new regulations, and withered in those regions where
criminal operatives were unable to overcome path dependency in their chain. Their success or
failure laid the groundwork for the peculiar geography of methamphetamine that continues
to this day. The findings demonstrate the explanatory efficacy of commodity chain analysis in
historical investigations of the illicit economy, and explain the roots of methamphetamine’s
peculiar distribution.
Methamphetamine in the 1970s

In May of 1971 in response to rising indicators of abuse, all members of the amphetamine
family of drugs, including methamphetamine, were made schedule II substances. At the time
of their scheduling, methamphetamine-based products were available in a dizzying array of
preparations from liquid ampoules for home injection to pills and inhalers, and were marketed
for a myriad of illnesses ranging from depression to narcolepsy.21
As a schedule II substance, the indications for which meth could be prescribed were severely
limited, and all prescriptions for the drug were made non-renewable. The drug’s licit commodity
chain also became highly regulated, with the government limiting the number of firms that could
produce it, and establishing strict production quotas. By 1973 legal methamphetamine production
was reduced to 373 kilograms, a 90 percent reduction from the peak year of 1970.22 Prior to the
scheduling, it was estimated that 92 percent of all amphetamines abused nationwide had been
legally produced and then diverted to the black market, so such reductions were significant to
both licit and illicit markets.23
The effect of the new scheduling was to virtually eliminate the availability of legally
produced amphetamines for black market diversion. The impact on the drug’s illicit market was
dramatic, particularly because illicit methamphetamine producers did not immediately swoop in
to fill the void left by the government’s crackdown on amphetamines. In 1975, only eleven meth
labs were seized by the DEA nationwide. Without new producers entering the market, street
quality quickly declined. By 1973, after the extant supply of already diverted pills and ampoules
had been consumed, the percentage of drugs sold as amphetamines on the street that actually
contained them dropped significantly, to the point that, between 1975 and 1977 the average purity
of amphetamine purchased on the street was fifteen percent. Many of the speed injectors in former
epicenters of abuse moved on to other drugs, particularly heroin and barbiturates. The Speed
Kills campaign had also tarnished meth’s reputation among drug users so that fewer individuals
were trying it for the first time. In short, it was a drug in decline.24
Because of the dearth of methamphetamine on the street, the market price of the drug
increased tenfold between 1965 and 1975. This rise in price served as an incentive for more
individuals to enter the market, and as the decade of the 1970s wore on, the number of labs seized
began to climb steadily. By 1979 the total number of lab seizures had risen to 137, a 1,200 percent
increase from 1975.25
The networks behind the rising number of methamphetamine labs in the 1970s varied
significantly in their levels of sophistication and organization. Some were individuals and small
groups who took up methamphetamine manufacture as a way to support their own habit or
make a quick profit. In some parts of the country, traditional organized crime became involved in
the chain. However, the dominant organization type, or chain driver, for the drug in the 1970s and
1980s was the outlaw motorcycle gang (OMG).26 In fact, one of the drug’s street names, “crank,”
purportedly comes from its frequently being hidden for shipment in the crankcases of the Harley
Davidsons that gang members rode.
Most prominent among the motorcycle gangs involved in methamphetamine production
and distribution were the four major motorcycle gangs operating at the time—the Pagans,
Outlaws, Bandidos, and Hell’s Angels. With regionalized networks of chapters, hierarchical
governance structures, and a propensity towards crime and secrecy, OMGs were an ideal system
of organization for the distribution of drugs.27 They combined corporate efficiency with higher
levels of loyalty than one might expect in a large drug-trafficking organization. Furthermore,
the mobility of OMGs, their very raison d’être, made them nearly impossible to police because
their activities fell within no single jurisdiction. As Gil Amoroso, a DEA agent in Philadelphia,
264 Gilbreath
explained: “They have no boundaries. It’s nothing for them to get on a motorcycle, a car, a van,
and drive to Florida at the spur of a moment, whereas your local officials can’t go outside their
jurisdictional boundaries.”28
Meth distribution was a natural choice for the gangs. First, it was already popular among
club members. Second, its price per ounce made it profitable even in small amounts, and increased
its transferability. A member of the Bandidos explained the importance in less sophisticated terms:
“Everything in the whole club revolves around crank. You can’t ride a $10,000 motorcycle, have a
big gun collection, and take care of three 19-year-old ladies working in no body shop.”29
In 1980, federal officials estimated that OMGs controlled fifty percent of the
methamphetamine trade nationwide.30 However, the ways they engaged the market differed by
gang and region. On the West Coast, where little traditional organized crime existed, the Hell’s
Angels appear to have controlled a large portion of the industry at every level of the chain,
from material acquisition through production to distribution.31 On the East Coast, the Pagans
were forced to operate in cooperation with traditional organized crime around New York and
Philadelphia, primarily providing muscle and handling distribution.
No matter who was making it, the methamphetamine production process in the 1970s
used the chemical phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P, in combination with methylamine, as its
primary precursor. P2P methamphetamine production methods produce what is called “racemic
methamphetamine.”32 Methamphetamine is a chiral compound, meaning it has symmetrical
isomers. These isomers are referred to as levorotatory (l) and dextrorotatory (d) methamphetamine.
The two molecules behave in different ways. The levorotary-methamphetamine molecule
has sympathomimetic qualities (raises the heart rate and blood pressure, causes smooth
muscle contraction, etc.), but is not a strong central nervous system stimulant. Dextrorotary-
methamphetamine is the molecule that provides methamphetamine with the stimulant and
euphoriant qualities that make it a drug of abuse by promoting the release of dopamine and then
inhibiting its reuptake in the brain.33 A racemic mixture contains equal parts of levorotary- and
dextrorotary-methamphetamine.
In the 1970s, phenyl-2-propanone was not a controlled substance; its sale was completely
unregulated. Instead, the DEA relied on the cooperation of chemical sellers in what they called
the “Precursor Liaison Program.” Largely educational, this program taught chemical companies
to look for businesses or individuals that were buying the necessary combination of chemicals
to make illicit drugs, and then asked them to report those people. Participation was voluntary.
Norton J. Wilder, the DEA agent in charge of Philadelphia, estimated that 40 percent of the labs
seized nationwide in 1979 had been detected via the liaison program and the diligence of the
chemical companies.34 However, enterprising producers were able to acquire the necessary
precursors quite easily in a relatively unregulated market.
On February 11, 1980, in response to the 1,200 percent increase in methamphetamine
lab seizures over the latter half of the 1970s, the DEA made phenyl-2-propanone a controlled
substance, making its diversion to methamphetamine production a much more difficult
proposition. This new regulation, and the manner in which producers responded to it, set in
motion events that permanently altered the geography of methamphetamine in the United States.
On the West Coast, regulation led to innovation in the supply chain, the loosening of the Hell’s
Angels’ control of the market, and a boom in clandestine methamphetamine production. On the
East Coast, the scheduling further entrenched the relationship between the Pagans and traditional
organized crime, and eventually led to the drug’s fall from favor among eastern drug users. The
spatial variation in these responses rewrote the drug’s geography, leading to the agglomeration of
methamphetamine production in the West and Southwest and setting the stage for the eastward-
moving epidemic of the 1990s and 2000s.
A West Coast boom

Meth producers on the West Coast responded nimbly to the loss of P2P, and the region
became the center of methamphetamine innovation in the 1980s. As early as 1981, rather than
continuing to try to make meth with P2P, producers there began to adopt the Red-Phosphorus, or
Red-P method of methamphetamine production, which used ephedrine as the primary precursor.35
The new method caught on for a number of reasons. First, it circumvented the need for P2P. After
scheduling, only powerful criminal organizations such as the Hell’s Angels or traditional mafia
could find black-market sources of P2P and avoid being detected by the DEA. That option was not
readily available to small-scale producers. However, in the early 1980s, ephedrine was not even
on the government’s radar, meaning its sale was not monitored, and any potential cook could
easily buy it in bulk from wholesalers. Most other necessary ingredients could be purchased from
hardware stores.
The wide availability of the new precursor meant that many freelance producers could
enter the market. Small-scale cooks operating in groups of two or three appeared in large numbers,
each producing a small amount of product for personal use and sale. This type of network
was a far cry from the vast, vertically integrated, interstate drug-trafficking Hell’s Angels that
previously had driven the chain on the West Coast.36 DEA agent Ron D’Ulisse lamented how the
new method had changed the drug market in San Diego: ‘“Everyone and anyone can do it. We
were dealing with the motorcycle gangs, but now we find it’s amateur hour, with people who
don’t belong in the business cooking methamphetamine.’”37 The Los Angeles Times associated
the transition with increased volatility in San Diego: “Virtually unlimited access to precursor
chemicals drew a new breed of unsophisticated criminals into the methamphetamine business.
It was these entrepreneurs, cooking drugs in their suburban garages and city homes, who were
largely responsible for making the explosions, fires, and other dangers of drug manufacture
virtually an everyday part of life in San Diego.”38
Quality was another reason for the increasing popularity of the new Red-P method. The Red
Phosphorous method produces meth that is composed entirely of dextrorotary-methamphetamine
molecules, rather than the fifty/fifty racemic mixture found in meth produced from P2P. This
means that the meth made with the Red-P method is significantly more psychoactive than racemic
methamphetamine, and users get much more of the desired central nervous system stimulation
with each dose.39 To producers who were operating for profit, higher purity allowed the meth
coming out of the newer labs to be “stepped on,” or degraded with other products, at a higher
rate than P2P meth, which translates into higher yields and profits. To users, the purity meant that
the meth being made in Southern California after 1981 was a significantly more appealing form of
the drug than anything that had come before it.
It does not seem coincidental then, that Southern California and the rest of the West Coast
experienced a methamphetamine boom after the introduction of the Red-P method. Nationally,
the DEA seized eighty-eight labs in 1981. By 1989 that number had jumped to 652, with the West
Coast making up a disproportionate segment of that number. In 1987 California and Oregon
accounted for 61.7 percent of all meth labs seized in the U. S. In 1988 that number grew to 66
percent (Figure 2).40
As the 1980s wore on, more and more meth producers adopted the Red-P method. A
1990 report on the procedure by a DEA chemist described it as “the most common method of
manufacture of methamphetamine in the United States.”41 This was true, but only by a slim margin.
Of the 416 labs seized nationally in 1989 for which the manner of production was determined, 53
percent used the Red-P method and 47 percent used P2P.42 Regionality was strong. In Southern
California, the percentage of labs using Red-P was as high as 90 percent in 1988.43 Gilbreath (2012)
estimates that in 1988, 45 percent of all the Red-P labs seized nationally were found in San Diego
alone.44
266 Gilbreath
Figure 2. Methamphetamine Lab Seizures by the DEA for 1988.45
The percentage of all seized clandestine labs that were making methamphetamine also
grew throughout the 1980s. In 1981, methamphetamine labs made up 48 percent of the drug
labs seized by the DEA. By 1987 that number was 80 percent.46 On the streets in the 1980s
methamphetamine emerged as the best bet among street stimulants (not including cocaine)
to contain what it claimed, rather than another chemical. Puder et al. (1988) found that drugs
purporting to contain methamphetamine did so 93 percent of the time in 1983, up from roughly
23 percent in 1972.47
As the number of labs using the Red-P technique increased, so too did methamphetamine
use. In 1979 methamphetamine mentions in the Drug Abuse Warning Network system in San
Diego were statistically insignificant (Figure 3). In 1984 they represented 3.6 percent of emergency
room drug mentions, but by 1989, it was the drug mentioned second most frequently in local ERs,
and represented 12 percent of all drug mentions for the metropolitan area.48 This is not surprising
given that, in 1988, the National Institute on Drug Abuse concluded that the most important
factor in the spread of methamphetamine abuse was the presence of methamphetamine labs
within a community.49
Based on its usage rates and a steadily increasing number of lab seizures, San Diego soon
began to attract national attention as the meth capital of the United States. DEA operatives in
the area did much to encourage that reputation. One in particular, Ron D’Ulisse, was quoted in
newspapers throughout the 1980s. Agent D’Ulisse compared San Diego to Bogota in a conversation
with the Chicago Tribune in 1987.51 In 1988, he estimated to the Washington Post that San Diego
Figure 3. Emergency room mentions for methamphetamine from the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s
Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) system.50
produced twenty thousand pounds of methamphetamine per year, or as he put it, enough to keep
every man woman and child in the city high for six months.52
As the number of meth labs grew in California, the business of supplying precursor
chemicals and equipment to cooks became a big business. In Southern California, ephedrine was
being sold for twenty dollars a pound wholesale and $150-$230 a pound retail, a markup that
yielded profits from $10,000 wholesale to $50,000 retail.53 The DEA estimated that wholesalers were
selling more than ten thousand pounds of ephedrine per year in Southern California, enough to
make eight thousand to ten thousand pounds of meth. In 1986, the California Legislature sought
to end this business and the clandestine labs themselves by scheduling the chemicals involved.
Chemical companies (in this case wholesalers and retailers rather than producers) were quick to
fight the new law.
One enterprising chemical supply storeowner, Robert J. Miskinis, hired a lobbyist to
successfully delay the implementation of the law from 1986 until October of 1987. However, when
it was revealed that this lobbyist had been hired by a man whose company, RJM Laboratories,
had sold all of the essential ingredients to cook meth on at least 142 separate occasions between
1982 and 1984, the law’s implementation was pushed up to April 1, 1987.54 The new California
precursor legislation required that chemical sellers report all sales of meth precursors to the
state justice department. It also installed a twenty-one-day waiting period between reporting
the purchase and delivery of the chemicals. Over-the-counter cold medicine preparations were
excluded from the new law.
268 Gilbreath
The California regulations were tough, but of course West Coast methamphetamine
production was not confined to California (Figure 2). In the late 1980s, predictably, Oregon and
Washington experienced major upsurges in meth activity. Between 1983 and 1987 lab seizures
in Oregon grew from ten to 131, while in Washington they grew from zero to twenty-seven.55
Observers saw the growth as a direct result of producers fleeing persecution in California, and in
1987 both states passed chemical reporting laws almost identical to those of California in an effort
to push production out of their states.56
The chemicals listed in the new laws included anthranilic acid, ephedrine, methylamine,
phenylacetic acid, pseudoephedrine, lead acetate, and methyl formamide. As was the case in
California, the laws scheduled ephedrine and pseudoephedrine except in the form of cold pills, a
loophole that was quickly discovered by cooks. San Diego Police reported that lab seizures dipped
for only three months after the law’s implementation in California before they saw production
return to its previous levels.57
East Coast busts
Before the scheduling of P2P, methamphetamine use and production on the East Coast was
most prominent in Philadelphia and surrounding counties in the Delaware Valley. As was the case
in the rest of the country, clandestine production had begun there in the 1960s as the police cut
down on diversion of legally produced meth. Also following national trends, methamphetamine
use had declined in most former East Coast hot spots during the 1970s. Most drug users in this
section of the country turned to heroin or cocaine and did not return to meth as the decade wore
on. Eastern Pennsylvania was the exception. Philadelphia, in fact, was the only city in the entire
DAWN system to have a significant number of mentions for prescription methamphetamine
in 1979 (Figure 3). It was also the only metropolitan area for which mentions of “speed” (the
term used for nonprescription methamphetamine) ranked in the top ten of drugs mentioned
at admission.58 Meth’s popularity in Philadelphia makes sense given the drug’s demographics.
Since the 1950s, it had been the drug of choice for many dispossessed and working class whites
who used the stimulant as a means of extracting more hours out of the day, and Philadelphia in
the 1980s had a large, white, working-class population. It also had a well-established organized
crime element. As Jenkins (1992) explained: “It was almost inevitable that any city with a history
of well-entrenched labor racketeering [like Philadelphia] would also have a thriving business in
the manufacture and distribution of stimulant drugs.”59
By 1980 clandestine meth production had become enough of a problem locally that the
House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control held a meeting in Philadelphia to
assess the impact of the labs. In this hearing, local law enforcement referred to Philadelphia as
the methamphetamine capital of the United States.60 Much of the testimony that day focused on
the Pagans Motorcycle Club and the partnership it had formed with traditional organized crime.
Robert Walker, the congressman for the district, described the Pagans as simply hired muscle
for the mob. Although it is true that some members of Pagans had acted as paid assassins for
members of the Scarfo-Testa Mob, the overall relationship was far more complicated than that.61
Sergeant Robert Collison of the Delaware State Police argued that the Pagans had cornered the
market on meth in the area, testifying that “the street word is if you do not sell Pagan dope, or
Pagan methamphetamine or crank, you do not sell it.”62
The head of the intelligence division of the DEA, Frank Wickes, testified that traditional
organized crime partnered with the Pagans to finance methamphetamine operations, obtain the
necessary precursors, and find chemists to do the cooking.63 The Pagans handled lab setup, security,
and distribution of the final product. The Special Agent in Charge of the DEA in Philadelphia,
Norton Wilder, predicted that the scheduling of P2P would only entrench that relationship as the
market for P2P became increasingly lucrative and precarious.64
Wilder’s prediction proved prescient. As the 1980s wore on, the Pagans formed
partnerships with various organized crime units within Philadelphia. The groups involved
included not only members of the traditional Cosa Nostra Italian Mafia, but also members of the
Greek Mob, a Jewish and Irish group known as the “K&A Gang,” and African-American groups.65
The associations these mob members formed with the Pagans were not the top-down, corporate
models one might expect from traditional organized crime, but rather reflected an opportunistic
and temporary coming together of motivated parties.66 The mob members who interacted with
the Pagans did so of their own accord, rather than at the instruction of higher-ups within the
organizations. Those interactions were fluid and temporary, and almost always dealt with the
smuggling and trade of P2P.67
Because of the relationships formed between the Pagans and various members of organized
crime, methamphetamine production and distribution on the East Coast remained dependent
on P2P and in the hands of very few individuals in the 1980s. This lack of diversity directly
contributed to the decline of the East Coast methamphetamine market because police could more
easily identify and target important operators. Federal officials had been monitoring the activities
of traditional (that is to say ethnically-based) organized crime since the 1920s. In 1970, they passed
the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as a tool for prosecuting such
groups. At approximately the same time, the government also began to view Outlaw Motorcycle
Gangs as an organized criminal threat. With all groups involved in the market already under
government investigation in the 1980s, the methamphetamine networks around Philadelphia felt
the full brunt of governmental scrutiny.
Government officials were unsuccessful at prosecuting mob bosses such as Nicodemo
Scarfo for drug dealing under the Kingpin provisions of RICO, because the members of their
organizations who entered the methamphetamine market did so for themselves, seizing an
opportunity for quick profit. However prosecutors proved much more adept at convicting
smugglers of P2P. Throughout the 1980s members of the Greek Mob, the K&A gang, and
key Italian-American P2P suppliers from within the Bruno and Scarfo organizations were all
successfully prosecuted.68
The Pagans faced a similar fate. In 1984 and 1985, government officials arrested over fifty
members of the gang in the Delaware Valley region. Prosecutors focused on the group’s mother
club (the lead chapter), and by 1985, had successfully convicted the group’s president Paul “Ooch”
Ferry to eighteen years in prison. The vice president, sergeant at arms, and treasurer, along with
nearly half of the rest of the mother club, also received sentences of at least fifteen years. Because
their national organization was perhaps the most centralized and hierarchical of the Big Four,
these arrests were particularly crippling to the gang.69
The successful actions against methamphetamine on the East Coast had a rapid and
permanent effect on the market there. By 1989 the government had eliminated the body that
controlled most methamphetamine distribution in the region as well most sources for P2P.
Seizures declined in stepwise fashion. Philadelphia Police seized 105 pounds of meth in 1987,
but only fourteen pounds in 1988. In 1989 that number grew again to seventy-seven pounds, all
but two of which originated in one high profile bust. With a low-grade product in limited supply,
drug users soon moved on to other stimulants. In testimony before the House Select Committee
on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Robert F. Armstrong, the special assistant to the mayor for
drug control, stated in 1989 that crack had replaced methamphetamine as the drug of choice in
Philadelphia.70
Data from the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)
reflected the West Coast agglomeration and East Coast decline of methamphetamine at the end
of the 1980s (Figure 3).71 Among the cities included in the DAWN system, six had significant rates
270 Gilbreath
of methamphetamine abuse reported between 1985 and 1989: Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia,
Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco. Between 1985 and 1989 the number of emergency mentions
of methamphetamine rose from 726 to 2,336 nationally. Three cities, Dallas, Philadelphia, and San
Diego, accounted for 74 percent of those mentions in 1985, 63 percent in 1986, and 68 percent in
1987. However, as the number of mentions increased for San Diego (+501 percent) and Dallas
(+271 percent), the number of mentions in Philadelphia declined by 41.5 percent.72 Philadelphia’s
portion of national emergency room methamphetamine mentions dropped from 53 percent in
1985 to 4.5 percent in 1989.73
Conclusions
In the era presented here (primarily the 1980s), methamphetamine declined as a drug of
choice on the East Coast at the same time that it rose in prominence in the West. The unofficial
title of the methamphetamine capital of the United States reflected this change, as it moved from
Philadelphia in 1980 to San Diego in 1987. During the 1990s, the drug would continue to grow in
prominence on the West Coast before migrating steadily eastward in the 2000s.74 Policing agencies
in charge of both tracking and stopping the spread of drugs have historically been unable to
explain why methamphetamine has shown such a distinctively western distribution. However,
this study has disinterred the roots of the drug’s particular distribution through a historical
analysis of its commodity chains. By emphasizing methods of production and product sourcing,
I have shown that the western concentration of methamphetamine in the United States stems
from sourcing decisions and production techniques adopted in the wake of precursor regulation
established in 1980.
This should not be surprising. The long history of methamphetamine shows that changes
in the regulatory environment have consistently produced unexpected and problematic results.
Initial regulation of injectable ampoules led to the country’s first clandestine labs in San Francisco
in the 1960s.75 After the timeframe of this paper, regulation of ephedrine sales following the
Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act of 1988 opened an opportunity for market penetration by
Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations, who produced methamphetamine at an industrial scale
and greatly expanded the market.
The efficacy of the commodity chain perspective shown here demonstrates a need for
more historical geographical analysis of all sorts of illicit commodities. By analyzing not just
consumption, but production, distribution, and regulation as well, new insight can be offered on
these significant global phenomena that can be of use not just to academics, but also to society as
a whole.
NOTES
1 These numbers reflect data extracted from the National Clandestine Laboratory Seizure
System (NCLSS) in January 2011. National Clandestine Laboratory Seizure System. Report
extracted January 15, 2011. (Washington, DC: Drug Enforcement Agency, 2011).
2 J. Caulkins, “Methamphetamine Epidemics: An Empirical Overview.” Law Enforcement
Executive Forum 3, no. 4 (2003): 17-42.
3 House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, Facing the
Methamphetamine Problem in America, 109 Cong., 1st sess., June 18, 2003, 70.
4 National Drug Intelligence Center, National Drug Threat Assessment: 2002 (Washington DC:
Government Printing Office, 2002).
5 National Clandestine Laboratory Seizure System.
6 House Subcommittee, Facing the Methamphetamine Problem.
7 Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom, The Speed Culture: Amphetamine Use and Abuse in
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Nicholas Rasmussen, On Speed: The
Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
8 George R. Edison, “Amphetamines: A Dangerous Illusion,” Annals of Internal Medicine 7, no.
4 (1971): 608.
9 National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Drug Abuse Statistical Series: State
Statistics 1976 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977); National Institute on
Drug Abuse, Trend Report: January 1977 – September 1980 (Washington DC: Government
Printing Office, 1981).
10 NDIC, Threat Assessment 2002.
11 Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, Johannes Huessy, Bruce G. Taylor, and Daniel
Woods, “The Organization and Operation of Illicit Retail Methamphetamine Markets,”
Justice Policy Review 20, no. 10 (2010): 1-23; Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Rueter, “What
Can We Learn from Drug Prices?” Journal of Drug Issues 28, no. 3 (1998): 593-612; Johnathan
Caulkins and Peter Reuter, “Illicit Drug Markets and Economic Irregularities,” Socio
Economic Planning Sciences 40 (2006): 1-14; John E. Eck, “A General Model of the Geography
of Illicit Retail Marketplaces” in Crime and Place, ed. John E. Eck and David Weisburd
(Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1994); John E. Eck, “Drug Markets and Drug Places:
A Case-Control Study of the Spatial Structure of Illicit Drug Dealing” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Maryland, 1995); Paul Gootenberg, “Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders,
and the Discourse of Drug Control,” Cultural Critique 71 (Winter 2009): 13-46; Mark A. R.
Kleimann and Rebecca M. Young, “The Factors of Production in Retail Drug Dealing,” Urban
Affairs Review 30, no. 5 (1995): 730-748; Mangai Natarajan and Mike Hough, eds., Illegal Drug
Markets: From Research to Prevention Policy, (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2000). I am
using illicit drugs to describe intoxicating substances that have been scheduled or banned.
For analysis of drug markets, see references cited.
12 Gootenberg, Talking About the Flow, 15.
13 Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz, and Roberto P. Korzeniewicz, “Introduction to Global
Commodity Chains,” in Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, eds. Gary Gereffi and
Miguel Korzeniewicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
14 Jennifer Bair, “Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back, Going Forward,”
Competition and Change 9, no. 2 (2005): 153-180; Neil M. Coe, Peter Dicken, and Martin
Hess, “Global Production Networks: Realizing the Potential,” Journal of Economic Geography
8 (2008): 271- 295; Jeffrey Henderson, Peter Dicken, Martin Hess, Neil Coe, and Henry
Wai-Chung, “Global Production Networks and the Analysis of Economic Development,”
Review of International Political Economy 9, no. 3 (2002): 436-464; Gary Gereffi and Miguel
Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1994), 1-14; Gary Gereffi and Karina Fernandez-Stark, Global Value Chain Analysis: A Primer
(Durham, NC: Center on Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness, 2011); Elaine
Hartwick, “The Cultural Turn in Geography: A New Link in the Commodity Chain,” in
Encounters and Engagements Between Economic and Cultural Geography, ed. Barney Warf (New
York: Springer, 2012); Suzanne Wilson and Marta Zambrano, “Cocaine, Commodity Chains,
and Drug Politics, A Transnational Approach,” in Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism,
eds. Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 297-316.
15 George Rengert, The Geography of Illegal Drugs, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
Rengert’s Geography of Illegal Drugs is still the most prominent work by a geographer on the
broad topic of drugs.
272 Gilbreath
16 Wilson and Zambrano, Cocaine, Commodity Chains and Drug Politics.

17 George Rengert, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Tom Bole, and Kristen Henderson, “A Geographic
Analysis of Illegal Drug Markets,” in Illegal Drug Markets: From Research to Prevention Policy,
eds. Mangai Natarajan and Mike Hough (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2000); George
F. Rengert, Jerry Ratcliffe, and Sanjoy Chakravorty, Policing Illegal Drug Markets: Geographic
Approaches to Crime Reduction (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2005); Jenifer B. Robinson
and George Rengert, “Illegal Drug Markets: The Geographic Perspective,” Western
Criminology Review 7, no. 1 (2006): 453-463; Micheal K. Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and
Kent Matthewson, eds., Dangerous Harvests: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous
Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See note 11 above, as well as first
three listed references. For the start of the drug chain, see last reference.
18 Aaron H. Gilbreath, “From Made in America to Hecho en Sinaloa: A Historical Geography
of North American Methamphetamine Networks”(PhD dissertation, University of Kansas,
2012); Aaron H. Gilbreath, “A Spatial Analysis of Methamphetamine Lab Seizures in
the Midwest High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Before and After Federal Precursor
Legislation,” in Crime Modeling and Mapping Using Geospatial Technologies, ed. Michael
Leitner (New York: Springer, 2013): 297-316; Max Lu and Jessica Burnum, “Spatial Patterns
of Clandestine Methamphetamine Labs in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” in Geography and
Drug Addiction, eds. Yonette F. Thomas, Douglas Richard, and Ivan Chueng (Washington:
Springer, 2008); Ralph A. Weisheit and L. Edward Wells, “Methamphetamine Laboratories:
the Geography of Drug Production,” Western Criminology Review 11, no. 2 (2010): 9-26.
19 James R. Sevick, Precursor and Essential Chemicals in Illicit Drug Production: Approaches to
Enforcement (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1993).
20 Gilbreath, “From Made in America to Hecho en Sinaloa.”
21 James M. Graham, “Amphetamine Politics on Capitol Hill,” Society 9, no. 3 (1972): 14-22, 53;
Rasmussen, On Speed.
22 Harold Schmeck Jr., “Sharp Reduction in Quotas on Amphetamines is Urged,” New York
Times April 4, 1973.
23 Graham, “Amphetamine Politics”.
24 John P. Morgan and Doreen Kagan, “Street Amphetamine Quality and the Controlled
Substances Act of 1970,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 10, no. 4 (1978): 303-317; John A.
Newmyer, The Epidemiology of the Use of Amphetamines and Related Substances,” Journal
of Psychedelic Drugs 10, no. 4 (1978): 293-302; Roger C. Smith, “Observations on the Illicit
Marketplace of Psychedelics, Amphetamines, and Barbiturates,” in Amphetamine Barbiturates
and Hallucinogens: An Analysis of Use, Distribution, and Control (Washington DC: Government
Printing Office, 1973).
25 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Illicit Methamphetamine
Laboratories in Pennsylvania/New jersey/Delaware Area, 96th Cong., 2nd sess., 1980.
26 Ibid.
27 Thomas Barker, “One Percent Biker Clubs: A Description,” Trends in Organized Crime 9,
no. 1 (2005): 101-1012, 2005; James F. Quinn, “Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Pagans: The
Evolution of Criminality Among the Big Four 1% Motorcycle Clubs,” Deviant Behavior: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 23 (2001): 379-399; Dick Thornburgh, Drug Trafficking: Report to the
President of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989).
28 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Illicit Methamphetamine, 52.
29 Michael Isikoff, “Rural Drug Users Spur Comeback of “Crank.” Washington Post, February
10, 1989.
30 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Illicit Methamphetamine.
31 Los Angeles Times, “Jury Indicts 17 in Drug Ring,” May 26, 1979.
32 Environmental Protection Agency, Voluntary Guidelines for Methamphetamine Laboratory
Clean Up (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009); Melissa A. Miller and
Bruce Heischober, “Methamphetamine Abuse in California,” in Methamphetamine Abuse:
Epidemiologic Issues and Implications, eds. K. Marissa A. Miller and Nicholas J. Kozel
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991); Harry F. Skinner, “Methamphetamine
Synthesis via Hydroiodic Acid/Red Phosphorus Reduction of Ephedrine,” Forensic Science
International 48 (1990): 123-134.
33 John Mendelson, Naoto Uemora, Debra Harris, Rajneesh P. Nath, Emilio Fernandez,
Peyton Jacon II, E. Thomas Everhart, and Reese T, Jones, “Human Pharmacology of the
Methamphetamine Stereoisomers,” Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 80, no. 4, (2006): 403-
420.
34 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Illicit Methamphetamine, 24
35 Skinner, “Methamphetamine Synthesis.”
36 John P. Morgan and Jerome E. Beck, “The Legacy and the Paradox: Hidden Contexts
of Methamphetamine Use in the United States,” in Amphetamine Misuse: International
Perspectives on Current Trends, ed. Hillary Klee (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1997).
37 Matt Lait, “California’s New Role: Leading PCP Supplier,” Washington Post, April 17, 1988,
A14.
38 Jim Schachter, “Methamphetamine Labs Reviving after Chemical Cutback,” Los Angeles
Times, September 1, 1987, A5.
39 Kenneth Taylor and Solomon H. Snyder, “Amphetamine: Differentiation by d and l Isomers
of Behavior Involving Brain Norepinephrine or Dopamine,” Science 168, no. 3938 (1970):
1487-1489; Scott Lukas, “Pharmacology and Toxicology,” The National Methamphetamine
Drug Conference Report (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1997); Miller and
Heischober, “Methamphetamine Abuse in California”; Skinner, “Methamphetamine
Synthesis.”
40 House Committee on Small Business, Subcommittee on Regulation and Business
Opportunities, of Representatives, Impact of Clandestine Drug Laboratories on Small Business,
100th Cong., 2nd sess., May 13, 1988; Gary D. Irvine and Ling Chin, “The Environmental
Impact and Adverse Health Effects of the Clandestine Manufacture of Methamphetamine,”
in Methamphetamine Abuse: Epidemiologic Issues and Implications, eds. Marissa A. Miller and
Nicholas J. Kozel (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990)
41 Skinner, “Methamphetamine Synthesis.”
42 Irvine and Chin, “Environmental Impact.”
43 Robert W. Derlet and Bruce Heischober, “Methamphetamine: Stimulant of the 1990s?” The
Western Journal of Medicine 153, no.6 (1990): 625-628.
45 Irvine and Chin, “Environmental Impact.”
46 Karoline S. Puder, Doreen V. Kagan, and John P. Morgan, “Illicit Methamphetamine
Analysis, Synthesis, and Availability,” American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 14, no. 4
(1988): 463-473; Irvine and Chin Environmental Impact
47 Puder et al., “Illicit Methamphetamine.”
48 National Institute on Drug Abuse, Annual Data: Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network
(Washington DC; Government Printing Office, 1980); National Institute on Drug Abuse,
Annual Data: Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (Washington DC; Government
Printing Office, 1985); National Institute on Drug Abuse, Annual Emergency Room Data: Data
from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (Washington DC; Government Printing Office, 1990).
274 Gilbreath
49 National Institute on Drug Abuse, Methamphetamine Abuse in the United States (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1988).
50 For 1979 and 1984, methamphetamine mentions in the graph represent the combination of
specific methamphetamine mentions (prescription form) as well as mentions of “speed,”
which was a street term that probably included both methamphetamine and some street
amphetamines. See note 47.
51 Bob Wiedrich, “Dope Merchants Make San Diego Capital of “Speed,” Chicago Tribune, April
20, 1987.
52 Lait, “California’s New Role.” This comment was repeated frequently in the press and is
almost certainly hyperbole. Just the year before, Representative Bill Lowry had testified
before Congress that San Diego produced between eight and ten thousand pounds of
methamphetamine in 1987, and described how that could keep every man woman and child
in the city high for three months. D’Ulisse was claiming this total doubled in a year. David
Voreacos, “Congressman Calls for Tougher Restrictions on Meth Chemicals,” Los Angeles
Times, October 16, 1987.
53 Wiedrich, “Dope Merchants.”
54 Danieal Weintraub, “Lobbyist Helped Drug Dealer Win Delay on Controls,” Los Angeles
Times, March 20, 1987.
55 House Committee on Small Business, Impact of Clandestine Drug Laboratories.
56 It is possible that the new reporting laws contributed to the increase in lab seizures on the
West Coast by improving the ability of police to catch cooks, and that the new numbers do
not reflect an actual increase in production. However, given the actual growth in labs in San
Diego before the 1987 law, I do not believe this to be the case.
57 Schachter, “Methamphetamine Labs Reviving.” The concentration of methamphetamine
production and use in the American West led to two other significant developments
that are outside of the temporal scope of this paper. The first was market penetration by
Mexican Drug-Trafficking Organizations, which resulted in industrial-scale production and
a significant increase in the volume of methamphetamine available in the U.S. The second
was the development of the Nazi method of production, which was even simpler than
the Red-P method, and eventually evolved into the one-pot method which is so prevalent
today. The Nazi-method first appeared in Vacaville, California in the late 1980s, but did
not spread significantly until the 1990s. For more on these topics, see: Drug Enforcement
Administration, Methamphetamine Situation in the United States (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1996); Roger A. Ely and Diane C. McGrath, “Lithium-Ammonia
Reduction of Ephedrine to Methamphetamine, An Unusual Clandestine Synthesis.” Journal
of Forensic Sciences 35, no. 3 (1990): 720-723; Gilbreath, “From Made in America to Hecho en
Sinaloa.”
58 NIDA, Annual Data 1980.
59 Phillip Jenkins, “The Speed Capital of the World: Organizing the Methamphetamine
Industry in Philadelphia: 1970-1990,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 6, no. 1 (1992): 18-39.
60 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, Illicit Methamphetamine.
61 Michael D. Lyman, Gangland: Drug Trafficking by Organized Criminals (Springfield, Il: Charles
C. Thomas, 1989); Jenkins, “Speed Capital.”
62 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, Illicit Methamphetamine, 95.
63 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, Illicit Methamphetamine.
64 Bill Hazlett, “Five Charged with Operating Drug Laboratory,” Los Angeles Times, September
19 1979; House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, Illicit Methamphetamine.
65 Jenkins, “Speed Capital”; Lyman, Gangland.
66 Mangai Natarajan, “Understanding the Structure of a Large Heroin Distribution Network:

A Quantitative Analysis of Qualitative Data,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 22, no. 2
(2006): 171-192. For an excellent explanation of the level of coordination in organized crime,
see reference.
67 Well into the early 1990s, arrests involving methamphetamine in Philadelphia still involved
the precursor P2P, a stark contrast to the West Coast. In the pre-Internet era, it appears that
knowledge of new methods simply did not travel across the country like it does today. This
also indicates that East Coast meth did not improve like it did on in the West.
68 Jenkins, “Speed Capital.”
69 Ann O’Neill, “The Road to Ruin: The Pagans Started Dealing Drugs, and It Was All Down
Hill from There,” Philadelphia Daily News, February 7, 1985; Barker, “One Percent Bikers
Clubs.”
70 House select Committee on Narcotics and Abuse and Control, The Reemergence of
Methamphetamine: Hearing Before the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, 101st
Cong., 1st sess., October 24, 1989.
71 Treatment data is not available for this era, as the Client-Oriented Data Acquisition Program
was no longer in operation, and Treatment Episode Data Sets were not yet being collected.
Furthermore, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health was not asking specifically about
methamphetamine, so that source is also not available. Therefore, the Drug Abuse Warning
Network, which tracks drug related admissions to emergency rooms is our best national
measure for use in this era, despite its limited geographic scope.
72 National Institute on Drug Abuse, Methamphetamine Abuse in the United States (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1988).
73 National Institute on Drug Abuse, Methamphetamine Abuse: Epidemiologic Issues and
Implications (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990).
75 Patricia Morgan and James E. Beck, “The Legacy and the Paradox: Hidden Contexts
of Methamphetamine Use in the United States,” in Amphetamine Misuse: International
Perspectives on Current Trends, ed. Hillary Klee (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1997); Roger C. Smith, “Traffic in Amphetamine: Patterns of Illegal Manufacture and
Distribution,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2, no. 2 (1969): 20-24.
Convergent Agrarian Frontiers in the Settlement
of Mato Grosso, Brazil
Lisa Rausch
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
Abstract: The heterogeneity of development in the contemporary southern

Amazon may be linked to different settlement experiences on the frontier. Three
main types of productive settlement have been identified, including official
colonization, private colonization, and spontaneous settlement, based on the
differentiated motivations and resources of participants in these settlements. Not
only did these different types of frontiers advance concurrently in the Amazon,
but these frontiers sometimes converged in one location. The interaction of settlers
from different groups sometimes created conflict, but also advanced the process of
territorialization of the Amazon. This position is illustrated via a case study of one
municipality at which three groups of settlers converged. Ultimately, though local
popular history privileges the role of one of the three groups in bringing about the
founding of the municipality and the development of a successful local economy,
these achievements were only possible due to the different resources that each
group brought to the settlement.
Introduction
T
he heterogeneity of the Brazilian Amazon frontier experience is just beginning to be
understood. Early researchers set out structuralist expectations of accelerating resource
exploitation, capital accumulation by a relative few as land holdings were systematically
consolidated, and the enlistment of the peasantry into wage labor as the agricultural frontier
advanced into the Amazon.1 A linear progression toward the homogenization of Amazonian
places has not occurred, however, even as highly capitalized industrial agriculture has continued
to advance in the region.2 Today, the Amazon is a tapestry of highly globalized and globalizing
cities, relic frontier towns, marginal extractive landscapes, and panoramas of modern, industrial-
scale agricultural production with a range of landholding sizes. Efforts to make sense of these
highly differentiated frontier outcomes must include reexamination of frontier settlement, which
was a considerably diverse process.
The Amazon region has supported various production systems and millions of people for
thousands of years and has periodically generated boom economies related to agriculture and
mining activities.3 Most recently, beginning in the 1970s, Brazilians took a renewed interest in the
Amazon as a site for development via the expansion of industrial agriculture. Today, less than
forty years after this most recent campaign to populate and develop the Amazon and integrate it
into the national project, the region is one of the most important sites of agricultural production
in Brazil, particularly in terms of soybean and cattle production. The massive environmental
transformations that have taken place in the Amazon as the result of this influx of people and the
subsequent agricultural and ranching booms have rightly received considerable attention from
scholars and other observers.3 The site of the most drastic of these transformations, the southern
Convergent Agrarian Frontiers in the Settlement of Mato Grosso, Brazil 277
Amazonian state of Mato Grosso, produces a third of the country’s soybeans and is a leader
in other types of agricultural production as well.4 Many scholars have linked this agricultural
production to deforestation and land concentration, and, likewise, have framed these negative
environmental and social outcomes as consequences of state policies promoting export-oriented
production and, more recently, corporate investments.5 Others have pointed to the importance
of small farmers in engendering the initial frontier clearings.6 While the outcomes of settlement
in Mato Grosso are becoming ever clearer and continually evolving, the complex socio-historical
processes that catalyzed these transformations across the state remain poorly understood.
With regard to the use of geographical terminology employed here, in Brazil, the term
“the Amazon” can refer to various spatial extents from the northern and western parts of the
country. These include an administrative region created in the 1970s—the Legal Amazon, in
which Mato Grosso is fully located––and a federally defined tropical forest biome. Mato Grosso
is located partially in the far-southern portion of the Amazon forest biome; the remainder of
the state extends outside of this biome into the Cerrado, a tropical savannah (Figure 1). This
amounts to most of the state occupying a transitional zone, or ecotone, between the two biomes,
but being subject to most administrative policies pertaining to the Legal Amazon. Present-day
residents of this region may or may not consider themselves to be residents of “the Amazon,”
but for settlers arriving during the 1970s, the region was clearly seen as the Amazon, a distant
and difficult place to settle. At this time, the human population of this region was very low and
most natural vegetation (which, depending on the location, could be open grassland, scrubland,
sparsely wooded areas, or dense forest) was still intact. Recent indigenous presence in the specific
site that would become Lucas do Rio Verde, in central Mato Grosso, is unknown. The settlement
activities discussed in this paper are responsible for the much of the initial removal of this native
vegetation, a process that continues today.7
Scholars of the Amazon have identified various settlement frontiers, or types of settlement,
in the agrarian Amazon, including state-sponsored official settlement, private colonization,
and spontaneous settlement, but relatively little attention has been paid to the variety of lived
experiences within these frontiers. This paper is an effort to fill this gap in the literature and a
continuation of the efforts of the handful of researchers who have so far worked to weave these
experiences into the larger narratives of frontier change.8 These three main types of settlement
in the Amazon did not act in isolation from one another, however; instead, different types of
settlers competed for spaces on the frontier over time as they were made accessible and desirable
for settlement. The outcome of decades of shifting policies for the Amazon emanating from the
federal level, and of a progressively worsening economic situation for the Brazilian population
had, by the 1980s, created not an orderly and advancing frontier planned and executed by the
authoritarian government, but instead, a landscape “latticed with migrant trails,” some of which
could be traced directly back to Brasília and some of which could not.9
This paper examines the intersection of three major agrarian frontiers in one site, Lucas
do Rio Verde, Mato Grosso (referred to from here on simply as Lucas). Merely thirty years after
its initial settlement, the municipality is widely recognized as a model of success in terms of its
economic development, competent management, and approach to environmental conservation.10
These successes are popularly attributed to the pioneering spirit of one particular group of
settlers, but concurrent claims to land and pushes for land tenure resolution, contributions to the
development of local social institutions, and advances in local agricultural production made by all
the settler groups were important. The Lucas case demonstrates how contested and simultaneous
claims to the same location on the frontier, though they often resulted in violence, could also have
the effect of hastening the development of institutions and material improvements as competing
groups strove to influence the nature of territorialization and the consolidation of
278 Rausch
Figure 1. Brazil with Pertinent States Highlighted.
state reach in the locale.11 Evidence presented in this paper also demonstrates that colonists of
all three frontiers were motivated by a multiplicity of factors, including economic, political, and
cultural motivations, which continued to evolve during the process of arriving and settling on
the frontier.
The primary sources of information drawn on for this paper were found in the Municipal
Archive of Lucas do Rio Verde, where I was able to consult collections of oral histories, newspapers,
narratives, and analyses written by local historians; primary documents related to the early
administration of the municipality; and collections of secondary sources written by Brazilian
scholars about the settlement history of the region, but that English-language scholars have yet
to use. In addition, I conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty farmers on a variety
of topics, including settlement history, and informal but ongoing interviews with select key
informants with particular knowledge about the settlement and development of the municipality.
Finally, data about settlement histories in each of Mato Grosso’s 141 municipalities were collated
from various published sources to allow for visualization of settlement processes across the state.
These primary and secondary resources were invaluable for the detailed and unique
information they supplied about the experiences of different people during the colonization project.
It should be noted, though, that the contentious nature of the colonization and early development
of Lucas means that many voices, particularly those who participated in colonization but moved
on or back in the face of the considerable early difficulties, are considerably diminished in local
narratives. The first colonizers of Lucas are still alive and the scars of the early conflicts on the
local, collective psyche are still apparent and sensitive. Indeed, there is a palpable discomfort
among many of the municipality’s remaining “pioneers” in discussing their early past, even as
they recount its glories. The fact is, many people were bullied, intimidated, and sabotaged into
leaving the settlement, in spite of the “populist frontier” narrative and identity that prevails
among many agricultural actors and other residents of Lucas today.12 It was, though, in many
cases, the organization and institutions of the unsuccessful settlers that supported the successful
settlement and transformation of Lucas into a leading city. Fortunately, Brazilian scholars of the
frontier have sought out the stories of the people who ultimately did not stay in Lucas, which
helps fill in gaps in the local record.
This paper builds on previous efforts by American and Brazilian scholars to expand
our understanding of the historical geography of frontier settlement and territorialization in
Mato Grosso. The paper begins by reviewing the three main types of frontiers from a political-
economic viewpoint, which is the conventional framework for explaining the advancing of the
agricultural frontier in Brazil. Instead of viewing these frontiers as discrete entities, however,
this paper challenges efforts to draw strong distinctions among these types of settlement. Newly
spatialized data on settlement histories across the state allow for the most complete visualizations
yet of settlement patterns in Mato Grosso during the period generally considered to be the initial
contemporary frontier advancement (1960s – 1980s), and show how these frontiers overlapped
across the state. The second section draws on a combination of archival data, interview data, and
secondary sources to present the settlement history of Lucas as a case study for the ways in which
these frontiers intersected. The third section explores the outcomes of these encounters on the
establishment of the municipality, as well as some of the legacies of the intersection of frontiers
in Lucas.
The Geography of Frontier Settlement in Brazil
The profound modern transformation of the Brazilian Amazonian landscape has frequently
been attributed to the efforts of the military dictatorship (1964 – 1985) to fulfill its project of
national integration and modernization. And indeed, the legacy, but also the incompleteness of
this national project are undeniable: trunk roads that brought settlers to the Amazon in the 1960s
and 1970s are important transportation corridors for the growing populations of the Amazon,
though in many places they remain unpaved, and mechanized agriculture encouraged by
favorable fiscal and economic policy drives the rapidly growing economy in parts of the Amazon,
while other areas sit as degraded pastures and fields producing unimpressive annual yields.
Conventionally, the Amazon has been characterized as a site of state intervention into a resource-
rich, unterritorialized (uncontrolled) environment via the imposition of controls and conditions
to facilitate the expansion of capitalist relations and extraction, with the predicted outcome
280 Rausch
Soybean production Mato Grosso Brazil MT % of national

(in tons) (MT) production
1980a 88,852 12,757,962 0.7
2011b 20,800,544 74,815,447 27.8
aIBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Agricultural Census, 2006

bIBGE, Municipal Agricultural Production, 2011

Table 1. Soybean production in Mato Grosso, 1980 and 2011.
ultimately being a homogenized landscape with wealth and resources securely concentrated in
the hands of a few and a population of laborers to do the bidding of capitalist landowners.13 The
present reality, though, is one of considerable variability.14 Scholars must now look for ways to
best explain the heterogeneity of the agrarian frontier in the Amazon, including the
failures of the state to execute its projects in a timely and coordinated way, and the role of actors
not associated with the state in frontier settlement and transformation.15 Finally, though the
influence of the military government’s projects on the Amazon is undeniable, the conventional
political economic perspective does not account for the motivations and characteristics of the
settlers that have acted out these transformations.16
Scholars have identified three main types of settlement on the agrarian frontier in
the Brazilian Amazon—colonization projects, private settlement projects, and spontaneous
settlement—which have generally been treated as separate frontiers acting in isolation from
one another. The case presented here though, calls for a reassessment of this assumption by
documenting the ways in which these three frontiers overlapped in Mato Grosso and arrived
simultaneously in Lucas, resulting in outcomes unexpected for any of the singular frontier
experiences. Furthermore, the rapid rise in importance of Mato Grosso as a producer of agricultural
commodities makes it an important site of inquiry regarding frontier settlement. For example,
at the time Lucas was first being settled, the importance of Mato Grosso as a site of soybean
production was negligible, contributing just 0.7 percent of national production in 1980; by 2011
the state produced 27.8 percent of the country’s soybeans (Table 1). The agents and geography of
this remarkable transformation deserve closer inspection.
State-organized settlement in Mato Grosso
The obvious influence of federal policies on the Amazon frontier has understandably
focused the attention of many scholars on assessing the outcomes of various types of state-led, or
directed colonization projects implemented by INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and
Agrarian Reform) in the Amazon.17 In 1964, Brazil entered into a period of dictatorship (led by a
series of generals) for whom dampening social unrest, securing the land borders of the country,
and capitalizing on the country’s vast natural resources were key goals. Achieving many of these
goals centered on more effectively incorporating the Amazon, which was the least populated
and explored part of Brazil and includes many of the country’s inland borders, into the national
economy. This was to be achieved by building infrastructure in the region and by incentivizing
resource-poor families from other parts of the country to settle there.18 A host of federal agencies
and programs, including INCRA, were created in the 1960s and the 1970s in the service of
achieving these goals, and a series of settlement projects through which INCRA would work to
recruit settlers and execute their installation in the Amazon were launched. During the time
period from1964 to 1994, INCRA settled an impressive 16,219 families in Mato Grosso, though
this was not even the state where INCRA was most active during this time period (for example,
Mato Grosso’s neighbor to the north, Pará, received over 43,000 families via INCRA settlements
and, to the west of Mato Grosso in Rondônia, over 42,000 families were settled).19 While certainly
transformative in certain locations, it quickly became clear that these directed settlements alone
would be insufficient to handle the massive land distribution issues facing the country.20 Official
settlements have continued and have increased in importance in Mato Grosso since the 1990s:
from 1995 to 2002, 68,491 families were officially settled in Mato Grosso and 49,623 families were
settled from 2003 to 2013, though administrative changes within INCRA and changes in the socio-
political climate of Brazil after the end of the dictatorship in 1984 set these more recent settlements
apart from those of the earlier period that is the focus of this paper.21
The spatial distribution of state-led colonization also speaks to the incompleteness of this
project. Almost without exception, these projects accompanied the construction of important
trunk roads in the region, as evidenced by the early federal colonization projects along some of
the first roads being built in the Amazon in Pará (along the Trans-Amazonian highway) and in
Rondônia (along the Cuiabá-Porto Velho highway) in the 1970s, and by the later arrival of official
colonization to Mato Grosso, with the construction of the Cuiabá-Santarém highway in the 1980s.22
The late arrival of federal highways to the central and northern parts of Mato Grosso meant that
the first period of directed colonization in the state was truncated, lasting only from 1980 to 1981,
though it lasted for up to ten years in some of the other Amazonian states.23 Seldom discussed
is a previous period of semi-directed settlement in Mato Grosso. These earlier settlements were
underwritten by the state government of Mato Grosso in the 1940s and 1950s during a period
of weakened federal control, following the end of the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (known as
the Estado Novo, or New State, 1937-1945), though most of these lands ended up contributing to
latifundismo (a prevalence of large landholdings) instead of smallholder settlement.24 Overall, a
litany of government programs and projects directly attempted to implant settlers in Mato Grosso
throughout the twentieth century, but many of these attempts at directed settlement ended in
complete failure with all settlers abandoning their plots.25 In total, only nineteen of the 141 present
day municipalities in Mato Grosso were affected by some form of successful directed settlement
by state or federal agencies (Figure 2).
Private settlement in Mato Grosso
Where directed colonization was either less prevalent or late to arrive in Mato Grosso,
private colonization thrived, sometimes via non-profit settlement cooperatives and sometimes via
for-profit companies that sold land parcels and offered a relatively straightforward path to legal
land ownership. This process has been well explored by both Ozorio de Almeida in her book The
Colonization of the Amazon and by Wendy Jepson in her work on the private colonization project
in Canarana.26 According to figures calculated by Jepson, between 1970 and 1990, 3,946,889 ha of
land in 22,150 lots were distributed in Mato Grosso via private colonization projects, while only
3,100 lots totaling 549,982 ha (5.5 percent of the total area) were distributed in state-led or directed
colonization projects.27 Private projects would distribute many lots at a time, averaging between
one hundred and three hundred lots per project.28
Private colonization was either absent or had a less significant impact in all other
Amazonian states except Pará. Ozorio de Almeida shows that twenty-eight out of forty major
282 Rausch
Figure 2. Official Settlement Projects in Mato Grosso (Adapted by author from Arcemy, 2007; IBGE,
Municipalities).
sites of private colonization projects in the Amazon were located in Mato Grosso.29 However, data
from IBGE and from brief municipal settlement histories suggest that private colonization projects
may have been even more widespread in Mato Grosso than this. Forty-two out of 141 present day
municipalities can be identified as having been settled in part or in full by private colonization
firms, which in some cases were carrying out projects at the behest of INCRA and in other cases
were simply organizing land for distribution among cooperative members or endeavoring to
make a profit off of the sale of the land.30 These data correspond with other research that has
identified similarly high numbers of private colonization projects in Mato Grosso (Figure 3).31
Private colonization was prevalent in Mato Grosso because of high demand for land that
exceeded the ability of INCRA to attend to it, the slowness and uncertainty of getting access
to land and title via public programs, and the interest of relatively more economically secure
individuals in settling in Mato Grosso. Public settlement projects were notoriously risky for
Figure 3. Private Colonization Projects in Mato Grosso (Adapted by author from Arcemy, 2007; IBGE,
Municipalities).
participants because admittance into a public settlement project usually required total or near-
destitution, and there were high and frequently shifting barriers (discussed below) to gain access
to the security and rights of a fully legal landowner via these projects. Though presumably out of
reach for the poorest of potential settlers, for a relatively small premium above the already low
prices of land in Mato Grosso, private settlement projects reduced transaction costs associated
with gaining land access, and, therefore, often organized and executed more stable settlements in
Mato Grosso during the 1970s to the 1990s than did the state programs.32
Private colonization in the Amazon did not exist in spite of public directed colonization,
but because of it. INCRA was a powerful agency and had authority over all settlement projects in
the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s.33 The agency asserted its authority, for example, by placing
conditions on member-generated cooperative plans for frontier settlement such as requiring
that the cooperative also provide services to members of official colonization projects and other
284 Rausch
settlers; by limiting the allotment of land permitted for each member to be equal to that of the
official colonists; or by simply designing resettlement projects for landless families agitating for
land reform under the name of a colonization cooperative, as in the case of Terranova and later
settlement waves in Canarana settlements.34
Spontaneous settlement in Mato Grosso
In spite of the importance of these types of organized settlement, the vast majority of
colonization in the Amazon has been what is considered to be spontaneous settlement.35 Though
technically extra-legal in terms of their actions, spontaneous settlers also played an important
role in the extension of the state’s territorial control to the Amazon frontier via the provision of
services and infrastructure such as transportation networks, education and health services, and
titling in parts of the frontier that the state and private colonization projects did not reach, as well
as in some places where they did. Spontaneous settlement has been undertaken by various types
of settlers, from poorly capitalized smallholders squatting without documentation on the margins
of the frontier to large-scale landowners and grileiros (speculators) with (frequently fraudulent, at
least initially) land titles.36
Due to its inherently off-the-books nature, the magnitude of spontaneous colonization
is difficult to calculate and seems to have led researchers to assume that Mato Grosso was a
less significant recipient of spontaneous migration relative to the other states on the agrarian
frontier of the Amazon. Based on the selection of sites for the studies of Amazonian settlements
as documented by Ozorio de Almeida, each of the main frontier states of the Amazon except for
Mato Grosso had roughly as many case studies done on spontaneous settlements as on directed or
private colonization projects, indicating that spontaneous settlements were at least as important
as public and private organized settlements combined throughout the Amazon.37 No studies on
settlements of any type in Mato Grosso were documented at the time of Almeida de Ozorio’s
writing in 1992, which may seem to suggest that there were few spontaneous settlements there
beckoning researchers’ attentions. The vast amount of territory (45 percent) of the state accounted
for by private and public settlement projects could indicate a paucity of other desirable locations
left for spontaneous settlement.38 The falling number of rural households in Mato Grosso,
documented by IBGE census data (from 161,276 in 1970 to 109,216 in 1991) during the major
period of settlement could also suggest there were few numbers of unaccounted-for spontaneous
settlers in Mato Grosso during this time period.39 Also, scholars have claimed that many of the
spontaneous migrants to the Amazon came from the Northeast and so would be most likely to
have settled somewhere in the eastern or the northern Amazon, instead of the southern Amazon
where Mato Grosso is located.40
The way in which spontaneous settlement occurred makes it difficult to quantify. While
nearly the entire state of Mato Grosso would have been considered rural in the 1970s, especially
the central and northern parts, both official and private colonization projects aimed to create
towns, or vilas, around which rural activities were organized. Spontaneous settlement, of course,
rarely had such organization from the beginning, meaning that many instances of spontaneous
settlement have likely gone uncounted.
Other evidence suggests, however, that the discounting of the history of widespread
small- and medium-holder spontaneous settlement may be a serious omission in inquiries into
the transformation of Mato Grosso’s agrarian frontier. For example, the most influential group
of pioneer farmers in Lucas today came neither from the INCRA-directed settlement project nor
from the private cooperative colonization project, but instead, were self-funded, small-holder
farmers who arrived before or just after these other projects. Consistent with the story of Lucas,
Figure 4. Spontaneous Settlement of Small- and Medium-holders in Mato Grosso (Adapted by author from
Arcemy, 2007; IBGE, Municipalities).
research by Mato Grossense geographer M. Arcemy suggests that spontaneous settlers engaged
in productive agriculture that influenced at least thirty-two municipalities’ settlement histories
(Figure 4).41 More research is needed to better understand this type of settlement in Mato Grosso.
While by no means guaranteed, in some cases spontaneous settlers were able to eventually
achieve registration and title for their land. Brazilian law has long allowed for legal acquisition of
land via squatting on unclaimed public lands, which comprised the vast majority of Mato Grosso
in the 1970s, with the right to register one hundred ha after one year and one day, and full title to
up to 3,000 ha after five years of occupation and use of the land.42 There are similar allowances for
squatting on private but unused lands, though the amount one can claim via this process on lands
already owned by someone else is smaller than on public lands.
286 Rausch
Convergent frontiers in Lucas do Rio Verde

Northern Mato Grosso, where Lucas is located, is presently the site of some of the most
rapidly globalizing places in the world. These places feature local economies based on the
production of large quantities of soybeans, corn, chicken, and pork for national and international
markets. The region is a modern study of quick and effective transformation of uncapitalized
natural resources (land) into highly capitalized production. By presenting Lucas’ settlement
history, I aim to highlight the way that the three main types of agrarian settlement overlapped
in Mato Grosso. Together these three groups hastened the extension of private control over
the region’s natural resources via a process of accelerated territorialization, which was driven
by competition among the different groups for space and state resources and which laid the
foundation for development processes that are ongoing in Lucas and northern Mato Grosso today.
In 1981 and 1982, Lucas was simultaneously an official colonization project, the site of
a private colonization project, and also claimed by spontaneous settlers, some of whom had
been farming there for five years or more. In the end, most of the settlers who remained on the
land and continue to farm it today are members or decedents of the spontaneous settler group.
The colonists had the force of the military government behind them, and the members of the
private colonization cooperative benefitted from a number of organizational and transaction-
cost-reducing benefits, but the spontaneous settlers were the group that most successfully
capitalized on the resources brought by these two other groups. Now, thirty years later, these
surviving settlers are economically secure, having long-since established secure land title and,
in most cases, expanded their landholdings to double or more of the property for which they
first received title. The important role of the less successful groups of settlers in prompting the
commencement of the land-titling process in the area, promoting closer linkages with this frontier
area to government and social services, and advancing economic opportunities for local products
has been diminished in dominant popular narratives, though the legacies of these innovations
form the foundation of the municipality’s present-day economic successes.43
Spontaneous settlement in Lucas do Rio Verde
Families from the state of Paraná first began to buy up land in the area known today as
Lucas (in lots of 1000 to 5000 hectares in size) in the mid-1970s, from individuals or organizations
that had supposedly obtained registration rights from the state as early as the 1940s.44 Land titling
in Brazil, particularly in frontier areas, has a long and well-documented history of fraud, deceit,
and contradictory legal treatment.45 In this way, the early settlement of Lucas was a classic case:
grileiros had purchased cheaply from the state, been given, or even simply forged documents for
land that was otherwise unclaimed and untitled (known in Brazil as terras devolutas, or public
lands), and had then turned around and sold the land, with or without some kind of legal contract
of sale.46 As this was all common practice, the families of spontaneous settlers (known as posseiros,
or claimants) that bought land in Lucas at this time knew that although the legality of their initial
land purchase was questionable, staying on the land and making it “productive” for one year and
one day would be extremely favorable for their eventual attempts to regularize, or make legal,
their land claims in the future.47
The posseiros began to arrive in Lucas, then known as gleba Rio Verde (or the Rio Verde
plot) essentially concurrently with the 9oBEC (9o Betalhão de Engenharia e Construção do Exérico,
or 9th Batallion of Engineering and Construction of the Army) and the construction of federal
highway BR-163, a trunk road running from the state capital of Cuiabá north into the state of
Pará in the mid-1970s. Thus, the posseiros who first settled in present-day Lucas corresponded
to neither stereotype of spontaneous settlement in the Amazon; these were not disenfranchised
and impoverished peasants, nor were they highly capitalized corporate land speculators––these
were mostly families who had voluntarily sold some or all of their land holdings in Paraná and
had come to Mato Grosso with the goal of buying larger tracts of land to achieve social mobility
in Mato Grosso more easily than they could have in Paraná.48
From approximately 1976 until 1981, the posseiros’ claims were uncontested in Lucas,
and they were able to focus their full attention on the practical problems at hand, not the least
of which was learning to farm in a tropical climate on land with sandy, acidic soils. Though the
legality of their land purchases was murky and they had few other resources, the local bank–a
branch of the national Banco do Brasil—accepted their claimes to the land and provided financing
for agricultural activities based on them.49 Opening the frontier was exciting, but challenging.50
For example, even once highway BR-163 had been completed, the quality of the road was terrible,
prone to wash-outs, and combined with the long distances (it was 200 km to the nearest town, the
municipal seat of Diamantino), traveling was a significant undertaking and represented a serious
hardship for anyone settling in Lucas.51
In 1981, the posseiros were informed that the area around the Rio Verde had been
appropriated for an urgent land reform settlement and that their lands would be confiscated
without compensation to allow for the settlement of landless families from the state of Rio Grande
do Sul (RS). Though they were at first assured by INCRA that the lands they were using would
be spared from any official settlement, the plans for the project ultimately included the lands
that were already claimed by the posseiros, thereby setting the stage for conflict and struggle
engendered by the government’s contradictory agendas regarding titling, populating, and
developing the area once the new settlers arrived.52 At this point, some of the posseiros returned to
Paraná or moved on, but others (approximately eighty-five families in total) decided to organize
and work with INCRA for continued access to the land alongside the official settlement project.53
Ultimately, most posseiros would receive 200 ha from INCRA, the same amount as the official
settlers, though some of the families had been claiming much more land prior to the project, up
to 2,000 ha. This was not a wholly bureaucratic undertaking; some posseiros threatened violence
against the “landless vagabonds” that were being brought up from RS as part of the project.54
To understand the way these struggles unfolded and their resolution, we must first examine
the roots of the land problems in Brazil’s southern-most state, RS, from where the settlers in the
official INCRA project in Lucas came.
Official colonization project PEA-Lucas do Rio Verde
The families that eventually joined the INCRA settlement in Lucas did not wish to move
to the Amazon; their arrival there represented an option of last resort after they had attempted
both creating spontaneous settlements and demanding land reform in their home state of RS. By
the mid-1970s, land concentration was rapidly taking place in RS due to new financial incentives
offered by the federal government to develop mechanized agriculture. Moreover, the growth of
families had, over the decades, led to a near exhaustion of places on which to put new farmlands
in RS. These concurrent developments were the source of growing unrest, caused by both rapid
urbanization and rapid growth in rural landless populations in a state, that for generations had
an economy based largely on family agriculture.
Land concentration in RS in the 1970s was marked; for example, between 1976 and 1978
alone, RS lost 61,000 small properties.55 Another driver of unrest related to land access in RS was
the improving legitimacy of indigenous lands and rights. Non-indigenous families had been both
encroaching on and settling as rent-paying tenants on the lands of one group, the Kaingang,
since their reserves were established in the early twentieth century.56 In 1978 the Kaingang,
forcibly and with the support of the state agency FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio/National
Indian Foundation), expelled some one thousand non-native familes who had been collectively
288 Rausch
squatting on up to a full 65 percent of their reserve (9,634 ha). 57 Some of these ejected families
would eventually make their way to Lucas via the INCRA PEA (Projeto Especial de Assentamento,
or Special Settlement Project).
The families expelled from the Kaingang reserves insisted that they be granted land in RS,
but the governor of RS claimed that there was no available land and they would have to accept
offers of employment or settlement in the Amazon. By settling the colonists in the Amazon, the
government hoped to both resolve the landless problem brewing in the South, and at the same time
advance its interests of promoting productive settlement in the Amazon.58 Some of the colonists
eventually accepted placement in colonization projects in other states, including two projects in
Mato Grosso––Canarana and Terranova, both administered by the cooperative Coopercol.59 A
certain subset of the families eventually formed a camp at a crossing near Ronda Alta-RS called
Encruzilhada Natalino, and were joined by other families also facing problems of land shortage,
including four families who had found the offical settlement at Terranova to be untenable and
returned, as well as four other families who had returned from Canarana.60
Calls for comprehensive agrarian reform intensified from within the camp. Calling the
situation at the camp a national security issue, the government dispached a military brigade to
guard the camp. Under the watch of one Major Curió, well known at the time for his abusive
psychological tactics for the suppression of local uprisings, the camp was transformed into a
full-on militarized zone, complete with barriers, apparatuses of surveillance, and visible police
presence at all times. The military promoted INCRA settlement projects in Mato Grosso (as well as
in Bahia, Acre, and Romaira, though these were later abandoned in favor of only settling people
in Lucas) to the settler, who were unenthusiastic about the idea of moving far from their home
state, with slideshows and videos. Meanwhile, conditions in the camps continued to worsen.
There were food and water shortages, leading to illnesses and deaths.61 Dwellings were made of
cardboard and plastic, and provided virtually no protection against the elements. On top of all
of this, state and local police threatened violence against the settlers, and local landowners hired
gunmen to infiltrate the camps and threaten and beat the settlers. Desperate to bring an end to
the rapidly deteriorating situation, Curió eventually resorted to paying certain colonists to talk
favorably about the Lucas project. In the end, he was able to convince 203 of the 506 families in
the camp to go to Lucas.
The PEA-Rio Verde was to have more than 270,000 hectares available for settlement. These
270,000 hectares would be divided into lots of 200 hectares each, with 100 hectares of each plot to
be reserved as forest and the other 100 hectares available for productive use, with the remaining
land to be parcelled out to later groups of settlers.62 Economic activities predicted for the area
were rice, corn, and soybeans. INCRA promised the colonists the following amenities in PEA-
Rio Verde: basic infrastructure including 96 km of local roads, three schools, two health centers,
administrative buildings, and an armazém (grain storage facility), as well as access to credit to
work the land for planting, including deforestation, root removal, cleaning, grading, technical
assistance, and fertilizer. Credit was to be conditional, based on accepting technical assistance and
complying with a requirement to plant basic food crops for at least two years, a requirement that
which was to be reduced by 50 percent during the rest of the finance period. The cost of the lot
was to be based on the land value at the time––Cr$370 (US$3.98) per hectare in the Municipality
of Diamantino––to be paid back over twenty years.63
Arrival and settlement at Rio Verde
The settlers who arrived in Lucas from RS became known as parceleiros because of the
small parcels of land they received from the settlement project. They arrived in three rounds in
1981 and 1982. The failure of this group to settle long term in Lucas (less than 10 pecent of them
would last more than two years) is attributed in local, popular history to their ill-suitability to the
difficult work of farming on Brazil’s agricultural frontier. This reasoning is mistaken, though; at
least half of the parceleiros were experienced farmers who, like the posseiros, were determined to
continue to make their livlihoods from the land.64 The failure of the official settlement in Lucas,
instead, is a story of a group of people who were used by their own government as instruments
for the extension of the reach of land tenure institutions over a previously unterritorialized locale,
thereby facilitating the success of competing groups of settlers who easily moved in in their wake.65
The parceleiros had been promised several basic benefits in exchange for their willingness
to move to Mato Grosso with essentially no personal assets. For example, they were told that they
would be provided with houses, but only upon their arrival did they find out that, instead, they
would have to build their own houses, with wood provided to them by INCRA.66 Additionally,
out of the 200 hectares they had each been promised for farming, they learned that they would
have to leave 50 percent of it forested in order to comply to the federal Forest Code as written
at the time and that only 2 hectares of the land would be cleared for them. Due to the terms
of their contracts with the Banco do Brasil, the bank that administered financial aspects of the
settlement, the parceleiros were completely dependent on the services of third-party vendors for
everything from clearing and plowing to planting and harvesting.67 These prices of payment for
the services would be negotiated exclusively between the bank and the vendors, who frequently
failed to perform services or failed to perform them adequately or with the appropriate timing.
The parceleiros never received the money they were being loaned; it went directly to the vendors,
stripping the parceleiros of their power to bargain for better services or prices. The nearest Banco
do Brasil office was more than 200 km away in the city of Diamantino, a week’s journey round
trip on foot; complaints that did make it to the bank were often lost in a bureaucratic triangle
among the employees of the Bank, INCRA, and the vendors. With no machinery and no access
to independent financing, it was up to the parceleiros to figure out what to do about clearing the
other 98 hectares of dense vegetation that they were allowed to clear from their plots.
Low crop yields during the first year and changes made to the terms of the loan by the Bank
furthered the troubles of the parceleiros. Poorly performing crops meant that the parceleiros were
unable to bring in income via the sale of their crops to pay their loans, and a forced refinancing by
the Bank meant that the parceleiros had to start making payments during the second year of their
loan instead of the fifth year, as had been the original agreement. Because their crops were not
producing well, some parceleiros worked as day laborers on the farms of the posseiros in order
to earn money to buy food at the Cobal (government dry-goods store) store in town and to make
their loan payments. Others relied on hunting and fishing to feed themselves.68 INCRA declined
to reevaluate the terms of the contracts between the parceleiros and the bank during the second
year of the settlement based on the actual conditions of the settlement rather than the predicted
ones, which had been used as the basis for the original contracts. The parceleiros’ inability to make
payments was viewed by the Bank as noncompliance with the terms of the loan, and the Bank
refused to issue any more funds for the settlement in 1982, meaning that many of the settlers were
unable to plant anything the second year. Under the terms of the settlement, INCRA maintained
posession of the land titles for five years, so the parceleiros had nothing with which to bargain.
However, illegal purchases of plots from parceleiros looking to leave the settlement, by posseiros
but also by INCRA staff planning to resell the land for personal gain, were widespread.69 On
top of all of this, the INCRA executor in Lucas, José Ferreira Soares, was notoriously physically
and psychologically abusive to the parceliros.70 These factors illustrate the extent to which the
objectives of the agency were not truly the successful implantation of impoverished families on
the frontier.
290 Rausch
Cooperlucas
Meanwhile, a third group of settlers had also set its sights on the gleba Rio Verde. The
members of a cooperative known as Holambra 3, based in São Paulo, had begun working in
cooperation with INCRA for assistance in starting their project in the 1970s. They decided they
would call their settlement project Lucas do Rio Verde, after a rubber tapper who had ocuppied the
area at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the name of the cooperative itself was changed
to Cooperlucas.71 Because the area was frontier territory, cooperative members understood that
they would be responsible for the provision of education, social and cultural resources, and the
technical assistance and infrastructure necessary for producing, buying, and selling agricultural
projects. Just before heading to Lucas, they were informed that a PEA would also be installed in
the same location.
Upon arrival in Lucas in 1981, the associados (cooperative members) were surprised to
find that there were also posseiros there making claims to area lands, which INCRA was partially
granting. At first, it was unclear if the cooperative project would continue. In an attempt to preserve
what they could of their plans for the settlement of the region, cooperative members proposed
a projeto integrado (integrated project), which would include support for the posseiros who had
negotiated with INCRA to retain a small amount of their claimed lands, and operate alongside the
official settlement project. INCRA accepted the continuation of Cooperlucas in the Rio Verde area,
but with some conditions. The cooperative would be allowed to settle up to 150 families at the site
(though only fifty families ended up participating), but it had to be fully responsible for “creating
and implanting the commercial, agroindustrial, and social infrastructure and to make it available
for members and for the entire local community.”72 This deal produced hard feelings between
the associados and the posseiros, who were still struggling to resolve situation of their land with
INCRA; each group thought the other was getting preferential treatment. The cooperative, which
planned to provide schools and other social services to everyone at the settlement, should have
been a unifying force, but instead it was viewed suspiciously by the posseiros. INCRA employees,
for their part, actively made it difficult for the cooperative to execute planned projects such as
educational programs, contributing to growing suspicions that INCRA was not truly interested
in the successful settlement of families in Lucas at all. Cooperative leaders, like the parceleiros,
reported receiving death threats from Ferreira, though at least one author has accused some of the
associados of issuing threats of violence to further their cause as well.73
From Settlement to Municipality
On August 5, 1982, Lucas was declared an agrovila (agricultural settlement) within the
municipality of Diamantino, its first step toward autonomy and a sign of official recognition
that the settlement process had been effective.74 However, as a result of the physical hardships,
isolation, violence, and lack of economic opportunities, many parceleiros had already abandoned
their plots or were in the process of doing so by the end of 1982. In fact, more than 90 percent
of the parceleiros would leave Lucas do Rio Verde by the end of 1983, almost without exception
selling their plots to posseiros, INCRA employees, or land brokers for nothing more than the cost
of a bus ticket home or to the next settlement.75 These “sales” of land were technically illegal, since
the parceleiros had never truly owned their lands. The terms of their contracts with INCRA and
the Banco do Brasil had deferred transfer of titles to the colonists until five years after settlement,
but the sales went uncontested by the government, suggesting that the primary goal of the project
in Lucas was the delimitation and registering of lands, not the support of any particular group
on the land. And, indeed, in spite of the exodus of parceleiros, the population of Lucas continued
to grow.
In 1983, Cooperlucas was invited to participate in PRODECER (Programa de Desenvolvimento

do Cerrado/Program for Development of the Cerrado), a bilateral Brazil-Japan project for the
production of grains in the Cerrado for export to Japan. The project operated by providing special
financing to cooperatives for agro-industrial infrastructure projects in specific, strategic locales.
North-central Mato Grosso had, by this point, become a target for the development of industrial-
scale agricultural production on the part of the federal and state governments.76 Thus, the selection
of Cooperlucas as a participant in the project was clearly strategic for the government, as the
smallness and newness of the cooperative did not otherwise make it a strong candidate for such
a high-value project. Through this project, the cooperative was able to install the settlement’s first
grain drier; until then, locals had been dependent on grain middle-men to store and process their
grains, at considerable cost. The drier was important in this history of Lucas because universal
access to it improved relations between the cooperative and the remaining parceleiros, as well as
the posseiros, all of whom benefitted from it.77
The settlement was granted the status of District in 1985. In the same year, INCRA settled
ten more families from São Gabriel do Oeste, Mato Grosso do Sul in Lucas. These families also
received 200 hectare lots, but from this point on, settlement and development in Lucas became
essentially a private endeavor, facilitated by the government only in terms of promoting favorable
conditions for the growth of the agro-industrial sector. From the point of view of the land tenure
and regularization priorities of the government, the settlement was successful even though the
majority of the parceleiro settler left. The cumbersome, contentious, and legally ambiguous
process of converting the lands in Lucas from terras devolutas to parcels that could be privately
owned and farmed had been completed within less than 10 years. Lucas was legally elevated to
the status of municipality on July 4, 1988 (State Law no. 5.318), counting 5,500 inhabitants at the
time.
The convergence of agrarian frontiers in Mato Grosso
The case of Lucas’ settlement clearly shows how multiple types of settlement acted in
concert as well as in competition with one another to carry out the settlement of the agrarian
frontier. The eighty-five families of posseiros who continue to make up a large portion of the
successful agricultural land-owner class in Lucas today were spontaneous migrants to the area,
mainly from the state of Paraná. They had either purchased their lands from brokers or simply
claimed them by setting about the business of farming them. The posseiros relied heavily on the
land titling process initiated by the other local settlement efforts to gain free and clear titles to
their lands and extend their landholdings, either by colluding with INCRA agents to push the
parcelieros off of their demarcated and registered lands, or simply by stepping in and buying
lands that other settlers were leaving.78 The developing profitability of local production came to
depend heavily on the infrastructure established by the cooperative, and the children of posseiros
attended schools begun by the cooperative in fulfilment of their agreement with INCRA.
Constructing a successful settlement on the Mato Grosso frontier in the late 1970s and
early 1980s was not an easy task. In fact, the posseiros had been farming locally for five years
when the other two groups of settlers converged on the locale, but they had not, during that time,
begun the construction of any infrastructure related to a town. Of the 203 families of parceleiros
that originally participated in the project, less than twenty remained in Lucas after two years.
Today, only a couple of these families continue to farm there. While there were conflicts among
the posseiros and the parceleiros, more of the difficulties stemmed from the treatment of the
parceleiros by INCRA. In fact, the outcome for the parceleiros might have been even worse if
there had not been a mutual recognition among the parceleiros and the posseiros that they had
common roots in the country’s south.79 The fifty families of cooperative members arrived in Lucas
292 Rausch
with the most financial support and options of any of the groups; not all of them continue to farm
in Lucas today, but their additional influence in the municipality is evident in the presence of the
first local grain drier and the first local schools.
The government’s goals for extending its control over the Amazon frontier in Mato
Grosso were articulated via hybrid state and private initiatives, including regularization of lands
claimed through posse (settlement first and applying for the title later) and the collaboration with
cooperative settlements in the Amazon, in addition to official organized settlements. Many of the
producers responsible for frontier development arrived in Mato Grosso from the southern states of
RS and Paraná where other processes of reterritorialization were taking place. These smallholders
were compelled to move to the frontier for various reasons, including pressure from agricultural
modernization efforts, competition with indigenous groups over land, and the expanding number
of rural households in the region due to generational expansion.80 Their convergence in certain
locales may help explain the spatial heterogeneity of successful development of agricultural
economies on the frontier. Competition and cooperation among rival groups ultimately facilitated
the establishment of institutions and infrastructure necessary to make a settlement successful and
sustainable in the places with the most favorable conditions.
The PRODECER project is one specific example of the way the confluence of frontiers
characterized the settlement of the Mato Grosso, and of Lucas more specifically. PRODECER was
an official project with the aim of developing the Amazon for national benefits, but the government
relied heavily on the activities of non-state actors to carry out the project. The settlement history
of Lucas is a clear example of this rather complex interweaving of state and private settlement in
the advancement of the frontier and the capitalization of the country’s natural resources. In the
end, individuals who were able to meet requirements set explicitly or implicitly by the state to
turn the country’s so-called empty spaces into globalized production spaces effectively extended
the reach of the state to regions and resources that were previously uncontrolled by it.
Conclusion
The Amazon has been transformed by multiple types of settlement frontiers, which
sometimes overlapped. This helps explain the diversity of outcomes of settlement in the region.
In 1981, three distinct groups of settlers, known locally as posseiros, parceleiros, and associados,
converged on the banks of the Rio Verde and together undertook the physical and institutional
transformations that would, over the next three decades, form the foundation of the emergence
of one of the most productive sites of industrial-scale agriculture production in the world. Here,
I show that all three groups received state assistance and furthered the state project of divvying
up and opening land in the Amazon for industrial agriculture expansion, but also, that all three
groups ultimately had rather ambiguous relationships with the state. In the end, the personal
relationships and private investments made by the settlers were also highly influential to the
outcome of the settlement project in Lucas. The posseiros group ended up benefitting the most
from the municipality’s contentious beginnings, and this outcome continues to mark the social,
economic, and political situation of the municipality today. Closer inspection of settlement histories
from the various frontiers of agrarian settlement in the Amazon shows how different groups
of settlers that overlapped on the frontier worked sometimes in competition, but sometimes in
collaboration with one another to influence the allocation of public resources, to set and enforce
boundaries, and to influence discourses that ultimately legitimated or invalidated particular
settlement outcomes.81 Future research should compare outcomes among municipalities with
different types of settlement histories.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Dario Munhak of the Municipal
Archive of Lucas do Rio Verde for his insights on this topic, which were fundamental to the
formulation of this paper, and Dr. J. Christopher Brown, for comments on previous versions of
this paper. This manuscript was greatly improved by the thoughtful comments of one anonymous
reviewer. Funding for this research was provided by an IIE Fulbright Student Grant. Any
remaining errors are the author’s alone.
NOTES
1 Joe Foweraker, The Struggle for Land: A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from
1930 to the Present Day, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); Marianne Schmink and Charles
H. Wood, “Land Conflicts in Amazonia,” American Ethnologist 9, no. 2 (1982): 341-357;
Donald Sawyer, “Frontier Expansion and Retraction in Brazil,” in Marianne Schmink and
Charles H. Wood, eds., Frontier Expansion in Amazônia (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1984), 180-
203.
2 David Cleary, “After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian
Amazon,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (1993): 331-349.
3 For examples, see Marcia N. Macedo, Ruth S. DeFries, Douglas C. Morton, Claudia M.
Sitckler, Gillian L. Galford, and Yosio E. Shimabukuro, “Decoupling of Deforestation and
Soy Production in the Southern Amazon during the Late 2000s,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 1341-1346; Eugenio Y. Arima, Peter Richards, Robert Walker,
and Marcellus M. Caldas, “Statistical Confirmation of Indirect Land Use Change in the
Brazilian Amazon,” Environmental Research Letters 6 (2011): 024010; Christian Brannstrom,
“South America’s Neoliberal Agricultural Frontiers: Places of Environmental Sacrifice
or Conservation Opportunity?” Ambio 38 (2009): 141-149; Phillip M. Fearnside, “Brazil’s
Cuiabá-Santarém (BR-163) Highway: The Environmental Cost of Paving a Soybean Corridor
Through the Amazon,” Environmental Management 39 (2007): 601-614.
4 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], Establecimentos Agropecuários, Censo
Agropecuário 1920/2006, Rio de Janeiro, 2007.
5 On deforestation and land concentration as consequences of agricultural production, see
Britaldo Soares-Filho, Ane Alencar, Daniel Nepstad, Gustavi Cerqueira, Maria del Carmen
Vera-Diaz, Sérgio Rivero, Luis Solórzano, and Eliane Voll, “Simulating the Response of
Land-Cover Changes to Road Paving and Governance along a Major Amazon Highway: the
Santarém-Cuiabá Corridor,” Global Change Biology 10 (2004): 745-764. For an examination of
the state’s role in attracting corporate investment, see John O. Browder and Brian J. Godfrey,
Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon (New
York: Columbia UP, 1997).
6 David Carr, “Population and Deforestation: Why Rural Migration Matters,” Progress in
Human Geography 33 (2009): 355-378.
7 Thomas K. Rudel, Ruth Defries, Gregory P. Asner, and William F. Laurance, “Changing
Drivers of Deforestation and New Opportunities for Conservation,” Conservation Biology 23,
no. 6 (2009): 1396-1405.
8 For examples see Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest:
Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon (New York: HarperPerennial, 1989);
Ana Luiza Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon, (Austin: U of Texas P, 1992);
Laudemir Luiz Zart, Desencanto na Nova Terra. Assentamento no Município de Lucas do Rio
Verde-MT na Década de 80, PhD diss., Universidade Federal de Santa Cataria, Centro de
Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-graduação em Sociologia Política (1998).
294 Rausch
9 Hecht and Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon.
10 Christian Brannstrom, Lisa Rausch, J. Christopher Brown, Renata Marson Texiera
de Andrade, and Andrew Miccolis, “Compliance and Market Exclusion in Brazilian
Agriculture: Analysis and Implications for ‘Soft’ Governance,” Land Use Policy 29, no.
2 (2012): 357-366; Marcio Batista Caparroz, “Ambiente, Urbanização e Agroindústria: a
Especificidade de Lucas do Rio Verde - MT,” XVII Encontro Nacional de Estudos Populacionais
(Caxambu - MG - Brazil, 2010): 20; José Forero, “In One Brazilian Farm Town, Reviving the
Forest,” NPR, 15 December 2009; Pat Joseph, “Soy in the Amazon,” Virginia Quarterly Review
(2009): 107-129; Angela Pimenta, Crescimento Chinês e Ambientalismo Nórdico, Exame, 26
March 2008.
11 C. S. Simmons, R. T. Walker, E. Y. Arima, S. P. Aldrich, M. M. Caldas, The Amazon Land War
in the South of Pará, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(2007) 567-592; M.
Schmink, C. H. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia, New York, 1992.
12 Browder and Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the
Brazilian Amazon; Ana Luiza Ozorio de Almeida and João S. Campari, Sustainable Settlement
in the Brazilian Amazon (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995).
13 Cleary, “After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian
Amazon”; Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, “The ‘Political Ecology’ of Amazonia,”
in Peter D. Little and Michael M. Horowitz, eds., Lands at Risk in the Third World: Local-Level
Perspectives (Boulder: Westview, 1987), 38-57.
14 Ana Paula Dutra Aguiar, Gilberto Câmara, and Maria Isabel Sobral Escada, “Spatial
Statistical Analysis of Land-Use Determinants in the Brazilian Amazonia: Exploring Intra-
Regional Heterogeneity,” Ecological Modelling 209 (2007): 169-188; Brian J. Godfrey and
Jeffery O. Browder, “Disarticulated Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon,” Geographical
Review 86 (1996): 441-445.
15 Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon; Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap, and Brian
Meuller, “Titles, Conflict, and Land Use: the Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on
the Brazilian Amazon Frontier,” (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999).
16 Wendy Jepson, “Private Agricultural Colonization on a Brazilian Frontier, 1970-1980,”
Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006): 839-863.
17 Phillip M. Fearnside, “Brazil’s Amazon Settlement Schemes: Conflicting Objectives and
Human Carrying Capacity,” Habitat International 8 (1984): 45-61; Ozorio de Almeida, The
Colonization of the Amazon.
18 Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap, Brian D. Mueller, “Land Reform Policies, the Sources of
Violent Conflict, and Implications for Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of
Environmental Economics and Management 39 (2000): 162-188.
19 Pablo Pacheco, “Agrarian Reform in the Brazilian Amazon: Its Implications for Land
Distribution and Deforestation,” World Development 37, no. 8 (2009): 1337-1347.
20 Charles H. Wood and John Wilson, “The Magnitude of Migration to the Brazilian Frontier,”
in Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, eds., Frontier Expansion in Amazonia, (Gainsville,
U of Floria P, 1981): 142-152.
21 Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agraria [INCRA], Assentamentos de
trabalhadores(as) Rurais, Brasília (2013).
22 Jepson, “Private Agricultural Colonization on a Brazilian Frontier, 1970-1980: Ozorio de
Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon.
23 Jepson, “Private Agricultural Colonization on a Brazilian Frontier, 1970-1980.”
24 Gilberto Torres Alves Jr., “O Planejamento Governamental e seus Reflexos na Estrutura
Fundiária de Mato Grosso,” Caminhos de Geografia 4 (2003): 17-30.
25 Vitale Joanoni Neto, Fronteiras da Crença: Ocupação do Norte de Mato Grosso após 1970, (Cuiabá,
MT: UFMT, 2007).
26 Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon; Jepson, “Private Agricultural
Colonization on a Brazilian Frontier, 1970-1980”; Wendy Jepson, “Producing a Modern
Agricultural Frontier: Firms and Cooperatives in Eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil,” Economic
Geography 82 (2006): 289-316.
29 Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon.
30 M. Arcemy, Geografia de Mato Grosso, (Rondonopolis, MT: UFMT, 2007); Instituto Brasileiro
de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], Cities, (n.d.).
31 Joanoni Neto, Fronteiras da Crença: Ocupação do Norte de Mato Grosso após 1970.
34 Anton Huber, Tempestade no Cerrado, (Cuiabá, MT: Carlini & Caniato, 2010); Telmo Marcon,
Acampamento Natalino: História da Luta pela Reforma Agrária, (Passo Fundo, RS: UPF, 1997).
36 Fearnside, “Brazil’s Amazon Settlement Schemes: Conflicting Objectives and Human
Carrying Capacity.”
39 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], Population Count, 1996.
40 Alston, Libecap, Meuller, “Titles, Conflict, and Land use: The Development of Property
Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier.”
41 Arcemy, Geografia de Mato Grosso.
42 Alston, Libecap, and Meuller, “Land Reform Policies, the Sources of Violent Conflict, and
Implications for Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon”; Pacheco, “Agrarian Reform in the
Brazilian Amazon: Its Implications for Land Distribution and Deforestation.”
43 A typical retelling of the settlement history in Lucas was found in a 1988 issue of the local
newspaper (translation and italics mine): “Everything began with the establishment, in 1982,
of the Special Settlement Project of Lucas do Rio Verde, which was meant to settle 282 [sic]
landless families from Ronda Alta, RS. Really, the initial settlement began well before this,
in 1979, when 26 posseiro families, adventuring with luck and life, occupied the region. It was
after the arrival of the parceleiros, though, that development came more quickly. Not because
of them, but because after them other farmers and merchants began to come…”, Na Historia
de um Povo a Marca do Trabalho, Folha Verde, 30 November 1988.
44 Interviews with early settlers, September – November, 2011. José Dário Munhak and L.
Dziúba Junior, “Lucas do Rio Verde: Um Resgate Sócio-Histórico-Econômico,” Ensino
Fundamental (Lucas do Rio Verde, 2001).
45 For examples, see Angus L. Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless
Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland: Food First Books, 2003); Jepson,
“Producing a Modern Agricultural Frontier: Firms and Cooperatives in Eastern Mato
Grosso, Brazil”; Cynthia S. Simmons, Stephen G. Perz, Marcos A. Pedlowski,and Luiz
Guilherme Teixeira Silva, “The Changing Dynamics of Land Conflict in the Brazilian
Amazon: The Rural-Urban Complex and its Environmental Implications,” Urban Ecosystems
(2002): 99-121.
46 Author interview with posseiro TU, 2011
47 Federal Law 4504, November 30, 1964/Land Statute.
296 Rausch
48 Interviews with early settlers, September – November, 2011. Fernanda Celina Nicoli da
Silva, “A História do Cotidiano de Lucas do Rio Verde do Início de sua Colonização à sua
Emancipação,” História (2011): 60.
49 da Silva, “A História do Cotidiano de Lucas do Rio Verde do Início de sua Colonização à
sua Emancipação”; Munhak and Dziúba Junior, “Lucas do Rio Verde: Um Resgate Sócio-
Histórico-Econômico.”
50 da Silva, A História do Cotidiano de Lucas do Rio Verde do Início de sua Colonização à sua
Emancipação.
51 Zart, Desencanto na Nova Terra. Assentamento no Município de Lucas do Rio Verde-MT na Década
de 80: 205.
52 Prefeitura Municipal de Lucas do Rio Verde, Plano Diretor do Município de Lucas do Rio
Verde - MT: Reavaliação e Atualização, 2007, 301.
53 Munhak, Dziúba Junior, “Lucas do Rio Verde: Um Resgate Sócio-Histórico-Econômico.”
54 Marcon, Acampamento Natalino: História da Luta pela Reforma Agrária.
55 Joanoni Neto, Fronteiras da Crença: Ocupação do Norte de Mato Grosso após 1970.
56 José Vicente Taveres dos Santos, “Programma de Colonização Terranova,” in João Carlos
Barrozo, ed., Mato Grosso do Sonho à Utopia da Terra, (Cuiabá, MT: UFMT, 2008), 97-140.
57 dos Santos, Programma de Colonização Terranova; Wright and Wolford, To Inherit the Earth:
The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil.
58 Wright and Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New
Brazil.
de 80.
62 S. P. Castro, J. C. Barrozo, M. Covezzi, O. Preti, A Colinzação Oficial em Mato Grosso : “A Nata e
a Borra da Sociedade”, Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 1994.; “Lucas do Rio Verde: um pouco de
história,” Journal Folha Verde, 4 July 1988.
63 Castro, Barrozo, Covezzi, and Preti, A Colonização Oficial em Mato Grosso: “A Nata e a Borra da
Sociedade.”
64 Prior to arriving at the camp, 48.92 percent of them had either been renting lands,
sharecropping, or working on family lands, 15.53 percent had been working as hired hands
on farms, 14.04 percent had been caretakers for others’ lands (possibly farming but possibly
not), and 10.44 percent had been engaged in some other sort of, possibly non-agricultural
work, with the remaining 11.07 percent coming from other backgrounds. Marcon,
Acampamento Natalino: História da Luta pela Reforma Agrária.
65 News stories at the time alleged that the resources INCRA provided to the parceleiros in
terms of transport from RS to Lucas and the preparation of the land were generous and that
they included a stipend of Cr$8,000 (approximately US$127) per month. Lucas do Rio Verde,
Três Anos de Emancipação, Folha Verde, 2 August 1991. According to my conservations with
a local historian in Lucas, these funds would have perhaps been the approximate value of a
monthly food basket for the family, which, like the land clearing and soil preparation, was
provided to the settlers through third-party organizations and not outright, which further
added to the perception among the parceleiros that they were considered irresponsible
second-class citizens by INCRA, personal communication, 2011.
de 80.
de 80; Laudemir Luiz Zart, “Lucas do Rio Verde: As Vozes dos Parceleiros no Processo de
Construção de um Novo Espaço Social,” in João C. Barrozo, ed., Mato Grosso do Sonho à
Utopia da Terra, (Cuiabá, MT: UFMT, 2008), 261-296.
68 Munhak and Dziúba Junior, “Lucas do Rio Verde: Um Resgate Sócio-Histórico-Econômico.”
de 80.
70 Huber, Tempestade no Cerrado; Joanoni Neto, Fronteiras da Crença: Ocupação do Norte de Mato
Grosso após 1970.
71 Huber, Tempestade no Cerrado.
72 From the “Agreement on Joint Action” between the Cooperative and INCRA, cited in
Huber, Tempestade no Cerrado.
73 Castro, Barrozo, Covezzi, and Preti, A Colinzação Oficial em Mato Grosso: “A Nata e a Borra da
Sociedade.”
74 Ata de Fundação da Cidade, 1982.
75 Interviews with early settlers, September – November, 2011; Joanoni Neto, Fronteiras da
Crença: Ocupação do Norte de Mato Grosso após 1970; Cristiano Desconsi, A Marcha Dos
Pequenos Proprietários Rurais: Trajetórias de Migrantes do Sul do Brasil para o Mato Grosso, (Rio
de Janeiro: Editoria E-papers, 2011).
76 Huber, Tempestade no Cerrado.
de 80.
78 Interviews with early settlers, September – November, 2011.
79 “Dificuldades Vividas,” Folha Verde, 2 August 1991.
80 Carr, “Population and Deforestation: Why Rural Migration Matters.”
Reflexive Regionalism and the Santa Fe Style
Ron Foresta
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Abstract:The Santa Fe Style is an assembly of cultural features associated with the city
of Santa Fe and its surrounding Upper Rio Grande Valley. The style, often dismissed as
a confection for tourists because of its gloss and worldliness, is in fact a manifestation of
reflexive regionalism. This overlooked cultural process occurs when worldly outsiders
fashion regional traits into responses to the life challenges that they and their extra-
regional reference groups face. In this case, outsiders fashioned what they found in
early-twentieth-century Santa Fe into responses to challenges that accompanied the
rise of American industrial capitalism. Threats to elite hegemony, the destruction of
established lifeways, and the need for new perspectives on American society were
prominent among the challenges to which the Santa Fe Style responded. Reflexive
regionalism is thus the kind of cultural process that Regulation Theory posits but
has found difficult to convincingly identify in the real world, i.e., one that adapts
individuals and societies to periodic shifts in the logic and practices of capitalism. I
examine seven individuals who made signal contributions to the Santa Fe Style. Each
reveals a key facet of Santa Fe’s reflexive regionalism. Together they show how this
process created the Santa Fe Style and, more generally, how it works as an engine of
cultural invention. The key concepts here are reflexive regionalism, the Santa Fe Style,
cosmopolitanism, Regulation Theory, the work of the age, and the project of the self.
T
he Santa Fe Style is an assembly of cultural features associated with the city of Santa Fe
and the surrounding region of the Upper Rio Grande River. The style, often dismissed as a
confection for tourists, is a manifestation of reflexive regionalism. This underappreciated
cultural process occurs when outsiders fashion regional traits into responses to the life challenges
that they and their extra-regional reference groups face. In this case, outsiders fashioned what
they found in and around early-twentieth-century Santa Fe into responses to challenges that
accompanied the rise of American industrial capitalism. The need for new class norms, the
destruction of established lifeways, and the declining usefulness of established perspectives on
American society were prominent among the challenges to which the Santa Fe Style responded.
Reflexive regionalism is therefore the kind of cultural process that Regulation Theory posits but
has found difficult to convincingly identify in practice, that is, one that adapts individuals and
societies to periodic shifts in the logic and practices of capitalism. I examine seven individuals
who made signal contributions to the Santa Fe Style. Each reveals a key facet of Santa Fe’s reflexive
regionalism. Together they show how this process created the Santa Fe Style and, more generally,
how it works as an engine of cultural invention.
The problem
New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande region is home to one of America’s most distinct
assemblies of region-based cultural traits.1 The Santa Fe Style, as this assembly is commonly
called, includes an unmistakable architecture; unique expressive forms in many crafts including
wood working, weaving, and pottery making; and a distinct mix of subjects and styles in the
Reflexive Regionalism and the Santa Fe Style 299
fine arts, especially in landscape and genre painting. The assembly also includes a cuisine, a
literature that celebrates the region’s lifeways and landscapes, and even a life model built on
region-inspired creativity and consumption. All these constituents of the style are bound up in a
semiotic package and enveloped in a dense mystique.2
The style has become more pervasive over time; it is more of a presence in Santa Fe and its
region today than it was a century ago. This does not square with the cultural theorists’ assumption
that personal mobility and the fluidity of money, commodities, and ideas undermine place-bound
cultural traits and weaken their hold on their domains, which allows cultural fragmentation and
dissonance to replace cultural integrity.3 Such cultural “disembedding,” to use Giddens’ term, or
“deterritorialization” to use Appadurai’s, is assumed to work with special force in cosmopolitan
places.4 The Santa Fe Style nonetheless thrived in and around a wealth-saturated and worldly
city.5
There are two common explanations for the Santa Fe Style. Each comports with received
wisdom about modern cultural possibilities and so might be considered orthodox. Each also has
shortcomings that have grown more obvious with the accumulation of scholarly work on the
Santa Fe Style. The first explanation holds that the style is genuinely old and indigenous, but
uniquely resistant to the normal agents of cultural corrosion. Formed in the crucible of Spanish and
Native American experience many centuries ago, this explanation goes, elements of Indigenous
culture were powerful enough to bleed through the layers of succeeding history like a strong dye.
Perhaps Mather and Woods best articulate this view in their influential book, Santa Fe Style. Santa
Fe, they write, “remains uniquely its own place, its residents stubbornly and stoically insisting
that tradition take precedence over change.”6 This interpretation sees the Santa Fe Style as an
authentic regional culture in folklorist’s understanding of authenticity; it is demotic and evolved.7
It also makes Santa Fe out to be a real place in Relph’s sense of the term; it is the product of the
free choices and creative acts of those for whom it is home.8
The style’s connections to Hispanic and Native American pasts are beyond dispute, and
so is the strong local commitment to that past. But the bleeding-through explanation does not
explain why the style’s florescence began around 1890, precisely when the Santa Fe region’s
connections to the rest of America began to multiply and its integration into national life started
to accelerate. The explanation also seems too neglectful of the capitalism that has never been far
beneath the surface of American life. One might try to address these shortcomings by encasing
the “authentic” explanation in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory or a similarly broad theoretical
framework that admits into its pale the play of cosmopolitan capitalism and local resistance. The
style then becomes a redoubt of resistance to the intrusion of an alien order.9 Adding this resistance
factor can account for the timing problem but it cannot account for how, far from resisting alien
intrusions, the style fed on the attention and contributions of outsiders.10
The second explanation takes precisely the opposite tack. It asserts that the style is
fundamentally contrived rather than fundamentally authentic. It was a concoction baked up,
albeit with some genuine local ingredients, to feed to tourists and other outsiders. Stewart
Brand expressed this view when he wrote that Santa Fe’s distinctive architecture sprang from,
“the collusion of three building styles, [Pueblo, Hispanic, and territorial] and one generation
of calculating boosters.”11 Chris Wilson, whose The Myth of Santa Fe is the definitive cultural
history of Santa Fe, also saw such image creation at work, as the title of his book suggests.
This contrivance explanation has abundant virtues. It gets the timing right. It squares with our
understanding of how tourism prompts false claims to a certain kind of uniqueness.12 It aligns
with what we know about the role of commercial intent in creating the American West of popular
imagination.13 Perhaps most importantly, it squares with how Santa Fe’s early twentieth-century
boosters embraced the Santa Fe Style as part of a tourism-based strategy of growth for their
300 Foresta
city.14 But the contrivance explanation has a flaw that it difficult to ignore; it fails to account for
the style’s depth, dynamism, and wealth of manifestations. These characteristics do not comport
with our understanding of how tourism hollows out cultural forms for economy of reproduction,
or with how the stages that commerce sets for the tourist’s undiscerning view tend to lack depth.15
The last decade or so has seen many excellent scholars including Rudnick, Burke,
Wingert-Playdon, Cline, Redding and Eldrick, Booker, and the Larsons, who closely examine
elements of the Santa Fe Style. Their work has deepened our knowledge of the style’s history
and of the individuals most centrally involved in that history.16 This work has encouraged a more
nuanced general understanding of the style’s origins that recognizes the role played by talented
newcomers. It also confirms that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon that is beyond the
interpretive reach of the ready dichotomies of authentic and artificial, real and unreal, folk and
commercial.
In this more nuanced understanding, the creativity of these newcomers, sharpened by
the emotional and cultural links they forged with the region, aided both the boosters seeking
commercial advantage and the nobler task of celebrating something indigenous. If a new
orthodoxy is emerging, it is this.17 This newer, more synthesizing explanation incorporates
strengths of both received explanations and hews closer than either to the actual historical
circumstances surrounding the style’s emergence. It does, however, have a shortcoming of both
older origin stories in its genes; it does not acknowledge what these newcomers brought with
them to the region––ideas, conventions, skills, preoccupations, etc. These things determined
both how the newcomers saw the region and what they could make of what they found in it.
The shortcoming leaves this newer explanation only a little more helpful than the older ones in
illuminating the creative sources of Santa Fe Style that lay beyond the region, or in explaining
the style’s relationship to wider currents in American socio-cultural history. As such, the new
explanation fails to take full advantage of recent scholarly accomplishments.
Reflexive regionalism
The folklorist Archie Green proposed the term “reflexive regionalism” for the identity-
enhancing relationship between folk culture and geographical area in which “lore delineates
region and region delineates lore.”18 Green uses “reflexive” here to mean “involuted” or “turned
in upon itself.” The region and its lore are in a closed, mutually reinforcing relationship that
deepens and more sharply delineates each. We are dealing with a different sort of reflexive
cultural process here, however, one involving both the region and the nation beyond it, and one
in which “reflexive” carries a meaning closer to “occurring in reaction.” In this second kind of
reflexive regionalism, regional cultural traits emerge in response to national cues. In other words,
the nation provides the incentives and guidance for regional cultural invention. The nation then
provides the scales on which this invention is weighted. The regional culture produced in this
way thus reflects, albeit in an altered and refractory form, the nation as a whole.
Regulation theory, which has proven useful in probing capitalism’s relationship to its host
society, allows us to fit such reflexive regionalism into the schematic of modern capitalism. Briefly
summarized, the regulation theorists begin with the question that Boyer phrased as, “How can
such a contradictory process [i.e. a capitalist economy] succeed over a long period of time?”19
Anyone can appreciate the question; capitalism’s accumulation strategies create an ongoing
churn of social upheaval and personal dislocation. The regulationists concluded that the key to
capitalism’s robustness is its capacity to shape, or “regulate,” its host society.20 In other words,
regulation theory posits that capitalism tends to shape society into forms that both facilitate
profit seeking and relieve the stresses caused by that profit seeking. Scholars have shown how
this regulation works through institutions that serve the interests of capital, through the actions
of its conscious or unconscious agents, and through the many deep channels of convention,
convenience, and practicality that accumulation strategies cut into society.21
The Santa Fe Style and the reflexive regionalism that produced it were part of this change-
accommodating process that the regulationists described. Each element of the style was a useful
response to a challenge presented by industrial capitalism’s rise and increasing sway in America.
Some elements of the style constructively articulated the social and psychic discontents that
accompanied that rise. Some dampened them. Other elements were part of new life models that
met the personal challenges presented by a newly industrialized society. Still other elements
blazed new pathways of consumption. And almost always, these elements opened new profit
opportunities and helped to more deeply integrate the Santa Fe region into the wider circuits of
national and international capitalism. The sum of these responses was not an involuted regional
culture as the folklorists of old conceived of them, but it was a region-based way of seeing,
thinking, behaving, and living. In short, it was a regional culture nonetheless.
The mainstream literature on American regionalism contains a trace awareness of this
national-regional reflexivity. It is latent in Mumford’s concept of emergent regionalism and in
Botkin’s concept of dynamic regionalism. Reflexive regionalism seems to lurk just below the
surface of the romantic-reactionary regionalism of the Nashville Agrarians and in the more recent
literature on creative ethnicity.22 Some of the recent writing on the culture of Santa Fe and the
Rio Grande region acknowledge that something akin to reflexive regionalism has been at work.
Scholars, for example, have noted the influence of national styles on the region’s artists; others
have pointed out the preoccupations that writers brought with them to the region; still others
have noted the importance of national opinion and national markets in shaping the work of those
who created the style.23 This awareness of outside influences has not inflated into a more general
explanation for the Santa Fe Style, however.
Exploring reflexive regionalism is important business. We fear that our progeny will
live in places that are wholly the product of sweeping and cunning accumulation strategies that
deaden capacity for creative expression and thwart people’s efforts to construct meaningful
environments for themselves.24 What happened at Santa Fe suggests sunnier possibilities of place.
Although the Santa Fe creative project was effectively over by the middle of the twentieth century,
it was the work of recognizably modern people responding, often skillfully and successfully, to
pressing challenges posed by a recognizably modern form of capitalism.25 Understanding and
encouraging reflexive regionalism may be the best way we have to create places where locally
grounded creative responses to the challenges of capitalism are possible, in other words, places
that Relph and others with his sensibility would recognize as real and spirit-sustaining.
A key enabling premise of reflexive regionalism is that imaginative and talented, but
otherwise ordinary individuals were (and are) capable of responding effectively to the socio-
cultural challenges of modern capitalism. We do not normally assume this. The cultural critics
of modern capitalism have tended to see the responses of ordinary people as limited in practice
to servitude, disengagement, or resistance, be the choice the subtle one of Raymond Williams or
the starker one of Mike Davis. Moreover, many of the foremost observers of twentieth-century
America including Randall Jarrell, C. Wright Mills, William H. Whyte, Eric Fromm, Hannah
Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse believed that modern capitalism had a devastating impact on
personal creativity.26 The interpretive personae that these observers constructed (the one-
dimensional man, the other-directed man, the organization man, and the well-adjusted man)
were shallow and passive entities. At best they were capable of furtive and ephemeral responses
to their predicaments like creative consuming, ironic understanding, and little acts of sabotage.
These constructs, with their limited capacity to respond to their predicaments and no capacity
whatsoever to change them, continue to shape our view of individuals facing the challenges of
modern capitalism.27
302 Foresta
We do know, however, that the rise of industrial capitalism elicited creative and durable
responses from ordinary and often historically anonymous people at key points in the formation
of modern America. While those responses served industrial capitalism in a regulatory fashion,
that is, they adapted society to its operations and, in cases, paved new avenues for its profit
seeking, they also gave ordinary individuals the space and tools they needed to take advantage
of what capitalism brought into their lives. Zunz and Aron showed how Americans constructed
micro-cultures for the office, the factory, and even the corporate boardroom when these places
became part of their lives. Warner and then Jackson explored how the enterprise and creativity
of ordinary Americans gave the suburb its form, substance, and much of its culture.28 The case
for reflexive regionalism builds on such findings. It assumes that region-based cultural invention
by talented and perceptive, but otherwise ordinary, individuals was within the range of effective
responses to the rise of modern capitalism.
The three resources that we need to probe for reflexive regionalism in Santa Fe’s cultural
ferment are at our disposal. First, we now have a detailed picture of this period in Santa Fe’s past
thanks to the appearance of substantial histories of Santa Fe and its region in recent decades.
Second, our knowledge of the lives of the many figures that took part in the Santa Fe creative
project has blossomed thanks to the organization of personal papers and the appearance of many
excellent biographies. Third, our understanding of the socio-cultural challenges that Americans
faced during those years has widened and deepened. Together, these sources let us explore
reflexive regionalism’s role in the creation of the Santa Fe Style.
America comes to Santa Fe
When Spanish soldiers, priests, and settlers arrived in the region of the Upper Rio Grande
late in the sixteenth century, they found the Pueblo Indians, who were settled agriculturalists
living in more than a dozen large, nucleated communities, or pueblos. The Spanish built missions
and churches and founded their own agricultural villages among the pueblos. They established
their capital, Santa Fe, on a tributary of the Rio Grande.29 Once colonized, the Upper Rio Grande
region became a remote bicultural region on the northern marches of the Spanish colonial empire,
and so it remained for over two centuries. Elements of the region’s Hispanic culture became
indigenized. The Native Americans embraced Christianity and modified elements of European
culture to fit their own needs. Although maintaining their separate identities and economies, the
two communities generally got along; intercommunity trade, intermarriage, a shared religion,
equitable distribution of water, and the common threat posed by marauding Apaches and
Comanches all encouraged amicable relations.30 The brief period of Mexican sovereignty in the
early nineteenth century saw the beginnings of trade with the expanding United States, but little
change otherwise.31
Santa Fe made an unfavorable impression on the American soldiers who came to occupy
it in 1846 during the Mexican War.32 Its squat adobe buildings struck them as barely fit for human
habitation. One soldier compared the small, mud-colored city to a prairie-dog town.33 They noted
the absence of shade trees, paved streets, and other town amenities that they took for granted back
home. Private Daniel Hastings wrote in his diary that, “great indeed was the contrast between the
beautiful and magnificent city which my imagination had pictured and the low, dirty and inferior
place which I then beheld.”34 The inhabitants of the city and the region made a comparably
unfavorable impression. The occupying soldiers described them as dirty, lazy, fond of drinking
and gambling, and Catholic. As a whole, Americans with voice were no more pleased with the
human fruits of their victorious war. They feared that the Mexicans and Native Americans of
their newly annexed territories would pollute what they saw as the nation’s Anglo-Saxon wells
of strength and virtue. The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the war, sharpened those
fears by automatically extending citizenship to all Hispanic residents of the annexed territories
who desired it. An editorial in the Richmond Whig warned that the “debased population” of the
conquered lands would, once “summarily manufactured into American citizens,” bring the
nation no good.35
The first decades of American rule saw the trickle of Americans from elsewhere into the
region widen into a stream. The newcomers brought their technology, commerce, architecture,
and city planning preferences, and Santa Fe began taking on an American aspect.36 The most
successful newcomers joined the foremost Hispanic families to form a new bicultural elite. Then
in 1880 the railroad arrived, effectively linking Santa Fe to the rest of the nation for the first
time. More Americans now arrived as settlers, entrepreneurs, sojourners, and tourists, and in
many other roles.37 Whatever brought them, and whatever else they brought with them, these
newcomers arrived with two very American items in their psychic luggage. One was a need,
indeed a compulsion, to establish their place in the world. The other was a sense of belonging to
a new and unfinished nation. Both were essential for the region’s subsequent cultural florescence.
The project of the self
The right to construct a satisfactory life for one’s self by one’s own lights and means
was among the personal rights on which the American republic was founded. The rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness fed into and sustained this right.38 Personal development and
fulfillment, which we might call the project of the self, was a civic obligation as well as a personal
right. The founding fathers held that only those who set themselves to making their place in the
world, and acquired the civic virtues that the task imbued in individuals, could keep American
society on an even keel and keep its democratic governing institutions properly inflated.39
This project of the self was generally straightforward in the early days of the republic
because people had to find themselves and create their places in communities that were for the
most part small, predictable, and as Wiebe described them, “homogenous [and] enjoyed an inner
stability that the coming and going of members seldom shook.”40 The local economy provided
the material resources for social self-creation; local society provided the social resources; local
norms provided the moral guidance; and successful local citizens provided the models. The range
of personal strategies and the scale of realistic aspirations were limited by this localism, and the
possibilities of innovative self-construction were scant. On the other hand, the local instruments
of self-construction were simple enough for most individuals to grasp and use.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century undermined the localness and the simplicity
of the project of the self. As American cities grew and the national territory expanded, the lure
of distant opportunities drew people away from their birthplaces. Conversely, corporations and
other great institutions intruded on local communities, weakening their hold on individuals, even
on individuals who never left them.41 Traces of this weakening of the local permeate the writings
of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau’s high place among American
thinkers derives largely from how he disentangled his life from the lives of his neighbors and his
thoughts from their thoughts. Once free of the grip of the local, the misanthropic Thoreau turned
inward, but his friend Emerson advised his readers to turn outward instead and forge what he
called “an original relation to the universe.”42
Many Americans had no choice but to form an original relation to the universe. The
new corporations and the national economy they created thrust individuals onto a wider life
stage regardless of their wishes. Many people found themselves in surroundings they did not
understand, in lives they could not manage.43 This disorientation in new places and new lives
became a preoccupation of late nineteenth-century American thought and a prominent theme in
its literature, as attested to by the popularity of such novels as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
and the Oz novels of Frank Baum.
304 Foresta
The outward turn created many new opportunities to shape one’s own life, however, and
it introduced a new plasticity into the project of the self. In their drive for profits and markets,
corporations created new ladders of mobility for the eager manager and the imaginative
mechanic.44 The new universities and museums of the era allowed greater scope for lives founded
on scientific learning and scholarly pursuits. National markets for arts and letters multiplied
opportunities for building lives on talent in these fields.45 The easier accumulation of assets by
the middle and upper classes of a now-wealthier nation expanded opportunities for travel, for
disinterested learning, and for the pursuit of avocational interests. The new railroads, telegraph,
and mail service that allowed commerce and industry to penetrate so many of the nation’s
heretofore inaccessible regions also permitted individuals to tap the resources of many new places
in their self-creation, especially Western places on newly opened frontiers where so little had yet
taken firm form. New ideals of inner growth and fulfillment, born of European Romanticism and
filtered into American thought, added a more expressivist dimension to the personal project.46
As its field of opportunity expanded and the project of the self assumed new interior
dimensions, it remained an intertwined personal and social obligation. Transcendentalism
stressed how the search for their own well-being joined individuals together in socially beneficial
union.47 The popular utopian literature of the late nineteenth century was at pains to show how the
redemptive possibilities open to the individual were linked those available to society as a whole.48
Both practical progressives like Walter Lippmann and those of a more romantic inclination like
Scott Nearing insisted that creating a worthwhile life for oneself and the great social projects
that industrialism forced on the nation, projects that Walter Lippmann called “the work of the
age,” were the private and public sides of the same task.49 It is useful to note that Lippmann’s
concept of work of the age is similar to regulation theory’s concept of social regulation. And in
late nineteenth-century America, both involved adapting society to what the nation’s industrial
capitalism had engendered: great cities, a consumer economy, great-power status, and all their
consequences.
The work of the age
The social and cultural work that industrial capitalism forced on the nation had many
facets. Simply understanding the many dimensions of American newness was one of them.
Writers like Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and William Dean Howells probed the nation’s new social
mores. Painters like Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer sought telling visual clues to the new
America in its bourgeois parlors, farm fields, and even in its hospital operating theaters. The
utopian Edward Bellamy searched America’s new social landscapes for paths to public harmony
and personal perfection. Understanding was just the prelude, however. The work of the age
also meant building and creating on that understanding. Institutions to manage new forms of
education and administer newly professionalized services had to be constructed. New lifeways
that complemented the new opportunities for working and consuming had to be created. Social
classes needed the kit for their new roles in a changing America. The national elite required values
that would allow it to lead a new great power onto the center stage of world affairs; the enlarged
middle class needed habits and values that would fit city life and bureaucratic work; the working
class needed norms and lifeways suited to mill towns and the factory districts of large cities.52
Although sometimes exhilarating, coming to grips with all the newness often provoked
anxiety and sometimes even a sense of dire urgency. Observers like Herbert Croly, Henry Adams,
Frederick Jackson Turner, and even Theodore Roosevelt fretted about the disappearance of old
opportunities for personal accomplishment.50 Anomie and kindred threats to the spirit, they
feared, were waiting to pour into the void.51 Some observers feared that the spread of mechanism
and the rise of new and unfair forms of competition were injecting a debilitating coldness toward
others into society. Others saw the vividness of everyday life disappearing beneath the soot of
industry and the pallor of office complexions. Moreover, many contemporary observers feared
that society’s guideposts were disappearing faster than new ones could be erected. Henry Adams,
on whom this fear weighed heavy, described an America that was “wandering in a desert more
sandy than the Hebrews had ever trodden about Sinai.” The nation, he wrote, was trying “to
realize and understand itself” and, earthworm-like, “catch up with its own head, and to twist
about in search of its tail.”52
These many challenges forced individuals to view the world differently and to live in
new ways. In responding to the need to understand the nation taking shape around them, the
learned and the inquisitive built the stock of knowledge on which the changing nation depended.
In seeing the nation in new ways, the perceptive devised ways for others to see it. By living in
new ways, forward-looking men and women created life models for others to emulate. When the
railroad joined Santa Fe to the rest of America in 1880, the region and its features became more
readily available for projects of self-creation and, through those personal projects, for the work of
adapting America to the newness of its circumstances.
The individuals who would give the Santa Fe Style much of its form and substance began
arriving in the region. Most came as adults, already intellectually formed, usually by experiences
in large cities, major universities, or other culturally fecund places. Many of these individuals
were already engaged with the era’s challenges, and they brought that engagement with them.
Their contributions to the Santa Fe Style were part of life work that looked beyond Santa Fe and
the region for its orientation and its audience. Their wider frame of reference did not make these
individuals cosmopolitan in Merton’s sense of the term, that is, worldly-wise sophisticates with
only superficial local connections.53 Their attachments to the city and the region were undoubtedly
genuine, but so was their sensitivity to their extra-regional reference groups: their readers, buyers,
agents, patrons, reviewers, and friends elsewhere. Its founders’ wide frame of reference accounts
for many of the Santa Fe Style’s striking features including its sustaining matrix of national
institutions; its sensitivity to national aesthetic trends; and how it took the nation as a whole as
the audience for its performances, the market for its products, and the student for its lessons.
This wide frame of reference also accounts for why the style had little resonance among
region’s Native American and Hispanic inhabitants. The elaboration of this new style in their
midst clearly had many consequences for these inhabitants.54 The socio-cultural challenges of
urbanization and industrialization to which the style was a response, however–challenges such
as the chilling of the national spirit, the need to live tastefully in a world of shoddy goods, and the
need to adapt to office–or factory-centered working lives–had little bearing on their lives.55 Hence
the style had little meaning for them as cultural expression per se.
Botkin understood that key individuals could serve as magnifying lenses in cultural
studies because the fine workings of a cultural process could often be seen reflected in their
lives.56 Botkin had folk cultures in mind, but given the importance of individual outsiders in
creating the Santa Fe Style, his insight appears useful for our purposes. Their lives should
reveal how national challenge and personal response worked in and around Santa Fe and,
more generally, how reflexive regionalism works as both an engine of cultural invention and an
instrument of capitalist regulation. Hundreds of individuals made identifiable contributions to
the Santa Fe Style, and more than twenty were considered for scrutiny. In the end, seven whose
lives seemed especially illuminating were selected: the writer Charles Lummis, the painter Ernest
Blumenschein, the designer Mary Colter, the architect John Meem, the salonist and diarist Mabel
Luhan, the administrator Edgar Hewett, and the lawyer and capitalist Frank Springer. Each made
important contributions to the Santa Fe Style. Each has been the subject of at least one full-length
biography that treats both life and work. Together these individuals reveal many of the national
306 Foresta
challenges to which Santa Fe’s reflexive regionalism responded. They also offer a diverse sample
of the life projects from which the Santa Fe Style grew.
Charles Lummis: Humanizing the American spirit
Charles Lummis forged the first clearly reflexive cultural links between Santa Fe and the
rest of the nation. Lummis was born into the family of a prominent New Hampshire clergyman
in 1859.57 Like many sons of his state and social stratum, Lummis went to Harvard, where he
absorbed distillates of the era’s optimism about national achievements and its misgivings about
the loss of old virtues. Bright but eccentric, rambunctious, and free-spirited, Lummis never fit
in at Harvard and eventually left to become a journalist. He was working for a newspaper in
Chillicothe, Ohio in 1884 when Harrison Grey Otis, the publisher of the fledgling Los Angeles
Times, saw one of his pieces and offered him a job. Ever the eccentric, Lummis set out on foot
from Ohio to his new job in California. Ever the self-promoter, he arranged to send dispatches on
his adventures ahead to his new paper and back to his old one.
Lummis’ first dispatches from the Upper Rio Grande region played to the negative racial
stereotypes that were still so much part of its national image. In fact, Lummis’ initial descriptions
of the region’s inhabitants were fiercely and gratuitously cruel. He found everything about the
lazy and dirty “greasers” he encountered to be repulsive, even their food. “Not even a coyote
will touch a dead Greaser,” he wrote, “the flesh is so seasoned with the red pepper they ram into
their food in howling profusion.”58 As the nearly penniless young traveler continued through
the region, however, he repeatedly benefitted from local hospitality, offered, he later reported,
without hesitation or fanfare by those who had little to spare. Lummis had an epiphany; he
beheld a people untouched by the rest of America’s increasing materialism, competitiveness, and
coldness of spirit. Native New Mexicans still appreciated the non-material aspects of life, had an
intact sense of dignity, treated each other with a respectful warmth, and enjoyed the comforting
certainties of an ancient faith. The grandeur and beauty of their land and the luxuriant warmth
of its abundant sunshine, he concluded, nurtured these virtues in them. The region-celebrating
books that Lummis wrote in the 1890s, including A New Mexico David, The Land of Poco Tiempo,
and The Enchanted Burro, were well received by a reading public wearying of the psychic costs of
material achievement.59 With these books, Lummis began transforming the region in the national
imagination from an alien and inferior place into a region where deep indigenous wisdom and
humane traditions immunized against America’s new ills of the spirit. In so doing, Lummis, in
Cline’s words, “plant[ed] the seeds of a fertile literary movement.”60
When others came to Santa Fe and the region, they came looking for the characteristics
that Lummis had found. They found them and further celebrated them. Writers including Willa
Cather, Mary Austin (a Lummis protégé), Mabel Luhan, Haniel Long, and John Nichols all wrote
of the unique, enduring, and endearing qualities of the people and their land.61 These writers
more deeply etched the regional traits that Lummis described onto the national imagination.
They strengthened the new national view of the region as a small, self-contained, alternative
America, one free of many common American ills. These writers also turned this view into an
elevating and creatively potent regional self-image.
Lummis’ epiphany about the region and its inhabitants, although dramatic, did not deflect
him from his journey or plans; he continued his trek to Los Angeles and became one of the young
city’s leading intellectuals, for many years editing the California-celebrating periodical, Out West.
He built a grand, eccentric Spanish-style house for himself in the hills above the city; it remains
a minor tourist attraction to this day. Lummis returned to the Rio Grande region periodically,
sometimes for extended stays, and he continued to celebrate it in his writing, but it became just one
of the places in the Southwest that figured in his great life project, freeing America from the grip
of what he saw as its deadening Anglo-Saxon heritage. Lummis’ experiences in the Rio Grande
region and then throughout the Southwest caused him to reject what was still the most privileged
element of national ethno-cultural heritage. He came to see it not as a source of national strength,
but as a source of a blinding national arrogance and the root cause of a national unhappiness.62
He wanted all Americans to experience the Southwest, where the “Saxon excrescences” that
he detested had so little purchase. He hoped that other Americans would be changed by the
exposure to the region, much as he had been, and that a warmer and more humane national spirit
would arise.63
Ernest Blumenschein: Creating a reflexive iconography
Painters of the era were drawn to the same master task that drew Lummis: responding to
the new America taking shape around them.64 They asked themselves how they might capture the
newness for others to see, how they might celebrate the nation’s fresh opportunities and point out
its new shortcomings. By using what they found in the region, artists complemented the regional
literature with a regional iconography that encompassed a wide variety of painting styles and
incorporated many personal idiosyncrasies, but was united in its focus on the people and the
landscapes of the region, and in the intensity of its engagement with both.
Ernest Blumenschein, among the foremost of these artists in critical standing, was typical
of them in many ways.65 He came to the region as a trained artist, already well aware of the
era’s pictorial challenges. After growing up in Pittsburgh and Dayton, he learned to paint at
the Art Students League in New York City and the Julian Academy in Paris. Blumenschein was
already a successful New York-based illustrator and artist in 1898 when a Western illustrating
assignment for McClure’s magazine took him and another artist, Bert Phillips, through Taos, a
village north of Santa Fe. A broken wagon there forced an unplanned sojourn. While waiting for
the repairs, the depictive possibilities of the Hispanic village, the nearby Native American pueblo,
and the surrounding land forcefully struck Blumenschein. It was, he later wrote, the first great
inspiration of his life. Like Lummis’ epiphany, Blumenschein’s was life changing, but not all at
once. He returned to his home in New York City and soon departed for another sojourn in Paris.
Although in continual demand as an illustrator by East Coast-based magazines and publishers,
Blumenschein began going west to paint in the summers, primarily to Taos, where Bert Philips
had already settled and a community of artists was forming. Finally in 1919, some twenty years
after what he called his great inspiration, he settled with his family in Taos, where he became one
of the most widely recognized and celebrated of the New Mexico artists.
Much as Lummis had done in this writing, Blumenschein portrayed the Rio Grande region
as a place with lessons for a nation beset with troubling forms of newness. The brilliant colors
of his landscape paintings chided America for its sooty and gray new industrial landscapes. His
paintings of the region’s wild places reproached Americans for what Higham called their “vices
of gentility,” that is, for spending too much time indoors, for acquiring office pallors, for putting
up with confining and crowded cities.69 Many of Blumenschein’s paintings of life in the region
had a timelessness that scolded America for giving itself over to heedless change.66 The Native
Americans and Hispanics he painted, often in the style of classical painters and sculptors, seemed
to project a wisdom that was deeper and more durable than industrial America’s growing stock
of technical knowledge.67 Blumenschein was not oblivious to the changes coming to the region,
however, and he capitalized on what they could teach as well. He painted the new dams that were
bringing the region’s water, its lifeblood, under bureaucratic management. He painted his younger
Native American neighbors in their purchased clothing, hinting how America’s commerce was
penetrating the lives of even its most spiritually independent and robust inhabitants.
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In spite of their focus on local subjects and their physical remove from the centers of
American art, Blumenschein and the other painters in the region remained very much part of the
larger art world. Many followed the general stylistic shift from academic realism to modernism
that occurred in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.68 Their work often
referenced the major promontories in the era’s artistic imagination. Their landscape paintings
often recalled Mediterranean landscape paintings, for example. Their intimate paintings of rural
village life in the region owed a debt to the era’s popular genre paintings of European peasant life.
Georgia O’Keefe’s now-iconic paintings of the region’s rock formations are indebted to paintings
of the stone canyons of Lower Manhattan, including some of her own earlier works. These links
to the prevailing styles and the iconic places of the wider art world made the paintings of region’s
artists readily interpretable as responses to the era’s wider iconographic challenges, and they
were valued as such. By the 1920s, Blumenschein and other region-based artists were regularly
showing in leading American art museums and were getting high prices for their work in galleries
in New York and San Francisco.69
These artists created communities as well as art, and in so doing they fashioned a response
to one of the foremost lifeway challenges of the era: how to combine the old advantages of small,
self-contained communities with the newer opportunities of a more easily accessible world. The
artist communities of Santa Fe, Taos, and several smaller places around the region offered local
benefits like informal exchanges of goods and services, friendships reinforced by proximity, and
perhaps most importantly, mutual encouragement in creative endeavors.70 A visiting journalist
wrote of Taos that, “The spirit of the place is to make something. Artists affect everyone and
everyone affects artists, until Taos is now a whirlpool of self-expression.”71 These communities
also helped their members remain professionally engaged with the national art scene.72 The
Taos Society of Artists, which Blumenschein co-founded, sent works by resident painters on
annual rounds to galleries in the nation’s art centers.73 The Santa Fe artist community had similar
arrangements.
Blumenschein and his fellow New Mexico artists thus forged a life model in the region
that combined participation in the national art scene with participation in an intimate and
creatively fecund local community. They also forged a life in which successful purchase in the
national arts economy was advantageous in their cash-poor local economies. The artists could
hire models, casual and skilled labor, and domestic help in the low-wage local labor market.
They could acquire native artifacts at prices that did not bear the markups that took place when
these artifacts entered larger markets. They could buy land in the local property market at prices
reflecting the relative isolation of their communities and the modest financial resources of their
indigenous neighbors.74
Mary Colter: A frame for the exotic
Mary Colter was another artist who helped shape the Santa Fe Style, but unlike the Taos
and Santa Fe painters, she did so primarily in response to just one task within the work of the
age: fitting the middle class psyche to its new urban and industrial circumstances. Born in Saint
Paul, Minnesota in 1869, Colter grew up in comfortable middle-class surroundings.75 She showed
precocious talent in many forms of visual expression and her family sent her to the California
School of Design in San Francisco. Coulter’s time at the school, the late 1880s, coincided with
the American ascent of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Inspired by John Ruskin and other anti-
modern British intellectuals, the movement offered crafted, aesthetically informed artifacts as a
counter to the crude and tasteless manufactured products pouring out of the era’s factories.76 The
Arts and Crafts Movement also proposed an antidote to the social ills of industrialization: artisan
communities based on simple hand-production of goods. The movement spread to America,
where its social ideal appealed to anti-industrial sentiment and its aesthetic principles made deep
inroads into popular taste, especially middle-class domestic taste.77 Californians drew on their
local Hispanic heritage to forge a regional variant of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, the Mission
Style, and Colter absorbed it at the School of Design. 78
After graduating, Colter took a position in “visual merchandising” at Frederick and
Nelson, Seattle’s leading department store. As objectivity and instrumental reasoning rose to new
levels in public life, the family home became what Taylor called “the haven of warm sentiment in
an otherwise cooling world.”79 Thanks in part to the Arts and Crafts Movement, the middle-class
home was also becoming a place where one might live tastefully in a tasteless industrial world.
Colter mastered the art of arranging hand crafted and hand crafted-appearing merchandise into
appealing domestic displays that stressed both taste and warmth for the store’s showrooms.
Then in 1910 the Fred Harvey Company hired her to design the interiors of the new hotels and
restaurants it was building in partnership with the Santa Fe Railroad.
Western railroads were by then promoting the territories they traversed as exotic
places of escape and spiritual nourishment for the middle-class, whose “horizons of emotional
fulfillment,” in Taylor’s words, were being straitened by bureaucratic routine and behavioral
formality.80 The celebration of the Southwest by Lummis and now others had elicited a favorable
popular response and the Santa Fe Railroad threw itself headlong into the strategy. It established
a marketing department that vigorously promoted the Southwest as the “Land of Enchantment”
and engaged artists, including Blumenschein and others of the Taos colony, to provide art for use
on posters, calendars, and brochures. It also engaged the Harvey Company to establish tourist
facilities at stops along its route.81
These facilities presented a formidable design challenge; what was strange, unfamiliar,
and perhaps threatening to middle-class Americans had to be rendered comforting and warm
without sacrificing freshness or the capacity to excite. Colter managed it brilliantly by filling her
restaurants and hotels with Hispanic and Native American motifs that she reworked just enough
within accepted, but still-fresh, Arts and Crafts design principles to achieve a balance between
the exotic and the familiar.82
In 1926, the Harvey Company acquired the La Fonda, Santa Fe’s foremost hotel, as part of
this “Land of Enchantment” strategy; it intended to use the hotel as a base for guided excursions to
the Native American pueblos and scenic attractions of the surrounding country. Called on to help
renovate the hotel, Colter used the same strategy of wrapping the exotic with the familiar when
she designed the hotel’s interior spaces, furniture, and fixtures. She refined Native American
motifs, alloyed them with elements from the California Mission Style, and enriched them with
her trained and disciplined imagination. She also filled the hotel’s interior spaces with locally
crafted objects that referenced the Arts and Crafts aesthetic.
This centrally located hotel became the preferred lodging place for the city’s visitors and
a favorite watering hole for its residents. As such, it became a fixture of Santa Fe’s social life
and an important part of its aesthetic signature.83 The many travellers who passed through La
Fonda were exposed to Colter’s interpretation of regional crafts and design motifs; it was Colter’s
interpretation that many undoubtedly took back home with them. The hotel’s interiors and the
objects that filled them were also available to guide the region’s artists, writers, and life-style
seekers in the arrangement of their own domestic interiors.
Colter’s work in Santa Fe, although important, was only one part of her creative
relationship with the Southwest. She worked and found inspiration in other parts of the region.
Membres pottery from southern New Mexico inspired her tableware for the Santa Fe Railroad’s
dining service. Navajo sand paintings figured large in her interior designs for Harvey hotels
in Arizona. The cliff houses of Mesa Verde in Colorado inspired the enchanting buildings and
310 Foresta
follies that she designed for sites on the rim of Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, when rail travel
declined, so did the commercial strategy that had given rise to her work, and she saw much of
that work demolished in the name of progress. Shortly before her death in 1958, she remarked
that perhaps she had lived too long.84 Colter continued to be honored in Santa Fe until (and after)
her death, however. And while recent years have brought a belated recognition of her genius and
accomplishments, including the creation of a “national park” architectural style, Santa Fe was the
one place where her work quickly transcended its original commercial context and become part
of a larger cultural project.89
John Meem and the architecture of place
No element of the Santa Fe Style is more recognizable than its architecture, with its earth
tones and textures, its rounded, ground-hugging, organic-like forms, and its simple wooden
embellishments. And no one contributed more to that architecture than John Meem, Mary
Colter’s collaborator on the La Fonda restoration. Born to American missionary parents in Brazil
in 1894, Meem came to America as a teenager to attend school in Virginia. After embarking on
a banking career in New York City, he contracted tuberculosis and went to high, dry Santa Fe
to recover in one of its sanatoriums. While there, he discovered the region’s building traditions.
After recovering, Meem went to Denver for formal architectural training. With certificate in hand
and a bit of work experience in Denver under his belt, he returned to Santa Fe in 1924 to establish
a practice.85
Meem soon became the city’s foremost architect and remained so for the next four decades.
During his long career, he designed several hundred buildings in and around Santa Fe and played
a leading role in restoring the region’s ancient mission churches. A style based on the indigenous
adobe building tradition had already emerged when Meem began practicing, but he brought
genius to its possibilities. The adobe-based forms of his buildings flow into each like living things.
They seem to have sprung from the soil of the region.86
Meem innovated in layout as well as form. In most of his hundred or so residential
commissions, Meem eliminated the enclosed central patio and the semi-enclosed placito of the
traditional regional dwelling and placed the outdoor living space around the house. In effect, he
turned the traditional regional house inside out, which allowed him to more efficiently arrange the
entertaining and dining areas, bedrooms, guest quarters, terraces, servant quarters, and garages
that affluent modern Americans demanded in their residences.87 It also allowed him to establish a
more sensitive relationship between house and site, and a more intimate one between the interior
of the dwelling and the vistas. With his combination of aesthetic and layout innovation, Meem
created ideal dwellings for those drawn to the region by its scenic virtues and cultural ferment,
dwellings where, what Patricia Brown called “a poetic meeting of the pueblo spirit and the
material world,” might take place.
Santa Fe was the center of Meem’s mature life, and he became one of the city’s foremost
and most civic-minded citizens. Santa Fe’s horizons were never Meem’s horizons, however. He
wrote on architecture for a national readership. He took commissions elsewhere and he worked in
styles other than the one he perfected. He was especially adept at a cool, classical modernism that
carried only hints of regional references, a modernism that he brought to a peak of refinement in
the art museum he designed for Colorado Springs. Meem in fact viewed himself as a thoroughly
modern architect. Wilson described Meem’s Santa Fe buildings as Pueblo gateways from the
modern world. While they can certainly be viewed as such, Meem also saw his buildings as
responses to the architectural dictates of modern times.88 Eliel Saarinen, an eminent architectural
theorist that Meem admired, held that every historical period had a unique form-giving spirit that
its architects had to respect. Modern times, Saarinen wrote, demanded elegantly simple buildings
in keeping with the elegance of the mathematics that undergirded so much of contemporary
civilization and the simplicity of the basic laws that science was discovering at the heart of natural
world. Meem argued that the adobe building tradition of the region aligned so completely with
the spare and elegant underlying spirit of the time that it was an ideal base for a modern regional
architecture that complemented the reigning international style.89 Moreover, Meem often gave
his buildings, whatever their style, a cool restraint and proportionality that reflected the wider
aesthetic sensibilities of the era. As if ratifying the modernist spirit of Meem’s work, the American
Institute of Architects made him a fellow in 1950, a year in which modernism, running at full tide,
was sweeping all before it.
Mabel Luhan: New elite lifeways and modes of cultural leadership
One of foremost challenges facing Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century was forging life models that blunted the assaults of change and capitalized on its
opportunities. Blumenschein and his artist colleagues used what they found in the region to
forge a life model that capitalized above all on new opportunities for creative endeavors. Mabel
Luhan forged another life model within Santa Fe’s cultural project. Hers was built on creative
endeavor as well, but also on inherited wealth and established elite status, and on the cultural
entrepreneurship that these things made possible.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American elite demanded of its
members high levels of emotional self-restraint and conformity to stringent rules of behavior.90
Women were expected to focus their energies on supporting their husbands’ careers and
nurturing their families; men were to focus theirs on commercial and professional success. Public
expressions of personal idiosyncrasy or deep inner feelings were discouraged. Not surprisingly,
some members of the elite, especially those with a creative or otherwise strong expressive bent,
felt trapped. Moreover, when called on to support the arts, the elite gravitated toward mannerism
and academic formalism that reflected its own norms of self-restraint.91 This made it difficult for
the elite as a class to exercise leadership in some of the most dynamic areas of high culture, and
for members of the elite to benefit from engagement with fresh art forms.92
Mabel Luhan (nee Gansel and then Dodge for a while) was born into a prominent Buffalo,
New York banking family in 1879. As a young woman she rebelled against the life prescribed for
those of her gender and station, escaping to Paris.93 The bright and forceful Luhan established
herself there as a cultural impresario after the fashion of Gertrude Stein, who came from a
similar provincial-elite background (and who had likewise rejected the restraining norms of
her upbringing). Luhan then moved to Italy, where she acquired a villa near Florence, her Villa
Curonia, and made it a center for artists and writers. In 1912 she returned to America and settled
in New York where, true to form, she acquired a large apartment in Greenwich Village and made
it a gathering place for artists and intellectuals, mostly of a reforming or radical bent. Her New
York circle included Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed. In
1917 Luhan visited the Rio Grande region and, charmed, she bought a property adjacent to the
Taos Pueblo. Shortly afterward, she made Tony Lujan, a member of the Pueblo, her fourth and
final husband. (She changed the spelling of his surname to Luhan when she assumed it.) She
envisioned making her property a base for exploring a region where the land, climate, and native
lifeways combined to show Anglo civilization a path toward renewal.94
She built Los Gallos, a large and rambling regional-style house, on the property, along with
several guesthouses, and she was soon playing host to creative luminaries, much as she had done
at her Villa Curonia in Italy. Her New Mexico visitors included Leopold Stokowski, Thornton
Wilder, Robinson Jeffers, and D.H. Lawrence. She pointed out the region’s virtues as the subject
of creative endeavor and encouraged them to incorporate it into their work. Luhan was especially
312 Foresta
anxious to point out how, by incorporating Native American wisdom into their work, her visitors
could help in “saving Western civilization from its rotting core.”95 Luhan also contributed to the
region’s literary identity with several books of her own. Her intimate and reflective Winter in
Taos, often considered her best, showed how her inner life had become intertwined with the
history, seasons, and moods of the place.96 With this and her other books, she helped strengthen
the introspective and quietist element of the region’s literary identity.
In creating a life for herself in the Rio Grande region, Luhan helped establish an elite life
model that threw off chaffing bourgeois norms of behavior, political and artistic conventionalism,
and an all-consuming commitment to family and commerce, but which did not reject elite
prerogatives or elite responsibility per se. Rather, she showed how to use privilege and wealth to
explore the creative possibilities of one’s surroundings and encourage such exploration by others.
In working out a personal solution to the restrictions of her class, Luhan gave the members of
the elite a path to personal liberation while offering the elite as a whole a means of re-exerting
leadership across a broad range of cultural endeavors. Luhan also showed that the reflexive
regional project under way around her was responsive to her kind of cultural entrepreneurship.
Others, especially other women with varying measures of her creative talent, financial means,
and force of personality, followed her lead, reinforcing the region’s distinctiveness as a place
where the options and responsibilities of wealth could be linked to aesthetic sensibility and the
creative urge.97 Meem designed houses for those who followed Luhan’s lead. Colter provided an
aesthetic of objects and spaces for them.
Edgar Hewett and cultural entrepreneurship
Like Mabel Luhan, Edgar Hewett was a promoter of the cultural project underway in the
region. But he differed from her, and from all the above-discussed individuals, in that he was
not an artist and he made no direct creative contribution to the Santa Fe Style. Nonetheless, his
supporting role in so many of the region’s creative endeavors made him as important as anyone
in the formation of the style.
One of the striking characteristics of the Santa Fe Style was the suite of formal institutions
arrayed around it. Museums, galleries, institutes, and foundations curated, interpreted, promoted,
monetized, and reported on the style almost from its beginning. Edgar Hewett, who led two of
the core institutions and profoundly influenced many of the others, was a tireless promoter––
Brand may have had him specifically in mind when he spoke of calculating boosters lurking in
the style’s shadows. Hewett was certainly calculating and he was a tireless promoter of the style,
but he was not a booster in the normal sense of the term. While he took steps to aid the city’s
commercial growth, promoting commerce was not his foremost aim; he was primarily intent on
sustaining Indigenous forms of cultural expression and supporting the emerging Santa Fe Style.
Hewett was an entrepreneurial administrator who saw that the region’s cultural past and its
present cultural ferment needed modern institutions to promote them––and sometimes to protect
them from baser sorts of commercialization. He created and led such institutions, and made a life
for himself out of the work.
Hewett’s journey to Santa Fe had many stops along the way. Born in rural Illinois in
1865, he grew up there and in Missouri, where he became a schoolteacher while hardly out of
his teens.98 Hewett’s flair for teaching and his skill at administration led to a succession of ever
more important education posts in Missouri, Iowa, and Colorado. By the early 1890s, he was the
school superintendent of Florence, Colorado. There, his boyhood interest in Native American lore
flowered into a disciplined passion for Native American art and artifacts. He spent his summers
exploring the region’s ancient sites in a wagon he fitted out for his expeditions. In 1897, Hewett
made a big career leap when he assumed the presidency of the newly established New Mexico
Normal College in Las Vegas. The innovative curriculum that he built around archaeology and
native arts brought him national repute, but territorial political machinations cost him his job in
1903. He capitalized on the latter by going to Switzerland to pursue a doctorate in archaeology
at the University of Geneva. After completing his course work, he returned to America and
established himself in Washington, D.C., where he threw himself into the affairs of the American
Institute of Archaeology. Hewett became the secretary of its committee on antiquities, and in
that position played key roles in establishing Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 and securing the
passage of the important antiquities-protecting Lacey Act of 1907.99
While in Washington D.C., Hewett also threw his energies into a proposal for an AIA-
supported field school for New World archaeology. When New Mexico offered to host the school
and affiliate it with its new museum in Santa Fe, the AIA accepted and invited Hewett to establish
the school.100 Hewett returned to New Mexico in triumph to head both the school and the museum,
and the two institutions formed the base of his long administrative career in the state. Under
Hewett, the School of American Archaeology and the Museum of New Mexico made a wealth
of ancient artifacts accessible to contemporary crafts practitioners, enriching the craft dimension
of the region’s cultural project.101 Hewett made space in the museum available to contemporary
artists and arranged for the museum to show their work.102 With Hewett’s encouragement, other
museums were founded in the region, creating more display venues for ancient art, modern art,
and sometimes both, drawing the two still more tightly together. Hewett personally encouraged
two potters from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, Maria Martinez and her husband, Julian, to produce
works modeled on the ancient pottery being discovered at the school’s excavation sites.103 The
two responded with the “black on black” style. Its references to both ancient pottery and modern
abstraction in the plastic arts made it popular, especially with avant-garde collectors, and it soon
became one of the more recognizable styles of contemporary Santa Fe pottery.
Hewett’s stature within the AIA grew with his successes in Santa Fe. He assumed a seat on
the editorial board of its popular national magazine Art and Archaeology, and arranged for several
of his New Mexico associates to join him on the board. This New Mexico group kept the magazine
focused on the region and its cultural ferment. Frequent articles on the field school written by
Hewett and his fellow Santa Feans portrayed the region as one where the continent’s antiquity
was a forceful living presence and creative urge. The magazine ran articles on the region’s Native
American cultures and its recent cultural achievements, advancing Santa Fe’s image as a place
where the American past flowed effortlessly into a living regional culture.104
Although Hewett was central to the emergence of the Santa Fe Style, it was only one part
of the work of the age that he took on. He frequently traveled to Washington D.C. on AIA business
and to Mexico to oversee archaeological work. Hewett’s institution-building talents and wide
pale of interests even gave him a career in Southern California, and for many years it paralleled
the one he built for himself in New Mexico. Between 1915 and 1928 he spent several months of
each year in San Diego, where he directed that city’s Museum of Man and held a professorship of
anthropology at San Diego State College. Thus while Hewett’s administrative role in advancing
the Santa Fe Style was unique, the spacious modernity of the life in which that role was embedded
was not unique; it was in fact typical of the lives of the style’s signal contributors.
Frank Springer: Harnessing frontier capitalism to the Santa Fe Style
Anyone looking for the controlling hand of wealth behind the Santa Fe Style would sooner
or later come across Hewett’s friend and patron, Frank Springer. Hewett’s accomplishments would
not have been possible without the support of Springer, the shrewd and wealthy lawyer who
personified the frontier capitalism of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century New Mexico.
Springer, reputedly the only person to whom the strong-willed Hewett habitually deferred, often
314 Foresta
provided financial support when Hewett’s plans needed it. He provided the political support
of a wealthy political insider when that was needed. He was thus the strongest link between
the region’s moneyed elite and style’s institutional matrix. However, while Springer may have
personified frontier capitalism, he cannot be viewed in simple functionalist terms, that is, as
capital’s instrument with regard to Santa Fe Style. Like others whose lives have been examined
here, his role in advancing the style was part of his own very personal project of self-construction,
and Springer’s project owed as much to his avocational interests as to his place in the edifice of
regional capitalism he helped build.
Born in 1847, Springer was the oldest of the seven examined individuals. He grew up
in rural Iowa when it was still frontier country and studied at the state university when it was
still new.105 In 1873, with a fresh law degree in hand, he set out for the West, more precisely, for
still-wild northeastern New Mexico, where he had been engaged to provide local legal services
for the Dutch investment consortium that controlled the Maxwell Trust, a vast tract of land that
had devolved from a Spanish land grant. Springer faithfully advanced the consortium’s interests
in the legally clouded tract, sometimes deploying force and taking other questionable measures
against small farmers and ranchers who occupied land claimed by the consortium. Springer’s
work for the Dutch investors over many years brought him wealth, which he enhanced through
ranching, land speculation, and other forms of investing.
Springer’s rise made him part of the regional elite and drew him into public affairs in
Las Vegas, the local seat of the Maxwell Trust and the largest city in northeastern New Mexico.
The territorial government appointed him to head the board of the newly founded New Mexico
Normal College in Las Vegas, and it was Springer who hired Edgar Hewett to head the school. Like
Hewett, Springer had hunted for Native American artifacts in the fields around his boyhood home,
and the boyish diversion matured into a disciplined enthusiasm for Native American cultures in
Springer as well as Hewett. This shared enthusiasm brought the two men into a friendship as
well as a close alliance in college matters; Springer was a strong supporter of Hewitt’s innovative
Native-American-arts-based curriculum.
With Hewett’s return to New Mexico in 1907 to assume his important new positions, the
two men renewed their friendship and Springer renewed his role as Hewett’s backer. Hewett’s
return also intensified Springer’s interest in the Native American past; he participated in the
field school’s digs, sometimes throwing himself into the physical labor alongside Hewett and the
students. Springer’s wealth and statewide influence now made him an even more formidable
backer for Hewett, and as Hewett’s interest expanded to include the entire cultural project
underway in the region, Springer’s backing did as well. His political support protected Hewett
and the museum from the vagaries of territorial (and then state) politics. His financial support
allowed Hewett’s museum and field school to underwrite several significant contributions to
the Santa Fe Style, including Carlos Vierra’s photo documentation of Santa Fe’s indigenous
architecture; the work of painter and Native American scholar, Kenneth Chapman; and that of
the archaeologist Jessie Nussbaum.106 Springer also supported several of the early steps in the
development of a modern regional architecture.
Ironically, the personal fortune that made Springer such a force in Santa Fe’s cultural project
also drew him away from it. Springer’s boyhood interest in natural history paralleled his interest
in Native American lore, and the former also matured into a disciplined scientific passion, one
that focused on crinoids, a class of small marine animals whose fossils he had collected as a boy in
Iowa. Throughout his adult life, Springer expanded his fossil collection and used it to work out a
definitive crinoid taxonomy. Springer eventually donated his collection to the National Museum
in Washington, D.C. and took an apartment in the city so he could continue his taxonomic work
on the collection. The publication of his completed taxonomy, a major work, brought him national
renown as a naturalist and drew him into the era’s great debate about Darwinian evolution. (He
was a skeptic.) Springer maintained his interest in the Santa Fe project as he grew older, but it
faced ever-greater competition from this other part of the work of the age that he had taken on.
Several conclusions might be drawn from Springer’s life. First, it showed that even those
near the privileged heart of the capitalist order were not above the project of the self or immune to
the tugs of the work of the age. Springer’s life also showed that wealth and power gave individuals
special freedom and effectiveness when they took up these intertwined personal and social tasks.
Finally, it showed that the relationship between the era’s capitalism and Santa Fe’s cultural ferment
had a mutually beneficial reticulate quality. While the Santa Fe Style served the ends of capitalism
by opening up new frontiers for profit opportunities and dampening discontents, Springer’s life
illustrated how the cultural project that created the Santa Fe Style accessed capitalism’s privileged
circles and drew the resources it needed from them.
Conclusion
Examining the lives of key individuals in the formation of the Santa Fe Style has illuminated
the contours of reflexive regionalism as it operated in Santa Fe and the surrounding Upper Rio
Grande region. The lives of those individuals also illuminated the scope of personal and social
challenges on which that regionalism was built. The seven lives do not span the full breadth of
participation in the project, however, nor do they reveal all roles on which the project was built.
It was the work of hundreds of individuals who contributed to it as painters, writers, curators,
journalists, designers, craftspeople, business people, decorators, collectors, and in many other
roles. In this breadth of participation, the Santa Fe Style was likely as demotic as the regional
cultures of the folklorists. Most of those who made significant contributions to the style were
unlike the creators of the older regional cultures in their degree of contact and depth of experience
with the wider world, however. That wider world raised them, educated them, sent them to the
region, and remained a point of reference for their creative endeavors or other work in advancing
the style. Consequently, breadth of knowing reference is among the style’s foremost characteristics.
This defiance of what we expect of regional cultures has made it difficult to take the full measure
of the Santa Fe Style as a creative achievement as well as to discern the reflexive regionalism that
drove it. We would expect such worldliness in a large, modern cultural project, however, if we
assume that it will be deeply intertwined with the era’s capitalism. As we saw, it was precisely the
worldliness of the Santa Fe project that made it such a useful complement to a capitalism that was
itself worldly, needed a worldly host society, and created worldly participants.
In the case of the Santa Fe Style, the demands and challenges of modern capitalism led to
something rich and profound because they stimulated a high degree of creativity in individuals.
Capitalism, expressing itself as a market for art that visually articulated the challenges of the
industrial era, drove and disciplined the personal creativity of the New Mexico artists. Manifesting
itself as a market for an aesthetic style that responded to the needs and anxieties of the new
middle class, capitalism stoked the talents of Mary Colter and the others who created the crafts
dimension of the Santa Fe Style. The book market, responding to the nation’s discomfort over
the loss of the softer virtues of rural and small-town life, gave rise to the Santa Fe Style’s literary
dimension.
In responding to industrial capitalism, Santa Fe’s reflexive regionalism thus prompted
a great variety of personal creative impulses, which produced a style that was as original and
spacious as the lives of its foremost creators. It also produced a style that was capable of fitting
into peoples’ lives without rupturing their psychic or economic ties with the wider world. This
allowed the style to meet the needs of people operating within the ambit of modern capitalism;
hence it met the needs of modern capitalism itself.
316 Foresta
This conclusion forces a final question on us. Can contemporary America host the kind
of vigorously creative and personally meaningful regionalism that produced the Santa Fe Style?
Today’s Santa Fe is not encouraging. The city and its region have become a node of highly
aestheticized consumption. As Patricia Brown quipped, John Meem made Santa Fe safe for Ralph
Lauren.107 While the Santa Fe Style can still garner admiration, the conventions on which it built
seem dated, the tropes threadbare. The portrayal of the region’s Hispanics and Native Americans
as noble innocents, for example, lost much of its power when more of them found their voices
and insisted that they never were such beings. Some challenges to which the style responded no
longer seem very pressing. Long ago the elite cast off the Victorian self-repression that the style
responded to, for example. On the other hand, some of the challenges to which it responded now
seem too great for the solutions that the style once offered. For example, a few crafted artifacts
no longer seem capable of providing sufficient warmth in a cool world or of making for tasteful
living in a tasteless one.
With so many of its referents no longer vital, the Santa Fe Style no longer seems capable
of pushing back against the commercialization that has always accompanied it. The style has
become formalized and glossy under the imperatives of a commerce that now seems to dominate
and define it. So rendered, the style hangs heavy on the city and weighs down its spirit. Moreover,
aestheticized consumption in Santa Fe has leapt past the city’s eponymous style; expensive baubles
of every conceivable cultural provenance––Italian clothing, African textiles, Japanese porcelain,
and rare European books, to name but a few––threaten the style’s privileges in the city as they
crowd into its shops and galleries.108 It is hard to imagine today’s intensely commercialized Santa
Fe inspiring the genius of a contemporary Meem, Colter, or Blumenschein.
Nor at first glance does the today’s capitalism seem to offer much cause for optimism
about individual creative potential. Hochschild has noted how consumer capitalism seems intent
on forcing itself ever deeper into our interior lives and rearranging what it finds there for its
own benefit.109 It would not welcome threats to its plans for us. On the other hand, the project of
the self remains alive in the lifestyle choices, experiments with identity, and personal narrative
options that Giddens identifies as hallmarks of contemporary life.110 Moreover, Hochschild shows
that many people perceive and resent profit-driven attempts to colonize their inner lives. Such
resentment can be a powerful creative stimulus; resentment, sometimes of a very personal kind,
over the impact of industrial capitalism provided creative fuel for the Santa Fe Style a century ago.
Perhaps more Americans will seek out places where the prospects for pushing back this frontier
of inner colonization seem bright. And perhaps they will enhance these places with reflexive
cultural invention of the sort that Santa Fe and its region saw in the past, invention that links the
project of the self with the work of the age.
Reflexive regionalism is unlikely to take exactly the same forms today as it did in Santa Fe
a century ago. As noted, many of the broader challenges to which the Santa Fe Style responded
have lost their sharp edge; many of its expressive forms seem dated. But new problems and
challenges have certainly sprung up to give us the work of our age. Some have arisen from the
long operation of established accumulation strategies, some from the newer strategies of a more
globalized and technology-enhanced capitalism. Environmental problems will undoubtedly
loom larger in any contemporary reflexive regionalism, as will lifeway challenges posed by
new technologies and by new uses of labor in more internationalized and finance-dominated
production settings.
Perhaps places like Boise, Idaho; Asheville, North Carolina; Bozeman, Montana;
Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Charleston, South Carolina, and their surrounding regions offer the
most obvious prospects for contemporary reflexive regionalism. They all have a strong sense of
their history, of their physical setting, and their uniqueness as communities, but each also has a
worldly spirit; many of their inhabitants, often from elsewhere, are in touch with the wider world
and perceive its challenges. In other words, such places appear to have the resources for reflexive
regionalism, much as Santa Fe once did. Perhaps the energy that emanates from these places
today comes from reflexive regional projects getting underway.
Any cultural invention occurring in these places will be intertwined with capitalism from
the beginning, to be sure, but so it was in Santa Fe. The real danger is not capitalism per se, but its
more culturally destructive manifestations. There is the danger, for example, that incipient place-
based cultural initiatives will immediately be overwhelmed by commercialization and place
promotion that are more alert than ever to the opportunities that lay in cultural uniqueness. In
other words, instead of supporting creativity, as commercial interests did in the early days of the
Santa Fe Style, there is the danger that they will smother it at birth. If such initiatives do escape
this fate and begin to develop into rich and deep reflexive cultures in a few favored places, they
face the danger of becoming exclusive, their bounty available only to those who can withstand
the consequent rise in land prices and then the ensuing design codes and growth-management
initiatives that further raise land prices––what happened in Santa Fe.
One possible approach to countering these threats is to encourage reflexive regionalism
wherever it shows signs of creating placed-based responses to the challenges that contemporary
Americans face. Such encouragement might be incorporated into the livable-city initiatives now
underway in so many places. The aim should be to foment as many reflexive regional projects
as possible. In this way they might become common, and their fruits widely available instead
of rare, precious, and intensely commodified. All cities and regions are unique in their histories,
identities, and settings. Perhaps in that uniqueness, many places, including not particularly
prepossessing ones, can find the resources on which a reflexive regionalism builds. After all, what
part of America seemed less in possession of useful cultural resources in 1848 than the Upper Rio
Grande region? If this is so, if such useful resources are in fact widely available, perhaps the kind
of reflexive regionalism that once created the Santa Fe Style will give a spirit-sustaining cultural
richness to many, perhaps even most, of the places where we lead our lives.
NOTES
1 The term “cultural” is used here both in the sense of an aesthetic signature, especially
in reference to a social elite, and in the more anthropological sense of lifeways and their
accouterments. The Santa Fe Style mixed the two to such an extent that it eroded much of
the distinction. For the various meanings of the term “culture,” especially with reference to
art and other forms of creative activity in the American Southwest, see M. Mullin, Culture in
the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2001), especially Chapter 1, “Culture and Cultures.”
2 C. Mather and S. Woods, Santa Fe Style (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1986);
H. Dent, The Feast of Santa Fe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); C. Wilson, The Myth
of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1997); L. Powell, Southwest Classics; The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands: Essays on
the Books and their Writers (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1974); C. Sheppard, Creator
of the Santa Fe Style: Isaac Hamilton Rapp, Architect (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1988).
3 U. Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture, and Society
7 (1990): 237-51, specific reference from 237; A. King, “Architecture, Capital and the
Globalization of Culture,” Theory, Culture, and Society 7 (1990): 397-411, specific reference
from 399; R. Robertson, “Globalization Theory and Civilizational Analysis,” Comparative
Civilizations Review 17 (1987): 20-30; A. Smith, “Toward a Global Culture?” Theory, Culture,
318 Foresta
and Society 7 (1990): 171-91, specific reference from 171; J. Entrikin, Betweenness of Place:
Towards a Geography of Modernity (Houndsmills, Hampshire, UK: Macmillan 1991), 31; R.
Peet, “World Capitalism and the Destruction of Regional Cultures,” in A World in Crisis?
Geographical Perspectives, Second Edition, eds. R. Johnston and P. Taylor (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989), 175-99, specific reference from 175-76.
4 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 2; A.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 49; L. Wirth, “The Limitations of Regionalism,” in Regionalism in
America, ed. M. Jensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 381-93.
5 Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe; H. Tobias and C. Woodhouse, Santa Fe: A Modern History, 1880-
1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).
6 Mather and Woods, Santa Fe Style, 8.
7 B. Allen, “Regional Studies in American Folklore Scholarship,” in Sense of Place: American
Regional Cultures, eds. B. Allen and T. Schlereth (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1990), 1-13; A. Green, “Reflexive Regionalism,” Adena, a Journal of the History and Culture of
the Ohio 3, no. 2 (1978): 3-15.
8 E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London, Pion, 1976), 117.
9 I. Wallerstein, “Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System,”
Theory, Culture, and Society 7 (1990): 31-55.
10 W. Johnson, “The Santa Fe of the Future,” El Palacio 3, no. 3 (1916): 11-27 plus following
unpaged illustrations; E. Hewett, “Recent Southwestern Art,” Art and Archaeology 9, no. 11
(1920): 31-32 plus following unpaged illustrations.
11 S. Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994),
142.
12 S. A. Lukas, ed., The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2007).
13 L. Logan, “The Geographical Imagination of Frederic Remington: The Invention of the
Cowboy West,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 1 (1992): 75-90; J. Allen, “Horizons of
the Sublime: The Invention of the Romantic West,” op. cit.: 27-40; D. Fowler, A Laboratory for
Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2000), viii.
14 Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe, “Chapter Three: The Reluctant Tourist Town”; Tobias and
Woodhouse, Santa Fe, “Chapter Five: The City Becomes ‘Different:’ Preservation, Style, and
Tourism.”
15 See J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze (New York: Sage Publications, 1990).
16 L. Rudnick, Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico
Press, 2009); The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis
in the Making of Modern American Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2012); F. Burke, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008); Kate Wingart-Playdon, John Gaw Meem at
Acoma: The Restoration of San Esteban del Rey Mission (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2012); L. Cline, Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fe and Taos Writers’ Colonies 1917-
1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); M. Redding and K. Eldrick, eds.,
Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (Santa Fe: Museum of Santa Fe Press, 2008); M. Booker,
The Santa Fe House: Historic Residences, Enchanting Adobes, and Romantic Revivals (New York:
Rizzoli, 2009); R. Larson and C. Larson, Ernest L. Blumenschein: The Life of an American Artist
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
17 See for example, the “Origins of the Santa Fe Style,” Canyon Road Arts Visitor Guide to
Arts, Dining, and the Santa Fe Lifestyle (Internet, accessed Feb. 1, 2014.) Guide sponsored by
Medicine Man Gallery.
18 Green, “Reflexive Regionalism,” 5.
19 R. Boyer, The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), 34.
20 M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The American Experience (London: New Left
Books, 1979), originally published as Regulation et Crises du Capitalisme, (Paris: Calmann-
Levy, 1976) is the seminal exposition of Regulation Theory. Also see the later and wide-
ranging R. Boyer and Y. Saillard, eds., Regulation Theory: The State of the Art (London:
Routledge, 2002).
21 See for example, M. Lauria, Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in
a Global Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).
22 L. Mumford, Culture of Cities, 313-14, cited in Entrikin, Betweenness of Place, 79-80; J. Hirsch,
“Folklore in the Making: B. Botkin,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 3-38. See S.
Stern and J. Cicala, eds., Creative Ethnicity: Symbols and Strategies of Contemporary Ethnic Life
(Logan: University of Utah Press, 1991).
23 See, for example, M. Redding, “Imagining Place” in Through the Lens, eds. M. Redding and
K. Eldrick 45-66; R. Larson and C. Larson, Ernest L. Blumenschein; L. Rudnick, “And La Bruja
Brought the Sunflowers,” El Palacio (Summer 2012): 34-41.
24 A. Bryman, “The Disneyization of Society,” The Sociological Review 47, no. 1 (1999): 25-47.
25 A. Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: The Age of the Muses, 1900-1942 (Norman: The
University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 271; Tobias and Woodhouse, Santa Fe, 99.
26 R. Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables (New York: Athenaeum, 1962);
C. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press,
1951); W. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); E. Fromm,
Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976); H. Arendt, The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in
the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Also see V. Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, (1980 [1957])).
27 U. Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals”; M. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991); A. Pred and M. Watts, Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms
and Symbolic Discontent (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); P. Wexler,
“Structure, Text, and Subject: A Critical Sociology School of Knowledge,” in Culture and
Economic Reproduction in Education, ed. M. Apple (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982),
181-201.
28 O. Zunz, Making America Corporate: 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
C. Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle Class Workers in Victorian America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially 187; S. Warner, Streetcar Suburbs
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); K. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of The United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
29 P. Horgan, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History (New York: Rinehart, 1954).
30 S. Forrest, The Preservation of the Village: New Mexico’s Hispanics and the New Deal
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 2.
31 R. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1948), 389.
32 J. Bloom, “New Mexico Viewed by Americans, 1846-1849,” New Mexico Historical Review 24,
no. 3 (1969): 165-78.
320 Foresta
33 Brown, Historical Geography, 389.

34 Bloom, “New Mexico,” 169.
35 Quoted in R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 239.
36 N. Veregge, “Transformations of Spanish Urban Landscapes in the American Southwest,
1821-1990,” Journal of the Southwest 34, no. 4 (1993): 385-459, specific reference from 397-98.
37 Tobias and Woodhouse, Santa Fe, Chapter Two.
38 E. Logue, “The Idea of America is Choice,” in Qualities of Life, eds. Commission on Critical
Choices for Americans (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976), 1-51.
39 M. Diamond, “The American Idea of Man: The View from the Founding,” in The Americans,
1976, eds. I. Kristol and P. Weaver (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976), 1-24.
40 R. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 2.
41 Ibid., 45-46.
42 Quoted in Hirsch, “Folklore in the Making,” 16.
43 Wiebe, Search for Order, 47.
44 Zunz, Making America Corporate.
45 C. Lasch, “The Moral and Intellectual Rehabilitation of the Ruling Class,” in his The World
of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture (New York: Alfred A Knopf,
1973), 80-99, specific reference from 97.
46 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 458, writes of the widespread efforts by intellectuals under
the sway of Romantic ideals to “integrate Romantic notions of personal fulfillment into
the private lives of the denizens of a civilization run more and more by the canons of
instrumental reason.”
47 D. Livingstone, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1987), 16-17. Also see S. Persons, Free Religion: An American
Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
48 E. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press, 2003 [1888]).
More generally, see J. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry
Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), especially
Chapter Ten.
49 W. Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961 [1914]); S. Nearing, Social Sanity: A Preface to the Book of Social
Progress (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1913), held that the work of creating a society ruled by
reason in the service of the commonweal was a great communion that would imbue its
participants with personal meaning and a transcendent sense of self.
50 D. Seidman, The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism (New York, Praeger, 1986), 7; T.
Donovan, Henry Adams and Brooks Adams: The Education of Two American Historians (Norman,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 163; P. Rego, American Ideal: Theodore Roosevelt’s Search
for American Individualism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 2008).
51 T. J. Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture: 1880-
1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Wiebe, Search For Order.
52 Quoted in Donovan, Henry Adams, 162-63.
53 R. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957); Hannerz,
“Cosmopolitans and Locals.”
54 The impacts of this developing style were many and sometimes profound. The style
changed the economic lives of many indigenes by drawing them in as craftspeople and
assigning market value to their output. As Hoerig, observed, the market for their crafts
reconfigured social relationships of many of the region’s native inhabitants and encouraged
new social networks and communities to emerge among them: K. Hoerig, Under the Palace
Portal: Native American Artists in Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2003) 131-46. The preferences of the market, of those who controlled access to the market,
and of prize-awarding panels also influenced those forms and styles of indigenous cultural
expression. (Hoerig, op. cit., 46, especially notes the pressure that patrons put on the artists to
reproduce prehistoric––hence “authentic”–– designs in their work.). As Swentzell noted, the
constant presence of images of themselves produced by outsiders, and respected outsiders
at that, had a distorting effect on the views of themselves held by the region’s indigenous
inhabitants: R. Swentzell, “Anglo Artists and the Creation of Pueblo Worlds,” in The Culture
of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture, ed. H. Rothman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2003). Rodriguez also discusses the psychological impact that interacting with the
outside artists and their works had on the region’s native inhabitants: S. Rodriguez, “The
Tourist Gaze, Gentrification, and the Commodification of Subjectivity in Taos,” in Essays
on the Changing Images of the Southwest, eds. R. Francaviglia and D. Narrett (College Station:
Texas A&M Press, 1994), 105-126.
55 For the lives and culture of the Hispanics of the Upper Rio Grande region during the
late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see S. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture,
Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987); R. Nostrand, “The Highland-Hispano Homeland,” in
Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place Across America, eds. R. Nostrand and L. Estaville
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 155-67; J. Smith, “Cultural Landscape
Change in a Hispanic Region,” in Geographical Identities of Ethnic America: Race, Space, and
Place, eds. K. Berry and M. Henderson (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002), 174-200.
Thickening connections with the rest of America and its capitalist economy mostly brought
economic hardship to the old communities of the Upper Rio Grande Valley. On this point,
see especially Deutsch, op. cit., and Forrest, op. cit., especially Chapters One and Two.
56 Hirsch, “Folklore in the Making,” 21.
57 Unless otherwise noted, the events of Lummis’ life are from M. Thompson, American
Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest (New
York: Arcade Publishing, 2001).
58 J. Higham, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana
59 C. Lummis, A New Mexico David (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891); The Land of Poco
Tiempo (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933 [1893]); The Enchanted Burro (Chicago: Way
and Williams, 1897). For the discontent and weariness with progress, see Higham, Writing
American History, 79.
60 Cline, Literary Pilgrims, 15. Lummis’ books were preceded by a few works that took a
more positive view of the Southwest. These included Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, The
Marvelous Country, [etc.] (London: S. Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1875), which tapped
the romantic landscape aesthetic in an appreciation of fantastical natural forms found in
the Southwest. Articles were beginning to appear in national magazines that romanticized
the ruins of ancient Native American cliff dwellings, and the cliff dwellers themselves. The
ethnographer Frank Cushing, whose close scrutiny of the lives of the Native Americans of
the Southwest led him to a sympathetic view of his subjects, was also beginning to change
the educated view of the region’s inhabitants. For more on the changing perspective, see R.
Francaviglia, “Elusive Land: Changing Geographic Images of the Southwest,” in Essays on
The Changing Images of the Southwest, eds. R. Francaviglia and Narrett, 8-39. See also Wilson,
Myth of Santa Fe, Chapter Three.
322 Foresta
61 W. Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Knopf, 1927); M. Austin, Land of
Journey’s Ending (New York: Century, 1924); M. Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to
Reality (New York: Harcourt, 1937); Winter in Taos (New York: Harcourt, 1935); H. Long,
Pinon Country (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1941); The Power Within Us: Cabeza de
Vaca’s Relation of His Journey From Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 (New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pierce, 1944); J. Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (New York: Henry Holt, 1974). See
Cline, Literary Pilgrims, for a history of the New Mexico writers.
62 Lummis, Land of Poco Tempo, 4.
63 Thompson, American Character, 171; D. Gebhard, “Architectural Imagery, the Mission, and
California,” Harvard Architectural Review 1 (1980): 137-45, specific reference from 138 to 139.
64 Gibson, Santa Fe and Taos, xi, 6, 270-71.
65 Unless otherwise noted, the events in Blumenschein’s life are from Larson and Larson,
Ernest L. Blumenschein; and Mark Sublett/Medicine Man Gallery, Ernest Blumenschein (1874-
1960), on-line biography [nd].
66 Larson and Larson, Ernest L. Blumenschein, 189-90, wrote that the professional and personal
choices of many artists of Blumenschein’s circle were driven by their “disillusionment with
industrialization [and] alienation from the values of a money-dominated middle-class
America.”
67 With their celebration of these qualities in the region’s Native Americans, Blumenschein
and his fellow artists were also responding to an older and more widely shared European
cultural trope, namely the Romantic perspective on Western civilization itself, which
reached educated Americans through many channels, including the work of the English and
continental Romantic painters and the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other English
Romantic poets. As Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 456-57, wrote, “For the Romantics,
the counterweight to the world deformed by mechanism and the utilitarian stance was the
real world of nature and undistorted human feeling.” Taylor noted that the Romantics’
search for this undistorted human feeling and “the spiritual reality behind it,” took them
the countryside and placed them among its simple folk. Resonance with this older and more
general Western trope could have only increased the appeal of the work of the New Mexico
artists.
68 Gibson, Santa Fe and Taos, 5, 27.
69 The regional iconography’s shared characteristics with the era’s larger pictorial project also
made it easy for talented sojourners to contribute to the region’s artistic florescence. John
Sloan and Robert Henri, leading members of New York’s Ash Can School of urban-realist
painting, were among those whose productive stays in Santa Fe enriched the region’s
iconography. See G. Holcomb, “John Sloan in Santa Fe,” American Art Journal 10, no. 1
(1978): 33-54.
70 See Larson and Larson, Ernest L. Blumenschein, especially Chapter Twelve. They note (189-
90) that the formation of art colonies in remote places in the early twentieth century was
encouraged by the growth of “the belief that in a setting of unspoiled nature, writers and
artists living near one other could create an environment conducive to the full flowering
of individual talent.” Their formation was also encouraged, they note, by a decline in
illustrating work available in New York and a similarly steep decline in demand for
portraiture in large urban centers.
71 Gibson, Santa Fe and Taos, 63.
72 Ibid., 81.
73 Ibid., 61.
74 S. Rodriguez, “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward a Sociology of the Art
Colony,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 45, no. 1 (1989): 77-100. Forrest, Preservation
of the Village, 11-12, notes that census of 1930 and other studies of that decade found that
Hispanics of the Upper Rio Grande region, with modest land holdings, meager farm
and farm-labor earnings, and often ensnared in debt peonage, were among the poorest
Americans.
75 The events in Colter’s life are from A. Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
76 L. Lambourne, Utopian Craftsmen: Utopian Craftsmen: The Arts and Crafts Movement from the
Cotswolds to Chicago (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980).
77 Ibid.; Lears, No Place of Grace.
78 Gebhard, “Architectural Imagery.”
79 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 458.
80 Ibid., 457; J. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1990), notes that the middle class, still uncertain of its place in society,
felt compelled to tame its environment and banish threats, real and symbolic, to its status. It
did so in part with an increasing rigidity and formality of behavior in everyday life.
81 S. D’Emilio and S. Campbell, Visions and Visionaries: The Art and Artists of the Santa Fe
Railroad (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991), 8-9. William Haskell Simpson, the head of
advertising for the Santa Fe Railroad in the early decades of the twentieth century, was a
discerning art collector who formed close, amicable relationships with many of the region’s
artists. He often purchased their paintings for display in the company’s offices and he
arranged for free rail passage for the region’s artists to encourage them to produce images
that promoted the region. For extended treatments of the relationship between the Santa Fe
Railroad and the artists, see Ibid. Also see M. Weigle and Barbara Babcock, eds., The Great
Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix: The Heard Museum,
1996).
82 Berke, Mary Colter, 49.
83 Tobias and Woodhouse, Santa Fe, 117; Cline, Literary Pilgrims, 16
84 Berke, Mary Colter, 271.
85 Artists began moving into old adobe houses and adopting them to their needs early in the
twentieth century. In Albuquerque in the first decade of the century, the University of New
Mexico’s President William Tight helped design and construct several buildings on the
Albuquerque campus that drew inspiration from Native American structures. In Santa Fe,
Carlos Vierra experimented with pueblo-inspired forms in the construction of his residence
a decade later. Isaac Rapp was designing similarly inspired commercial buildings. For a
fuller account of the style that Meem brought to perfection, see Chris Wilson, “Spanish
Pueblo Revival.” Unless otherwise noted, B. Bunting, John Gaw Meem: Southwestern Architect
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983); and C. Wilson, Facing Southwest: The
Life and Houses of John Gaw Meem (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2001) are the source
for the events in Meem’s life.
86 P. Brown, “Visionary Who Looked Back and Saw Santa Fe,” The New York Times, January 9
(1992): 1. Its organic associations were an important source of adobe’s appeal to refugees and
sojourners from an industrializing America. They allowed the material to make anti-modern
and anti-industrial statements that complemented those of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Gibson, Santa Fe and Taos, 89, wrote that for the artists and intellectuals gathering in the
region, adobe also symbolized “the irrefutable progression of life––born from the earth
mother, sustained by her during life, and returning to her at death.”
324 Foresta
87 See C. Wilson, Facing Southwest.

88 Brown, “Visionary Who Looked Back.”
89 J. G. Meem, “Old Forms for New Buildings,” American Architect, November (1934): 10-21.
90 Lasch, “Moral and Intellectual Rehabilitation.”
91 M. White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York: Viking, 1949).
92 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 457, wrote of the “collusive relationship that develops between the
bourgeoisie and the [artistic] avant-garde.” The relationship, he wrote, opens up the creative
imagination, which is, “an indispensible part of spiritual nourishment––even for those who
staff the world of power and commerce.”
93 The events in Luhan’s life are from E. Hahan, Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), and Rudnick, Suppressed Memoirs.
94 L. Rudnick, Introduction to Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: Escape to Reality
(Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1987 [1937]), vii.
95 Cline, Literary Pilgrims, 85.
96 Powell, Southwest Classics, 77.
97 See Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace, for the role women played in creating and advancing
the Santa Fe Style. Mullin notes that a powerful network of independent Anglo women (for
whom independence usually included freedom from male household domination) formed
in the Upper Rio Grande region in the 1920s. Its numerous members were usually from
elsewhere and well educated, and many were wealthy. One of its participants referred to the
network as the “City of Ladies,” (Ibid., 4).
98 Unless otherwise noted, the events in Hewett’s life are from B. Chauvenet, Hewett and
Friends: A Biography of Santa Fe’s Vibrant Era (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1983).
99 R. Thompson, “Edgar Lee Hewett and the Political Process: The Antiquities Alliance,”
National Park Service Archaeology Program. Internet, updated March 3, 2014.
100 Fowler, Laboratory for Anthropology, 100.
101 J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1971), 67; K. Chapman, Secretary of Region 13 PWAP, interviewed by Mrs. Sylvia Loomis,
December 5, 1963. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, roll
no. 3418.
102 El Palacio 10, no. 5 (1921); “Art Policy of Museum and School,” 2-3.
103 Wikipedia, entry for Edgar Lee Hewett (revised 27 Sept. 2009). Rudnick, “And La Bruja
Brought the Sunflowers,” discusses the costs to the indigenes of this sort of arts guidance
and support.
104 For examples from Art and Archaeology, see M. Hartley, “Red Men Ceremonials: An
American Plea for American Esthetics,” 9, no. 1 (1920): 7-14; “The Scientific Esthetic of the
Redman,” 13, no. 3 (1922): 113-119; K. Chapman, “Life Forms in Pueblo Pottery Decoration,”
13, no. 3 (1922): 120-23; P. Walter, “Santa Fe-Taos Art Movement,” 4, no. 6, (1916): 330-340; K.
Hewett, “Recent Southwestern Art,” 9, no. 11 (1920): 31-32, plus the unpaged illustrations
that follow.
105 Unless otherwise noted, the events in Springer’s life are from D. Caffee, Frank Springer and
New Mexico: From the Colfax County War to the Emergence of Modern Santa Fe (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2006).
106 For more on this work see Wilson, Myth of Santa Fe; Fowler, Laboratory for Anthropology;
entries for Vierra, Chapman, and Nussbaum on Nationmaster, the on-line encyclopedia.
107 Brown, “Visionary Who Looked Back,” 1.
108 B. Cullen, “What Has Happened to the City Different? A Santa Fe Case Study,” Papers and
Proceedings of Applied Geography Conferences 15 (1992): 75-82.
109 A. Hochschild, Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003).
110 Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity, 5; U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, Reflexive
Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge UK:
Polity Press, 1994), 59.
Remembering and Forgetting an American President:
A Landscape History of the Harrison Tomb
Charles H. Wade
Fulton County, Georgia
ABSTRACT: In the village of North Bend, Ohio rest the remains of little-known US
President William Henry Harrison. After a long and distinguished military and political
career and his election as president in 1840, Harrison earned the dubious distinction of
the shortest term in presidential history after falling ill and dying after just one month
in office. Following his wishes, Harrison was entombed in an inconspicuous crypt on
his North Bend property. For decades afterward, the Harrison Tomb suffered from
neglect and vandalism, an artifact that deteriorated along with the memory of this
obscure president. There were numerous proposals to preserve the tomb, but nothing
materialized. Shortly after World War I, new interest in preserving history and heritage
arose, and the tomb received professional preservation and a monument. However,
the tomb fell into disrepair again for several more decades until the Ohio Historical
Society and a local non-profit restored the grounds and added enhancements to create
a park and monumental setting in the 1990s. Through a landscape history approach,
this paper traces the evolution of the Harrison Tomb from an austere crypt into a
memorial landscape. An historical analysis and comparison to other presidential
monuments shows an inequality in the way American society remembers its prominent
leaders in the cultural landscape and attendant artifacts. I demonstrate that it was the
knowledge and awareness of the Harrison Tomb’s landscape and material culture that
provided the impetus to restore it and create a monument for President Harrison after
he was essentially forgotten. I argue that, by adopting a more expansive temporal
context in which to study landscapes and sites, landscape history provides another
perspective on historical research that geographers are well equipped to provide and
that others often overlook, which allows historical geographers to enhance and add
additional dimensions to the historical record through their specialized abilities in
landscape interpretation and analysis.
William Henry who?

Approximately fifteen miles west and downriver from Cincinnati, in the small
village of North Bend, Ohio, rest the remains of William Henry Harrison (Figure 1). Upon
hearing that name, many might ask, “William Henry who?” And such a response is somewhat
understandable, as he is not an overly familiar name to those who are not historians or history
enthusiasts, though this is a regrettable thing to say about the ninth President of the United
States. In fact, many rankings of presidents based on any factor (best, worst, familiarity, etc.) often
omit Harrison from the list entirely, citing his presidential tenure as too brief to be considered
significant (or memorable).1 Much of this unfamiliarity relates to the fact that Harrison served as
president for only about a month before his tragic death shortly after he took office. And it was
only a matter of time before the memory of this historic military and political figure faded, both in
the national narrative, and also materially through the desecration and deterioration of his burial
site.
Remembering and Forgetting an American President 327
Figure 1. Map of Hamilton County, Ohio and study site. Map by Charlene Zimmerman.
328 Wade
Historian Richard Norton Smith proclaims, “Ohio is the mother lode of presidential
gravesites” and, “by and large, chief executives from the Buckeye State demonstrate an inverse
ratio between accomplishment in life and the lavishness with which that life is memorialized.”2
And while Ohio seems to be proud of its role in presidential history, it is noteworthy that the
major, more recent general histories of Ohio barely even mention Harrison at all.3 While there are
studies that document various periods in Harrison’s life and the times in which he lived, they
are usually written in the context of the history of Ohio, Indiana, or the Northwest Territory, and
not always specifically on the man himself.4 There are also a number of biographies ranging from
juvenile literature to serious scholarship, but even the number of these works is comparatively
few when measured against most US presidents.5 Historian Reginald Horsman explains that
Harrison “has always held more interest for historians of Indiana and the Old Northwest than
for those interested in the national scene. Even his election to the presidency has usually been
examined more in regard to the methods the Whigs used to secure this success than in terms
of Harrison’s fitness for office,” adding that, as a national politician, he “remains a shadowy
figure.”6 Even more astonishing is how Harrison’s biographies often abruptly end at his death,
offering little, if any, analysis of the man or his legacy.
This paper shows that the limited legacy of William Henry Harrison did not end at his
death and a further, significant story about him remains untold. Here, historical geography steps
in where traditional historical research leaves off, as many Harrison biographers say little about
what became of him after his death, instead shifting their focus to his successor, President John
Tyler. This is somewhat understandable for the sake of chronology, but this paper explores how
Harrison was memorialized through a landmark that was also forgotten—several times over, in
fact—and how, or if, this artifact helped to memorialize him when he was effectively forgotten
after his burial.
In this paper, I examine the evolution of the Harrison Tomb from an austere, neglected
crypt into a memorial landscape. I trace the history of his burial site as a cultural landscape and
how it and its condition (and meaning) changed over time. Due to the sporadic coverage of the
tomb in the news over the last century and a half, and the fairly limited available sources, a fully
comprehensive history of the site is difficult to construct, but I attempt to provide as complete a
narrative as possible. I wish to be clear that it is not my intention to pass judgment or evaluation
of Harrison, though I do want to advance my opinion that, despite his complicated biography
and character, he was still a historically significant figure and that he is worthy of study despite
his deceptively minor role in American history.
I begin the paper with an evaluation of the literature by geographers on monuments
and memorial landscapes, a brief discussion of presidential gravesites, and introductions to
the concepts of reputational politics and landscape history. The next section provides a brief
biographical sketch of Harrison. While my purpose is to focus on the story behind the Harrison
Tomb and the role that monument plays as a landscape feature perpetuating his legacy and
memory, some detail on his life is necessary to provide information on this largely unfamiliar
president. I then provide a landscape history of the Harrison Tomb, documenting how it was
discovered by the public in deplorable condition, how people attempted for decades to preserve
it and restore the memory of a former president, how it fell into disrepair again for many more
decades, and how others stepped forward to care for it and offer Harrison the respect he deserved.
I conclude with an analysis of Harrison’s legacy and that of his tomb based on my research,
and a call for geographers to engage further with landscape history as an additional means of
demonstrating historical geography’s potential to enhance the historical record.
I find that, despite his current obscurity in American history, William Henry Harrison is not
an inconsequential person or president. While Harrison’s biography is apparently controversial
in the sense that he was an “insignificant” president, it was the public’s interest in the landscape
and artifacts that memorialize him, along with the stories behind those elements, which proved to
be the impetus to preserve his legacy and gravesite. In fact, it is through a historical-geographical
analysis of the public’s attention to the condition of the Harrison Tomb that we see what historical
geography can add to the historical record. An assessment of the Harrison Tomb over the years
demonstrates how concern with historically significant landscapes and artifacts provides a
different approach to preserving heritage where traditional historical approaches (such as a
controversial biography and legacy) did not prove sufficient. Landscape and material culture can
serve as more than just a backdrop or context in studies of public memory, as they and the stories
behind them can play a key role in helping to determine what society remembers (or forgets) in
the landscape. From these points, I argue that, by adopting a more expansive temporal context in
which to study landscapes and sites, landscape history provides another perspective on historical
research that geographers are well equipped to provide and that others often overlook, which
allows historical geographers to enhance and add additional dimensions to the historical record
through their specialized abilities in landscape interpretation and analysis.
Memorial landscapes, reputational politics, and landscape histories
It is first necessary to review some relevant literature and concepts, specifically in regard to
memorial landscapes, reputational politics, and landscape histories. The study of monuments and
memorial landscapes has gained greater popularity in geography in recent years.7 These studies
cover a variety of memorial landscapes including monuments, memorials, shrines, museums,
and other forms of commemoration, guided by three principal concepts. First, before a site, event,
cause, or figure can be commemorated, it must be deemed worthy of commemoration and have
influential backing. Second, geography involves more than a physical setting for memorialization
by not just reflecting, but often shaping how people perceive and interpret the past. And third,
memorial landscapes are in a constant state of redefinition as political and social contexts change.8
Furthermore, geographers tend to analyze memorial landscapes through three conceptual
lenses: one, the “textual” metaphor through critical analysis of the histories and ideologies that are
both voiced and silenced through the landscape; two, the “performance” metaphor recognizing
the bodily enactments and rituals that bring meaning to memorial landscapes; and three, the
“arena” metaphor focusing on the ability of memorial landscapes to serve as sites for groups to
debate the meaning of history and the commemorative process as part of larger struggles over
identities.9 This case study on the Harrison Tomb most closely fits the “arena” metaphor.
While the distinction between a monument and a memorial is sometimes blurry, and
scholarship does not always differentiate between the two, geographer Wilbur Zelinsky defines
a monument as “any object whose sole function at present is to celebrate or perpetuate the
memory of particular events, ideals, individuals, or groups of persons,” which provides a broad
and fungible definition, but emphasizes those who have made significant contributions and
are worthy of some form of permanent commemoration in the landscape.10 Zelinsky goes on to
explain that a memorial serves more functions and goes beyond the single-purpose monument
to include parks, gardens, forests, bridges, highways, buildings, or other kinds of institutions; he
mentions that tombs and birthplaces of figures such as presidents often straddle the line between
these two landscape features.11 The official name for the Harrison Tomb’s location is the Harrison
State Memorial, though I refer to the tomb itself as a monument within a memorial landscape
for this study because it is located in a public space and it is marked through various forms of
material culture, notably an obelisk, historical markers, and a park setting.12
Geographers in particular have contributed to studying memorialization by demonstrating
the contestable and contradictory aspects of space and place, as the specific location of a given
330 Wade
monument affects how groups conceptualize and carry out memorialization, and locations can
confirm, erode, contradict, or mute a memorial’s intended meanings, as they simultaneously
draw and give meaning to their surroundings.13 As such, the constitutive relationship between
memory and place is most obvious through material culture and landscapes.14 More specifically,
some geographers have examined the way in which historical figures are remembered in the
landscape. Derek H. Alderman investigates the politics related to place in remembering Martin
Luther King Jr. in a Georgia county through the process of naming streets after King.15 Alderman
shows that the image of a person, regardless of whether it is positive, negative, or ambiguous,
plays an important role in remembering the past and the interpretation of any historical figure
is open to a multitude of viewpoints.16 In fact, Alderman argues through the example of King
that these debates are not arbitrary, “but often accompany, revolve around, and participate in the
production of memorial spaces and places.”17
While today most Americans view King and his legacy in a positive light, other geographical
studies similar to Alderman’s show further complications in interpreting memorial landscapes.
Jonathan I. Leib presents a case study of the controversy surrounding the mural of Confederate
General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia.18 Though Lee remains a problematic figure years
after the Civil War ended, Leib focuses not on the fact of if, or which, icons of Lee will be erected or
removed in Richmond’s landscape, but where they will be placed and the problems that this can
engender: “In this way the places themselves are intertwined in the construction of the meaning of
symbols.”19 Through a study of an arguably more ambiguous personality, Chris Post investigated
the issues surrounding the landscapes that memorialize mid-nineteenth century abolitionist John
Brown in Kansas.20 Post’s article concentrates on the differing interpretations of Brown through
time and from his commemoration at different sites by different groups, highlighting a variation
in the collective memory for this controversial figure and his resultant ambiguous stature in
American history.
One important theme tying these three studies together and relating them to this one is
the concept of reputational politics. Reputational politics comes from the work of sociologist Gary
Alan Fine and his research on society remembering major figures whose reputations have not
been solidified as heroic or with high social approval and who carry what Fine labels “difficult
reputations,” for those who are somehow tarnished or otherwise controversial.21 Alderman
builds on this concept in geographical research, offering “an approach that focuses on the socially
constructed and contested nature of commemorating historical figures and the discursive rivalries
that underlie the memorialization of these figures.”22
The studies from Alderman, Leib, and Post all highlight the high subjectivity of
memorializing specific people and the numerous ways that society can interpret or portray them
either historically, presently, or in the future. The individuals that carry out the shaping and control
of historical reputations are reputational entrepreneurs.23 Geography is particularly important to
commemoration and the processes behind it, because it offers tangibility and visibility. It is also
notable that few geographers have explored the role that memorial spaces play in reputational
politics by not focusing on the struggle to define the cultural meanings and significance of
specific historical figures in the landscape.24 I demonstrate below how Harrison’s reputational
politics may have created problems for how society chose (or forgot) to remember him in material
form and how reputational entrepreneurs helped to redefine those politics by advocating for the
preservation and eventual enhancement of his gravesite.
Additionally, geographers have not thoroughly explored what presidential memorial
landscapes have contributed to the national narrative. Some geographical research that has
examined presidential memory in the cultural landscape has come from Craig E. Colten and
his study of Lincoln place names and their creation of a vernacular region in Illinois.25 Larger
studies include Zelinsky’s Nation into State, in which he covers the influence of major American
historical figures, including presidents, and how they are reflected and remembered in place
names, landscapes, material culture, and civic institutions, and their effects on the development
of American nationalism.26 In Shadowed Ground, Kenneth E. Foote significantly adds to the
geographical literature on monuments and commemoration and devotes a chapter to monuments
for the four assassinated US Presidents: James Garfield, William McKinley, Abraham Lincoln, and
John Kennedy.27 Though these works demonstrate some geographical research on presidential
sites, overall there is still little scholarship on the topic by geographers, despite their notable
contributions to the literature in memory studies and the large potential for further research on
presidential sites.
In other disciplines writing about presidential gravesites, journalist Brian Lamb notes
how each president has helped shape the direction of the United States and visiting a president’s
grave helps people learn more about the men who have held the highest office and the times in
which they lived: “When we learn about these men, we learn more about our collective selves.”28
Presidential deaths are very public events and, Lamb argues, the graves of presidents are more
about personal and political symbolism.29 Building on this point, historian Douglas Brinkley
mentions that a pilgrimage to a presidential gravesite is a way to pay a “quiet tribute to all of
our glorious past” and that “all presidents––no matter how well they performed in office––are
revered by most Americans simply because they represent our grandest political traditions.”30
As such, “presidents’ graves serve as guideposts to our past and why a monument of quiet
reflection in such places nourishes the soul and fuels the historical imagination. It’s a way to
make a connection with the lives of individuals who helped shape our nation,” since “both the
lives and deaths of presidents play a part in our national drama.”31 Brinkley posits that regardless
of a president’s historical rank, one can find enlightenment at every presidential gravesite, as it
is more important to pay homage to the institution of the presidency.32 Oftentimes, the death of
a president signals that “it is a symbol that is being mourned as much as, or more than, the man
himself.”33
Art historian Benjamin Hufbauer conducted several case studies of presidential libraries,
which are less numerous than gravesites and have essentially only been around since 1940,
though there are parallels to presidential resting places, as both are sites of commemoration.34
Hufbauer observes the noticeable transformation in presidential commemoration since the
dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1922, and the monuments of the past
(obelisks, classical temples) have been largely replaced by libraries located principally outside of
Washington.35 These commemorative places are attempts to construct sites of civil religion, acting
as sacred national places attracting pilgrimages in an effort to raise national consciousness of
presidents who are represented as being worthy of patriotic veneration.36 Hufbauer notes that the
president is, for some, the person who embodies the nation, and the presidential library (or other
commemorative site) is a material manifestation of this reality.37 This last point gives one pause to
wonder what may have happened in the case of Harrison’s tomb.
Landscape history, which urban planner Daniel J. Marcucci basically defines as the
“biography” of a landscape, either cultural or natural, is often a multidisciplinary endeavor in
an attempt to understand a landscape’s form and meaning and explain it in a temporal context.38
Landscape history is by no means a new concept, but it has not been a common approach in
geography. According to geographer Richard H. Schein, a landscape history empirically
documents when, where, why, and by whom a landscape was created, altered, and so on.39
Landscape history is about a specific place, but it can also encompass larger scales.40 It must
explain how and why a landscape evolved, focusing on what Marcucci calls keystone processes,
or the points that were influential in the development of that landscape.41 It not an area that
332 Wade
has always been attributed to historical geography, but often labeled as part of the “geographic
factor in history.”42 Geographer William Norton notes that the general tendency in cultural and
historical geography has been to incorporate time, but not necessarily to argue for time as a major
component or overriding point of interest in geographical studies.43 While many geographers
have advocated for landscape history, relatively few case studies are available. And though many
geographical studies have approached landscape from an historical perspective, they have not
always focused on the concept or use of landscape history per se.44
Leading historical geographer Michael Conzen notes that landscape history is perhaps the
least developed approach to landscape studies in the United States and he maintains that because
we exist in time, we must incorporate time into our studies of landscape.45 Historically examining
a landscape acknowledges it as both a history and as place, and focusing on its cumulative
character recognizes that “nature, symbolism, and design are not static elements of the human
record but change with historical experience”; in turn, this shows that the “geographically distinct
quality of places is a product of the selective addition and survival over time of each new set of
forms peculiar to that region or locality.”46 Time is a key component to landscape history and
each generation inherits landscapes shaped in certain ways, subsequently shaping and reshaping
them with its own distinctive traits and selectively removing those from previous generations.47
“The aim of the landscape historian, then,” writes Conzen, “is to distinguish the threads woven
into this complex, changing fabric and account for their respective appearance, arrangement, and
disappearance. Landscape elements vary widely in the speed of their formation and change, and
time plays an important role in how historically composite a landscape may become.”48
Geographer and archaeologist Richard Muir observes that landscape history has always
had a complex relationship with historical geography, as they are closely intertwined, but never
really merged, with the differences between the two difficult to pinpoint.49 Muir posits that
historical geographers tend to employ evidence from sites and subsequently develop theories
about processes of change, whereas landscape historians often regard sites and landscapes as
worthy subjects of study by themselves.50 And while landscape is a popular topic for geographers,
it is fragmented between those who identify as historical geographers and those as landscape
historians.51 This dichotomy is complicated by the fact that the term landscape history has different
roots and meanings on either side of the Atlantic, and even though historical geographers have
been involved with the topic, it tends to have stronger ties to archaeology, as geographers and
archaeologists view sites differently.52
Eminent historical geographer Alan R.H. Baker discusses how landscape history, like
environmental history, has not always been warmly welcomed in the discipline of history and it
has struggled for acceptance: “Historians have been incorporating landscapes into their studies for
a very long time, but landscape history as an identifiable sub-discipline is a relatively recent and
not always appreciated addition to history’s extended family.”53 Architectural historians have also
been somewhat aloof to the concept and, in a paper entitled “Architectural History or Landscape
History?” Dell Upton urges architectural historians to move away from their rigid concept of
landscape and embrace a wider notion of the cultural landscape and all that it encompasses.54
While some geographers have had difficulty in justifying the relevance of landscape history, it
is my impression that another problem is that geographers have not sufficiently shown how
landscape history is a particularly useful concept beyond the theoretical insights it can offer.
Furthermore, while geographers have devoted significant attention to the role of landscape
in remembering or forgetting the past, extant studies in the literature often offer only a short time
frame in their analyses. Geographer Karen E. Till discusses this shortcoming in a similar approach
she calls site biographies, which typically provide nuanced accounts of ways that national
histories, memorial cultures, and shared stories are remembered or forgotten with the goal of
analyzing changes to existing public cultures of memory within a specific national context.55 The
best results from such an approach examines “how seemingly stable material forms are dynamic
in space and time, and elucidates how contestations over the significance of past narratives are
given meaning within particular socio-political contexts,” while “at their worst, biographies [of
sites] are narrow in their analyses of social exchange and power relations,” by focusing on the
emergence of a site and related debates in a limited period of time, neglecting to explore “how
sites change over time or how events, practices, and places may become institutionalized venues
of official memory.”56
In the case of memorial sites, such an approach is important, as Foote argues that sites
themselves often play an active role in their own interpretation,57 as I show below. But despite the
spatial character of landscape history, papers on the topic in Anglophone scholarship are rare in
major geographical journals and are more common in historical and archaeological periodicals.58
This paper aims to contribute to historical geography by illustrating the significance and value
of landscape history as more than a purely theoretical construct by demonstrating its usefulness
both within and beyond geography, particularly with reference to applications in heritage and
memory studies.
General biographical background
While Harrison’s life and presidency have been covered more thoroughly by historians
and biographers, it is necessary to provide a brief and selective overview of his life to better
understand the story behind him, his burial site, and his presidential legacy. Because Harrison
was a minor president, he has not received nearly as much attention as other figures such as
Washington, Lincoln, or Kennedy, and therefore the sources on his life are noticeably fewer.
Perhaps this fact contributes to his intriguing story.
William Henry Harrison was born on February 9, 1773 on Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation
along the James River, the seventh child and third son in a family of three boys and four girls in a
prominent political family (Figure 2). His ancestor Benjamin Harrison was a Jamestown colonist
who arrived in Virginia in 1633 and was elected to the local council. Benjamin’s descendants
included prominent colonial politician Benjamin Harrison III and his son, politician Benjamin
Harrison IV, and his son Benjamin Harrison V, governor of Virginia, member of the Continental
Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and also the father of William Henry.
Young Harrison was educated at home early on and his parents pointed him toward the
medical profession. He enrolled at Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College and pursued a classical
curriculum, but was pulled out by his parents and subsequently sent to Richmond for a medical
apprenticeship, eventually transferring to the Medical School of Pennsylvania (now the University
of Pennsylvania) in 1791. Harrison’s father died that year and, without money, he began to seek
a new career path.59 He dropped out of medical school and enrolled in the army as an officer,
arriving with the troops at Fort Washington near the young settlement of Cincinnati in the fall
of 1791, at a time when the Northwest Territory was consumed with wars among the region’s
Native Americans.
Harrison rose rapidly through the ranks. His mother died in 1793, but his inheritance
did not provide much, and with his fading connections to Virginia, he began to focus his life and
career westward.60 He made a name for himself at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and was
promoted to commander. Harrison met and married Anna Symmes in 1795, and they moved to a
one-hundred-and-sixty-acre farm near North Bend on land purchased from her father, judge and
land developer John Cleves Symmes, where they eventually had ten children, allowing Harrison
to move “smoothly from the Virginia gentry into the emerging political and economic elite of the
Old Northwest.”61
334 Wade
Figure 2. Portrait of President William Henry Harrison. Daguerreotype, circa 1850, copy of 1841 original.
Photographed by Albert Sands Southworth, Josiah Johnson Hawes, and Albert Gallatin Hoit.
Harrison left the military in 1798 and got a job as secretary of the Northwest Territory, and
he was elected as the congressional delegate of that territory the following year. Ohio became a
state in 1803 and President John Adams appointed Harrison as Governor of the Indiana Territory
(comprising present-day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota), where
his family lived well in an estate that William Henry called Grouseland in the then-capital of
Vincennes. Harrison served as governor for twelve years, where his primary responsibility was
to acquire land from Native Americans to promote settlement of whites, and he delivered by
gaining millions of acres of land for the United States. Notably, much of the land that he obtained
came through rather unscrupulous means, including coercion, bribery, and illegal purchases.62
In fact, it was his aggressive actions in acquiring Native American lands63 that caught
the ire of some tribes, culminating in the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811, along the
Tippecanoe River in northeastern Indiana, which subsequently catapulted Harrison to national
fame. The battle occurred as a result of mutual antagonisms between the various tribes of the
Indiana Territory and the American settlers and, even though much of the battle is remembered
for the partial truths deriving from its folk accounts rather than historical facts, it still resulted in
a decisive victory for Harrison.64 While the Americans suffered more casualties than the Shawnee,
and Native American leader Tecumseh was not actually present at the battle, Harrison managed
to scatter Native American attackers and destroy some settlements, but antagonisms actually
increased after the skirmish and resurfaced the next year in the War of 1812.65
At the onset of the War of 1812, Harrison left working in government to rejoin the army,
where he became a general. His heroic efforts at the Battle of the Thames, which resulted in a
far clearer victory than at Tippecanoe, propelled him to further fame, where he was second only
to Andrew Jackson in iconic military status at that time.66 In 1814, with the war still underway,
Harrison submitted his resignation to President James Madison and “Old Tippecanoe” retired
from the military to return to a quiet life in North Bend. But politics called again when Harrison
returned to the House of Representatives in 1816, where he became a strong advocate for veterans
throughout his life and remained a popular and prominent citizen, especially in Ohio. After his
term ended in 1819, he returned to North Bend, but was nominated for the Ohio State Senate,
where he served from 1819 to 1821.
Afterward, Harrison came home, disappointed that he was unable to gain a higher office
and the financial security he craved,67 though he returned to Washington, D.C. as one of Ohio’s
U.S. Senators in 1825, spending another three years in the Capitol, where he unsuccessfully tried
to get the vice presidential nomination under John Quincy Adams. As a consolation, Adams
appointed Harrison as diplomat to Colombia until 1829. He did not stay there long, as Adams lost
the presidential election to Andrew Jackson in 1828 and, due to deep hostility between Jackson
and Harrison for many years, President Jackson recalled Harrison from his post when the new
foreign minister arrived in Colombia later in 1829, again sending Harrison home to North Bend.68
Back home, the Harrison estate had greatly expanded after the War of 1812 and, by
Harrison’s homecoming, the farm, nicknamed The Point, extended for about five miles along the
Ohio River, with much of the land parceled off to the Harrison children as they became adults.69
His political career appeared to be over and he suffered from financial trouble due to numerous
bad business deals and his many dependents. Because of these financial entanglements, Harrison
eagerly accepted an appointment as Hamilton County Clerk of Courts in 1836, which was a major
step down for someone of his stature.70
What appeared to be a quiet homecoming ended due to a political sea change in the
United States in the late 1830s, as Andrew Jackson’s presidency created two political parties, the
Democrats and the Whigs. Harrison ran for president as a Whig against New York Democrat and
Vice President Martin Van Buren in the 1836 election and, despite Van Buren being the favorite
and winning the presidency, Harrison did well in the polls. The political climate quickly turned
against Van Buren, however, as the Panic of 1837 set in and destroyed the US economy just weeks
after he took office, resulting in a deep, widespread depression; another panic followed in 1839,
exacerbating the economic situation further.71 At this point, national attention turned again to
Harrison as a contender for the 1840 election against Van Buren.
The Whig party emerged from the economic turmoil of the Jackson administration and in
opposition to his perceived authoritarian style of governance.72 Harrison gained greater support
as the Whig nominee as a type of hero-candidate with popular appeal from his military success
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and without Jackson’s authoritarian tendencies;73 he beat out Henry Clay for the nomination,
which he received in December 1839, selecting Virginia Senator John Tyler as vice president on the
ticket. Other suggestions for the vice president included Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster,
but
Webster and virtually everyone else who might have been a first choice rejected a
post that had traditionally been regarded as meaningless at best. The vice president
had so little to do that the men who occupied the job often never even bothered to
come to Washington during their term of office. . . . And having made it through
eight presidencies without any serious health crises, people had stopped seriously
contemplating what would happen if Number Two suddenly became Number
One.74
During the campaign, people often didn’t even bother to ask Tyler about his political
beliefs. The Whigs had no political platform and no core group of supporters, and their campaign
75
was built with songs, slogans, and rallies.76 The media branded Harrison the “log cabin and hard
cider” candidate to emphasize his frontier background and genial, humble, and unpretentious
image, contrasted with Van Buren’s image as the urbane, affluent Washington insider.
Until more recently, presidential elections were essentially in the hands of America’s landed
elite, elected officials, and other political insiders. This began to change with the Whigs’ election
tactics, such as the log cabin imagery, referring to Harrison as “Tippecanoe,” and through direct
appeals to rural voters and common people, even though the Whigs had more aristocrats among
them than the Democrats.77 As a result, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” became a legendary slogan in
American political history. Harrison began making speeches himself, directly addressing crowds
of voters, which was a major political breakthrough,78 and he actually went out and campaigned
in person in the famously branded “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign. The voting public
was attracted to and enthusiastically consumed the Whig Party’s myths and emblems.79 Though
there was controversy regarding his age, Harrison used frequent speechmaking as a means to
prove his fitness.
Voting commenced on October 30, 1840 and continued until November 18. Harrison was
exhausted from all of the personal campaigning, but he was determined to prove that he was
capable of the job.80 While the economy was the foremost issue, slavery, Native American relations,
and national expansion were other major topics at the time. Tippecanoe himself had a questionable
status on some of these controversial issues, as he “consistently supported slavery,” was a slave
owner himself, and had a “mixed” record regarding Native Americans. He appeared sympathetic
to Native Americans’ plight, but was also willing to take advantage of them, historically gaining
somewhat of a reputation as an “Indian killer”; his war record was also controversial and remains
so today, and defending his military record was one reason Harrison sought to get back into
politics.81 Harrison spoke in generalities and avoided directly addressing major issues except
for the abuse of presidential power, spoke of only serving for one term, and stressed his military
background and his life as a simple farmer.82 In the end, Harrison won only slightly more than
Van Buren in the popular vote, but the Whigs won both the House of Representatives and the
Senate, and Old Tippecanoe emerged victorious in an electoral landslide.83 Indeed, the sudden
jump from the lowly Clerk of Courts to successful presidential candidate marked his return to
national prominence as “one of the great success stories in American political history.”84 The
election of 1840 marked the first time two nationally organized political parties competed for the
White House.85
Harrison arrived in Washington on February 9, 1841, his sixty-eighth birthday, in the middle
of a snowstorm.86 Inauguration Day arrived on March 4 and, in the rain during a Washington
winter, neglecting to wear an overcoat or even a hat during his address, Old Tippecanoe delivered
a nearly two-hour speech, the longest inaugural address in US Presidential history, in front of a
crowd of at least fifty thousand.87 As a result, he contracted pneumonia. Prior to the speech, he
had spent nearly a month almost endlessly walking around Washington, D.C. in the cold, wet
weather, meeting with politicians and regular citizens alike, and the constant personal interaction
exhausted him.88 By March 26, he was beginning to show signs of illness and, on April 4, 1841,
President William Henry Harrison died after barely a month in office.
Up to that point, the United States had never experienced the death of a sitting president
and the country was naturally shocked and grief-stricken. Biographer Gail Collins succinctly
sums up the sadness by stating that, despite his earlier fame and achievements, the country never
really got the chance to know Harrison.89 Congress was not even in session at the time of his death
and John Tyler was in Williamsburg, Virginia, unaware of the president’s illness; in fact, the press
did not even mention that Harrison was ill until March 31.90 Tyler received the news early on
April 5 and left for Washington immediately to be sworn in as the tenth President of the United
States.91 Though Harrison’s life came to an abrupt end, the tragedy behind his public memory did
not end with his death.
A landscape history of the Harrison tomb
News of Harrison’s passing spread slowly throughout the country, “[bringing] sorrow to
opponents as well as partisans,” while ministers across the nation preached memorial sermons
and “newspapers of both parties were ‘clothed in mourning.’ ”92 While Harrison’s passing
pleased some detractors (most notably Andrew Jackson), it created a major political problem, as
“never before had a president died in office, and as word of the tragedy slowly spread throughout
the country, outpourings of grief continued for weeks,” including sorrow among some of the
Native American tribes who knew Harrison.93 His body rested in state at the Capitol until the
funeral procession, which attracted some forty thousand people in Washington, D.C. on April 7,
1841, as they “reverently watched the melancholy procession make its way to the Congressional
Cemetery.”94 The president was temporarily kept in a public vault in Washington’s Congressional
Cemetery until he could be laid to rest at North Bend in accordance with his wishes, though his
tomb had to be built in response to his unexpected departure. Harrison’s body did not actually
arrive at the family property until it was delivered by ship from Pittsburgh in July 1841. In fact,
it was not for years after his death that Harrison or his whereabouts garnered any significant
attention in the media or the wider public.
In an 1872 article from The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, the pseudonymous Ithuriel recounts
an “expedition” to find the whereabouts of Harrison’s burial site in the early 1870s and the
apparent mystery surrounding it by opening his piece declaring, “The vexed question of the
death and burial place of the lamented W.H. Harrison has at last been settled.”95 Ithuriel, in the
company of the Harrison Tomb Legislative Committee, took a train to North Bend in 1872 where
they hired Native American guides who knew of the tomb’s location to take them to it.96 In the
article, the author makes references to the “rumored” death of Harrison, implying doubt about his
passing, and he mentions that some people even thought that his death was based on hearsay.97
This account mentions that discussions to build a monument for Harrison had occurred for years
to create a proper memorial site for the tomb that had been neglected for decades, even by that
time.98 The party found the site to be “cheap and unworthy” of the distinguished man resting
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inside the crypt;99 the tomb was not even marked with the Harrison name. (Figure 3)
Figure 3. An illustration depicting the Harrison Tomb along the Ohio River, mid-nineteenth century. From
Benson J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, 1869.
While accounts differ regarding the precise size of the original tomb, it was between
approximately ten and fifteen square feet and between three and four feet tall. The New York Times
mentions perhaps the first proposal for someone to obtain and care for the Harrison property,
though neglect of the tomb was apparent as early as 1846.100 The initial vault was “a simple,
barrel-arched brick structure topped with sod.”101 Early on, the Harrison family installed an iron
door to prevent desecration, but with little success.102 One notorious anecdote from local history
came from 1878 when John Scott Harrison, son of William Henry, father of Benjamin, and an Ohio
Congressman, died that year and was supposed to be buried in the Harrison Tomb. Grave robbery
and body snatching were common in those days, particularly for medical schools in need of fresh
cadavers in light of strict laws regarding dissection, even for scientific purposes, which resulted
in an underground body snatching industry, and the Harrison family found itself to be victims
of this crime.103 In fact, they found that the body of John Scott Harrison and another relative had
been stolen after the tomb was opened in preparation for his funeral. Both bodies were found and
reburied, but the tale brought unease to the Harrison family and the local communities. In 1879,
the family oversaw a reconstruction of the tomb after this incident, but it proved insufficient.
More public attention arrived in the 1880s, as two formal meetings in Ohio about proper
care for the tomb failed to yield any results.104 The Louisville Courier-Journal remarked on the sparse
Figure 4. The Harrison Tomb, circa 1890. Courtesy of the Harrison-Symmes Foundation.
quality of the grave and compared its poor condition to those of other presidential resting places.
The Cincinnati Enquirer noted the contradiction of Harrison’s resting place that lay unvisited,
while hundreds of people would see a statue of him in downtown Cincinnati every day, and thus
arguing that his gravesite was deserving of some memorial.105 More public support turned out in
October 1887 when two thousand five hundred people attended the first public demonstration
to honor Harrison (albeit forty-six years after he was laid to rest), in an attempt to raise public
interest in a monument, as “the utter neglect of the grave of the distinguished man has become a
source of mortification to the pioneer citizens of the Miami and Ohio Valleys.” The crowd found
it especially noticeable that Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison, William Henry’s grandson, did
not attend the event.106
These events might have had an impact, as the condition of the tomb improved slightly
by the 1890s (Figure 4). In 1896, an equestrian statue of Old Tippecanoe funded by the State of
Ohio was dedicated in downtown Cincinnati that still stands, though no such monument was
established at his tomb, even though the statue was originally intended for his burial site (Figure
5).107 A spectator at that ceremony stated that the country would not have done “its full duty”
until a proper monument stood at the president’s tomb.108 Nonetheless, Harrison’s relatives and
descendants created a new tomb in 1894, which added more crypts and was slightly enlarged. It
was remade of limestone and laid in cement, as opposed to the original brick and mortar crypt.
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Figure 5. Harrison’s statue in downtown Cincinnati. Photo by author.

The doorway was deepened and, for the first time, a “Harrison” inscription was added to mark
the tomb.109 Earlier that year, the then-former President Benjamin Harrison had visited the tomb
and, upset by its condition, made plans to replace the old structure and make improvements to the
site.110 Before Ben Harrison’s involvement, the public could not do anything about the condition
of the tomb because it was still on the property of the Harrison family. While the view of original
tomb was somewhat obscured, the new tomb was visible for several miles along the Ohio River
and parties began discussing using the new site as a base for a monument around this time.111
But the discussion went no further until new attention followed an article that again
exposed the severe quality of the tomb and subsequently sparked renewed public interest, though
little action.112 The early twentieth century saw a rise in deforestation around the tomb for lumber
and a movement began to preserve both the forest and tomb in the hopes of creating a government-
operated park.113 Harrison’s descendants, scattered around the country, began to plead for the
government to care for his gravesite. One article mentions how the tomb was virtually forgotten
on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), referring to the ragged American flag flying over the
tomb that had not been replaced for a significant amount of time.114 On Decoration Day of 1910,
another group visited the “neglected tomb” that they discovered haphazardly, and acknowledged
that its services were probably the first held at the site “in decades.”115 The party was disturbed by
the tomb’s poor condition and decided at that moment to form the William Henry Harrison Club,
with the organizational goal to restore the tomb and fly a large flag at the site.116
These concerns were partially addressed in 1912 by the Hamilton County Sons of Veterans
Club, who asked for national assistance to create a “suitable monument” for Harrison’s resting
place and also to purchase and maintain the grounds of the tomb.117 The tomb was still in rough
condition, with parts of it hacked away and stolen by “relic hunters,” the grounds covered in
weeds and underbrush, and many unmarked crypts.118 James Hendryx wrote in a newspaper
article that “a visitor to this tomb is deeply impressed by the general air of dilapidation and
neglect surrounding the final resting place of a former President of the United States of America,”
mentioning the high regard for Harrison at the national level during the time of his death and
contrasting it to the condition of his tomb.119 Despite talk from groups to preserve the site, there
was still no action by either the United States or the State of Ohio to do so, even amid public
outcry.120 Another group pledged to care for the tomb the next year, resulting in more fundraising,
following more damage and vandalism, including the tattered flag that was raised there just a
few years before, and a broken and vandalized door to the tomb.121
It was not until 1915 that some serious, formal attempts to preserve the Harrison Tomb
and the memory of President Harrison were underway, when the Ohio Archeological and
Historical Society (now the Ohio Historical Society) made a formal appeal in response to dire calls
to care for the tomb and growing concern from Cincinnatians.122 The movement hoped to secure
federal, or at least state, involvement in the tomb’s preservation. An article describes the tone of
the meeting as leaving “little doubt but that the outcome will start a concerted movement which
will result in the tomb of William Henry Harrison being provided with a magnificent memorial
like those which mark the last resting place of the three other Presidents that Ohio furnished to
the nation – Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley.”123 One newspaper
article recounted the years of neglect at the tomb and that people were largely unaware of the
tomb’s condition until articles and editorials were published.124 Though there were moves to
acquire the property and ask Congress for money to erect a memorial and maintain it, nothing
ever happened. The article goes as far as to compare it to other presidential memorials, such as
the large monetary value of Hayes’s memorial and the grandiosity of the McKinley and Garfield
monuments; in Ohio, the Harrison site was the only one which was not memorialized or formally
recognized.125 Thus, “it is now deemed to be high time that this action also be taken and the
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dereliction of the past thus atoned for.”126 In late 1916, Harrison’s descendants agreed to cede the
land to the memorial association as long as the property received adequate care.127
The momentum to preserve the tomb was also likely propelled by global events with far-
reaching ramifications, namely World War I. In 1919, after the conclusion of the war, there was
a renewed public interest in caring for veterans, and this sentiment was demonstrated by the
Ohio state legislature that appropriated $10,000 for improvements at the Harrison Tomb.128 While
groups tried for over fifty years to find help for the tomb, the war sparked the impetus to take
meaningful action.129 Civic groups used the money to restore the tomb, acquire the land, and add
other improvements, such as better access by improving the roads to the site with the hope of
turning the area into a park, as care for the tomb ceased after the last round of improvements in
1887.130 One article chronicles the many groups that attempted to preserve the tomb, though they
had only limited success in doing so.131
It appeared that the Harrison Tomb would finally receive its due status as state funding for
the site was finally authorized in late 1920 and the State of Ohio gained title to both the tomb and
the property, including a donation of land totaling thirteen acres for the site.132 Cincinnati architect
Harry Hake created the plan and constructed the memorial free of charge. The groundbreaking
for the park occurred on October 24, 1921, drawing a large ceremony and crowd including
citizens, politicians, and Harrison descendants.133 Media coverage documented the sense of
shame from the crowd regarding the poor condition of the tomb. A local school superintendent
mentioned how he “bowed his head in shame that a nation should be so ungrateful, and a state
so neglectful, as to let the tomb of one of the founders of America fall into such decay.”134 While
Cincinnatians were largely familiar with Harrison’s equestrian statue located downtown, “few
probably think of the long neglect of the grave of that great character,” pointing to the disparity in
Harrison’s popularity in his life versus his death.135 The landscaped entrance with its two pillars
was completed in 1922 and the sixty-foot limestone obelisk was finished and dedicated in 1924.
The obverse of the obelisk prominently lists Harrison’s major political positions:
WILLIAM
HENRY
HARRISON.
SECRETARY OF THE
NORTHWEST TERRITORY.
DELEGATE OF THE NORTHWEST
TERRITORY TO CONGRESS.
TERRITORIAL GOVERNOR
OF INDIANA.
MEMBER OF CONGRESS FROM
OHIO.
OHIO STATE SENATOR.
UNITED STATES SENATOR
FROM OHIO.
MINISTER TO COLOMBIA.
NINTH PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES.
Figure 6. Landscaped entrance to the Harrison Tomb. Photo by author.

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Figure 7. A view of the Harrison Tomb obelisk and memorial site from the adjacent road. Photo by author.
The reverse of the structure lists his major military accomplishments:
ENSIGN OF THE FIRST

UNITED STATES INFANTRY
COMMANDENT
OF FORT WASHINGTON.
HERO OF TIPPECANOE.
MAJOR GENERAL
IN THE WAR OF 1812.
VICTOR OF THE BATTLE
OF THE THAMES.
AVENGER OF THE MASSACRE
OF THE RIVER RAISIN.
The protection and management of the site was officially passed from the Ohio legislature to the
Ohio Historical Society in 1934 (Figures 6-8).
After the conversion of Harrison’s austere crypt into a historical monument, all appeared
to be well as Ohio and the United States had provided a proper resting place for a former
Figure 8. Harrison’s crypt next to his wife, Anna Symmes Harrison, and other relatives. Photo by author.
president who had been all but forgotten. And yet, all was not well, as the Harrison Tomb would
be forgotten again. There is scarcely any mention of the Harrison Tomb in any media for years
after its dedication as a monument. In 1948, not terribly long after responsibility for the tomb
came under the care of the Ohio Historical Society, a newspaper reported that the tomb was in
“bad condition” and concerned citizens from the North Bend area appealed to the state for help,
only to receive nothing.136Again, the face of the tomb had cracked, the flagpole was rusted and
with a torn flag, with the road leading to the site being a “disgrace,” and only one rusty highway
marker pointing to the tomb’s location.137
The property suffered additional loss when, in 1958, local power company Cincinnati Gas
& Electric (CG&E) destroyed the house where Benjamin Harrison was raised after it purchased
some of the land.138 Though William Henry’s home burned down before the Civil War, much of
the family continued to live at The Point for years after his death, and some structures remained
on the property.139 Initially, a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution intended to
erect a plaque documenting the childhood home of Benjamin Harrison, but the group was not
even notified about the house’s destruction, despite its plans for a ceremony or even a chance
to place a marker.140 Harrison biographer Gail Collins, whose father worked for CG&E at
that time, mentions that The Point was a significant historic landmark, but due to insufficient
funding to preserve it, CG&E’s management did not want a historic landmark on its property.
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Figure 9. Interpretive markers installed at the Harrison Tomb by the Ohio Historical Society in 2007. Photo
by author.
They had some workers quietly destroy it, though the Cincinnati Enquirer claims that the house
was destroyed for “safety reasons,” because it was beyond repair from dilapidation and it was a
potential “hazard.”141 Notably, the Harrison Tomb was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in 1970, but even then it failed to garner sufficient care or attention for about another twenty
years. Indeed, the fortunes of the Harrison Tomb finally began to turn for the better beginning in
the early 1990s.
The movement to preserve the tomb was initiated through the formation of the local
non-profit Harrison-Symmes Memorial Foundation in 1991, which is staffed by a small group
of civic-minded citizens who simply enjoy preserving local history and the memory of William
Henry Harrison and his relatives. They educate the public through occasional tours and events,
and through the operation of a small museum nearby. While the Harrison Tomb is still owned by
the Ohio Historical Society, the Harrison-Symmes Foundation maintains the grounds through an
annual stipend.142 By 1991, the tomb suffered from a leaking roof, the grounds were filled with
litter, the view of the obelisk was partially obscured by dead trees, and a fallen tree had knocked
out all of the electricity and lights, with the resultant darkness drawing substantial vandalism.143
In 1996, care for the tomb was ensured through large renovations that year, the first
preservation work at the site since 1922.144 The Harrison-Symmes Foundation was able to obtain
grant money through political involvement with state senators and the governor of Ohio.145 CG&E
restored electricity and vandalism declined as the tomb received greater care, including clean
stonework, repaired steps, new mortar, new lighting, new paving, a new flagpole, re-landscaping,
and the addition of a wheelchair ramp.146 The Ohio Historical Society erected several interpretive
markers at the site in 2007 and a small parking lot was added to invite visitors to the park area
(Figure 9). As of 2009, the tomb receives about 5,500 annual visitors.147 While finding funding
is a constant concern for the Harrison-Symmes Foundation, the Harrison Tomb is now in good
hands and presently well cared for. But one important question remains: how could something
as potentially important and historically significant as the grave of an American president be
neglected for so long?
Creating a legacy for a president who never had the chance to be president
A geographical study of the Harrison Tomb reveals the paradox of how to address the
legacy of a president and how to remember him in the cultural landscape when he was only
president for a very brief time. After all, what is his legacy? It appears that, superficially,
Harrison’s presidency was basically a footnote in his life and career, and that, given the absence
of presidential accomplishments and his treatment by many historians, he was only nominally a
president. Without knowing the story behind Harrison and his tomb, it appears that the Harrison
Tomb is a monument to an inconsequential politician, or possibly even a fluke.
Collins asserts that, “Harrison’s one-month term in office was really nothing more than
a list of nonachievements.”148 She points to the folklore of the Battle of Tippecanoe, noting
that it was a minor fight against an outnumbered group of Native Americans, with the whites
suffering more casualties, and arguing that Harrison was more successful in the War of 1812 and
as governor of Indiana Territory by cheaply acquiring several states worth of land for the United
States. She also argued that his greatest political achievement came “as one of the most ridiculous
presidential campaigns in history,” that depicted Harrison as the simple soldier who drank cider
and lived in a log cabin.149 Collins postulates that had he lived, Harrison would not have been a
great president anyway and that the Whigs may have lasted a bit longer as a political party, but
neither he nor his party would have prevented the Civil War.150 “The William Henry Harrison
story,” she writes, “is less about issues than about the accidents of fate and silly campaigns.”151
Historian Norma Lois Peterson mentions that Harrison never considered himself a great political
leader and the Whigs picked him as their candidate because they believed that he had the best
chance of defeating Van Buren and that, in power, he would be “pliable” and easily submit to the
wishes of the party.152 She also suggests that Harrison would have been a weak and ineffective
president.153 Biographer Mary Jane Child Queen succinctly states her opinion that “inadvertently,
President William Henry Harrison’s one and only contribution came about due to his sudden
death.”154 The dismissive tone from these writers seems to make Harrison out to be something of
a joke. With such an attitude, it is little wonder that the Harrison Tomb suffered in a state of decay
for decades. But a closer examination of the historical context around the time that Ohioans took
action to preserve the tomb leads to some insight into how the crypt became the memorialized
landscape that it is today.
Even back into the late nineteenth century, the memory of Harrison was dim. Before its
enlargement, his tomb was visible from the Ohio River and, even before the Civil War, in the days
of busier traffic along the river, it was customary for steamboats to blast a “salute” when passing
North Bend and, for years, steamboats and other watercraft blew horns or tolled bells as they
approached Harrison’s tomb.155 People tried to revive this custom in the early twentieth century,
which may have inspired architect Frederick Garber to create a memorial (the obelisk) on top of
the tomb itself and give it greater visibility.156 Evidently, many travelers along the river did not
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even know why there was such a custom and they did it out of habit; others knew that the salute
was for President Harrison, but they mistakenly believed it to be for Benjamin Harrison.157 What
might have renewed public interest in Old Tippecanoe?
Much of the larger social impetus to preserve American history began during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. Zelinsky observes that nationalistic monuments did not
become common in the landscape until the 1850s when an “explosion” of monuments followed
in the half-century following the Civil War.158 During this time, the Civil War and Reconstruction
were still in recent national memory and widespread socioeconomic polarization and economic
depressions resulted from the Panics of 1873 and 1893. Rapid technological advances and
increasing immigration contributed to the sense of alienation and instability that many Americans
felt and experienced during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. These major changes had specific
effects on Ohio through the growth of industry, a sharp decline in its rural population coupled
with increasing population and urbanization, greater political involvement and activism, rapid
technological advancement, and a stronger presence of labor unions and professional societies,
with uneven social and geographical impacts between Reconstruction and World War I.159
Historian Andrew R.L. Cayton sums up the zeitgeist, declaring, “Rural or urban, most
Ohioans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that their world was
reconfiguring itself overnight.”160 Following similar movements across the United States from the
1890s through the 1910s, a sense of revivalism swept through the Buckeye State, as many Ohioans
believed that there were serious problems with their state and sought to reform government to
reinvigorate public culture, which they premised upon restoring “a sense of common purpose
in the midst of rapid change.”161 In an attempt to cope with these changes, some “wealthy and
respectable Ohioans” became insistent on the value of a public culture, fearing that the world of
the early nineteenth century was becoming more fragmented from the disparate voices in society,
as people generally seemed more concerned with themselves than the greater good and material
progress trumped moral progress.162
The proliferation of institutions such as presses, libraries, schools, churches, and civic
organizations, as well as parks, cemeteries, and memorials helped to revive Ohio’s public culture,
especially in partial reaction to growing political radicalism, rapid immigration, and Americans’
subsequent xenophobia that accompanied this rapid social change and its perceived threats.163
The outbreak of World War I, which had a particularly profound effect on Ohio, suspended efforts
for reform in the state. However, it also reinvigorated the motivation for reform by enforcing
certain cultural values, such as a “widespread insistence on cultural homogeneity and absolute
patriotism” and the spread of “Americanization” through society and institutions promoting
reconnections to American heritage.164
Ohioans, like other Americans, became more conspicuous in their public displays
of patriotism, whether they were saluting the flag, pledging allegiance to the
United States, or talking about the necessity of law and order. Understandable as
some of this hysteria was in the midst of a war, it represented a coercive period in
the evolution of a public culture. At no point in the history of Ohio had a citizen’s
political identity been so critical. Loyalty to the United States and to Ohio had to
trump any and all personal loyalties.165
Though most progressive reforms occurred at the local and state level, observers documenting
the changes describe the sentiments as a reaction to the sense that “Ohio had lost its soul” and
many Ohio progressives sought to restore a sense of order to economic and social worlds that had
become disjointed during recent periods of industrial and urban growth.166
This explanation corresponds to the impacts of World War I on the sentiments behind
the Harrison Tomb that I covered in the previous section, when the monument directly benefited
from renewed public interest and financial support from the state with greater improvements in
the early 1920s. But his tomb was not the only landscape artifact dedicated to Harrison, as his
memory is recorded in other landscapes and geographical features. For example, Harrison has
statues, towns, counties, and schools named after him across the United States, and not just in
Ohio. Beyond the equestrian statue in Cincinnati, these include his birthplace, Berkeley Plantation
in Charles City County, Virginia; Grouseland in Vincennes, Indiana; the Tippecanoe Battlefield
Museum in Battle Ground, Indiana; a Harrison statue in Indianapolis; and a Harrison bust at
the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. But these sites and artifacts are relatively few reminders
of Harrison in the landscape, especially compared to figures like Lincoln or Washington, and
they suggest that he was more of a local or regional historical figure than a president. From
this realization, we see a stark inequality in how American presidents are remembered in the
landscape.
Richard Norton Smith wryly observes how “[Franklin] Pierce, [Millard] Fillmore, and
[James] Buchanan are relegated to the Jeopardy Daily Double, while Lincoln’s Springfield [Illinois]
tomb attracts 300,000 visitors each year.”167 As a point of comparison, there is a wide inequality
for the care, preservation, and promotion of presidential sites. In some cases in Ohio, the “Mother
of Presidents,” some sites receive federal funding, such as the William Howard Taft House in
Cincinnati or the James Garfield House in Mentor; Ulysses S. Grant has three sites commemorating
his life in Ohio alone, despite being entombed in New York City.
Garfield provides an interesting comparison because there was no immediate, popular
movement to memorialize him, as he was second only to William Harrison in having the shortest
term as president and he left no imprint on American politics; his reputation rested solely on his
career as a scholar, Civil War general, and Congressman.168 Secondly, Garfield’s death occurred at
a peaceful time in American history, and his presidential career was not tied to any major historical
event.169 “Yet,” Foote comments, “Garfield had led an impressive life, and his accomplishments
seemed to demand commemoration,” and he eventually received it in the form of an ornate
mausoleum in Cleveland and a statue in Washington.170 For smaller presidential sites, particularly
those of lesser known presidents like Harrison, “just managing to stay open is a triumph.”171
Many have to raise money locally, or are dependent on institutions such as the Ohio Historical
Society, but they often struggle for funding, face constant maintenance problems, and have to
deal with costly site preservation.172
In addition to his seeming historical obscurity and insignificance, at least in contemporary
public memory, Harrison’s legacy is also partially entangled in his own reputational politics. Much
of his reputation is clearly related to the changes in how the public remembered him through
time, and I suspect that, in general, Harrison might not have been viewed as problematically in
the past and he might be today. Zelinsky notes that Harrison is among the heroic figures that
entered the American scene in the development of American nationalism during the approximate
seventy-five years between the Constitutional Convention and the outbreak of the Civil War.173
And though none of these characters rivaled the stature of the Founding Fathers, their inclusion
in this cohort and in the national narrative reveals much “about the character of the rising
nation from their identities and their followings.”174 While Harrison is heroically depicted in
his equestrian statue in downtown Cincinnati and his tomb extolls his long list of political and
military accomplishments, these sites certainly do not focus on his exploitation and killing of
Native Americans or his support of slavery, as these were highly important political topics within
the temporal context that Zelinsky frames. Historian Robert M. Owens describes Harrison’s
record with Native Americans to be mixed, while at times he was helpful and protective of them,
350 Wade
at others he was quite the opposite. He even went as far as punishing whites who mistreated
or killed Native Americans, though this was not always enforceable.175 It becomes apparent
that remembering Harrison through time became not only more complicated, but also carried
politically charged connotations, further establishing him as a potentially “difficult reputation”
and affecting the reputational politics behind his legacy.
Reputations fluctuate over time, especially when claims are contested and, as society
evolves, so does the reputation in question.176 Fine affirms that not all attempts to establish
reputations succeed because, for a reputation to sustain public memory, it must have an audience
with shared values and beliefs.177 This was difficult for Harrison as he never had the chance to
carry out his presidency and cement a national reputation and legacy. Further historical context
reveals that the deaths of Harrison and President Zachary Taylor (1850) while in office, “two
sitting presidents who were also military heroes in their own right, resulted in little emotional
turmoil,” which somewhat contradicts the historical descriptions of the impacts of Harrison’s
death. It may show that “something about the status of the presidency during the antebellum
period, namely, that it had not yet attained the olympian level that was to characterize it from the
Lincoln administration onward,” as the deaths of these presidents occurred before Lincoln “lifted
the office of president to soaring symbolic heights.”178 Zelinsky’s description of this sentiment
provides a partial explanation as to why Harrison’s tomb may have fallen out of public memory,
but the shift in the push to preserve it also occurred at a pivotal time in which civic leaders were
gaining greater prominence within the American political and cultural landscape and certain
reputational entrepreneurs sought to redefine Harrison’s reputational politics.
An added geographical complication in the case of Harrison is that many Cincinnatians
are unaware of the fact that he is buried in North Bend or that there is even a tomb there, and that
is even if they know who Harrison is at all. That the tomb has no markers on the nearby interstate
or local highways and has only a single, small, simple sign just a few hundred feet down the road
pointing to its location indicates the level of stature and esteem that the Harrison Tomb holds in
the local landscape (Figure 10). So, unlike the monuments of many other significant historical
figures, the Harrison Tomb is in a decidedly remote location, only augmenting his obscurity and
perhaps inadvertently rendering him to inconsequentiality. To prevent this, it stands to reason
that his tomb was recreated into a monument. But what about a monument for something that
does not seem to fit the occasion, such as a monument for a president who never really got a
chance to be president? Some presidents receive more recognition and are remembered more
clearly than others, but this is not necessarily because they were better or more effective chief
executives, and this incongruity is sometimes apparent through the landmarks and artifacts that
commemorate them.
These points help explain my interest in this topic, because it is worth asking whether
people are interested in Harrison because of who he was or because he was an anomaly. Another
illustration of his unusual status in American history is that a substantial amount of memorabilia
from the 1840 campaign, such as flags, lapel ribbons, pins and buttons, ceramics, cigar cases, and
print items, much of which emphasizes the log cabin image, still survives and can command
thousands of dollars from collectors.179 Much of the appeal surrounding Harrison seems to be
related to his obscurity. The repeated references to his one-month term throughout historical
writings only focus more attention on this unusual fact and draw attention away from the man
himself, despite his many other accomplishments and his important role in early American
history. Given the history of the site, and the long process in giving it proper care and respect, did
Harrison get a presidential monument only because people felt they owed it to him? “Regardless
of whether greatness is judged by reputation, position, or accomplishment,” argues Foote, “there
arises a sense that the achievements of these individuals [prominent people who died violently
or accidentally] demand commemoration.”180
Figure 10. The sole sign pointing to the location of the Harrison Tomb, located in North Bend just slightly
down the road from the site. Photo by author.
Significantly, it appears that Harrison’s memory is also partly a victim of geography by

its situation in an inopportune location. Post’s study of John Brown’s monuments in Kansas
demonstrates how the location of some of Brown’s monuments have a lower prominence in the
landscape than others and therefore offer different contexts and perceptions of Brown for the
public to debate, just as Harrison’s various memorials in different locations honor him in disparate
ways.182 Even today, the Harrison Tomb site is fairly remote and somewhat hard to find; its location
certainly only fed the ambivalence that so many felt for it until people began to take notice of
its poor condition. Foote remarks on how landscape is intimately involved in the emergence of
historical traditions: “Not only do these traditions become inscribed on the landscape in the form
of memorials and monuments, but in many cases the condition of the sites themselves precipitates
debate over what will be commemorated as part of these traditions.”181 But necessarily, time must
pass before societies consider commemorating the past and commemorated sites go through a
lengthy process of canonization; over time, it becomes easier to simplify the stories behind who or
what we commemorate through a filtered view of the past after significant time passes.182 Much
of this point obviously links to potentially difficult reputations and the way that reputational
entrepreneurs wish to portray the figures that they champion, but while it takes time to create a
monument and decide how to commemorate someone, its care and upkeep are another matter.
352 Wade
It is my belief that Harrison should not be diminished simply because he succumbed to

an illness and thus only served a short presidential tenure. Although his presidency was brief, I
view it as a capstone to an otherwise long and accomplished life and his sudden death and the
odd circumstances and ramifications that it brought about should not negate his entire life and
career. While the effects of what his presidency would have been are uncertain, and there may be
disagreements about his reputation, “there is no doubt that he had great impact on the history of
the young republic” from his military career until he assumed the presidency.183 Despite a lack
of achievements while in the White House, too few people seem to realize or appreciate that the
United States would not be what it is today had it not been for Harrison’s role in American history,
seeing that he played a major part in the early stages of shaping what we now call the Midwest.
While he does not have the name recognition of most other presidents, and is now essentially an
obscure character in national memory, he was a historically significant local, state, regional, and
national figure, in addition to being commander-in-chief, and I submit that, as a member of that
office and institution, Harrison deserves the same level of basic respect as other presidents.
Fortunately, the story behind his tomb has a happy ending in the sense that Harrison finally
received a proper monument and it is currently well cared for; historical markers now permeate
a once-dilapidated landscape full of overgrowth. The site is now well lit, landscaped, has security
cameras, and has local police patrol the adjacent streets on their regular route. But this case study
does highlight the sad trend across the United States for the lack of sufficient care, and sometimes
even basic interest, in the preservation of monuments dedicated to prominent historical American
figures. While reputational politics always surround prominent personalities, one should not
underestimate the effects of ignorance and apathy on behalf of the wider public. Writing in 1912,
local historian Reverend Charles Frederic Goss wrote it was the “shame of our great state [that the
Harrison Tomb had been neglected]...and no true patriot can visit that lonely and (architecturally)
hideous sepulchre without a feeling of pain.”184 He continued, saying “it is hard indeed to refrain
from bitterness and denunciation [seeing the state of the tomb]…and contemplating our lack of
appreciation for our local heroes.”185 And yet, excepting the brief period surrounding its formal
memorialization, the tomb continued to deteriorate for several more decades following Goss’s
observation. While Harrison’s biographies and examinations of his presidency or political career
offer insightful and valuable information on these topics, few seem to give serious consideration
to his legacy or even mention what happened after his body left Washington in 1841.
Landscape history and its potential for geography
Given the movement to erect a proper monument for Harrison in the 1920s under the
premise of honoring the president, the sincerity behind the motive is questionable because for
sixty-plus years afterward, it fell into disrepair again, leaving the memory of an obscure president
left to deteriorate in an obscure location. Interestingly, Harrison was remembered and forgotten
in cycles, but without a more formal monument and prominent landscape feature, would he
have been remembered at all? In some regards, his presidency was little more than a footnote, but
that is no reason to let a presidential monument fall by the wayside and into decay for decades.
Harrison may not have been an inconsequential personality, but society did seem to treat him
that way. Hufbauer observes that in the context of presidential monuments, as memory fades, so
does interest, and commemoration acts as an intercessor between death and societal memory.186
Foote notes that it is common for memorial landscapes to take shape over long periods of time
and the public interpretation and reception of these sites can vary with political, economic, social,
and cultural changes through time.187 Foote’s observation and my case study help to affirm why a
landscape history approach can be valid and insightful when studying memorials or many other
types of landscapes.
This discussion of landscapes and artifacts, topics both popular and familiar within
geography, illustrates another strand in the connections between geography and history by
opening up the question regarding the treatment of public monuments to prominent historical
figures and specifically to the inequality of treatment and memory of US presidents, an inequality
that is often evident in the cultural landscape. Through this example, a geographical study utilizing
landscape history reveals more than general historical or biographical sources and adds more to
the story behind a major figure. Hopefully it illustrates an instance of how the re-adoption of
landscape history could signify an important step toward creating a more coherent and balanced
geographical approach to landscape.188 “Through landscape history,” argues Marcucci,
The issues, problems, and outcomes for a specific landscape can be reframed in a
valid historical context. Enriching the popular perception of a changing landscape
has the potential to alter the political willingness of a society for collective action
directed at planning and managing the common landscape. Ultimately, this
change of perception may result in a change of attitudes towards the land. Perhaps
most importantly, the landscape history will change attitudes by educating people
about the impact of human actions on the land and about the significance of place
to the local culture.189
The story behind the Harrison Tomb illustrates Marcucci’s points quite well, demonstrating the
effects of both actions and inactions in preserving a landscape.
This study also demonstrates that landscape is not simply a reflection of the debate
regarding historical reputation and legacy, but that the reputation or prominence of the memorial
landscape itself can become part of the debate. The poor condition and maintenance of the
Harrison Tomb for so many years prompted public concern over Harrison’s neglected reputation.
A full consideration of reputational politics must be sensitive not only to the social actors and
issues at play in public memory, but also the spatial issues and factors at play in the landscape,
both historically and in the present. Through this example of the Harrison Tomb, landscape
history considers how the cycles of a memorial landscape’s development, decline, and subsequent
redevelopments can generate social and geographical change in debates and discussions of the
past and what those meanings may infer in the present, as well as what new meanings they could
carry in the future.190 Foote states, “Landscape is more than a passive reflection of a nation’s
civil religion and symbolic totems. Landscape is the expressive medium, a forum for debate,
within which these social values can be discussed actively and realized symbolically. Moreover
the debate never ends.”191
The stories behind landscapes, either natural or cultural, illustrate what landscape history
can add to further geographical and historical research and, hopefully, create a stronger bond
between the two. Moreover, I hope to pique other geographers’ interest and encourage them
to do more work in landscape history. Due to the dynamic nature of landscapes, their limitless
varieties, their unconfined geographies, and the myriad ways in which scholars can interpret
and reinterpret them through changing historical contexts, landscape history provides a virtually
inexhaustible area of research for both past landscapes and the evolution of contemporary
landscapes. Geographers’ skills at landscape analysis and interpretation suggest that they could
make significant and meaningful contributions to this not-fully-explored field of research by
telling or helping others to tell the stories behind landscapes, and consequently creating a more
complete picture of significant people and places. Historical geographers in particular have much
to offer in such a field and the public (and also other disciplines) could gain much from their
insights. As we see from the case of the Harrison Tomb, without an awareness of the landscape
354 Wade
and attention to the artifact that it houses, along with its meaning, historicity, and symbolic
significance, the resting place of an American president might have fallen into even greater
obscurity than the man it entombs.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Maria Lane, Paul Watts, and my anonymous reviewers for their support
and suggestions in helping me to strengthen this paper. I also thank Charlene Zimmerman for her
excellent cartographic assistance. I offer a special thank you the volunteer staff at the Harrison-
Symmes Foundation for their interest in and support of this project, for their permission to use
some of their photographs, and for granting me access to their invaluable archives, much of which
came together through the work and dedication of local historian Marjorie Byrnside Burress. The
final product and opinions contained within this paper, however, remain mine alone.
NOTES
1 Kenneth R. Stevens, “William Henry Harrison,” in Buckeye Presidents: Ohioans in the White
House, ed. Philip Weeks (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 38.
2 Richard Norton Smith, “Foreword: Forty-Two Men and the Great Adventure,” in Who’s
Buried in Grant’s Tomb? ed. Brian Lamb (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), xiii-xiv.
3 Andrew R.L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: The Ohio State University
Press, 2002); Walter Havighurst, Ohio: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001);
Kevin F. Kern and Gregory S. Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State (Malden, MA: John
Wiley & Sons, 2014); George W. Knepper, Ohio and Its People, Bicentennial edition (Kent, OH:
The Kent State University Press, 2003).
4 Hendrik Booraem V, A Child of the Revolution: William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–
1798 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2012); Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-
Cabin Campaign (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); Robert M. Owens, Mr.
Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Norma Lois Peterson, Presidencies of William Henry
Harrison and John Tyler, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).
5 Freeman Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time, (New York, C.
Scribner’s Sons, 1939); Gail Collins, William Henry Harrison, (New York: Times Books, 2012);
Meg Green, William Henry Harrison (Breckenridge, CO: Twenty-First Century Books, 2007);
Sue Ann Painter, William Henry Harrison: Father of the West (Cincinnati: Jarndyce & Jarndyce
Press, 2004); Mary Jane Child Queen, William Henry Harrison: General and President (New
York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2007).
6 Richard Horsman, “William Henry Harrison: Virginia Gentleman in the Old Northwest,”
Indiana Magazine of History 96 (2000): 125.
7 Derek H. Alderman, “New Memorial Landscapes in the American South: An Introduction,”
The Professional Geographer 52, no. 4 (2000): 658-60; Derek H. Alderman and Owen J. Dwyer,
“Putting Memory in its Place: The Politics of Commemoration in the American South,” in
WorldMinds: Geographical Perspectives on 100 Problems, eds. D.G. Janelle et al. (Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 55-60; Maoz Azaryahu and Kenneth E.
Foote, “Historical Space as Narrative Medium: On the Configuration of Spatial Narratives
of Time at Historical Sites,” GeoJournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 179-94; Luke Desforges and
Joanne Maddern, “Front Doors to Freedom, Portal to the Past: History at the Ellis Island
Immigration Museum, New York,” Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 437-57; Dydia
DeLyser, “‘Thus I Salute the Kentucky Daisey’s Claim’: Gender, Social Memory, and the
Mythic West at a Proposed Oklahoma Monument,” Cultural Geographies 15 (2008): 63-94;
Owen J. Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” Social & Cultural Geography
5, no. 3 (2004): 419-35; Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes:
Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” GeoJournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 165-78; Steven Hoelscher
and Derek H. Alderman, “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship,”
Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 347-55; Jonathan Leib, “Separate Times, Shared
Spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the Politics of Richmond, Virginia’s Symbolic
Landscape,” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 286–312.
8 Alderman, “New Memorial Landscapes,” 658.
9 Dwyer and Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes,” 166.
10 Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 180.
11 Zelinsky, Nation into State, 181.
12 Dwyer and Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes,” 167.
13 Alderman and Dwyer, “Putting Memory in its Place,” 55, 59; Nuala Johnson, “Cast in Stone:
Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13
(1995): 51-65.
14 Hoelscher and Alderman, “Memory and Place,” 350.
15 Derek H. Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of
Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. in a Georgia County,” Historical Geography 30 (2002):
99-120.
16 Ibid., 103.
17 Ibid., 103.
18 Jonathan I. Leib, “Robert E. Lee, ‘Race,’ Representation and Redevelopment along
Richmond, Virginia’s Canal Walk,” Southeastern Geographer 44, no. 2 (2004): 236-62.
19 Ibid., 246.
20 Chris Post, “Reputational Politics and the Symbolic Accretion of John Brown in Kansas,”
Historical Geography 37 (2009): 92-113.
21 Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial
Arenas.”
22 Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial Arenas,” 100.
23 Fine, Difficult Reputations; Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial Arenas,” 103.
24 Alderman, “Street Names as Memorial Arena,” 103-04.
25 Craig E. Colten, “The Land of Lincoln: Genesis of a Vernacular Region,” Journal of Cultural
Geography 16, no. 2 (1997): 55-75.
26 Zelinsky, Nation into State.
27 Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, revised and
updated edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
28 Brian Lamb, Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?: A Tour of Presidential Gravesites (New York:
Public Affairs, 2003), xix.
29 Ibid., xix-xx.
30 Douglas Brinkley, “Afterword,” in Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? ed. Brian Lamb (New York:
Public Affairs, 2003), 199.
31 Ibid., 199.
32 Ibid., 200.
34 enjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
356 Wade
35 Ibid., 1.
36 Ibid., 7.
37 Ibid., 5.
38 Richard W. Judd and Blake Harrison, “Introduction,” in A Landscape History of New England,
Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 5; Daniel J. Marcucci,
“Landscape History as a Planning Tool,” Landscape and Urban Planning 49 (2000): 68-69. The
use of “biography,” however, should not be confused with Marwyn Samuels’s introduction
of the “biography of landscape,” in which he focuses on the importance of “authors” of
landscapes. See Marwyn Samuels, “The Biography of Landscape,” in The Interpretation of
Ordinary Landscapes, Donald W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51-88.
39 Richard H. Schein, “A Methodological Framework for Interpreting Ordinary Landscapes:
Lexington, Kentucky’s Courthouse Square,” Geographical Review 99, no. 3 (2009): 383.
40 Judd and Harrison, Landscape History; Marcucci, “Landscape History,” 70.
41 Marcucci, “Landscape History,” 71-72.
42 William Norton, Historical Analysis in Geography (London and New York: Longman), 27.
43 William Norton, Explorations in the Understanding of Landscape: A Cultural Geography (New
York: Greenwood Press), 88.
44 Prominent examples by geographers and landscape historians include Karl W. Butzer,
“Cattle and Sheep from Old to New Spain,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
78, no. 1 (1988): 29-56; Michael P. Conzen, ed., The Making of the American Landscape, second
edition (New York: Routledge, 2010); Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 1984); Denis Cosgrove and Stephen
Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and
Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); William Cronon,
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1983); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision, Landscape Imagery and National Identity in
England and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); H.C. Darby,
The Draining of the Fens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956); Mona Domosh,
Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of
Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990); John Fraser Hart, The Look of the Land (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975);
W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955);
Peter J. Hugill, Upstate Arcadia: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Triumph of Social Differentiation
in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995); J.B. Jackson, Discovering the
Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Fred B. Kniffen, “Folk
Housing: Key to Diffusion,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (1965): 549-
77; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985); Donald W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979); Allen G. Noble, Wood, Brick, and Stone: The North American Settlement
Landscape (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Kenneth Olwig, Landscape,
Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to
1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). More recent examples include
Harrison and Judd, eds., A Landscape History of New England; Charles H. Wade, “Legends in
the Landscape: Myth as Material Culture at Dartmouth College,” Material Culture 45, no. 2
(2013): 28-53.
45 Michael P. Conzen, “Introduction,” in Michael P. Conzen, ed., The Making of the American
Landscape, first edition (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 4.
46 Ibid., 4.
47 Ibid., 5.
48 Ibid., 5.
49 Richard Muir, “Geography and the History of Landscape: Half a Century of Development as
Recorded in The Geographical Journal,” The Geographical Journal 164, no. 2 (1998): 148.
50 Ibid., 148.
51 Ibid., 153.
52 Richard Muir, “Landscape: A Wasted Legacy,” Area 30, no. 3 (1998): 264.
53 Alan R. H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 113, 115.
54 Dell Upton, “Architectural History or Landscape History?” Journal of Architectural Education
44, no. 4 (1991): 195-99.
55 Karen E. Till, “Memory Studies,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 327.
56 Ibid., 329-30.
57 Foote, Shadowed Ground, 5.
58 Muir, “Landscape,” 269; Katharine Arntz, “Comments on ‘Landscape: A Forgotten Legacy,’”
Area 31, no. 3 (1999): 297-99.
59 Collins, Harrison, 13.
60 Ibid., 17.
61 Horsman, “Harrison,” 129.
62 Stevens, “William Henry Harrison,” 16.
63 Ibid., 16.
64 Collins, Harrison.
66 Collins, Harrison, 56; Horsman, “Harrison,” 140.
67 Collins, Harrison, 65; Horsman, “Harrison.”
69 Collins, Harrison, 60, 69.
71 Peterson, Presidencies.
72 Ibid., 15-16.
73 Ibid., 17.
75 Ibid., 88.
76 Havighurst, Ohio, 157.
77 Collins, Harrison, 94, 96.
78 Ibid., 105-06.
81 Stevens, “William Henry Harrison,” 19-24.
87 Peterson, Presidencies, 135.
358 Wade
88 Collins, Harrison, 121; Peterson, Presidencies.

91 Ibid., 41.
92 Peterson, Presidencies, 41; Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign, 273-74.
93 Peterson, Presidencies, 42; Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe, 342; Stevens, “William Henry Harrison,”
37.
94 Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign, 273.
95 Ithuriel, “The Harrison Exploring Expedition,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, January 26,
1872, 4.
96 Ibid., 4.
97 Ibid., 4.
98 Ibid., 4.
99 “Our Honored Dead,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, February 3, 1871, 8.
100 “The Tombs of Ex-Presidents,” New York Times, January 27, 1871, 6; Conteur,
“Improvements at the Harrison Tomb,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25, 1922, D6.
101 “The Harrison Tomb,” Timeline: A Publication of the Ohio Historical Society 22, no. 4 (2005): 23.
102 Ibid., 23.
103 Harold W. Coates, “An Eighty-Year-Old Promise to Be Redeemed,” Louisville Courier Journal,
February 20, 1921, SM11; “Harrison’s Grave,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 18, 1881, 2.
104 “Harrison’s Grave,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 18, 1881, 2.
105 Ibid.; “Old Tippecanoe,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 24, 1887, 5.
106 “Pilgrimage to Harrison’s Tomb,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 6, 1887, 3.
107 “The New Harrison Tomb,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 26, 1899, 26; “Restoration of
Harrison’s Tomb Assured; Memorial Park Planned for Burial Place,” Cincinnati Enquirer,
April 14, 1919, 7.
108 Timeline, 24.
109 “The New Harrison Tomb,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 8, 1897, 25; James B. Hendryx, “The
Tomb of Harrison,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 10, 1912, 5.
110 Cincinnati Enquirer 1897, 25.
111 Cincinnati Enquirer 1899, 26.
112 “Tomb of Gen. Wm. H. Harrison,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 11, 1901, 5.
113 “Movement On Foot at North Bend,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 16, 1902, 12.
114 “Seek to Put Harrison’s Tomb at North Bend in the Control of the Federal Government –
Movement is on Foot,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 3, 1907, 12; “Harrison’s Tomb, On the Hill
Overlooking North Bend, Was Practically Forgotten,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 1, 1909, 7.
115 “Harrison’s Tomb to be Put in Good Condition by Cincinnati Club Formed Yesterday,”
Cincinnati Enquirer, May 31, 1910, 7.
116 Ibid., 7.
117 “Monument to Mark Resting Place of Harrison at North Bend Requested of Congress,”
Cincinnati Enquirer, April 29, 1912, 12.
118 Hendryx, “Tomb of Harrison,” 5.
119 Ibid., 5.
120 Ibid., 5.
121 “Harrison Tomb Neglected,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 31, 1913, 4; “Vandals at Harrison
Tomb,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 18, 1913, 1.
122 “Harrison’s Tomb at North Bend Will Be Properly Cared for if Proposed Movement is
Successful,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 3, 1915, 18.
123 “Monument: Over Harrison’s Tomb,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 15, 1915, 14.
124 Ibid., 14.
125 Ibid., 14.
126 Ibid., 14.
127 “Aid from State to Maintain Grounds Surrounding Harrison Tomb to be Sought,” Cincinnati
Enquirer, November 6, 1916, 16.
128 “Restoration of Harrison’s Tomb Assured,” 7.
129 Ibid., 7.
130 Ibid., 7; “Monument Planned for Harrison,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 29, 1919, 5.
131 “Restoration of Harrison’s Tomb Assured,” 7.
132 “Huge Shaft Suggested for Harrison’s Tomb; Entrance Plans are Adopted by Commission,”
Cincinnati Enquirer, January 1, 1921, 10.
133 “League to Assist in Ceremony,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 23, 1921, 31; “Support of
Commission Urged,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 25, 1921, 11.
134 “Support of Commission Urged,” 11.
135 Conteur, “Improvements,” D6.
136 James Ratliff, “North Bend Residents Deplore Harrison Home Neglect; Want State To
Restore ‘The Point’ and Sagging Tomb,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 25, 1948, n.p.
137 Ibid.
138 Collins, Harrison: 2; “Harrison Home Razed Before Marker Arrived,” Cincinnati Enquirer,
October 20, 1959, n.p.
139 Collins, Harrison, 2-3.
140 “Harrison Home Razed”
141 “Harrison Home Razed;” Collins, Harrison, 3.
142 Eric Bradley, “Group Keeps Weeds, Snakes Away from 9th US President,” Cincinnati
Enquirer, May 16, 2009, A1.
143 Albert J. Mestemaker, “Resurrection at Harrison’s Tomb” Western Hills Press (Oh.), May 22,
1996, A16, A18.
144 Ibid., A18.
145 Albert Mestemaker, “Preserving Tomb Will Preserve Our History,” Western Hills Press (Oh.),
May 8, 1996, A18-A19.
146 Mestermaker, “Resurrection,” A16; Lew Moores, “Tomb of Ninth President Gets Modern-
Day Face Lift,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 28, 1996, C3.
147 Bradley, “Group Keeps Weeds”
149 Ibid., 4.
150 Ibid., 5.
151 Ibid., 5.
153 Ibid., 42-43.
154 Queen, Harrison, 83.
155 Coates, “An Eighty-Year-Old Promise to Be Redeemed,” SM11; Cincinnati Enquirer,
“Restoration,” 7.
156 Timeline, 25.
157 “Eighty-Year-Old Promise,” SM11.
159 Cayton, Ohio, 175; Knepper, Ohio.
160 Cayton, Ohio, 175.
360 Wade
161 Ibid., 207.

162 Ibid., 207.
163 Knepper, Ohio.
164 Cayton, Ohio, 233-35.
165 Ibid., 235.
166 Knepper, Ohio, 315-16; Cayton, Ohio, 237.
167 Smith, “Foreword,” xv.
169 Ibid., 38.
170 Ibid., 38-39.
171 Carl Weiser, “Grant Slept Here; Preserve It,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 9, 2004, B1.
172 Ibid., B1.
174 Ibid., 43.
175 Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer, 60-61, 139-40.
176 Fine, Difficult Reputations, 20.
177 Ibid., 20.
178 Zelinsky, Nation into State, 60, 91.
179 Wes Cowan, “Hail to the Chiefs’ Campaign Memorabilia,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November
1, 2008, n.p.
182 Ibid., 263-64, 284.
184 Goss, Rev. Charles Frederic, Cincinnati: The Queen City, 1788-1912, Vol. I (Chicago: The S.J.
Clarke Publishing Company, 1912), 196.
185 Ibid., 196.
186 Hufbauer, Presidential Temples, 197-98.
187 Foote, Shadowed Ground.
188 Muir, “Landscape: A Wasted Legacy”
189 Marcucci, “Landscape History,” 77.
190 I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer who helped me to further develop and more fully
articulate these points.
Statecraft on the Eve of the Civil War:
Influences on New Territories and States
in the 36th U.S. Congress
Brandon Stanley Plewe and Samuel Otterstrom
Brigham Young University
ABSTRACT: Regional jurisdiction (states, provinces, counties, etc.) is a crucial part

of the governance of a country, and thus one would assume that great care is given
to developing an optimal set of jurisdictional boundaries. However, the geometric
simplicity of the boundaries of the western United States seems to defy the logic of
the region’s human and physical geography, suggesting that other forces have played
a role in the production of political space in the West at pivotal times in its history.
In particular, the 36th Congress (1859-61) changed the map of the West considerably
just before the beginning of the Civil War, when the politics of slavery were at their
height. Congressional bills, debates, and votes show that slavery did have a strong
influence on the creation of new states and territories, but western geography was
also very important. In particular, bills were generally introduced to the 36th Congress
at the request of settlers, with boundaries that were motivated by geographic or
regional factors. Conversely, votes on those bills tended to fall along the sharp party
and sectional divisions that were driving the country apart. This paper analyzes the
process of boundary making by governments through a consideration of the complex
combination of geopolitical and regional forces that result in a final decision. The
study period of the 36th Congress included the creation of three new territories and a
new state, as well as myriad intriguing but unsuccessful proposals.
Introduction
The boundaries of states are an important part of the governance of the United States.
Border locations have influenced transportation infrastructure, the provision of services, economic
wealth, and political power, both positively and negatively. It would seem that the geometric
boundaries that are predominant in the western United States are less “rational” than those that
follow natural divisions in human or physical geography, but things are not that simple. Perhaps
there are situations where straight lines were the best solution. To understand the current political
geography of the American West, we need to understand the process by which the states and
territories were originally created in the 19th Century, because the boundaries have changed very
rarely since they were first drawn. Multiple attempts to “fix” boundaries have failed, and the U.S.
has not seen a significant state boundary change since the division of Dakota in 1889.
This paper focuses on the 36th Congress, from late 1859 to early 1861, which admitted
Kansas as a state and created Nevada, Colorado, and Dakota Territories, thus making more
jurisdictional changes than any other two-year period in Western American history, and
introducing many boundary lines still in use today. In contrast, several significant proposals were
not enacted, including territorial status for Arizona, a North-South division of California, the
elimination of Utah Territory, and statehood for Utah, New Mexico, and Nebraska. This leads us
to ask two questions: why did some proposals become law while others didn’t; and why were the
boundaries drawn where they were?
362 Plewe and Otterstrom
The nature of territory

These are not new questions. Governments have to grapple with similar issues whenever
new boundaries are drawn, so any general theory of the process is desirable. Political scientists
and political geographers have studied the nature of territory and boundaries throughout the 20th
Century.1 The vast majority of past work has focused on international boundaries,2 but some of
the same principles can be applied to how governments divide their land into smaller units, such
as territories, states, provinces, and counties.
The literature has followed several related themes concerning how territory is seen by
both the residents in territories and by those in the central government. Generally, these themes
align with four broad conceptual principles:
• Principle 1. Territory is an identity:3 home is a part of who we are. A collective homeland helps
bind a group of people (especially cultural and ethnic nationalities) together, even if they
do not currently live there.4 The status of that homeland as a territory, state, independent
country, or having no distinct government at all can influence how the group’s inherent
status is perceived by themselves and others.5
• Principle 2. Territory is a resource:6 the subordinate governments require capital to operate,
and part of that capital can be derived from the land and its contents, whether from
natural resources (e.g. minerals, water), economic development (e.g. agriculture, retail,
industry), or tax-paying residents. The value of land based on potential revenue is not
homogeneous, but in general, more is better.7
• Principle 3. Territory is a service area: a government is expected to provide services for the
land and its inhabitants, including infrastructure, education, environmental management,
regulation, and many more.8 If the cost (financial, political, etc.) to service an area is
greater than its potential value, the state-to-be may wish to cede the area, as had recently
happened with Oregon and Minnesota. Meanwhile, inhabitants of regions that are remote
from the capital may feel that they can service themselves more effectively.
• Principle 4. Territory is political capital: the land contains voting citizens, who collectively
can have great political power. When the territory functions as a unit of governmental
representation, and the distribution of citizens with differing views is not even, as in the
slave and free states in 1860, or the “red states” and “blue states” of today, then boundaries
become very important in either empowering or marginalizing people.9
As we explore how the subdivision of the West proceeded between 1859 and 1861, we
are in effect attempting to divine the thought processes of the members of the 36th Congress.
What was each legislator trying to accomplish by his actions? In this situation, and many similar
situations before and since, policy makers are tasked with building a political geography that
accommodates the interests of the local community, the interests of the country at large, and of
course their own personal interests.
Based on the principles of territory listed above, these interests are of two types that we
designate “Political factors” and “Regional factors.” Political factors (based on Principles 1, 2, and 4)
promote the political aspirations of the territorial residents and/or those of members of Congress.
These factors include such goals as: the desire for self-rule by a distinct population group, the clout
that comes from the governmental status of a region (whether state, territory, periphery of a larger
territory, or completely unorganized), trying to gain more representatives from one’s own party
or section of the country, and using boundaries to unify or divide distinct groups to control their
influence in government (as is often an ulterior motive of congressional redistricting).10 Regional
Statecraft on the Eve of the Civil War 363
factors (based on Principles 1 and 3) increase the effectiveness and efficiency of governance by
creating territories that conform to preexisting physical, cultural, or functional regions. The
latter factors include minimizing the cost of traveling to the capital, drawing boundaries along
physical barriers like mountains or rivers, or keeping tight-knit cultural groups together within
a territory, akin to the fundamental principle of the nation-state.11 Therefore, our earlier research
questions can be rephrased as, “to what degree did each of these types of factors influence the
final outcome?”
Previous studies of the subdivision of the Western United States
We are not the first to seek to understand the historical political geography of this region
and this time period. Historians and geographers have discussed the antebellum West at length.
Meinig even goes so far as to develop a general model of settlement in the Western United
States,12 which asserts that regional factors were generally dominant; that is, regions became
territories and states at about the time and in about the shape they needed. Although it provides
a strong foundation, this model cannot fully explain the activities of 1860 and 1861. Further, in
his seminal Making of America series, Meinig discusses congressional philosophies and actions
concerning statecraft throughout the history of the United States, from Jefferson’s predilection
for geometric boundaries in the Northwest Territory through the debate over Kansas statehood
in 1858. However, the actions of the 36th Congress are only briefly mentioned as having occurred
“with little controversy.”13 Other historical geographies of the West have generally followed suit.14
Regional historians, when describing the creation of their own states, have often relied on
arguments related to local pride. These histories often portray the territorial desires of settlers as
rational and justified in the sense of regional factors as defined here, while Congress knows and
cares little about the area and makes decisions primarily on political grounds.15 A notable exception
is Mark Stegmaier’s analysis of the New Mexico statehood proposal considered below, in which
he thoroughly looks at the statements and actions of both Congress and the New Mexicans.16
Historians of the antebellum United States often discuss the debate over the extension of
slavery into the territories,17 but the focus is often on events before 1859, such as the compromises of
1820 and 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Kansas statehood (under the Lecompton
Constitution) debates of 1858, then skipping over the 36th Congress to the presidential election of
1860 and the secession crisis. Those that do mention the new state and territories do not attempt
to explain the underlying rationale.18 Generally, the primary thesis is that political factors were
dominant in the decisions to make new territories, in direct contrast to Meinig.
The setting in 1859
To better understand the actions of the 36th Congress, we need to consider the situation its
members faced in Washington and in the West as they convened in December 1859. A variety of
geographic and political issues framed the decision-making process that followed.
Settlement in the West
It is clear that boundary making would not have been an issue in Congress had not
the expanding settlements of the western territories pressed the point. The Congress arrived
in Washington to find a variety of proposals for territorial changes already before them. The
growth of settlement in four western territories led citizens to request statehood. Newly emergent
settlement cores were requesting their own territories. These requests, and the distribution of
settlements (according to the 1860 Census), are shown in Figure 1 and Table 1. It should be noted
that the 36th Congress did not know very much about this distribution; results of the Census were
not available until late in the second session of the 36th Congress, and even then its accuracy is
sometimes doubted.19 Still, the map gives a useful picture of where people lived in the West.
Figure 1. Status of territories at the beginning of the 36th Congress, distribution of settlement (Europeans
and urbanized Native Americans) according to the 1860 Census, and boundaries requested by the
provisional territories of Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Jefferson, and Dakota.
The de facto standard for admission as a state was a population large enough to qualify for
a seat in the House of Representatives, although Congress occasionally made exceptions in cases
such as Oregon, Florida, and later Nevada. The 1850 Census had set that standard at seventy-six
thousand, while the 1860 Census would soon increase it to ninety-three thousand, which Kansas
and New Mexico met. In anticipation of this, the Kansans had drafted their fourth attempt at a
state constitution at Wyandotte, this time as a free state,20 while the New Mexicans waited for
permission from Congress. Nebraska and Utah also requested admission as states, the latter still
hoping for the name “Deseret,” but both were in fact far too thinly populated. Only the new
Washington Territory made no request of the 36th Congress.
In addition to the established cores, several new population centers had appeared in the
West in recent years. These included towns set up by land companies, such as Denver and several
in southeastern Dakota; mining camps in the Front Range, the Carson Valley, and Tucson; the
farming region of the Mesilla Valley in southern New Mexico; and the trading post of Pembina
in northern Dakota. After years of attempting to participate in the distant governments of their
respective territories, it was clear to them that they were too isolated to be governed effectively.21
In fact, Dakota had no official governance after the rest of Minnesota Territory was admitted in
1858.22
Several of these nascent regions had asked for a new territory in 1858, but the 35th Congress
took no action. Upon failure, each of the four major regions created an unofficial provisional
Region Population Government Request
Arizona (Mesilla) 6,239 Provisional Territory

Arizona (Tucson) 6,482
California (North) 353,161* State none
California (South) 26,833 part of California Territory
Front Range (Colorado) 35,682** Provisional Territory

Dakota (Pembina) 3,630 Provisional Territory
Dakota (South) 1,047
Kansas (w/o Colorado) 107,206* Territory Statehood
Nebraska (w/o Colorado) 27,076 Territory Statehood
Carson Valley (Nevada) 6,857 Provisional Territory

New Mexico 93,516* Territory Statehood
without Arizona: 80,795
Oregon 52,465 State none
Utah (without Nevada) 40,273*** Territory Statehood
Washington: 10,598 Territory none

* Sufficient for statehood (93,400 required for single house representative)
** Questionable: includes nonexistent towns
*** Questionable: 1856 territorial estimates (also questionable) claimed
76,335; Wahlquist (1978) estimated 47,000 using demographic statistics
Table 1. Status of western settlement regions in 1859, with 1860 Census population.
government, as had most other states and territories in the West,23 a tradition dating all the way
back to the unsuccessful state of Franklin that preceded Kentucky.24 The residents of the Carson
Valley chose the name Nevada, those on the Front Range called themselves Jefferson, the Mesilla
and Tucson areas formed Arizona, and Dakota included the area removed from Minnesota. Figure
1 shows that each provisional government claimed an extensive area for its new territory, quite
different from its eventual boundaries.25
Another home-rule movement was occurring in sparsely settled Southern California,
which felt neglected by the more populous North with its distant capital at Sacramento. In
response, the state legislature passed an enabling act for a new territory to be called Colorado
that was supported overwhelmingly by a referendum of the Southern voters.26 However, ceding
land from an existing state to a federal territory also required an act of Congress, so a memorial
was sent to Washington for approval.
It is important to note that the proposed territories of Jefferson, Arizona, and Colorado
all had the vocal support of the legislatures that then governed them (respectively, Kansas, New
Mexico, and California). Each of these governments realized the difficulty of governing a region
that was both different in its character and remote from the capital (one of our regional factors),
and was willing to cede these areas. Only Utah maintained a firm claim on the Carson Valley.
Cultural attitudes
When politicians consider creating governments and drawing their boundaries, settlement
geography cannot be the only factor considered. The actions must fit within a larger political and
cultural context, since forces that have little to do with geography often have a profound impact
on geographic actions. Among the territorial issues in 1859 was public opinion of the Mormons
(and their practice of polygamy) in Utah, and the Mexican-Americans of New Mexico.
Mormon Sentiments: Brigham Young and the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints had sought security in isolation in Utah, but this also bred misunderstanding
and distrust. Easterners speculated wildly on what was going on in Utah, focusing primarily on
polygamy and supposed rebellion against federal officials (despite a peaceful end to the Utah
War in 1857). Many members of Congress saw it as their duty to eliminate polygamy, if not the
Church itself. In fact, Republicans had made the removal of “the twin relics of barbarism: slavery
and polygamy” from the territories as a core part of their 1856 presidential platform.27
Hispanic Sentiments: The Hispanic people of California and New Mexico, U.S. citizens
since joining the United States in 1848, were rarely treated as peers by Anglos. In congressional
speeches, they were still often called “Mexicans,” and were often stereotyped as uneducated,
backward people who could not speak English, did not know how to run a proper government,
and had mixed loyalties for their former and present country.28
The 36th Congress and slavery
The fractious 1858 election had created a Congress that was polarized to a degree seldom
matched,29 especially on the question of the extension of slavery into the territories. Admitting a
state is a consequential decision, the only congressional act that cannot be repealed, and is thus
worthy of careful consideration.30 A state theoretically had the sovereign right to choose whether
to allow or prohibit slavery when it wrote its constitution, but the status of slaves in a territory
was the prerogative of Congress. The eventual slave or free status of the future western states
could easily tip the delicate sectional balance in Congress, so both sides wanted more states on
their side. An unofficial quid pro quo pattern of admitting free-slave pairs of new states had existed
since 1820, but after the acquisitions of 1846-1853, the United States had much more northern
territory than southern in the West, pushing the slavery issue into the fore.
Four clear congressional factions had gradually formed during the 1850s, defined
primarily by their stance toward territorial slavery (Table 2, Figures 2 and 3). The Republican
Party, strongest in the Northeast and northern Midwest and led by Senator William H. Seward
(New York), had been created in 1854, largely from the anti-slavery wing of the Whig Party, to
fight against the extension of slavery into the territories.31 At the other extreme, Democrats from
the slave states, led by senator and future confederate president Jefferson Davis (Mississippi),
demanded that a slaveholding settler’s “rights and property” be protected in the territories.
Neither group was monolithic, containing both hard-liners who would rather the Union break
1860 House 1861 House 1860 Senate 1861 Senate

Republicans 113 115 26 26
Democrats (South) 66 38 27 15
Democrats (North) 34 33 10 10
Americans/ 24 22 2 2
Opposition/
Unionists (South)
Table 2. Voting Blocs at the beginning and end of the 36th Congress.
Figure 2. Political makeup of the 36th House of Representatives.
Figure 3. Political makeup of the 36th Senate.

up than consider compromise, and moderates who could be conciliatory as long as they did not
have to sacrifice their core principles.
Between the Republicans and the Southern Democrats were two moderate camps that
saw the others as too extreme, but differed over the proper form of compromise on the issue of
territorial slavery. The Northern Democrats, strongest in the southern Midwest and the Mid-
Atlantic cities, and led by Senator Stephen A. Douglas (Illinois), favored popular sovereignty, in
which territories could choose their own stance on slavery, as expressed in the Compromise of
1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.32 The final faction was not an organized party. The Southern
Opposition, or Southern Unionists, primarily consisted of border-state remnants of the Whig and
American (Know-Nothing) parties. Led by Senator John J. Crittenden (Kentucky), they considered
themselves the ideological successors of the Kentucky Whig Henry Clay, and felt that Congress
needed to take a firm, but moderate, stand similar to Clay’s Missouri Compromise of 1820.33
The four groups had become so entrenched by 1859 that they tended to vote as blocs on
most votes, even those unrelated to slavery.34 While the votes of the Republicans and Southern
Democrats were generally predictable, the two moderate groups were important swing blocs
that could change the outcome in both chambers. In the 1858 elections, the Republicans gained a
plurality in the House, while the Democrats held a slim majority in the Senate. The secessions of
1861 eventually gave the Republicans a majority in the Senate and complete control of the House.
Actions of the 36th Congress
To really understand the causes of the acts of the 36th Congress, one would have to know
the thoughts of each congressman. In lieu of this, we evaluated three secondary indicators of their
motivations: their discussions and debates as reported in the Congressional Globe, their votes as
recorded in the House and Senate Journals, and the geography of the boundaries sought in bills that
were or were not enacted.35
Initial bills
In response to these requests, a variety of bills were introduced in the House and Senate
and referred to the territorial committees, chaired by Galusha Grow (R-PA) in the House and
James Green (D-MO) in the Senate. In December 1859, Jefferson Davis introduced a Senate bill for
Arizona Territory (S. 24) (calling it Arizuma) that was supported by President Buchanan in his State
of the Union address.36 A Nevada Territory bill (S. 44), a resolution to create Dakota, the Colorado
cession memorial from California, and a Kansas statehood bill (S. 194) were also introduced in
the Senate.37 In the House, bills were introduced in February 1860 for Kansas statehood (H.R.
23), Arizona Territory (H.R. 192), Nevada Territory (H.R. 202), Nebraska statehood (H.R. 209),
and Dakota Territory (H.R. 611).38 In addition, alternative proposals were introduced to annex
southern Dakota to Iowa (H.R. 157) or Nebraska; to annex El Paso, Texas to New Mexico (H.R.
196); and to annex Carson Valley to California (H.R. 419).39
Of all the above bills, only H.R. 23 (Kansas) eventually emerged from committee.40 It is
not clear what happened to the rest, due to the lack of surviving committee documentation,41
but it appears that the annexation and Nebraska statehood proposals were dropped with little
consideration, while the territorial bills were redrafted by the House and Senate committees.
Although the division of California may have been the most intriguing proposal of
all (in terms of “what if” scenarios) and had significant support in California, it also died in
committee. During debates on the other territories, Green twice mentioned that the Senate
Committee refused to consider it because of constitutional questions regarding creating a
federal territory from a sovereign state.42 Although this was a valid issue, the slave question
almost certainly was a consideration. Colorado (whatever its eventual name) would be
Figure 4. House proposals to eliminate Utah Territory by partitioning it between Jefferson (Colorado)
and Nevada, made by John Logan (D-IL), John McClernand (D-IL), and Eli Thayer (R-MA), April 1860.
changing from a free state, to a southern territory. The last thing Congress wanted was an
additional federal territory in which the slavery question would have to be dealt with again.
Mormons and the Utah question
While the territorial committees considered and redesigned these territorial bills during
March and April 1860, the House debated H.R. 7, a proposal from Justin Morrill (R-VT) to
eliminate polygamy in Utah. H.R. 7 would outlaw polygamy and punish the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Utah Legislature for allowing it, but more drastic measures
were also considered. During his campaign against Abraham Lincoln in 1858, Stephen A. Douglas
had suggested solving the “polygamy problem” by eliminating Utah Territory and partitioning
the Mormons between the surrounding territories.43 Representatives John Logan and John
McClernand, fellow Illinois Democrats, offered just such an amendment to H.R. 7, proposing
to partition Utah between new Nevada and Jefferson (Colorado) territories as shown in Figure
4; Eli Thayer (R-MA) unsuccessfully tried to introduce a similar division three times.44 A third
alternative punishment, creating a federally appointed territorial legislature, was also offered as
an amendment.
The partitioning proposals aimed to divide the fifty thousand Mormons in half, so
they would be the minority in each of the new mining-dominated territories. In defending his
proposal, McClernand stated that once they had been stripped of political power, “they would
probably pass out of our jurisdiction into Mexico or the British territories [Canada].”45 During the
debate, most speakers approved of disenfranchising the Mormons, but differed on whether the
plan would work. Supporters assumed that the miner populations at the east and west ends of
Utah were larger and growing faster than the Mormons, while the few opponents who mentioned
it said that the Mormon population was large enough to easily dominate both new territories
(which the 1860 Census would soon confirm), and that it was better to keep them all in one
territory. According to our model, this debate tried to reconcile the regional factor of settlement
geography with the political factor of using boundaries to reduce the influence of a population
group. On April 5, the Logan/McClernand amendment was defeated by a large margin, while
H.R. 7 passed.46
The vote on the Logan/McClernand amendment to H.R. 7 had a very unique pattern,
as shown in Table 3 and Figure 5. Support came from the Northern Democrats, with both the
Southerners and Republicans uniting against it. The strongest support came from Missouri and
Illinois, states with a history of animosity toward the Mormons; in fact, a few in this region voted
for all three alternatives. According to the debates, the votes against the amendment were heavily
influenced by slavery. Republicans favored the original bill outlawing polygamy, possibly setting
a precedent for future anti-slavery legislation. Southerners feared this precedent, favoring the
alternative for an appointed legislature, especially with a southern-friendly White House.
Committee bills
Once the Utah partitioning schemes were put to rest, Congress was ready to deal with
the territories in a more conventional manner. H.R. 23 (Kansas) was the first of the territorial bills
to be reported from committee on March 29, 1860. It had the same boundaries as the Wyandotte
constitution, which meant ceding its western third, the future Colorado, back to the federal
government. The bill was hotly debated for two days. Most of the debate centered on regional
factors, with very little attention to political factors such as the state’s slavery status. Republican
supporters focused on the simple qualifications: the residents had created and voted for their
own constitution, and they met the population requirement, citing indirect measures such as
Figure 5. House Vote on Logan/McClernand amendment to H.R. 7 (to divide and eliminate Utah Territory).
voter turnout, since the 1860 Census had not yet been taken. Democratic opponents also made
regional and legal arguments, as summarized by Daniel Gooch of Massachusetts:
• The first is, that the people of Kansas, in framing and adopting the Wyandotte
constitution, acted in violation of law; [i.e., the English Bill of 1858, which required an
official population count prior to Kansas admission]
• the second, that the population of Kansas is insufficient;
• the third, that the boundaries in the Wyandotte constitution violate certain treaties
which this government has made with Indian tribes;
• and the fourth is . . . that this constitution permits foreigners . . . to vote. [an issue only
for the few nativist American Party representatives]47
Despite the fact that the spoken words of the debate focused on regional factors, every
argument against statehood was made by a southerner, and every supporting argument by a
northerner, with some mixing of views by those from the border states. This is clear evidence
of the overriding influence of slavery politics. One piece of evidence of the insincerity of the
regional-factor rhetoric was that both sides had made the exact opposite arguments when
debating the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution for Kansas in 1858. Also, some congressmen
suggested that the real reason for the concern over the Indian treaties was that they contained
indirect protections of slavery rights.48 The final hint of the congressmen’s real motivations was
on April 11, when the bill passed the house on a nearly perfect sectional vote, as shown in Table
4. The lack of explicit slavery discussion in the public debates was probably for two reasons: first,
there was little point in restating one’s views on slavery since the sectional lines had been drawn
on Kansas in 1858. Second, southerners believed in state sovereignty, so they could not reject
Kansas solely on its anti-slavery constitution. Several stated that they had obligingly voted for
free-constitution Oregon and Minnesota in the previous congress, although they may have voted
for Oregon simply because of the dominance of the Democratic Party there.49
Voters NO percent YES percent

Republican 102 101 99% 1 1%
So Dem 50 38 76% 12 24%
No Dem 24 2 8% 22 92%
Opposition 20 19 95% 1 5%
Table 3. House vote on H.R. 7 Logan/McClernand amend (partition Utah), Apr. 5, 1860.

Republican 105 0 0% 105 100%
So Dem 51 50 98% 1 2%
No Dem 29 3 10% 26 90%
Opposition 22 20 91% 2 9%
Table 4. House vote on H.R. 23 (Kansas Statehood), Apr. 11, 1860.

Figure 6. Territorial plan of James Green (D-MO) and the Senate Committee on Territories
during the first session of the 36th Congress, as laid out in bills S. 365, S. 366, and a speech
on June 5, 1860.
Figure 7. Initial proposal from the House Committee on Territories, May 1860 (H.R. 707-712).
On April 3, 1860, Green introduced new Senate bills for Arizona (S. 365) and Colorado
(S. 366). As shown in Figure 6, the Arizona bill gave the citizens the boundaries they desired,50
while the Colorado bill went further north than the current state (as requested by the provisional
government), but cut off less of Utah and none of New Mexico. However, the Senate was busy
with other matters, and the bills would have to wait several months for debate.
Grow and the House Committee on Territories had grander designs, drafting bills to create
five new territories, adding “Chippewa” (North Dakota) to the four requests (H.R. 707-712), as
shown in Figure 7. Comparing the boundaries of these bills with an earlier set of drafts found in
the committee minutes51 show that Grow and the other committee members had put some time
and effort into drawing the boundaries, which would have been drastically different from the
1861 acts; Nevada was actually more similar to its current shape than the final 1861 boundary,
except for a northern panhandle that was never explained. Arizona was divided from New Mexico
differently than other contemporary proposals, but close to what it would eventually look like in
1863. It is also the first mention of a massive Dakota, acquiring the unsettled (by whites) northern
plains from Nebraska.
On May 10, Grow reported H.R. 707 to create “Idaho” (Colorado), which was postponed.52
On the next day, he re-reported the Idaho bill as H.R. 708, along with the others. In his report, Grow
stated that the new settlement areas were too far from existing capitals to be governed effectively
(especially the protection from Native Americans, and the rule of law), and needed immediate
attention. However, all of the bills were tabled with little debate.53 Only the Chippewa bill (H.R.
710) garnered much discussion, as congressmen on both sides were skeptical that anyone lived
there. Although the Minnesotans and some others were aware of the settlement at Pembina, few
realized that it was larger than all the southern Dakota towns combined. In addition, Eli Thayer
spoke at length on his stand against all federal territories, preferring provisional self-government
prior to statehood.
The votes to table H.R. 707-712 paint an interesting picture, passing with a unanimous
bloc of Southern and Northern Democrats and the Southern Opposition (Table 5), and also several
Republicans, for different reasons. First, the bills banned slavery, anathema both to the slave
states and the non-interventionist Northern Democrats. The Republican defectors were primarily
Thayer and his supporters.
Although all of the Senate and House bills failed, they are important to understanding the
mindset of the members of Congress. The various drafted boundaries, the public debates, and
the voting patterns are all evidence of the consideration of different political and regional factors.
The first session ended in June 1860, with no action concerning the territories, but it was
very clear during the autumn election season that this issue was contributing to the crisis the
country was facing. In one of the most fractious presidential campaigns in the country’s history,
each of the factions nominated their own candidate: Lincoln for the Republicans, Douglas for the
Northern Democrats, the sitting vice president John Breckinridge for the Southern Democrats,
and former Tennessee senator John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party (an ephemeral
Voters All NO Percent Mixed percent All YES Percent

Republican 95 83 87% 3 4% 9 9%
So Dem 55 0 0% 0 0% 55 100%
No Dem 28 0 0% 0 0% 28 100%
Opposition 20 0 0% 0 0% 20 100%
Table 5. House votes to table H.R. 707, 708, 709 (territories), May 11-12, 1860
organization of the whiggish Opposition in the Upper South, which found hope in a unionist
platform). Each stated a strong position on the territorial question: Republicans for banning
territorial slavery, Southern Democrats for protecting it, Northern Democrats for popular
sovereignty, and the Unionists, who considered themselves the successors to Henry Clay, for a re-
establishment of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and its slave/free territorial division at 36°30’ N.
Second session
When Congress returned for the second session in December after the election, it was clear
that Lincoln’s victory had accelerated the crisis. South Carolina did not officially secede until
December 20, but its representatives never returned to Congress. Other Deep South congressmen
returned, but even moderate Southern Democrats like Jefferson Davis, who wanted the Union to
stay together, stated that it was probably too late for compromise, and would gladly depart with
their states if the demands of the South were not met.54 In contrast, the newly minted Unionists
returned more unified and optimistic about the possibility of union-saving compromise, the
Bell ticket having won three states, but were also the most fearful among the four factions of
the disastrous consequences of not compromising.55 Green and Grow intended to continue their
agenda, but had little success.
Grow’s House Committee on Territories created a new set of territorial bills (H.R. 887-890)
for the second session. The proposed boundaries were changed somewhat from the earlier bills,
as shown in Figure 8, especially the merger of Chippewa and Dakota, a shift in the New Mexico/
Arizona Border and a significant enlargement of the Nebraska panhandle. The bills were printed,
but were never introduced to the floor. Also, the 1856 Deseret (Utah) state constitution was re-
introduced in the House December 31, and referred to committee, where it promptly died.56
Meanwhile, the Senate opened the second session by returning to the consideration of
Kansas statehood (H.R. 23), which it had debated for only a few days at the end of the previous
session. It was the subject of constant and heated debate for the next two months, following the
Figure 8. Second proposal from the House Committee on Territories, printed in December 1860
(H.R. 887-890), but never officially introduced.
same script as in the House: legal and regional-factor arguments (e.g. population) divided along
sectional lines. However, once the 1860 Census returns showed Kansas to have one hundred
seven thousand residents, which was more than enough for a seat in the House, most of the
South’s arguments evaporated.57
One additional proposal was an amendment offered by Green to change the Kansas
boundaries, as shown in Figure 6. Although he justified the new western boundary proposed
by the Kansas citizens as an even division of an uninhabitable desert, he wanted to move the
southern boundary north of Indian lands and the northern boundary to the Platte River. Green
justified the southern shift as a compromise to avoid the treaty infringement arguments, while
also compensating for the lost farmland and population with the northern shift that was also a
more visible boundary than where it then was (and now is).58 This would have taken more than
half of the Nebraska population, which Green proposed to compensate by annexing southern
Dakota to Nebraska.59 During the debates, opponents of the amendment generally agreed with
the rationale, but did not feel it was serious enough to warrant opening a new boundary debate.
In January 1861, Green offered a second amendment—a rider to create Jefferson Territory.
This was intended to avoid the situation in Dakota that resulted from the admission of Minnesota,
in case a reduced Kansas was enacted, but not a separate Colorado Territory bill. Both amendments
were defeated,60 but the bill easily passed the Senate on January 21, and was signed on January
29, 1861.61
The Senate vote (Table 6) showed the same sectional vote as the House: 34-0 from the
North, 2-16 from the South. The only two defections were Crittenden of Kentucky and future
president Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, leaders of the Unionist faction who likely wanted to
demonstrate that common sense should trump sectional politics.
Special committees
As South Carolina was seceding in December 1860, both the Senate and House created
special committees to devise a solution to the slavery question in order to save the Union. The
Senate committee considered many options, including the “Crittenden Compromise,” a package
introduced by the Kentucky Unionist that included extending the 1820 Missouri Compromise
line (36°30’ N) through New Mexico Territory (but without any mention of altering territorial
boundaries), and a proposal by Henry M. Rice of Minnesota to create a state of “Washington” from
all the remaining territory north of 36° 30’ N, and “Jefferson” from the area to the south (Figure
9). His justification was that since states have the right to choose their slavery status, it would no
longer be the concern of Congress. He acknowledged that the states would be unmanageably
large, but he believed that they would divide themselves into several states as practical (although
this had never happened before or since). It was offered and voted down on December 28, along
with every other proposal of the committee.62 Rice later proposed another solution to the entire
Senate, dividing the northern territories between the existing states (plus new states Kansas and
New Mexico), as shown in Figure 9, but he tabled it himself until other options were exhausted.63
The House special committee was more successful, creating five resolutions that it reported
to the House, including Crittenden’s extended Missouri Compromise line, and an enabling act

Republican 26 0 0% 26 100%
So Dem 16 15 94% 1 6%
No Dem 8 0 0% 8 100%
Unionist 2 1 50% 1 50%
Table 6. Senate vote on H.R. 23 (Kansas Statehood), Jan. 21, 1861.
Figure 9. Compromise proposals of Senator H. M. Rice (D-MN), introduced

during the second session.
for New Mexico statehood, allowing the residents to choose their slavery status.64 During the
committee debate, this was explicitly intended as a quid pro quo for a free Kansas, but once Kansas
was recognized as a fait accompli, the direct connection was dropped.
The proposals were debated almost every afternoon and evening for the remainder of
the session; an astounding eighty-seven congressmen (half the house) gave hour-long speeches,
notably excepting New Mexico’s own delegate, Miguel Otero. Although New Mexico statehood
did not garner nearly as much discussion as the other committee proposals, it was frequently
mentioned. Both sides often discussed regional factors, usually concerning the population
(supporters usually giving an estimate of one hundred five thousand that turned out to be
accurate, detractors usually estimating seventy-five thousand), and the potential economic
viability of the desert landscape. Many on both sides stereotyped the residents (often referred to
as “Mexicans,” even though they were U.S. citizens) as potentially disloyal or too uneducated to
govern themselves.65
However, most comments (for and against) were related to the possibility of adding a
slave (or possibly free) state. A group of conciliatory Republicans, including Seward and Charles
Francis Adams of Massachusetts, had created the proposal to woo Southerners, saying that it
would probably choose slavery due to its existing slave code. However, they also told other
Republicans that it might reject slavery because there were very few slaves, and if not, it could
easily be overtaken by Northern immigrants as Kansas had been. Extremists on both sides rejected
this two-faced argument; unwilling to accept even the possibility of the other side gaining the
state, they demanded guarantees. In fact, the backlash from Republican hardliners caused Adams,
the sponsor of the proposal, to eventually turn against it.66 Douglas Democrats and border-state
Unionists voiced limited support for the idea, although most preferred the proposal to extend the
1820 Missouri Compromise line.
In February, after seven states had seceded, many Republican opponents added the
arguments that the Crittenden Compromise was too late to save the Union, and that a sovereign
Figure 10. House vote to table H.R. 1008 (New Mexico statehood), March 2, 1861.

Republican 105 27 26% 78 74%
So Dem 31 13 42% 18 58%
No Dem 29 20 69% 9 31%
Unionist 22 11 50% 11 50%
Table 7. House vote to table H.R. 1008 (New Mexico statehood), May 2, 1861.
New Mexico might secede, joining the Confederacy or even rejoining Mexico. Even the border-
state moderates who had created the compromise proposals began to despair at their chances of
success. James Wilson of Indiana summed up the situation very succinctly:
I have now considered all the plans of adjustment before Congress. No one of
them can bring permanent and lasting peace to the country. I admit the Union is in
peril. But . . . I do not believe that there is any possibility that this Congress can do
anything to effect a settlement–we differ too widely and radically.67
When the New Mexico bill (H.R. 1008) was brought up for a vote on the penultimate
day of the Congress on May 2, 1861, it was quickly tabled, even as Otero begged for the floor,
and William Hooper, the Utah delegate, attempted to add an amendment granting statehood to
Deseret.68 New Mexico would have to wait another fifty years for statehood. As shown in Table
7 and Figure 10, the vote to table H.R. 1008 clearly did not follow the common voting blocs, with
all four factions dividing. For once, it appears that each congressman weighed the political and
regional factors involved, in the context of other compromise proposals, and voted his conscience
rather than toeing the party line. Remnants of moderate, multi-partisan support for New Mexico on
both sides of the slave-free border were overwhelmed by the extremists at both ends: Republicans
who refused to make any concession to slavery when they were so close to dominating the entire
government, and Southerners who recognized New Mexico as an immaterial gain.
Final acts
During the time the Senate was debating Kansas, the Arizona bill introduced the previous
spring (S. 365) also resurfaced in December 1860. After two days of debate on whether slavery
would be allowed, it was “postponed until tomorrow,” and never came up again.69
On January 30, 1861, S. 366 returned to the floor of the Senate under the name of
“Jefferson.”70 Green immediately offered a replacement bill, with no mention of slavery status
whatsoever, the name “Idaho” and a new boundary that trimmed the northern border but took
much more of Utah (Figure 11), which was accepted. There was very little debate on the bill, since
by this time enough Southern Senators had left due to their states seceding, that passage was
guaranteed. Also, most lawmakers who did speak recognized the regional factors—especially
that it was a significant cluster of population far removed from capitals in Salt Lake City and
Topeka—and they saw little point in a drawn-out debate.
On February 4, S. 366 was again amended, changing the boundary to its current location
and the name to “Colorado.” Green explained that the western boundary change was necessitated
by new information on the extent of Mormon settlements; in his words, “they had better all remain
together.” He also said that the southern boundary was being changed against his wishes and
those of Otero, the delegate from New Mexico, as a compromise to garner Republican support
for a territory without a ban on slavery. 71 Although there were some objections to moving New
Figure 11. States and territories of the Western United states after passage of four
acts in early 1861, including the final adjustments of Colorado Territory.
Mexicans who did not want to change governance, and transferring land out of a slave territory,
the bill passed the Senate by a party line vote, taking advantage of the new Republican majority.
When S. 366 was reported in the House on February 18, Otero attempted to amend the New
Mexico border to its original location, with vocal support from southern Democrats, but Grow
quashed debate, incorrectly claiming that nobody lived in the transferred portion of New Mexico.
The bill was passed by another party-line vote (Table 8), and the President signed it on February
28, 1861.72
Once the Colorado model was set, matching bills for the other territories, minus an
Arizona bill that would have incurred a slavery debate, were rushed through Congress, as shown
in Figure 11. Bills were introduced in the Senate on February 14, for a Dakota (S. 562) that took
the northern plains and mountains from Nebraska (which retained southern Wyoming, and
even annexed a portion of northeastern Utah in a rider on S. 562), and a Nevada (S. 563) that
was smaller than earlier House proposals but adding the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada,
subsequent to approval by California (which never happened before Nevada relinquished the
claim upon statehood in 1864). The bills passed the Senate with no debate, no amendments, and
voice votes on February 25 and 26, rushed through the House on March 1 (with a party-line vote,
as shown in Table 9), and signed by the President March 2, 1861.73
It was a great irony that after months of refusal to compromise, and after the threat to
secede without compromise had already been realized, the Republicans single-handedly created
three territories without banning slavery. Moreover, they passed a constitutional amendment
protecting slavery in the states, and decided not to repeal New Mexico’s slave code. It is also a
mystery why the Northern Democrats and southern Unionists, after begging for compromise
on the territorial issue, almost unanimously voted against these bills. The lack of debate does
not help, nor the fact that even the moderate Republicans did not promote the legislation as a
compromise.74 One possible reason is that other compromise legislation was then pending, as
described above, including the extension of the Missouri Compromise line. Perhaps these acts
were silent on slavery because the Republicans thought the rest of the compromise would take care
of that, even though the possibility of passage was slim by late February. Southerners (including
Unionists) likely voted against the bills because they created three more potential states that,
even without an explicit slavery ban, were almost guaranteed to become free states. Yet another

Republican 88 2 2% 86 98%
So Dem 20 20 100% 0 0%
No Dem 16 12 75% 4 25%
Unionist 11 11 100% 0 0%
Table 8. House vote on S. 366 (Colorado Territory), Feb. 18, 1861.

Republican 81 0 0% 81 100%
So Dem 22 22 100% 0 0%
No Dem 21 13 62% 8 38%
Unionist 18 17 94% 1 6%
Table 9. House vote on S. 563 (Nevada Territory), Feb. 26, 1861.
possibility is that the Republican majority gave the Southern Moderates some political cover, so
they could publicly take a pro-slavery stand while knowing that the bills would pass.
Conclusions
By the end of the 36th Congress in March 1861, the map of the West had changed
significantly (compare Figure 11 to Figure 3), but not as much as it could have. Kansas was made a
state with smaller boundaries than it previously had, and three new territories were created. Utah
and Nebraska were reduced considerably, but neither had achieved the statehood they sought.
California and New Mexico were left unchanged, despite their support for ceding territory. By
analyzing the citizen requests, the debates, the votes, and the boundaries of failed and enacted
bills, several observations can be made about the underlying processes.
A variety of regional factors played a role in the territorial changes. Bills were introduced
(three times in some cases) subsequent to legitimate petitions from the new and established
settlement regions asserting their rights of self-rule and the challenges of governance from distant
capitals,75 and in most cases, the outcome was in line with their regional-factor justification.
Kansas had the requisite population to be admitted as a state, while Nebraska and Utah did not.
Nevada and Colorado were clearly justified by their population and remoteness. The population
of Dakota was very small but it was without any organized government at all. Utah was able to
retain its status as a territory, despite attempts to destroy it. Of course, citizen requests were not
entirely based on regional factors. Political desires for identity, clout, and economic potential76
were also evident in the requests and their claimed boundaries. The debates in Congress over
these proposals tended to focus on regional factors (such as settlement patterns and physical
features) more than political factors, showing that congressmen were aware of the geographic
situation in the West, even if they did not have complete information.
However, the evidence also shows that the final voting was most strongly influenced
by slavery and the political goals it engendered. Most Republicans said that Kansas, Colorado,
Nevada, and Dakota were obvious and immediate needs (using regional-factors rhetoric), but
the equally justified proposals for changes to New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California
were ignored or rejected. They wanted to create as many northern territories as possible and to
promote existing northern territories to states to build their power base, but keep southern New
Mexico as a single territory to reduce southern power.77 The Southern Democrats had the exact
opposite view: Arizona and New Mexico were the most immediate needs. Even the proposals
of the two moderate groups had more to do with solving the slavery problem than what was
actually happening in the West. For example, extending the 36°30’ N Missouri Compromise line
had a strong political rationale, but contradicted regional factors because it would have divided
the most densely populated part of New Mexico in half.
Almost every significant vote divided along either slavery or party lines, and the internal
solidarity of the four voting blocs (Republicans, Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats,
Southern Unionists) proved very strong. Although the Unionists generally sided with the Southern
Democrats on these issues, the Northern Democrats were usually the group that decided the
outcome, at least in the first session. In the second session, the successful bills were only enacted
once the southern secessions had given the Republicans power to legislate at will.
In summary, most members seem to have followed a clear order of priorities from our
model in their voting:
1. Take the action that will increase the long-term strength of your political interests (political
factor)
2. Take the action that is desired by the residents, unless they are Mormons or Hispanic
(regional factor).
In contrast to the voting on the creation of the political units themselves, regional factors appear
to have been much stronger in the design of the boundaries. This is especially the case when one
considers Congress’ knowledge of western geography, as evidenced by contemporary maps.78
The information on these maps about physical features and human settlement was very scarce,
imprecise, and incorrect, especially at greater distances from the established settlement cores.
The boundaries designed by Congress generally attempted to evenly divide the major settlement
regions. Although the straight boundary lines may seem irrational today, in most cases, “better”
boundary locations (e.g., mountains, rivers) were unknown, and the frontier regions between the
cores were not considered important or contested enough to warrant more careful boundaries.
The major exceptions to this pattern were in cases in which western governments with
greater political clout such as Kansas and Nebraska desired to gain high value land or to get rid
of distant, unmanageable land by giving it to regions with less influence. For example, Nebraska
ceded most of its distant territory to Dakota, except for the potentially lucrative railroad corridor,
of which it even annexed some territory from Utah. Only the New Mexico-Colorado border
appears to be an overt political boundary (a compromise for votes, as stated above).
Generally, boundary decisions tended to follow the following order of priorities from our
model:
1. Give the territories you like what they want (political and regional)
2. Keep existing boundaries whenever possible (regional)
3. Minimize travel distance to the state/territory capital (regional)
4. Straight boundaries that are simple to describe are best, especially in unimportant lands
(regional)
5. Use barrier features such as rivers and mountains if they are well known and consistent
with other factors (regional)
In general, regional boundaries appeared when political issues did not come into play, which in
this case was most of the time. This pattern was quite different from the Compromise of 1850, in
which political factors played a much larger role in the drawing of the boundaries, especially the
line between Utah and New Mexico.
In all of these cases of territorial change, our four basic principles apply in varying degrees.
For example, the “identity” associated with the Mormons in Utah and the Hispanic population
of New Mexico was certainly an important issue. Additionally, “resource” and “service area”
arguments were important in the discussions related to Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. And
finally, the perceived “political capital” associated with the creation of political units that might
lean one way or the other in terms of the slavery questions loomed large during our study period.
In conclusion, the bills, debates, and votes of the 36th Congress exhibit a fairly clear pattern
of legislators considering both regional and political factors. These factors could also explain the
process of governmental subdivision in many different historical and current situations, and at
different scales, although perhaps in different orders of priority. As our model is further refined,
it would be valuable to test its application to other eras in U.S. History, and in other countries,
especially comparing various forms of federal and unitary governments. We would also like
to test how well the model applies to other scales, such as cities, counties, and congressional
redistricting, which appear to be created based on similar factors.79
Regardless of its general applicability, our analysis significantly aids in the understanding
of the territorial actions of 1859-1861. As it created territories and states, and declined other
proposals, the 36th Congress was not just about slavery, nor was it purely concerned with the
geography and wishes of the western territories; its decisions exhibited a complex interaction of
geographical and political considerations. It was an interplay of general principles and unique
events that has had a lasting effect on the geography of the western United States.
NOTES
1 Richard Hartshorne, “Suggestions on the Terminology of Political Boundaries,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 26 (1936): 56-57; Douglas W. Johnson, “The Role of
Political Boundaries,” Geographical Review 4 (1917): 2-10. Notable early examples include
these references.
2 Stephen B. Jones, Boundary-making, A Handbook for Statesmen, Treaty Editors, and Boundary
Commissioners (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945);
Eric J. Hobshawn, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge
University Press, 1990); J.R.V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries (Boston: Allen &
Unwin, 1987).
3 David M. Smith, “The Sharing and Dividing of Geographical Space,” in Shared Space-Divided
Space: Essays on Conflict and Territorial Organization, eds. Michael Chisholm, David M. Smith
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1980), 2-3; Robert D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and
History (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21.
4 Ronan Paddison, The Fragmented State: The Political Geography of Power (Oxford, UK:
Blackwell, 1983), 16.
5 Paddison, The Fragmented State, 12; John A. Agnew, “Regions on the Mind Does Not Equal
Regions of the Mind,” Progress in Human Geography 23 (1999): 91-96.
6 Smith, “Geographical Space,” 1. Paddison, The Fragmented State, 123; Jean Gottmann, The
Significance of Territory (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1973), 54.
7 Prescott, Political Frontiers, 102.
8 Sack, Human Territoriality, 151, 157; Paddison, The Fragmented State, 14, 147; Gottman,
Significance of Territory, 101.
9 Paddison, The Fragmented State, 19, 253; Rosemarie Zagarri, The Politics of Size: Representation
in the United States, 1776-1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 61-81.
10 Smith, “Geographical Space,” 1, 11- 12; Paddison, The Fragmented State, 19, 123, 253;
Gottman, Significance of Territory, 54; Zagarri, The Politics of Size, 37, 61-81, 122.
11 Sack, Human Territoriality, 157; Paddison, The Fragmented State, 14, 147; Gottmann,
Significance of Territory, 101.
12 Donald W. Meinig, “American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Introduction,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 62 (1972): 159-184; Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping
of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 3: Transcontinental
America, 1850-1915 (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1998). The model is further developed
and contextualized in previous reference. Paddison, The Fragmented State, is a broader
comparative work of subnational government.
13 Meinig, The Shaping of America, 432-479.
14 For examples, refer to Fred M. Shelley, J. C. Archer, F. M. Davidson, S. D. Brunn, Political
Geography of the United States, (New York: Guilford Press, 1996); Glen M. Leonard,
“Southwestern Boundaries and the Principles of Statemaking,” Western Historical Quarterly 8
(1977): 39-53..
15 For examples, see B. Sacks, Be It Enacted: The Creation of the Territory of Arizona (Phoenix:
Arizona Historical Foundation, 1964); Howard R. Lamar, Dakota Territory: 1861-1889 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).
16 Mark J. Stegmaier, “An Imaginary Negro in an Impossible Place? The Issue of New Mexico
Statehood in the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861,” New Mexico Historical Review 84, no. 2: 263-290.
17 Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the
Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); David M.
Potter (completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher) The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861
(Harper & Row, 1976); Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American
Politics Before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1985).
18 William J. Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us (New York: Knopf, 2012), 207-208; Daniel
W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 255.
19 Wayne L. Wahlquist, “Population Growth in the Mormon Core Area: 1847-90,” in The
Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 1978), 107-134.
20 United States House of Representatives, Miscellaneous Documents, 36th Congress (hereafter H.
MiscDoc.), 1st Session #6.
21 Sacks, Territory of Arizona, 39; Kent D. Richards, Growth and Development of Government in
the Far West: The Oregon Provisional Government, Jefferson Territory, Provisional and Territorial
Nevada (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1976)
22 Brad Tennant, “Becoming Dakota Territory: The 1861 Organic Act and the Struggle for
Territorial Status,” South Dakota History 43, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 118-146.
23 Richards, Growth and Development, 163, 232; Sacks, Territory of Arizona, 40; Lamar, Dakota
Territory, 41. A few, such as California, Oregon, and Utah (as the “State of Deseret”), had
been fully functioning; however, Nevada, Arizona, Dakota, and “Jefferson” (Colorado), were
more symbolic than substantial, with assemblies that existed only long enough to draft a
constitution, elect a spokesman “governor” and send a lobbyist “delegate” to Washington
with a memorial requesting recognition.
24 Kevin T. Barksdale, The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2008).
25 Myron Angel, History of Nevada (Thompson & West, 1881), 71; H. MiscDoc. 1st Session, 10;
Sacks, Territory of Arizona, 40 and Stegmaier, “New Mexico Statehood,” 265. First reference
for Nevada. Second reference for Jefferson. Third reference for Arizona.
26 S. MiscDoc. 1st Session, 2; CG, 1st Session, 494.
27 Kirk H. Porter, National Party Platforms (1924), 48.
28 Stegmaier, “New Mexico Statehood,” 274.
29 Daniel J. Elazar, Building Toward Civil War: Generational Rhythms in American Politics
(Madison Books, 1992),18.
30 Matthew Glassman, “Beyond the Balance Rule,” in Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s, eds.
Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon, (Athens, OH: United States Capitol Historical
Society), 84.
31 Porter, National Party Platforms, 48.
32 Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 195.
33 Potter, The Impending Crisis, 416; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 123-124. “Southern
Opposition” was never an official name, nor was it an organized party. The congressional
record lists these congressmen as the American Party, which was the official name of the
1850s nativist party that was commonly known as the Know-Nothing movement. However,
by 1859, the American Party was basically defunct, and most of these congressmen had only
loosely ever been tied to it. They generally still referred to themselves as Whigs, or as “the
opposition” to the Democratic Party that dominated most of the South. During the 1860
Election and the subsequent Secession Crisis, the opposition in the Upper South became
more unified in their defense against the secession of slave states, thus becoming known as
Unionists. In fact, many border states organized a Union Party during the winter of 1861. In
the Deep South, former whigs such as Alexander Stephens reluctantly agreed to secession,
and thus were often called “cooperationists.”
34 Thomas B. Alexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Voting Patterns
in the United States House of Representatives, 1836-1860 (Vanderbilt University Press, 1967),
104.
35 United States Congress, Congressional Globe, 36th Congress (Washington, D.C., John C. Rives,
1861), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ankaw/lwcg.html (hereafter CG); U.S. House of
Representatives, House Journal, 36th Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/
lwhj.html (hereafter HJ); U.S. Senate, Senate Journal, 36th Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/
ammem/amlaw/lwsj.html (hereafter SJ); U.S. Congress, Bills and Resolutions of the House and
Senate, 36th Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwhbsb.html (cited as H.R. or
S.).
36 HJ 1st Session, 210; SJ, 1st Session, 27.
37 SJ 1st Session, 66, 97; CG 1st Session, 494, 648. The Dakota resolution was tabled before it was
referred to committee. The California memorial was referred to the Judiciary Committee,
probably due to constitutional questions of the re-federalization of state land.
38 HJ, 1st Session, 232, 294, 326, 691; SJ, 1st Session, 177; CG, 1st Session, 756, 909. The Senate
Kansas Bill (S. 194) was fiercely debated upon introduction, but never referred to committee.
39 CG, 1st Session, 648, 816; HJ, 1st Session, 320, 571.
40 In fact, since most bills were not printed prior to committee consideration, the text of these
bills (including their boundaries) is unknown.
41 United States House of Representatives, Minutes, House Committee on Territories, 35th
Congress, 1st Session (Feb 23, 1860) - 43rd Congress, 1st Session (Dec 17, 1873) (Hereafter HCT
Minutes), U.S. National Archives, 8E3/15/20/2. Presumably, minutes, debate, and testimony
were recorded, but only one incomplete minute book from the Committee on Territories
could be found via reference.
42 CG, 1st Session, 2616.
43 Stephen A. Douglas, Remarks of the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred
Scott Decision, Delivered at Springfield, Illinois, June 12th 1857 (Chicago: Daily Times).
44 CG, 1st Session, 1411, 1495, 2057; HJ, 1st Session, 1165. Thayer’s proposals were unique in
that they did not propose territories, merely land districts to sell federal lands to settlers.
Thayer had been instrumental in settling Kansas with free-state emigrants, and preferred
that settlers govern themselves through ad hoc provisional governments rather than federal
territories. However, he had very little support for this theory in Congress, and almost every
one of his proposals was refused from being officially introduced on the floor (let alone
brought to a vote). It seems likely that Thayer’s unorthodox views on this and other issues
were among the reasons he lost his seat in the 1860 election.
46 HJ, 1st Session, 661. H.R. 7 later died in the Senate committee, but a virtually identical bill
from Morrill was enacted by the 37th Congress.
49 Glassman, “Beyond the Balance Rule,” 96.
50 The East-West dividing line would have passed through the middle of the future Phoenix.
51 HCT Minutes, 30 April 1860.
53 CG, 1st Session, 2066-2077.
54 Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us, 105.
55 Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 195.
56 HJ, 2nd Session, 122; H. MiscDoc. 2nd Session, #10.

57 CG, 2nd Session, 189.
60 SJ, 2nd Session, 116, 121.
61 United States Congress, Statutes at Large of the 36th Congress of the United States of America
(1861), 288; 17, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsl.html (hereafter U.S. Stat.).
62 United States Senate, Committee Reports, 36th Congress (1861) (hereafter S. Rep.), 2nd Session,
#288, 17.
64 United States House of Representatives, Committee Reports, 36th Congress (1861) (hereafter H.
Rep.), 2nd Session, #31; CG, 2nd Session, 378.
65 Stegmaier, “New Mexico Statehood,” 274.
66 Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us, 156.
67 CG, 2nd Session, Appendix, 133.
69 SJ, 2nd Session, 68.
71 CG, 2nd Session, 728, 765; Lamar, Dakota Territory, 61.
72 CG, 2nd Session, p. 1003; U.S. Stat., 59; 172.
73 U.S. Stat., 83; 209; and 86; 239.
74 Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us, 105; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 255. Previous studies
have also noted the inexplicable nature of this result, including references.
75 Sack, Human Territoriality, 86-90, 151, 157; Smith, “Geographical Space,” 12; Zagarri, Politics
of Size, 26, 37.
76 Paddison, Fragmented State, 12; Agnew, “Regions of the Mind”; Gottmann, Significance of
Territory, 105.
77 Paddison, Fragmented State, 19, 253; Zagarri, Politics of Size, 61-81.
78 Gouverneur K. Warren, Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to
the Pacific Ocean (Washington, D.C.: Army Topographical Engineers, 1858). Although it is
not known what maps were used in the drafting of bills, a likely candidate is this reference.
It was produced for Congress, matches the geography as described in the debates, and the
Library of Congress has a copy with the enacted 1861 boundaries hand-drawn (G4050 1858.
W34, digital copy at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4050.ct001205).
79 Fr coKarinne Rancie, Samuel M. Otterstrom, Jeffrey M. Sanders, and Fredric J. Donaldson,
“Environmental and Social Influences on Historical County Creation in the United States,”
in Planning and Socioeconomic Applications, Geotechnologies and the Environment 1, eds. J. D.
Gatrell and R. R. Jensen, (Berlin: Springer), 183-204. For counties, see reference.
BOOK REVIEWS
Edited by Soren Larsen
University of Missouri
Co-Editor John T. Bauer

Department of Sociology, Geography and Earth Science
University of Nebraska-Kearney
GO: On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson. CHRISTIAN ABRAHAMSSON & MARTIN GREN,
editors. Surrey / Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xiii+398, reprints, diagrams, illustrations, index.
$144.95 hardback. ISBN 978-1-4094-1237-3.
This book masterfully traces Gunnar Olsson’s journey as a major geographical thinker
from his early years as a “space cadet” of the quantitative revolution to his ontological conversion
and contemporary explorations of the semiotic landscape and the abyss of Western cartographic
reason. Lovingly cultivated by Christian Abrahamsson and Martin Gren, this homage places the
esteemed Swedish geographer mapping “the taboo-ridden territory of the taken-for-granted”
and entering “lands not yet discovered,” somewhere in between the certainties of modernity and
the ambiguity of postmodernity (p. 22). As a doctoral candidate, Olsson was influenced by Esse
Lövgren whom he described as a “brilliant man obsessed with the idea of translating the vagaries
of human behavior into the precise language of mathematics” (p. 8). However as a practicing
geographer, it soon became apparent to Olsson that mathematical models applied to social issues
were problematic, particularly as identical spatial forms could be generated through drastically
different processes. To Olsson this revealed more about spatial distribution models themselves
and less about the intricacies of human behavior and interaction. As a citizen of a modern
Nordic welfare state buttressed by the ideology that a better and just society was based on the
exact scientific knowledge, he soon began to believe that planning based on spatial interaction
models not only created ethical and political dilemmas but was also scientifically questionable
as well. Olsson concluded that social engineering approaches were “far more geared towards
the growth and maintenance of its own bureaucracy than towards the interest of those sick and
disadvantaged which it is supposed to serve” (p. 11) and tended in his view, to conserve rather
than diminish existing inequalities—an ironic outcome contrary to the political intentions of
the social democratic state. In Servitude and Inequality in Spatial Planning, penned for the journal
Antipode in 1974, Olsson writes:
In retrospect, it appears that the majority of spatial analysts—among whom I

certainly include myself—have confined ourselves so thoroughly within our
inherited concepts, within our categorical frameworks, within our particular
mathematical language, and within our artifacts that we thereby have helped
perpetuate the functional inequalities of the past (p. 106).
This recognition presaged and served as a catalyst for Olsson’s ontological transformation in
which he viewed human “power” as inseparable from language. Influenced by Samuel Beckett’s
Reviews 387
observation that James Joyce’s writing was “not about something, but is that something itself”
(Samuel Beckett, quoted in GO, p. 21), Olsson invoked Joyce’s “map of the soul’s gruopography”
to guide his conceptual expeditions in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s through intangible fields of
“invisible geographies” to establish a semiotically influenced cartography of thought (p. 21).
Accordingly, Abrahamsson and Gren’s text presents Olsson’s papers in their original typefaces,
font sizes and journal template styles. Their text also charts via companion pieces and pen profiles
by Olsson’s colleagues and former students of his mental and physical travels from Uppsala
to the University of Michigan, and back to Sweden in 1977 where he was appointed chair of
economic geography and planning at the Nordic Institute in Urban and Regional Planning in
Stockholm. It can be seen that his teaching strongly informed his research perspectives. Olsson’s
trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural pedagogical experiences informed his vision of lecturing
in “neither a scientific laboratory nor a government-sponsored Center for Brainwashing [but]
rather an open environment in which the grafting proves to be so successful that everyone can
develop one’s own personality” (p. 20). In “Chiasm of thought-and-action” (Environment and
Planning D, volume 11, 1993), Olsson states “I prefer the term ‘imagination’ to that of ‘theory’”
and declares “social realism is bad art for the same reasons social engineering is bad ethics, less
because knowledge is power, more because power is knowledge” (quoted in Abrahamsson and
Gren, p. 190).
He then goes on describes the evolution of his ontological transformations, and the
questions provoked, in terms of his own work:
My own imagination has emerged gradually, in stages without breaks. This there
are clear affinities between my current concerns and the etchings of Birds in Egg/
Egg in Birds [1980], the watercolors of Antipasti [1990], and the oils of Lines of Power/
Limits of Language [1991]. How do I know the difference between you and me and
how do we share our beliefs in the same? To which extent is it I who speak through
language and language speaks through me? How are we made so obedient and so
predictable?1
Such musings and observations contain seeds which would bloom fully in 2007’s Abysmal: A
Critique of Cartographic Reason. In 1994 Olsson noted “any artist worthy of the name tries to render
not the visible but the non-visible, not what catches the eye but what hides in the taken-for-
granted” (p. 21). It can be argues that Joyce successfully did so in Ulysses (1922). In this instance,
Abysmal is both Joycean and Biblical in its scale and scope, with Olsson apocalyptically stating,
“Plato’s Sun is setting,” and declaring in manifesto:
The current truth is in fact that the fix-points, scales and mappa of cartographic
reason have lost much of the power they once had. Immersed in a world which
is neither solid nor stable we are beginning to suspect that the excluded of the
excluded middle might have escaped from the Renaissance lines of modernism
and taken refuge in the Baroque folds of postmodernism.2
Olsson advises to approach Abysmal “as a minimalist guide to the landscape of western culture”
(p. ix), and draws upon theology, mythology, cartography, aesthetics, philosophy, geometry and
semiotics to exegetically braid strands of thought rooted in seminal pieces of literature, art and
scripture. Giving voices to Biblical, classical Greek, enlightenment and modern philosophers,
modernist artists, linguists and novelists among others, Olsson’s critique gives lie to the emperor’s
new clothes of modern cartographically parsed reason. Abrahamsson and Gren, who open their
text with a dialogical “Preamble,” have done a great and invaluable service for geographical
388 Reviews
scholarship. Acting as conductors they skillfully orchestrate pieces by Reginald G. Golledge,

Michael Dear, Michael J. Watts, David Jansson, Jette Hansen-Möller Chris Philo, Gunnael Jensson,
Alessandra Bonazzi, Ole Michael Jensen, Marcus Doel, and Franco Farinelli into a coherent over-
arching multi-perspectival intellectual symphonia, which interspersed with critical tones and
colors from Olsson’s own oeuvre over the past thirty years, provides an Arcades-like impression
of one of the most innovative geographical thinkers at work on the planet today.
Charles Travis
Trinity College, Dublin
NOTES
1. Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 247. Gunnar Olsson’s question: “How are we made so obedient and so predictable?”
struck this reviewer as a perfect description of the human landscape of recent Association
of American Geography meetings where conference attendees sit peering obediently into
the predictably soft glow of their iPads, laptops, and cell phones—perhaps instigating
digital ecosystems and networks, or more ominously braiding their synaptic structures
into complacent electronic straightjackets. The reviewer is also guilty of this obedience and
predictability.
2. Ibid.

Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century. LUCAS C. BARGER,
transcribed and with an introduction by Peter A. Rogerson. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2013. Pp. xxv+163, maps, appendices. $19.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4384-4602-8.
Life on a Rocky Farm is a captivating first-hand account of agricultural life in nineteenth

and early twentieth century Putnam County, NY. The account, written by Lucas Barger (1866-
1939), demonstrates the impacts of industrialization on “traditional” agricultural life through a
series of vignettes. A typewritten version of the manuscript was discovered at the Putnam Valley
Historical Society by Peter Rogerson, a geographer and relative of Barger’s. Rogerson’s research
also led him to the New York State Library where he discovered a copy of the original handwritten
manuscript and a series of letters between Barger and his daughter. Both Barger and his daughter
had intended to publish the manuscript but failed to do so before Barger passed away in 1939. The
Barger family’s efforts are here recognized by Rogerson, who has painstakingly transcribed and
edited the manuscript. His preface describes the curious history of the manuscript’s discovery
and transcription, and his editor’s introduction and notes throughout the book situate Barger’s
account historically using maps, US Census Non-Population Schedules and other documents.
Barger’s vignettes provide a unique commentary on farm life, though they do not often
name specific characters or family members. The manuscript is divided into several chapters
such as “Incomes Directly from Nature” or “Life of the Rocky Farm Women,” and subdivided
into descriptions of aspects of farm life such as making apple cider, planting, making soap or
candles, basketry, raising sheep, and even women smoking. Three appendices at the end of the
book list words and their phonetic spelling as pronounced in the regional dialect, and then provide
example conversations between named individuals (though it is unclear what their relationship
is with Barger, if any).
Barger describes tasks vividly and colorfully in his own unique style, as if he were an
older relative recalling fond memories. An air of nostalgic yearning is present in most of the
Reviews 389
stories, and these are described in detail only to end with a wistful and disappointing statement
of how that particular task, profession, or tool was replaced by industry or an invention. For
example, Barger meticulously describes an old woman drying apples in her kitchen, but ends the
story with “Several women got to doing this, and then, as usual, some inventor got wise as to
what was needed, and produced an ‘evaporator’ that dried not only apples, but any old kinds of
fruit, vegetables, or what have you! The old apple peeling machine was thrown up in the garret
to rust out” (p. 35). It must be remembered by the reader that this is not a diary, but a conscious
attempt by Barger not only to describe the past, but to make certain the reader understands the
impact of industrialization on small, rural farming families and their daily tasks. He consistently
references the advent of industry and invention, and how these socio-economic impacts forever
changed life on rocky farms in Putnam County for the worse.
Barger’s resistance to technology and change is not surprising given his history and
geographic location. His perspective mirrors other first-hand accounts of nineteenth-century life
in Putnam County as well as other areas in the Northeast. These accounts dovetail with the broader
historical processes that permeate Barger’s writings. For example, Field Horne’s article “Life on
a Rocky Farm 1862-1902” in The Hudson Valley Regional Review (1990, vol. 7 no.1) summarizes the
diaries of Isaac Oakley, a farmer who lived near Lake Oscawana in Putnam County, NY during
the nineteenth century. The article complements Barger’s manuscript by situating Oakley’s daily
activities within broader regional socio-economic processes, such as the transport of butter or
apples from Putnam County to New York City. Lynn Bonfield’s article “The Work Journal of Albert
Bickford, Mid-Nineteenth-Century Vermont Farmer, Cooper, and Carpenter” (Vermont History
72, Summer/Fall 2004) discusses Bickford’s diaries and their relationship to broader regional
patterns as well. Jonnycakes and Cream: Oral Histories of Little Compton, R.I., edited by Carlton
Brownell (1993) is a compilation of oral histories from a small agricultural town on the Rhode
Island coast. Many stories are similar to Barger’s (for example, farming flint corn); others describe
region-specific tasks, such as collecting seaweed from the beach. Finally, Janet Nylander’s Our
Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860 (1994) compiles other accounts from
diaries that mirror Barger’s resistance to change and industry.
The broader processes occurring during this time period include industrialization and the
advent of the railroad, the migration of young adults from farmsteads to cities or the Midwest,
and the eventual abandonment of farms and farming altogether as the countryside and coast
became an escape for wealthier city-folk (see The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an
American Rural Landscape by Blake Harrison, 2006). Barger’s microhistorical account describes the
impact of all of these processes, most notably with an anecdote of a young man who left the family
farm and returned twenty-five years later. He found the cornfields grown over, the house rotting
away, and a lilac bush “fighting for its life” amidst a second-growth forest in the dooryard. In his
characteristic style, Barger says of the man, “He said it made him feel sad” (p. 4). These processes
are visible today to any resident of the Northeast who finds stone walls, building foundations,
and other reminders of our cultural history in the forest. This landscape gave a specific identity to
Barger and those who lived near him, just as it did (and continues to do) to others in the Northeast
who described the stoniness of their own glacial till, and who built miles and miles of stone walls
for which the region is now known. In addition to these widespread historical processes, Barger
also offers unique insight on ecological events that occurred during the time period, such as the
extinction of passenger pigeons, the American chestnut blight, the introduction of Paris Green to
kill potato bugs, and the 1868 bee die-off. Barger not only encapsulates these events with his own
commentary and perspective, but also describes the repercussions of these events for farmers.
This book is unique, and imparts Barger’s own sense of nostalgia on the reader. I found
myself wistful for my own childhood while reading his appeal for a time when there was no need
390 Reviews
to use pesticides in apple orchards, pumpkins still tasted good, and baskets and barrels were still
made by hand. Unfortunately the account does lack a good sense of the exact time period that
many of these events might have transpired; and with the exception of scattered place-names
throughout, and what is known about Barger living in Putnam County, NY, there are few hints as
to whose farm or in what town these events occurred. Despite these small drawbacks, this book
will interest a broad range of individuals from historical geography, historical archaeology, rural
sociology, environmental science, and history itself. It would also be suitable for non-academic
use as well, and would be of interest to any individual intrigued by the agricultural or rural
history of the Northeast.
Katharine M. Johnson
University of Connecticut

Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. DOROTHEE BRANTZ and SONJA
DÜMPELMANN, editors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 246, site plans,
photos, notes, index. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 978-08-1393-114-2.
Greening the City is an edited collection of ten essays that examine the production of urban
green spaces in Europe and America during the twentieth century. The collection is the result
of a conference at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. For editors Brantz and
Dümplemann, the aim of this collection is to investigate how the use of urban “natural elements”
evolved “as many industrial cities were transformed into postindustrial landscapes” (p. 7). To do
this, the editors draw on a rich interdisciplinary body of knowledge from urban and environmental
historians, architects and landscape architects, planners, anthropologists, and geographers.
This collection does not attempt to present a unifying definition of “nature.” Instead,
it provides examples of the various approaches scholars have used to examine the historical
relationship between the built and natural environments. The essays in this collection examine
the wide-ranging ways in which cities have employed nature in the planning process. Throughout
the four sections of this collection—“Constructing Green Spaces,” “Nature and Urban Identity,”
“The Function of Nature in the City,” and “Ecology and the Urban Environment”—the “nature”
the authors refer to includes individual plant species, open spaces (including parks, sporting
grounds, forests, and nature preserves), and “countercultural ecotopias” found in the urban
public realm (p. 8).
The two essays in Part 1 explore the influence of politics, Western European planning
schemes, and modernization on the planning of green spaces and park systems in Sofia, Bulgaria
and Mexico City. Sonia Hirt compares the ideological visions behind the use of green space in the
master plans of pre-Communist, Communist, and post-Communist Sofia. Alfonso Valenzuela
Aguilera examines the ways in which planning regimes in Mexico City used green spaces to
improve public health and promote environmental awareness.
In one of the strongest sections, the three essays in Part 2 highlight the ways in which
nature was used to forge both urban and regional identities in Barcelona, Berlin, and Los Angeles.
Gary McDonough analyzes the plans and designs for the 1992 Summer Olympics and the
2004 Universal Forum of Cultures, to explore the social construction of nature and identity in
Barcelona. He argues that the city used its unique physical geography and cultural landscape—its
“Mediterraneanness”—as the foundation upon which to shape the city’s (and Catalan) identity
and sense of place (p. 67). Stefanie Hennecke examines the ideologies behind the 1907 design
of Berlin’s Schiller Park to show that park was a conservative reaction to modernization where
Reviews 391
“modern cities were not reconcilable with nature” (p. 75). She notes that the park’s designer called
for the strict use of native German plant species since they embodied the noblest dimensions of
the German character. Shifting from Europe to the United States, Lawrence Culver examines the
increasing privatization of Los Angeles’ public spaces throughout the twentieth century. Culver
highlights the ways in which city boosters marketed the city’s suburbs as places of recreation
and leisure for white middle-class Angelenos, which “prioritized a private conceptualization of
nature and recreation over a public one” (p. 109).
While the intention of Part 3 is to focus on the function of nature in the city, the essays
in this section lack coherence. The weakness of this section comes from its inability to define
the “function” of nature. The first essay examines the development of green spaces for sport
in London and Helsinki. The authors try to assess the impact of these highly mechanized and
modern landscapes on ecological function and biodiversity. Unfortunately, other than making
broad claims about chemical fertilizers and monocultures in golf courses, it does not show
specific ways that these spaces have altered the functioning of ecosystems. Highlighting the lack
of coherence in this section, the second essay uses the notion of the “function” of nature to show
that ways in which nature functioned as a “civic landscape” around which European cities could
promote recentralization of the city and promote community life (p. 134).
The essays in Part 4, another strong section, explore the ecological dimensions of the city.
Zachary Fakk examines the disagreements and legal disputes over what constitutes a “weed” in
St. Louis, Buffalo, and Chicago to note that the creation of a tidy and orderly popular ecology,
especially the “animosity” toward weeds and other unregulated plants, led cities to create a
variety of nuisance laws that required the eradication of weeds (p. 175). Jeffrey Sanders examines
the ways in which the cohousing, food co-ops, recycling programs, and community gardens in
1970s Seattle attempted to transform the city into an “ecotopia” (p. 183). These initiatives provided
the basis for the “Jane Jacobs-meets-Rachel Carson vision” for urban growth (p. 184). Shifting to
Germany, Jens Lachmund shows how the erection of the Berlin Wall separated naturalists and
biologists in West Berlin from their previous fieldwork sites, and therefore, they turned their
attention to the flora and fauna found within the isolated green spaces in the shadow of the wall.
Overall, despite lacking a broad theoretical focus from one section to the next, the essays in
this collection are solid. They are well-written, short, and consumable in one sitting. Geographers
seeking a theoretical argument along with a good narrative will enjoy many of these essays.
However, conspicuously absent is a conclusion to this collection, which ends abruptly after the
last essay. A short discussion of the findings presented in the essays, as well as the connections to
the dilemmas facing the neoliberal cities of the twenty-first-century, would have been a welcome
addition, and might have provided some coherence to the overall collection.
Phil Birge-Liberman
University of Connecticut

Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. JULIAN BRASH. Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. xii+344, maps, b&w photos, notes, index. $24.95 paper.
ISBN 978-0-8203-3681-7.
Brash dissects the events leading up to and the first nine years of the Bloomberg
administration, which started January 1, 2002 and ended on December 31, 2013. His thesis is that
the Bloomberg Way, as he calls it, was a unique form of neoliberalization of urban governance
rooted in the recent experiences and conditions of New York City (hereafter referred to as the
392 Reviews
City). The Bloomberg Way relied on postindustrial elites, whom Brash identifies as members of
the Transnational Capitalist Class and of the Professional-Managerial Class. The ascendance of
the Bloomberg Way depended on an urban imaginary of the City as a corporate entity that should
be governed by a CEO mayor, who would lead in battle against urban-corporate competitors.
Brash, an anthropologist, relies on a methodology that combines neoMarxian class theory
with intense ethnographic research in the City. He assumes class is determined in relation not
only to production, but also is constituted by race, ethnicity, gender, space, and a complex lived
reality in a place. For the ethnographic investigation Brash attended city council and planning
commission meetings, met with neighborhood activists, conducted interviews (some off-the-
record) with stakeholders, and perused a wide array of secondary sources.
The book is divided informally into three parts. In chapters 1 and 2 Brash, with an eye
toward explaining Michael Bloomberg’s rise to mayor, provides a history of the City’s post World
War II governance, especially after the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. In chapters 3 through 5,
focusing on the early years of Bloomberg’s first term as mayor, Brash discusses the assembling
of the Bloomberg administration, the commodification of the City as a luxury product, and the
Bloomberg Way. Chapters 6 through 9 detail the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to gain
support for and approval of the Hudson Yards plan, a project to develop Mid-town Manhattan’s
far west side. In the conclusion Brash ruminates on the broader implications of the Bloomberg
Way to the City after 2005, its role in understanding City politics, and its significance to neoliberal
governance in general.
The City’s near bankruptcy of 1974 meant that bonds could no longer be sold to finance
popular liberal redistribution policies. That crisis paved the way for neoliberalism with an
emphasis on capital formation associated with entrepreneurialism. The rise of neoliberalism
in the City, but its imperfect realization in City administrations through 2001, set the stage for
Bloomberg to run for office as a “CEO mayor.” He would be the anti-politician, the businessman
with entrepreneurial and managerial experience who would govern the City effectively and
independently of special interests.
Brash assesses Bloomberg’s corporatization of City governance, treatment of businesses
and citizens as clients and customers, and rebranding and marketing of the City as a luxury
product. The reader is introduced to Daniel Doctoroff, the Deputy Mayor for economic
development, Andrew Alper, the head of the Economic Development Corporation, and Amanda
Burden, the chair of the City’s planning commission. They were critical players in the Bloomberg
Administration.
Rebranding the City involved creating an image of it as a peerless place to live and work
that had great economic value for the right companies and ambitious, well-educated professionals.
The City was to be transformed into its image via the Bloomberg Way, which involved trying to
get everyone to support the new urban imaginary.
Brash highlights the Hudson Yards plan as the epitome of Bloomberg’s urban and
economic development strategy. Both the City Planning Department and NYC2012, a private
organization crafting a bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, planned for the redevelopment
of the Hudson Yards. These rail yards were to be covered and then topped with an extension
of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, a stadium for the Jets and the Olympics, tall office
buildings and hotels, and related facilities. This area had evaded redevelopment since the 1920s,
but the Bloomberg administration was confident that it could use the Olympics bid to whip up
enthusiasm for the execution of its plan. The stadium, however, was controversial among various
constituencies that either deemed it unnecessary or better located elsewhere in the City.
The author captures the charade as the City invited public participation in the planning
process, made some small concessions in building design and size, and then approved its plan
Reviews 393
as representing “best planning practices.” To avoid having to fight for local legislative approval
of the proposed stadium, the Bloomberg administration subjected the financing of the stadium
side of the project (east of Eleventh Avenue) to approval by New York State’s Public Authorities
Control Board (PACB). Various community planning associations offered counterplans that
opposed locating a stadium in Hudson Yards and proved sufficiently persuasive that unanimous
approval by the PACB, a prerequisite for stadium financing, never happened. Brash argues that
the coup de grâce for the west-side stadium was the Bloomberg administration’s last ditch resort
to urban patriotism; that is, the argument that any real New Yorker would never oppose the
proposed stadium. That tack raised the ire of stadium opponents from all corners of the City.
Brash concludes with a discussion of how neoliberal urban governance has spread across
the nation. Anyone in the academic world also can see this model of corporatization being applied
relentlessly to colleges and universities by their governing bodies.
The book is a piece of solid scholarship, but is not without a few shortcomings. Cablevision
owned the Madison Square Garden during the years covered in the book and did everything
in its power to block the proposed stadium, a potential competitor for events, yet Brash only
touches on Cablevision’s machinations. The one map, of the Hudson Yards plan, is insufficient in
detail in that it shows none of the proposed multi-use redevelopment east of Eleventh Avenue,
and other maps are needed to show the reader the locations of various places and buildings
referred to that are beyond the Hudson Yards. Some of the black and white illustrations are too
small to be entirely legible. Finally, I would have liked more fleshing out of the main actors in
this story. Brash’s characterizations of Bloomberg and Doctoroff are very one-dimensional public
personas—single-minded entrepreneurs.
This volume would make a good reader in a course on contemporary urban governance
and is a valuable resource for any scholar interested in neoliberal urban governance, urban
imaginaries, and the relationship of class formation and mobilization to neoliberal governance.
Steven L. Driever
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Approaching African History. MICHAEL BRETT. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2013. Pp.
xi+356, maps. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-84701-063-6.
Approaching African History is a formidable book. In his own words, Brett describes the
aim of the book as providing “a narrative outline of African history over the past ten thousand
years, as it has been established over the past sixty years, to describe on the one hand the growth
of the concept of Africa, and on the other to show the ways in which the narrative itself has been
constructed and its content understood” (p. x). In itself, any one of the three themes probably
warrants a book on its own; combined, they constitute a monumental undertaking.
Brett divides the book into five parts. In Part I (The Problem of African History), he
discusses the problem of defining African history and how to solve the problem of sourcing
information and writing African history. In Part II (The Making of African Society), he uses
archaeology and ethnography as tools to construct the African past, while in Part III (Africa in
the World), he discusses African history as captured by the written word and the role of religion
on the continent. In Part IV (The Unification of Africa), Europe enters the African narrative in a
discussion of European colonization of the continent and the reactions among African societies
to this invasion. In the last part (The Arrival of African History), Brett brings his account to the
present in a discussion of the resurgence of Africa and gives his views on the contemporary
history of Africa. The book is concluded by the last section, which mirrors the title of the book.
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Brett has three aims in Approaching African History. First, he seeks to provide a narrative
outline of the continent’s history over ten thousand years. He highlights the problem of a sketchy
(at best) written record, at least for most parts of the continent over the expansive time period he
engages. His way of dealing with this problem is to take an interdisciplinary route. Borrowing
from ethnographic analogy, archaeology, and oral tradition, he tries to peer into the distant past
and then move from there to the more familiar ground of historical analysis of text. In so doing,
Brett accomplishes two things: he fills in the gaps that undoubtedly would have existed had
he relied solely on text, and he encourages historians confronted with the same limitations to
emulate this interdisciplinary approach. In this way, Brett’s work reflects the growing importance
of interdisciplinary approaches to historical understanding. A recurring theme in this section
is how changes in the Sahara desert influenced the course of African history. His discussion of
the Sahara forms one of the book’s most valuable contributions and underscores the complex
relationships between the continent’s geographical and historical developments.
The second aim of the book is to provide a historiography of Africa. To this end, Brett
surveys sources from the earliest writers up to the contributions of contemporary authors, which,
in turn, enables him to accomplish his third aim, an understanding of the development of Africa as
an idea. Historical narratives, in short, have developed “Africa” as a coherent concept, a distinctive
place that requires its own modes of explanation and understanding—a conceptualization that
has grown in sophistication and importance over time, and continues to do so. In the final chapter
of the book, Brett ties together his three themes into a coherent whole, as evident in the repetition
of the book’s title. He concludes the work by discussing the impact global warming and high
population growth might have on Africa’s future, indicating new avenues for research and debate
in the unfolding history of this complex continent.
Does Brett accomplish the ambitious aims he sets out at the beginning of the book? My
answer is a qualified “yes.” Obviously, in taking on the entirety of African history in a single
book, it is inevitable that important themes will be underrepresented or even completely absent.
State formation, agriculture, and iron working are among the most notable of these. But these
absences do not necessarily detract from the overall value of the book. Brett manages to give
a reasonably comprehensive account of African history over the past ten thousand years, and
his narrative is enriched substantially by the interdisciplinary approach. At the same time, his
analysis of how Africa developed as a distinctive conceptual domain for historical study, and how
this conceptualization has changed over time, adds valuable perspective to our understanding of
African history as a whole. My only criticism is that the project is just a bit too ambitious. While
Brett achieves the three aims he sets for himself, the discussion of each would have benefitted
from expansion. I was left feeling that I wanted to know more about each theme long after I
finished reading the book, and also that the narrative would have flowed better had each theme
been given more space for elaboration. This, of course, would have added to the volume of the
book, already long at 356 pages, and added to the problems of coherence. The ambition of Brett’s
undertaking is at once the strength and the weakness of the work.
Historical geographers should find the book a worthwhile read. The robust bibliography
makes it possible to find a source on most themes related to African history, and as such adds to
the value of the book. On a personal level, the book made me aware of some of the strands of
African history I had little knowledge of, even though I lived on the continent my entire life. It
also inspired me to read more about some of the issues addressed in Approaching African History.
To me, a book that can do that has served its purpose.
Hennie A.P. Smit

University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
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Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico. DAVID CORREIA.
Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. xiii+220, maps, photographs, index. $69.95
cloth. ISBN 978-0-8203-3284-0.
Last year, the rugged landscape of the Manzano Mountains near Chilili, New Mexico stood
in for Afghanistan in the Hollywood film Lone Survivor. The production company paid $30,000
to the Chilili Land Grant to film at the location. However, the land was held by deed as private
property and the landowner was not aware of the filming. The president of the Chilili Land
Grant argues that the entire land grant, which was awarded by the Mexican government in 1841,
remains common property and all deeds for private property within the grant are invalid (KRQE
News, Albuquerque, New Mexico). This case is notable only because of its ties with big-budget
filmmaking. Contentious claims of land ownership in New Mexico’s land grants are common and
date to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. The Treaty ended the Mexican-American War
and ceded what is today New Mexico to the United States, including millions of acres of Spanish
and Mexican land grants that were occupied by smallholders as common property. Between 1848
and when New Mexico gained statehood in 1912, land speculators and corrupt public officials
had conspired to dispossess the grantees and their heirs of roughly 80 per cent of land grant areas.
David Correia’s Properties of Violence reveals for the first time how land grant heirs have actively
contested this dispossession in a struggle that continues up to the present.
Properties of Violence presents a case study focused on the social and legal history of a
land grant in northern New Mexico called Tierra Amarilla. The title derives from the violence
that Correia argues is inherent in property law because enforcement of legal interpretations
necessarily results in the forcible removal of people from their land. The simmering violence in
Tierra Amarilla that Correia describes thereby challenges the conventional view among historians
that the land grant heirs lost their land rights due to the incompatibility of common property
and private property wherein the law is an apolitical fact. “Rather,” Correia convincingly argues
throughout, “law is a site of social struggle where claims over property are constructed and
contested” (p. 7). Correia also advances the historiography of New Mexico land grant studies by
adding intellectual depth to the one-dimensional view that common property was quietly lost in
a series of discrete legal events. As Correia details, this “social struggle” has rather been ongoing
since the nineteenth century within and without the court system.
The book’s historical sweep begins in 1832 when the Mexican government awarded the
Tierra Amarilla land grant to settlers. This expansion into what is today northern New Mexico—
lands already occupied by Ute and Apache Indians—sparked Indian aggression that continued
into the 1860s. In the twentieth century, violence broke out between land grant heirs and Anglo
ranchers in Tierra Amarilla. A clandestine group known as La Mano Negra (The Black Hand)
cut the fences of private ranchers and razed their homes and outbuildings. Some ranchers fled
after receiving death threats. Later in the twentieth century, resistance to the enclosure of private
property in Tierra Amarilla transitioned into legal challenges. In 1937, land grant heirs founded
a broad-based membership organization called La Corporación de Abiquiú, Merced de Tierra
Amarilla (the Abiquiú Corporation, Tierra Amarilla Land Grant). La Corporación collected and
organized deeds, wills, letters, and other documents with which to assert the heirs’ claim to
communal property and rid the grant of private landowners. The chapter on the legal geographies
of resistance is perhaps the book’s most important. This is because other historians have largely
ignored or overlooked the title and ejectment lawsuits filed by La Corporación between the 1930s
and 1950s. As Correia explains, these lawsuits are critical for comprehending the sophisticated
agency of local people in their ongoing struggle to defend their right to common property use.
The courts ruled against La Corporación, however, by finding that common property use lies
outside the law and so their ownership claims were dismissed.
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Following their defeat in the courts, in the 1960s land grant heirs began to engage in more
confrontational tactics such as sending eviction notices to Anglo ranchers and issuing their own
fishing and hunting licenses on the grant. Correia contextualizes this continuing resistance to
land dispossession not only as being about property rights but also about a struggle against racial
inequality and economic injustice, which provoked state-sponsored violence. He recounts how
the New Mexico State Police and federal law enforcement agencies targeted land grant heirs for
surveillance, harassment, and arrest, and labeled some prominent activists as domestic terrorists.
After writing with impressive historical detail about the conflicts among social groups—
Mexican settlers, Indian societies, Anglo ranchers, and law enforcement agencies—in the epilogue
Correia extends his gaze into the present and finds irony. He notes how market forces are now
shaping the (social) landscape of Tierra Amarilla. Sheep trails are being turned into hiking trails,
and million-dollar vacation homes are popping up on the ridgelines. Correia recognizes that this
new wave of property development “follows the logic of the market in which property is merely
a technical problem of land use and an object wholly legible to the state” (p. 173). Properties of
Violence thus adds to the scholarship on legibility that examines the ways states have engaged
in top-down approaches to social ordering that disregard local knowledge and practices. In the
case of Tierra Amarilla, common property use was illegible to the state in its myopic pursuit of
high-modernism.
Properties of Violence is a powerful contribution to land grant studies and historical legal
geography. Correia’s long perspective introduces fresh factual information and interpretations
that expose how tightly linked violence and property have been in the Tierra Amarilla land grant.
A small improvement would include the addition of an orientation map. Also, the dramatic
cover photo of an Uzi submachine gun hanging off a tree trunk misrepresents most of the book’s
content, although this curious design choice may have been the publisher’s.
Richard Hunter
State University of New York College at Cortland

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. ERIKA DOSS. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. ix+458, figures, notes, index. $40.50 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-226-15938-6.
Organizing memorials by the emotion they commemorate, Doss argues that contemporary
memorial mania is characterized by an “obsession with issues of memory and history and an
urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts” (p. 2). Memorials serve
as a source of symbolic capital that are readily visible on the natural landscape. The transition
from monument to memorial mania is characterized by increasing acknowledgement of diversity,
leading to American commemorative landscapes that personify public sentiment and emotion
at significant moments and structure social narratives of identity and national purpose. These
narratives are particular to today’s “Prozac nation” where memorialization becomes a method
for mediating multiple and sometimes coterminous efforts to manage emotional tensions (p. 59).
In successive chapters, Doss uses five emotions—grief, fear, gratitude, shame, and anger—to
categorize memorials and exemplify the contemporary tradition of memorial mania.
A discursive analysis of memory management revealed that control is a pervasive
theme in contemporary memorials. According to Doss, efforts to commemorate the victims of
terrorist acts symbolize a need to control meaning, manage memory, and alleviate fear. Four
security narratives are pervasive in contemporary terrorism memorials—naming, assumptions
of innocence, survival, and the heroic sacrifice—and together they present a very specific frame.
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Through this conceptualization, Doss shows how the national narrative presents a positive and
unified front that is focused on survival instead of loss and that praises heroic sacrifice, diverting
attention from critical examinations of causal factors. The lack of critical examination in American
memorials is a pattern identified throughout the book. However, Doss never confronts this issue
directly or offers insight into how we might better incorporate the causal factors leading to these
events into memorials.
Somewhat oddly placed in the chapter on fear is a discussion of the minimalist architectural
revolution in commemoration. In a fascinating discussion of several international memorials,
Doss describes a link between minimalism and the interpretation, participation, and engagement
with memorial landscapes. The importance of minimalist sculpture is “what the sculptural object
does—in terms of [our] response—rather than what it is” (p. 125). Instead of pressing a particular
narrative, minimalist art allows the public a sense of ownership through interpretation and
participation. While her discussion of minimalism and artistic symbolism in commemoration
is thought-provoking, she does not provide much in the way of a semiotic analysis of the actual
text that appears on the memorials. Her discussion is not lacking in examples and analysis of
memorials from an artistic perspective, but a more detailed examination of memorial text would
have added greater depth to her arguments about the primacy of certain frames in American
commemoration.
Unique to the contemporary commemorative landscape in the United States are memorials
representing shameful acts. In an accessible psychological analysis, Doss borrows principles from
Freud and Sartre to discuss the contentious issue of how to adequately memorialize shameful
events through the visual act of looking. Commonalities among these types of memorials include
re-humanizing victims and perpetrators (seen through the lack of abstract art and the renewal of
human subjects in the commemoration process), the concept of bearing witness, and reflecting on
past violence. These memorials have become a symbol of obligation and responsibility (bearing
witness) in the face of any atrocity. The return to human subjects in shame memorials (versus
the more popular minimalism) is linked to the relationship between the body and shame. Doss
could have expanded her analysis of memorials via the geography of the body and included a
productive discussion of how abstract forms of the body are used in commemoration.
Anger as memorialization is presented in the unique way in which antithetical
accretion is displayed on the landscape. Anger at injustice is presented as a strong motivator
for commemoration. Anger incites questions of representation and agency, dominant cultural
assumptions which can lead to counter-memorials, anti-thetical accretion, or the toppling of
memorials. In this chapter Doss begins to acknowledge the complexity of emotions represented
by and invoked through memorials. Her discussion of the many types of anger alludes to this
idea. However her analysis never goes so far as to discuss the multiplicity of emotion that can be
elicited by any one particular memorial.
While Doss identifies and explains components of memorials, little attention is given
to the surrounding landscape or location of the memorial. Her artistic perspective is valuable
in understanding the motives and methods of commemoration, but misses some of the more
intrinsic geographical concepts. Although structuring the book by emotion is logical, in reality
memorials evoke a series of emotions, not just one. This complexity is never made explicit,
however. In addition, Doss addresses but does not fully articulate the role of globalization in
memorialization fervor. In a globalized world where memory (like news-media attention spans)
is fleeting and individuality is often subsumed, the memorial mania of today describes the most
basic desire: to be visible, gain power, and be remembered. The monument is a human creation
designed to keep single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations. The shift
from the monument to the memorial, from official national narratives to subjective and symbolic
398 Reviews
expressions of disparate American sub-national collectives, underlines this concern with loss
of identity. In the face of globalization and loss of communal identity, issues of ownership and
belonging become particularly relevant. “Increasingly,” Doss writes, “self-interest groups view
the nation’s memorials as the direct extension of their particular causes” (p. 34). This desire for
public ownership is part of the contemporary popularity of functional public art. Art that invites
public participation, exists as functional part of the environment, and has multiple purposes;
allowing individuals to claim emotional (if not legal) ownership of that memorial and the
concepts it embodies. Without a substantive conclusion to Memorial Mania, we are left with the
impression that America has failed to implement commemorative justice. Unfortunately there is
little information on how to mitigate this failure in the future.
Cadey Korson
Kent State University

Political Migrations on Polish Territories (1939-1950). PIOTR EBERHARDT. Warsaw: Polish Academy
of Sciences (Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization Monograph No. 12), 2011. Pp. 225,
maps, tables. €26.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-83-61590-46-0.
This book focuses on an event that transformed the demography of Poland during a
short period of sixteen years, from the beginning of World War II in September 1939 through its
aftermath in 1950. It is written by one of Poland’s leading historical geographers, Piotr Eberhardt
of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who in 2003 provided us with his 560-page book called Ethnic
Groups and Population Changes in Twentieth-Century Central and Eastern Europe (published by M.E.
Sharp). In 2011, he published this new book dealing with the historical events that changed the
demographic situation in Poland from a multinational country with more than 39 million people
in 1939, only two-thirds of them Poles, to a true nation-state occupied by only 25 million people
in 1950, about 97.8 of whom were Polish people.
The book is devoted to the forced resettlement of the population in the years between
1939 and 1950 within the territory of the Polish state, before and after the Second World War. The
resettlement involved 30 million inhabitants, among them 13 million Poles, 11 million Germans,
around five million Jews and about one million Ukrainians. The population migration that occurred
during this short period finds no precedent in world history. The forced migration which took
place in 1947-1948 during the establishment of independent India and Pakistan brought about the
resettlement of about ten million people, about one-half million of whom died during that event.
Here we deal with a phenomenon roughly three times bigger than that. The uniqueness of the
migration event in Poland also derives from the ethnic and linguistic complexity of the people
involved. This large-scale movement began in September 1939 when the German army attacked
Poland. One of the aims of the attack was to conquer new territories for the German population
by exterminating and deporting ethnic groups found “unfit” according to racial ideology—
mainly Jews but also Poles. After nearly six years of bloodshed, about six million people died,
including nearly all of the three million Jews who lived in Poland before the War. The defeat of
Nazi Germany then brought about the forced exodus of about nine million Germans from the
newly established Poland, with its new boundaries imposed by the Soviet Union, Britain, and
United States.
Eberhardt’s book is a historical geography of the largest population movement to have
taken place in modern Europe. In the past, scholars have dealt with fragments of the event,
mainly in books and monographs published in Polish and German. For exceptions to this trend,
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English readers can refer to E. M. Kuliscer’s Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-
1947 (Columbia University Press, 1948), Yehuda Bauer’s The History of the Holocaust (Franklin
Watts, 1982), and a few other books concerning the Jewish component of this history. Eberhardt’s
book, however, is the first to provide an account of the entire migration event on Polish territory
in English. Eberhardt draws from an exhaustive array of source material on the evacuation of
the Polish people during and after the war, the Jewish Holocaust in Poland, the Germans who
settled in occupied Poland and fled during the last stage of the War, and finally the evacuation
of the remaining Germans from new Poland, established in 1945 east of the Oder-Neisse Rivers.
Eberhardt synthesizes these sources to create one complete work that examines the phenomenon
from the perspective of historical geography.
Eberhardt uncovers the underlying decisions, strategic operations, and ultimate results
of the migrations that occurred from the opening of the Second World War to the last evacuation
of the Ukrainians from southeast Poland. The account proceeds stage by stage, area by area,
each section focusing on a different segment of the population involved. The cartography
is completely original to the book and drafted by Eberhardt himself; these 23 maps provide
more than illustration but serve as tools for understanding the explanations presented in text
concerning the resettlement activities undertaken in Poland during the period. Collected from
different sources, more than fifty tables provide visual arrangement of the numbers needed to
understand the magnitude of the resettlement process: about three million Polish Jews murdered;
more than one million additional Jews brought to the death camps in Poland; the flight of about
six million Germans before the approaching Soviet Army; and the evacuation of more than three
million Germans resettled in Potsdam.
As this book was written originally in Polish and later translated into English, one can
find here and there some unconventional sentence structures and even some mistakes, mainly
in syntax (the definite article “the” often is missing as this word does not exist in Polish). The
translation may hinder its accessibility for English readers, but it does not undermine the book’s
contribution as a near-comprehensive compilation and interpretation of source material related
to the resettlements. Nor does the quality of the translation undercut the book’s ability to convey
the sheer magnitude of the event and the roles taken by leaders of some of the most advanced
countries of the world at the time—German, British, American, and Russian heads of state whose
decisions led to the evacuation of millions of people, Poles and Germans, during and after the War.
This book will be of interest to scholars whose work focuses specifically on wartime demography
and the historical geography of World War II, but also those who are interested in military history
and modern Europe more generally. At the same time, because many people are connected by
relation to those who lived and died in Poland at this tragic period, this book will find a second
audience by providing research that can shed light on the events that changed their lives forever.
Gideon Biger
Tel Aviv University, Israel

The Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in the American Imagination. KELLY ENRIGHT. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. xii+187, illustrations, index. $29.95 cloth. ISBN 9-780-8139-
3228-6.
One hundred pages into The Maximum of Wilderness, Kelly Enright lists tips given by the
naturalist William Beebe in 1958 for observing animals in deep forest. In addition to advice on
breathing styles and clothing colors, Beebe instructed National Geographic readers to keep their
400 Reviews
eyes half closed around wild creatures. “Animals,” Beebe noted, “do not like to be stared at.” This
is an apt metaphor for studying “the jungle in the American imagination.” If we look too intently,
the subject threatens to slip away. Is the jungle a place, or a reaction to a place—a spot on the map
or a state of mind? Enright manages to center her subject, for the most part, and in doing so, she
has written a lively study of tropical wildness in both mass and specialist media in the twentieth
century. The major development that Enright chronicles is the semantic and perceptual shift from
dangerous jungle to vulnerable rainforest. She organizes her material chronologically, with seven
figures standing in for particular perceptions. When linked in a chain connecting the 1910s to
the 1960s, these subjects add action to introspection to show how abstraction and practice mixed
under the trees.
The first two figures are Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, both of whom experienced
Brazilian forests as what H.J. Fleure might have called “regions of difficulty.” Roosevelt hacked,
shot, canoed, and mapped his way along the Amazon’s tributaries in 1913. He believed the
Amazon was destined for human conquest. By contrast, Muir appreciated the way in which the
forests seemed to resist human effort in 1911, even though they scuttled his attempt to see a
rare water lily in its natural setting. Through these hoary, malarial men, South American forests
emerge as places of severe struggle. Their reactions to these difficulties are telling for Enright: one
gritted his teeth and planned future triumphs, while the other relished the unknowable tropical
expanses. The intellectual transition that Enright detects in the wider culture appears here as
a difference between Roosevelt, representing nineteenth-century adventuring, and Muir, who
attained the ecological mindset, but not quite the vocabulary, of his successors.
Next, Enright follows the traveling filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson between the World
Wars. This married couple produced movies that straddled the lines between “adrenaline-filled
adventure and serious scientific undertaking” (p. 36) and between exaggerations of wildness and
claims of domestication. Martin cut his teeth as a photographer for Jack London’s Snark voyage
before filming with Osa in a variety of tropical locales. Between 1916’s Cannibals of the South Seas
and 1937’s The Jungle Depths of Borneo, the Johnsons depicted tropical forests as appealing milieux
with their fair share of hazards but also precious, intriguing animals. Enright shrewdly imagines
that zoologists and biologists watching these films recognized the value of winning the hearts of
the mass audience. Proto-ecology in Muir becomes proto-rainforest conservation in the Johnsons.
Enright’s fifth subject, William Beebe, evangelized a style of patient observation to find
the hidden rhythms of tropical forests. His innovation, seen best in books about British Guiana,
was to describe immersion in the wild both from a scientist’s point of view and in the context
of a spiritual journey. Beebe stressed the harmony, even community, he witnessed in the jungle.
Enright’s presentation of Beebe suffers slightly from a lack of trajectory. It is hard to get a hold of
him as a thinker, perhaps because his activities between World War I and the late 1950s remain
hazy here. Enright does a better job of fleshing out the jungle visitors in her last chapter, on
the botanists David Fairchild and Richard Evans Schultes. Fairchild looked to bridge American
agriculture and the “vast storehouses of utterly unknown material” (p. 116) that he found in the
tropics. He grew such plants on his property in South Florida in the 1930s, believing that the taste
of fresh bael fruit or “strange little pineapples” connected him directly to the experience of the
wild. Schultes, too, saw a link between using tropical plants domestically and experiencing the
forest firsthand. His trip to Colombia in 1939 yielded insights on the hallucinogenic, healing, and
anesthetic qualities of flora that were unknown to even well-read botanists. For Enright, Schultes
represents the flowering of rainforest advocacy, devoted to the protection of tropical biodiversity
and the people who lived with it.
Throughout The Maximum of Wilderness, Enright focuses on “interplays between scientific
information and cultural narratives” (p. 5) to show how jungle concepts have been more about
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notions of transcendence and authenticity than about land. The book’s argument rests on the
connection between experts and audiences; together, they form the “American imagination.” The
phrases that Enright uses to describe that dialogue, however, are strategically vague. Her figures
“pointed the next generation” forward; they “inspired” others; they “fostered sympathy” for
faraway places; and they “struck a chord with the public.” This comes close to willing a population
with particular ideas into existence, or, at least, conflating accessibility with popularity. On page
76, the “popular image” of the jungle appears, and from that point, Enright treats it as if it is
something she has demonstrated. She describes certain viewpoints as holding “currency” in the
United States, but it is never clear how popular any of those ideas were, or if Enright’s septet had
anything to do with it. That said, her analysis of these individuals works well as an intellectual
history, released from the burden of representing the consumers of films, magazine articles, and
tropical super-foods.
Although the book may not directly address American interests in (or ignorance of)
tropical forests writ large, it has much to teach us about practitioners’ divergent views on tropical
zones. It also shows how illuminating professional biography can be in the hands of a skilled
writer. Another of Beebe’s dozen lines of advice from 1958 was to speak in a “low monotone”
while in the field. Enright disregards this suggestion in her prose, to the great reward of her
readers. She skillfully brings to life a half-century of thought about the distant jungles that fueled
fascination and fear.
Edward Slavishak
Susquehanna University

Migration: A World History. MICHAEL H. FISCHER. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp.
xiii+149, maps, images, chronology, notes, further reading, websites, index. $75.00 cloth, $19.95
paper. ISBN 978-0-19-0766433-4.
Migration remains one of the most debated issues facing humanity today. It touches
on such a range of vital concerns, including demography, economic development, national
security, environmental sustainability, and basic human rights, to name a few. The centrality of
migration should hardly be surprising given that migration has been intertwined with most of
the seminal events in human history stretching from the earliest humans to move out of Africa to
contemporary movements of peoples. Indeed, migration is one of the most fundamental ways in
which people make and remake places and ultimately transform the Earth into our home. This
is a central theme in Michael Fisher’s Migration: A World History. As Fisher explains at the end of
the preface: “From the earliest Homo sapiens to all of us today, migration, in its many forms, has
remained central to world history” (p. xiii).
Fisher’s book is one of the most recent entries in the New Oxford World History series.
The series is situated within the recent shift toward so-called “big history” perspectives and
covers a mix of chronological (e.g., The World from 1450 to 1700), thematic (e.g., Democracy: A
World History), and geographical volumes (e.g., China in World History). Fisher’s book fits
among the thematic volumes, but it follows a rather straightforward, chronological approach
to examining migration over the course of human history divided across five chapters. The first
chapter covers the migration of early humans stretching from 200,000 BCE to 600 CE. Initially,
humans organized themselves into nomadic and semi-nomadic bands that coalesced and divided
based on population size, ecological conditions, and seasonal shifts, among other factors. Some
of these bands began moving out of Africa around 70,000 to 60,000 BCE, and in a comparatively
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short time, had fanned out across most of Eurasia, and somewhat later the Americas. Already
by around 10,000 BCE, humans had reached most of the planet’s land surface, excluding a few
remote locations such as Greenland and New Zealand. Around 1000 CE, the first Scandinavians
from the Old World arrived in Newfoundland and made contact with Amerindian groups,
marking the point at which humanity had finally encircled the Earth. These migrations were
more than a simple process of diffusion as they were interlinked with the discovery of agriculture,
permanent settlements, writing, and more generally the beginnings of civilization. It is here that
Fisher succeeds in weaving together a sweeping portrait of the interaction between migration
and topography, climate change, demography, genetic change, technology, and the rise and fall of
successive dynasties, empires, and civilizations.
Chapter two is largely framed around the rise of Islam, spanning 600 to 1450 CE, roughly
from the life of Muhammad to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. This alone covers nearly
half of the chapter, while developments in other parts of the Old Word fill much of the remainder.
Only the last couple pages address events in the Americas. Regardless of the region, the power
of migration as a point of mixture and conflict between peoples is the main theme. Chapter three
continues the story up to 1750 and generally coincides with the age of exploration and early
colonialism. This period witnessed some of the first migrations possessing the speed, volume,
and reach to begin connecting far flung places around the globe within a single lifetime. This new
period of interconnection coincided with some of the first systematic efforts to restrict migration,
such as declaration by Japanese rulers that the country was closed to outsiders or the Ming Dynasty
prohibiting subjects from undertaking sea voyages abroad. Chapter four covers the late colonial
period up to World War I. This period saw the peak of migration to the Americas. The chapter
emphasizes the varied conditions accompanying these migrations, especially focusing on African
slavery and indentured servants among some Europeans. Perhaps predictably, attempts to close
off countries from migration and the wider world foundered and were eventually abandoned.
The final chapter covers the relatively brief time since 1914, yet the brevity of this period still
managed to entail massive, and unfortunately often very destructive, migrations. The World Wars
and subsequent decolonization across much of Africa and Asia are major foci, as are more recent
topics, like the plight of guest workers in the wake of the Libyan civil war or the establishment of
freedom of movement within the European Union. After recounting the prominence and impact
of migration since our earliest times, Fisher concludes that “…we are all migrants and migration
history is the core of the world history” (p. 125). The book ends with brief chronology of major
migration events in world history, a list of further readings, and websites related to migration.
Fisher is to be commended for producing a well-written and easy-reading piece while
managing to cover much ground in a slim volume. Fisher contextualizes the broader narrative
by drawing upon travel accounts, memoirs, and autobiographies to integrate firsthand accounts
of migrant experiences, especially in the later chapters. These stories remind us of the intensely
personal and emotional aspects of migration, something easy to lose when examining events far
removed from our time. The book features several helpful maps and attractive images. Given
the broad swath of time covered and the intent of the series to keep the volumes short and to the
point, it would be unfair to criticize that this or that migration event was omitted while ones of
seemingly lesser consequence were included. Those are rather subjective decisions that authors
have to weigh against other considerations, like ensuring relatively balanced geographic coverage,
in a book such as this. At times, the book could have made the linkages between migration and
specific historical events more explicit. For example, the book succinctly summarizes the litany
of territorial changes following World War I, but then simply concludes “all these changes in
government led to many emigrations and immigrations” (p. 106). The book could have dug a bit
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deeper into the assumptions and motivations of the Allied Powers during the peace talks that
resulted in widespread territorial restructuring, although this too might be an unfair criticism
given the prescribed length of the series.
Perhaps the most substantive critique would be that the book never explicitly defines
migration. Instead, the book adopts a rather vague notion that nearly all of us are migrants, since
“very few people remain in their parents’ home throughout life, never spending significant time
away” (p. xiii). This leads to the characterization of Napoleon as an immigrant from Corsica and
his military campaigns as migration events. Similarly, Stalin was also a migrant from Georgia,
while the Chinese communists enduring the Long March were emigrants. In many ways, the book
is more about mobility than migration, at least as migration is traditionally defined. Regardless,
Fisher is to be commended for producing an excellent introduction to the role of migration through
human history that will prove useful for those seeking a quick, broad overview of the topic.
Joshua Hagen
Marshall University

California through Russian Eyes, 1806-1848. JAMES R. GIBSON, compiler, translator, and editor.
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. 492, photographs, tables, glossary,
bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN 9-780-8706-2421-6.
Volume 2 of the University of Oklahoma Press series of Early California Commentaries,

California Through Russian Eyes is a compilation of thirty-two translated reports, journals, letters,
and memoirs written by Russians who visited Alta (New) California in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Active in Alaska since the mid-eighteenth century, advances in shipbuilding
allowed a growing number of Russians to visit California shores for trade and restocking of
provisions. Detailed accounts tell of not only the landscape of Alta California, but of Spanish
garrisons and missions, relations between colonists and the indigenous population, the cultures
and outward appearances of the (Native) Americans, and the potential for trade in the region.
As scholars of the U.S. West seldom have access to Russian materials, this volume is of particular
value for the access it provides beyond Spanish—and later English—language sources. As
scholarly disciplines are often divided by country, this volume reveals the interconnectivity of the
Pacific, as ships continued on to Hawaii, Manila, Calcutta, or Canton. The collection documents
the decline of the Spanish empire and the tumultuous transitions of the territory from Spain to
Mexico and finally the United States.
One of the most compelling documents in the collection is an excerpt from Russian state
official Nikolay Rezanov’s report on his six-week visit to San Francisco Bay in 1806. Rezanov
is known best for his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Conceptión Argüello, daughter of
the commandant of the local presidio (fortress). More significant than the officer’s love interest,
however, was his confidence that trade with California could provide abundantly for Russia’s
possessions in Alaska and the Far East. Rezanov reported enthusiastically on Alta California’s
potential to supply wheat, cattle, wool, horses, and wine. Warning the Minister of the Interior that
he had to act quickly—“For God’s sake, gracious sire, examine patriotically the circumstances of
this territory” (p. 56)—Rezanov proposed building granaries and organizing regular trade with
Canton. (The Minister evidently listened, since in 1812 the Russian Fort Ross was founded to the
north of San Francisco.) The Alta California portrayed by Rezanov was a paradise on earth. He
praised the Spanish for their efficient administration.
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A very different picture emerges in documents that follow. While Rezanov focused on
the achievements of the Spanish, subsequent Russian visitors witnessed a California in decline.
California was expensive, several visitors noted, bringing no gain to the Spaniards “except the
conversion of several hundred heathens into Christians” (p. 90). Fewer and fewer Spanish ships
visited, leaving missions unprovisioned and salaries unpaid. Future visitors agreed with Rezanov
that the land was abundant, writing excitedly of “watermelons, muskmelons, peaches…grapes…
wheat, beans, peas” (p. 112), as well as various trees, animals, birds, minerals, and precious metals
(pp. 200-205). Yet this abundance did not bring prosperity to the “half-wild, sleepy, and indolent
Spaniards” (p. 168) who lived there in 1821. The situation only worsened when Mexico gained
independence, cutting off Spanish aid to the territory completely. The ensuing decades saw
frequent uprisings, adding chaos to poverty, neglect, and soon drought as well. “What remains
of niggardly nature is being destroyed by internal strife and violent anarchy!” (p. 354) remarked
a visitor in 1830. When the Mexican government decided to secularize California missions in
1833, entire settlements fell into disrepair. It was clear to the Russians that not California, but
Californios [California-born Spaniards] were to blame.
While Californians today imagine kind friars and peaceful Indians coexisting in harmony
at the region’s twenty-one missions, a recurrent theme of the Russian reports is the misfortune
of the California indigenous population. Already in 1806, Rezanov was told by the governor that
nearly all the Indians perished in Baja California, and that since the establishment of missions,
two-fifths of those in Alta California had as well (p. 70). Later visitors referred to the melancholy
of the Indian converts, their inability to adjust to a European way of life, and their often premature
deaths. Since the Indians did not understand the Catholic rituals they practiced, a Russian who
visited in 1816 supposed that “the deepest gloom must rule the minds and hearts of these poor
people, who can only mimic the external ceremonies by eye and then copy them” (p. 89). Some
visitors described an even worse scenario: “Even the situation of Negro slaves cannot be worse,”
an 1824 visitor lamented. “The Indians are subject totally to the unlimited arbitrariness and
tyranny of the friars” (p. 286). To guard their chastity, young Indian women were kept locked
up, while the men faced “corporal punishment, imprisonment, and shackles” for unpunctual
fulfillment of the friars’ demands (pp. 292-93).
Russians themselves demonstrated a variety of attitudes toward the Indian population.
While they lamented their mistreatment and forcible conversion, they shared European
stereotypes of the natives as “wild,” “half-savage and savage tribes” (pp. 252, 255). One Russian
visitor made reference to the Indians’ “extreme backwardness,” declaring that “this stupid and
plain people…ranks even lower than the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and Van Dieman’s
Land” (p. 293). Yet they consistently reported positive relations with the Native Americans, and
remained hopeful about their civilization. Commenting on the region’s agricultural potential,
an 1821 visitor suggested that the Indians could be taught to work industriously (“without the
necessity of having to buy black slaves to do so” [p. 155]). “Many travelers compare the Indians
…to cattle on account of their [i.e., the Indians’] marked stupidity,” a frequent visitor from Alaska
noted, but he explained that it was not the Indians’ fault, but that the land’s abundance incited no
need for mental engagement (p. 348).
The 1830s saw the beginning of the end of Mexican California. Once the government began
granting land to non-Catholic settlers, Russians reported (U.S.) Americans moving westward and
settling near the Russian Fort Ross. There was concern about a possible American takeover. By the
1840s, visitors encountered Europeans and Asians, blacks and whites, who lived not at missions,
but in towns with taverns, mills, fine homes, and large trading houses. The document collection
ends in 1849, following the cession of the territory to the United States. Referring to the discovery
of gold in the region, the final report describes Alta California as “an enchanting land,” a “New
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Eldorado” (p. 459), lamenting Russia’s sale of Fort Ross in 1842. Despite the hardships the visitors
witnessed, the message they transmitted to St. Petersburg can perhaps best be summed up by a
Russian saying: vsegda tam luchshe, gde nas net! It is always better where we are not!
Sharyl Corrado
Pepperdine University

Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. JO GULDI. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012. Pp. 297, b&w illustrations, index. $42.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-674-05759-3.
Roads have long offered an attractive topic for research in historical geography, for they
combine and concretize many broad questions through their linking-together of the landscape.
Indeed, few historical geographers have made it to the end of their career without managing to
comment on the importance of roads, and the field is therefore well-covered by a diversity of
works ranging from Carl Sauer’s “The Road to Cíbola” (1932) to J. B. Jackson’s “Roads Belong in
the Landscape” (1994).
Yet even a thoroughly studied topic can yield important new insights when subjected to
a fresh draw of primary sources, as Jo Guldi proves in her fascinating book Roads to Power. While
many scholars of landscape have recently turned their attention to the phenomenological kinetics
of mobility (well-summarized in Merriman et al.’s roundtable “Landscape, mobility, practice”
[2008]), Guldi reminds us that roads still run through structures of power, finance, technology, and
politics. By closely scrutinizing the forces which drove a wave of Parliamentary road construction
in Britain from 1726 to 1848, Guldi demonstrates how turnpike authority, centralized in London
under the aegis of expert engineers, was a key component in the construction of British unification
and hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She couples this political story of a
massifying “infrastructure state” with an attention to the social experiences of travelers, who
alternately welcomed and detested the new roads, and who fashioned new class behaviors to suit
an increasingly interconnected nation.
The book targets the conventional wisdom that Britain’s ascent on the world stage during
this period was characterized by a laissez-faire politics in which Parliament allowed the Industrial
Revolution to follow its natural course. To the contrary, Guldi argues, “both the construction and
finance of the transport revolution were set in gear by government funding, made possible by
the emergence of a state bureaucracy” (pp. 28–29). The consolidation of Scotland and England—
and later Ireland—into the new political confection called Britain led the burgeoning “fiscal-
military” state to preempt local turnpike trusts and begin constructing a national transportation
network which allowed troops, commercial wagoners, and mail carriers to stitch the formerly
disparate regions together. Guldi is particularly effective at showing how Scottish representatives
to Parliament, through strategic control of infrastructure committees, were instrumental in
drumming up the political support necessary for the new road-building projects. The national
roads therefore become financial transfer mechanisms from England’s wealthy core to the poorer,
newly-integrated British peripheries.
A new class of technical professionals also formed an important bloc of political support for
the “infrastructure state,” even as their use of measurements and formulae made their arguments
seem apparently apolitical. The engineers Thomas Telford and John Loudon Macadam, through
their personal competition and their rubbishing of vernacular turnpike-maintenance techniques,
popularized the idea that British roads should be standardized, centrally planned, and nationally
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financed. Thus, even when their projects vastly overran cost projections—as in the Menai Straits
Bridge on the Holyhead Road—they enjoyed generous financial support from the state throughout
this period.
By 1848, Guldi argues, a backlash against the Parliamentary roads brought this first era
of state infrastructure support to a close. She traces two main currents of discontent. On the one
hand, radicals and proto-socialists such as William Cobbett and Richard Milnes worried that
the roads intruded on local customary rights and served little use to the poor, for whom the
national commercial trade carried by the roads brought more oppression than opportunity. On
the other, economic libertarians such as Edward Knatchbull and Joshua Toulmin Smith resented
the way that centralized roads redistributed wealth, and argued for a return to local management.
Ultimately the rhetoric of the former group was swallowed up by the more powerful political
position of the latter.
Here it becomes clear that Roads to Power is not just a work of historical geography but
a political parable for the present day—a hunch confirmed by the blurb from the electronic
media activist Tim O’Reilly, who calls the book “required for those who aim to shape the twenty-
first century.” Guldi is straightforward about the symmetry which she sees between Britain’s
infrastructure age and the late twentieth-century digital age: “History was repeating itself,”
she says in the conclusion (p. 208). Both then and now a period of state-financed, nationalistic
infrastructure investment gave way to a hostile backlash against centralization, articulated in
both radical and libertarian terms. Guldi furthermore cautions that the participatory utopian
prospects of infrastructure-driven connectivity are not automatically guaranteed by the march of
technology. In a fascinating (though somewhat orphaned) final chapter, she shows how Britain’s
national roads, far from ushering in a hopeful era of sociability amongst a newly-united people,
in fact became the scene for a renewed entrenchment of behavioral distinctions along class lines.
Citizens who had once walked together on the same mud roads now traveled in total isolation
from one another, with the new middle class developing a polite and privileged world consisting
of private coaches and hotels. Guldi’s implication—that our digital era faces the same forces of
centrifugal class fragmentation and political mistrust—is self-evident.
One difficulty with Roads to Power is that it is in some parts ineffectively signposted, and
thus, within the impressive mass of primary material which Guldi has accumulated, it is sometimes
difficult to discern any given paragraph’s relative subordination to the larger argumentative arc.
Scholars of an internationalist bent may also find the book’s meager comparisons between Britain
and other contemporary infrastructure state projects frustrating. However, in its impressive depth
of research, its careful reading of history, and its deft delivery of an important and relevant political
lesson, Roads to Power is a valuable new look at a favorite topic for the historical geographer.
Garrett Dash Nelson

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape. DONALD C. JACKSON.
Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Pp. x+332, images, index. $34.95
hardcover. ISBN 9-780-8229-4426-3.
Donald C. Jackson’s book examines Americans’ relationships with dams and damming
projects as recorded and interpreted through the medium of picture postcards. Focusing on a
period from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Jackson approaches both dams and
postcards as part of a larger trends in American history. The book is clearly a passion project,
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and does a fine job repackaging some of the more abstract points about the human-environment
relationship that can be found in cultural geography, environmental history, and science and
technology studies (STS) scholarship. The key to the book, as many might suspect, are the
illustrations.
Jackson identifies a two-pronged thesis for his book which links together the subjects
of dams and picture postcards. He argues that postcards represent a very particular social
and cultural medium, capturing many different elements of a rapidly industrializing and
technologizing United States. Dams, ranging from small local “crib” dams to major New Deal-
era projects, are a similarly unique infrastructural representation of “America’s technologically-
driven political economy” (p. 10). For these reasons, Jackson asserts that dam postcards are far
more than “souvenirs of an antiquarian past,” but rather “an entrée into understanding how
Americans have used hydraulic technology to transform the environment” in both positive and
negative ways (ibid.).
The book is organized into eight chapters and postscript along with bibliographic notes
and an index. In addition to introducing the major arguments of the text, chapter one provides
a lengthy overview of the entire book. Crucially, it is here that Jackson makes a number of
connections between the social history of the first half of the twentieth century and the history of
dam technology and design, illustrating how specific choices were made in the dam design and
construction process to send a particular ideological message to the general public. Subsequent
chapters examine different components of this connection while also discussing the role of picture
postcards. Chapter two in particular examines the production of these “texts” and how changing
materials and techniques contributed to new types of images. Jackson focuses on a “Golden
Age” of U.S. postcard culture—perhaps, a “Golden Age” of U.S. postal culture more generally—
culminating shortly after the end of the First World War.
Subsequent chapters offer studies of various elements of this dam-picture postcard hybrid
culture, and are all richly illustrated with examples drawn mainly from the author’s personal
collection. Chapter three offers a useful primer on dam construction, explaining how engineers
made choices about materials and design. While certainly the most engineering-heavy part of the
book, this chapter does a fine job of illustrating the “Monumental” nature of dams referenced in
the title. Chapter four offers a look at when dam projects fail, focusing on significant disasters of
the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of which (for better or worse) were also
documented with picture postcards. Though interesting in its own right, this chapter may have
benefitted from drawing connections to the geographic literature on disasters and memorialization,
as there are several points in this section of the book which suggest that dam disasters and other
engineering failures may hold insights to scholars studying other types of catastrophes.
Chapter five looks at the reasons for using dams in the first place. Although this
chapter feels out of place organizationally, like chapter three it offers a strong primer about the
reasons for damming along with good illustrations of dams built for that specific purpose. The
longest of the book, this chapter would be excellent accompaniment to any course focusing on
environmental technologies. Chapter six shifts gears to focus on the meaning of major damming
projects constructed during the New Deal, including the Hoover Dam, Norris Dam and the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, dams in the Central Valley
of California, and the project at Fort Peck. This chapter combines well with the previous two for
looking at the specific circumstances—both historical and technological—that surrounded each
project. Of course, more detailed studies have been completed of each project, but the text makes
for an interesting synoptic case.
Chapter seven is the first in the text to directly approach the environmental concerns
associated with hydraulic projects. This chapter is certainly one of the more potent and discussable
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parts of the text, tracing opposition to dam projects since the late nineteenth century, but focusing
on the controversy surrounding Hetch Hetchy. Again, and most curiously, this chapter features
illustrations of the controversy itself illustrated with picture postcards. This chapter could have
been longer, or perhaps integrated more closely with chapter five on the uses of dams; however,
the purpose of the book is not to focus on such controversial issues, either.
Chapter eight and the postscript both look at the demise of postcard culture amidst the
rise of amateur photography in the U.S., a culture which has undoubtedly been even further
impacted by digital and smartphone photography. These sections and especially chapter eight
would have been strengthened with a discussion of contemporary photo culture and how dams
figure in. This is perhaps symptomatic of the book’s main shortcoming, which is that it doesn’t
always deliver on the promise to trace dam history as part of a broader techno-cultural history of
the U.S., and in particular readers are left hanging as the book ends when strong and organized
public concern with environmental protection began in earnest around the time of the Viet Nam
War. Perhaps these connections are missed due to the organization of the book’s chapters, which
feels a bit random at times. The index also would have benefitted from a geographic sorting of the
dams featured in the book’s many illustrations, which would aid in locating projects with local or
hometown significance.
The strengths outweigh these minor issues, however, and in particular the book’s ability
to literally show students how visual imagery contributes to the formation of environmental
discourse. These images in the book (and those like them, related to a range of U.S. environments
like National Parks, forests, shorelines, aerial photography, etc.) are critical to informing what we
think of as “natural.” As such Pastoral and Monumental is an interesting and unique project that
could be useful to scholars and courses in environmental history, cultural geography, and STS.
Jordan Howell
Rowan University

Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast.
CLAY MATHERS, JEFFREY M. MITCHEM, and CHARLES M. HAECKER, editors. Tucson: The
University of Arizona Press, 2013. Pp. xii+382, maps, tables, appendices, index, references. $60.00
hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8165-3020-5.
In recent years universities, federally funded granting agencies, and research institutes
have increasingly encouraged (and outright pushed) scholars to engage in high-profile,
interdisciplinary research projects. Under this scenario a collection of experts from cognate fields
convene to answer some of sciences’ most compelling and complex questions. There are obvious
challenges when trying to mesh research from disparate fields (e.g., background, approach, and
terminology), but all too frequently the published product of such collaborative work is a collection
of disjunct essays where editor(s) seldom make connections across chapters in the anthology. I am
pleased (and relieved) to report that Native and Spanish New Worlds is an exception. The book is
a tightly woven collection of essays that are well integrated around a central theme and unified
purpose. If interdisciplinary research is the wave of the future, here is an example of how to do it
correctly.
Starting at the 2009 Society for American Archaeology meeting, an aggregate of scholars
from anthropology, archaeology, geography (dendrochronology), and history met numerous times
to engage in dialog that would help us better understand the “interactions between sixteenth-
century Native and European communities in what is now the Southwestern and Southeastern
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United States”(p. 2). Although the book considers all of the major Spanish colonial expeditions
that trooped around the greater Spanish borderlands, the focus is on the interactions between
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (1540-1541) and the Puebloan peoples of present-day New
Mexico as well as between Hernando de Soto (1539-1543) and the Mississippian cultures of the
Southeast (extending from modern Florida and the Carolinas to eastern Texas).
The book begins with an introductory chapter that explains how the edited volume was
intellectually conceived and discussion about the incomplete nature of existing data sources.
The remainder of the book is divided into seven sections each addressing a specific aspect of
Native-Spanish interaction. Section I (Native Perspectives) is a single chapter that attempts to
bring to light a Native American perspective on the Spanish entradas. The authors draw out
active Zuni voices to interpret Spanish presence in North America, but sadly the chapter is largely
anecdotal and incredibly underdeveloped. It is no wonder that this chapter is largely forgotten in
the concluding section. Sections II through VI carefully consider such topics as history of contact,
climate change, introduction of diseases, political organization, and external conflict. Each of these
sections follows a predictable pattern beginning with a relevant discussion of conditions in the
American Southwest followed by a look at the same issue in the American Southeast. Clearly the
individuals selected to write each of the chapters in these five sections are luminaries in their field,
however it is understandable if readers find some of the chapters less gripping than others. This
is not a criticism leveled at any of the authors’ work, rather it is simply the nature of the beast; the
book is not everything to everyone. In Section VII (Discussion) most of the loose ends are tied up.
Chapter 14 does a superb job of comparing and contrasting the regional Colonial Spanish entrada
strategies. For example, in the Southeast the Spanish transitioned from a militaristic approach to
missionizing activity, whereas in the Southwest they relentlessly pursued the accumulation of
wealth. The last chapter is by far the best and should be read first. Not only does it outline the
entire book, but it helps explain the key findings within each chapter.
An underlying theme coursing through the book (sometimes subtle, sometimes overt) is
the questioning of conventional wisdom and a call for more critical debate. Readers are repeatedly
reminded that because most data available on the Spanish Colonial period are incomplete (e.g.,
one-sided historical accounts and limited archaeological evidence), conclusions reached by early
scholars are mistaken at best. Within each of the book’s four main themes (climate, diseases,
political organization, and conflict) there are ample examples to illustrate that a new perspective
is needed if we are to fully understand early Native-Spanish interaction. For example, Chapter
5 shows that climate variability (annual fluctuations between hot and dry to cold and wet) had
a more significant impact on the success and failure of the early Spanish entradas than once
believed. In Chapter 9, Richard Chapman asserts that instead of the Pueblo peoples living in large
concentrated settlements year-round, they dispersed throughout the greater American southwest
between early spring and late fall because it was a more sustainable way to use the land. My
favorite example is found in Chapters 7 and 8 where readers learn that there was no pandemic
during the sixteenth century and the Native American population did not readily succumb to
European diseases as once believed. Instead, diseases were but one of many variables that led to
population decline over centuries of interaction with the Spanish. Collectively the authors have
effectively demonstrated that a new perspective with new dialog is needed if we are to fully
understand Native-Spanish interaction.
With the exception of Chapter 2 (as explained above), the book is a tremendous success and
a very enjoyable read. It is well organized and free of jargon. Scholars of various backgrounds and
experience will benefit from reading it and the dense bibliography will undoubtedly serve as a
valuable resource. The volume would be very appropriate for a graduate-level seminar, spawning
many healthy discussions. My only complaint as a geographer is the lack of high-quality maps to
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support the text. Sure, there are maps, but they are of poor quality and very limited value. Setting
aside this relatively minor criticism, I commend the editors and the authors for a great example
of how to bring together scholars with diverse backgrounds and publish an anthology that works
as a unit. In this case, the whole really is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Jeffrey S. Smith
Kansas State University

They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero- Era
California. DON MITCHELL. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. ix+529, notes,
bibliography, index. $26.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8203-4176-7. 
In They Saved the Crops, Don Mitchell provides a history of the California bracero program
that is both richly theoretical and solidly grounded in extensive archival research. Providing a
narrative that will appeal to both geographers and historians alike, Mitchell draws explicitly
from the work of classic cultural geographers such as Carl Sauer and Pierce Lewis to emphasize
the constructedness of the California landscape, reframing agricultural land as a site of struggle
between competing versions of social development. In practice, a theoretical emphasis on
economic and spatial systems leads Mitchell to focus on California braceros’ stark daily working
and living arrangements, demonstrating that growers intentionally allowed desperate living
conditions and facilitated job instability in order to ensure braceros’ relative powerlessness in the
face of grower exploitation.
Backing up his arguments with an array of government documents, union correspondence,
and oral histories, Mitchell argues decisively that growers invented the domestic labor shortage
that justified the establishment and continuation of the bracero program. Expanding on this point,
Mitchell begins his narrative in the 1930s and argues that the turn to bracero labor was due to a
combination of factors: the systematic rationalization of the rural landscape and agricultural labor;
the consolidation of California agriculture under a few anglo growers; and the prevalence of race-
based assumptions that led growers to decide that domestic workers would not be interested in
farm labor. With this list in mind, Mitchell argues that growers understood the bracero program
not as an emergency, wartime boost in the labor force, but as a way to ensure a steady supply
of “just in case” (p. 138) labor that could serve as strikebreakers and depress wages for both
domestic and foreign workers.
Mitchell goes on to offer a largely familiar history of the bracero program populated by
greedy growers, apathetic government administrators, and protracted labor strikes. However,
within this discussion, Mitchell emphasizes that growers used the bracero program as an
opportunity to change the very landscape of agriculture, reducing farm workers to pure labor
power—to predictable factors in the system of production. Upon gaining control of Works Progress
Administration camps after World War II, California growers set about replacing family residences
with bunkhouses and dismantling worker community centers and social organizations. Mitchell
spends a great deal of time describing the degrading working conditions that followed the early
WPA system. Growers allowed camps to deteriorate, with workers lacking access to flush toilets,
heat in the winter, and, at times, even potable drinking water. As California agricultural expanded
and growers imported more and more braceros, these factors, along with the camps’ extreme
geographic isolation, meant that almost all domestic workers were driven out of agricultural
employment. In this way, Mitchell argues, growers were able to create a self-fulfilling prophecy
in which domestic workers refused farm jobs due to bad infrastructure and worse pay even as
growers claimed that there just was no domestic labor pool available to do the work.
Reviews 411
For Mitchell, the structural changes wrought by the bracero program were ultimately
so fundamental that it was almost impossible for either union activists or the state and federal
government to conceive of any viable labor alternative. Although a series of strikes led by groups
such as the National Farm Labor Union and Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee were
mounted against big growers, Mitchell argues that these strikes only succeeded in achieving
minor improvements in wages, not the needed structural change. At the same time, growers
successfully appealed for public support, citing the very landscape of labor they had constructed
as an explanation for the seeming lack of options. Buying into these explanations, as well as the
regional economic importance of big California growers, Congress again and again extended
the life of the “emergency” bracero program and responded to calls for its disbandment with a
series of largely-ignored, investigative studies. Mitchell sees the tide turning, with government
inspectors arriving at bracero camps to punish the worst offenders, only after broad public
sentiment turned against the bracero program in the late 1950s.
Mitchell’s theoretical argument is most compelling when paired with the individual
stories of braceros, activists, and labor leaders. To this end, he relies heavily on correspondence
from labor leader Ernesto Galarza to describe worker experiences and document the complex
relationships between regional labor unions. Similarly, he incorporates the personal narratives
of colorful figures such as doctor-cum-labor-activist Ben Yellen and Henry Anderson, a Berkeley
graduate student who advocated on behalf of braceros. In contrast, however, a surprisingly small
number of individual braceros make it into his narrative, giving Mitchell’s otherwise exceedingly
well-researched study a lopsided feel. Similarly, while Mitchell makes passing reference to the
systematic discrimination of women in agricultural jobs and the importance of family housing to
labor patterns, greater theoretical attention to the gendered nature of the agricultural landscape
would add further depth to his argument. All this said, Mitchell provides a nuanced, complex
study within what is already a lengthy volume. His thoughtful theoretical engagement with
issues of landscape, power, race, and class offers a useful, new perspective on a well-studied
period in the history of labor in America.
Sarah Stanford-McIntyre
College of William and Mary

American Capitals: A Historical Geography. CHRISTIAN MONTÈS. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2014. University of Chicago Geography Research Paper, No. 247. Pp. iv+394, maps,
halftones, diagrams, index. $65.00 cloth; $7.00 to $52.00 e-book versions. ISBN 978-0-226-08048-2
cloth; 978-0-226-08051-2 e-book.
The fifty state capitals in the United States seem to include oddities. Eight are small cities
(under 40,000 people) in states that have larger cities; others are somewhat larger but pale in
comparison to other cities in their state. Some are remote from parts of the population. Dalhart, a
town in Texas, is farther from Austin than it is from Santa Fe, Denver, Oklahoma City, Topeka, and
Cheyenne (the last two in states not even bordering Texas). Juneau is a small city in “Southeast
Alaska,” which is a large region (about six percent of the state) but connected to the rest of Alaska
by a strip of U.S. land less than 20 miles wide at one point. You can’t reach Juneau by car without
a ferry ride. When Alaska became a state in 1959, Juneau remained the capital even though
Anchorage was more than four times as big. Many think Juneau is the most beautiful capital, but
its capitol less beautiful than many a post office.
412 Reviews
There’s much more to America’s capitals than all that. In his book Christian Montès
shows us general patterns—locations, sizes, economic structures, recent economic successes and
failures, senses of identity—and explains the patterns make sense considering how the nation
and its states have evolved through history. His book is a solid achievement, and I recommend
it heartily to historical, regional, and urban geographers. Some ideas are original, and certainly
the book as a whole is an original assemblage. Teachers will find it a valuable source for lectures,
discussions, and student research. They can ask students to study a city in the light of Montès’s
generalizations, and to challenge him on various points. The exposition is not technical, so one
can use the book with beginning students.
Montès, a French geographer at Université Lumière Lyon 2, covers many topics, has a
wealth of quantitative data, and jam-packs the book with petit faits vrais. He draws on archives
and a wide range of secondary literature, including state and city histories and interpretations by
geographers and other social scientists. He cites 372 references. He applies standard concepts like
the urban hierarchy and trade centers, and although I don’t remember him using the phrase, one
may see a sophisticated use of “site and situation.” Cartographer Marie-Laure Trémélo provides
useful diagrams illustrating the author’s arguments.
Much that seems odd isn’t, really. A lack of centrality is generally the result of choices
made by small populations at the time of statehood (earlier, for the original thirteen). Montès
examines those choices in chapters 3 and 4. From the initial conditions, patterns of locations,
sizes, and other features emerged from historical processes that in no way resembled periodic
spatial optimization by social planners. Economies changed radically, but path-dependence was
enormous. At statehood (1864) Nevada’s population (under 40,000) chose their territorial capital,
Carson City, to be the state capital. Now, Nevada has about 2.8 million people, Las Vegas—400-
plus miles away—is more than ten times as big as Carson City, Reno is more than four times as
big, and the capital is … Carson City. In Texas any remoteness of Austin is due more to Texas’s
retaining its enormous size throughout history than to Austin’s location. My own capital is Boston.
Four other capitals—Albany, Montpelier, Hartford, and Concord—are closer to me. I often feel
remote from “Boston” (a.k.a. as “Big Dig”) as political complex, but Boston was a coastal port of
entry long before my town existed, and history kept us in a corner of Massachusetts rather than
in New York or Vermont (the town abuts both states) or Connecticut (origin of some early settlers)
or New Hampshire (which escaped from Massachusetts in 1691).
Three successive chapters (5, 6, and 7) are of special note: one is on history up to the
1950s, the next on history since then, and the third has three case studies that represent important
categories for Montès. The cases are: Columbus, which grew from small size to overtake Cleveland
and Cincinnati and become a player on the national scene; Des Moines, which became Iowa’s most
important city yet remains medium-sized on the national scale; Frankfort, which has remained a
small place (“the ever-small capital” (p. 275)). It is a real plus that Montès puts the history of each
city (and metro area, for Columbus and Des Moines) in the context of its state’s evolution in the
national economy. However, he slights the income and employment effects of medical centers and
branches of state universities (what Tim Bartik and George Erickcek call “eds and meds” effects).
As we would expect, a major theme in Montès’s history is the role of a capital’s economic
hinterland. It couldn’t develop a sizeable hinterland on its own, there being so many forces largely
beyond its control: railroads, airline routes, the spread of various industries (manufacturing, higher
education and medical care, high level producer services), internal and international migration,
and the later decline of manufacturing. State boundaries were not trade area boundaries, political
centrality and political power didn’t necessarily imply economic centrality and economic power.
Being “central” in a state was not sufficient—a nearby city in another state could have better
situation.
Reviews 413
Other chapters show Montès’s remarkable range. We find cultural geography in a nice
chapter on capitals as “places of memory” (p. 14). He brings in place names, sites, plats, architecture
of capitols, public spaces. He describes states’ frequent moves of capitals in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (the “migration of capitals” (p. 62)). When Sherman captured Atlanta in
1864 he wasn’t capturing the capital of Georgia; Atlanta did not replace Milledgeville until 1868
(Sherman devastated Milledgeville, too). Of more general interest is a chapter on the fate of cities
that were once capitals but then displaced—87 of them, in 44 states. Some did quite well, for
example New Castle (Delaware), Williamsburg, Iowa City, Golden (Colorado), and Monterey.
Heritage tourism and favorable situation in a metropolitan area were major factors.
Montès ventures sweeping generalizations, and some are wrong or at least seriously
misleading. Teachers may use them as openings for student discussion, but they need to correct
them before class ends. I mention just two here. He says that in a capital “[M]ost state employees
live in the suburbs or nearby metropolises, where they pay almost no taxes, leaving the inner city
to crumble” (p. 311). What about state income and sales taxes, and redistribution (through “state
aid formulas”) to local governments? He also says, “[A] capitol is not a factory” (p. 83) and “[A]
capital primarily produces laws rather than goods” (p. 309). That misses the point that a state
government produces services: education and research, medical care, highways, law enforcement
and justice, information, tourism marketing, and more. Many of the main bureaucrats that manage
production work in the capital city, and state universities are not unlike modern factories.
Montès thanks his editors. I can’t say “Amen.” There are many writing problems. They
don’t reduce the book’s value drastically for most readers, but one must use it with caution. It is
too long and too crammed with minutiae that will interest only narrow specialists, yet specialists
will know that Montès couldn’t help but pick out facts selectively. The proofreading is less
meticulous than we expect from Chicago.
A map showing all 50 capitals is small and hard to read. In each state it shows only the
capital if the capital is the largest city, otherwise only the capital and the largest city. My own
choice would be to show San Diego, San Jose, and San Antonio, which are in the U.S.’s top ten in
size, and San Francisco, Fort Worth, and El Paso, in the second ten, and also Reno, Tulsa, Tampa,
Orlando, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Charleston (South Carolina).
Finally, there are real clinkers, which provoke frowns as they pile up. One example: the
number of presidents and vice-presidents from the state of New York (p. 212). Montès misses one
president and ten vice-presidents; surely his “fact” screamed “Check me!” On the other hand,
why is that fact there in the first place? Other examples: where the Civil War began (p. 236);
the extent of insurance business in New York City (p. 243); the origin of the firm Delco (p. 259);
mixing up two different museums in Albany (p. 237). Three involve state universities: the names
of those in Madison and Lincoln (p. 230); the location of Texas A&M (p. 227); when SUNY came
to Albany (p. 51). Finally, embarrassing in a geographer’s book: Salt Lake City is “the largest city
between Denver and the Pacific Coast” (p. 244). Even if by “between” we mean at roughly the
similar latitude, Reno and Sacramento are larger.
Roger Bolton
Williams College
414 Reviews
Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition. AARON SACHS. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. xi+368, maps, notes, figures, index. $35.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-
17640-7.
One of the challenges of teaching nature-society relationships in geography is provoking

students to think beyond a dualistic notion of nature and society. The challenge is compounded
when attempting to explore how nineteenth-century Americans thought about and acted upon
nature. The Arcadian tradition in American environmental thought provides an outstanding
avenue for considering these complex ideas. In Arcadian America, Aaron Sachs explores the middle
landscapes that Arcadian thinkers and artists attempted to capture and create as they wrestled
with the borderlands of nature and culture, life and death, and wilderness and modernity. The
cast for Arcadian America includes well-known nineteenth-century American writers and thinkers
such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Washington Irving, and Margaret Fuller, as well as those who may be less well-known to history
and geography majors, such as Andrew Jackson Downing, William Cullen Bryant, Ignatius
Donnelly, Horace William Shaler Cleveland, Hamlin Garland, Henry George, and Edward
Bellamy. As important as the writers, activists, and planners to the story are the works of artists
such as Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, and Albert Bierstadt and the Civil War photographs
of Timothy H. O’Sullivan. What these diverse figures have in common is their attempts to
contemplate—perhaps comprehend—modernity, mortality, and morality at the intersection of
society and nature, civilization and savagery. Central to and representative of this tradition are
the garden cemeteries, such as Mount Auburn near Boston, that were established in antebellum
New England.
Yet Arcadian America is not simply a review of literary and artistic works of the Arcadian
tradition. Sachs weaves together the lives and thought of nineteenth-century Americans with
a memoir of his own experiences with death, illness, self-doubt, sadness, regret, friendship,
anxiety, familial relationships, aging, parenthood, and identity. This combination of history and
memoir is what makes Arcadian America a creative and unique contribution to the literature on
nineteenth-century American environmental thought. Sachs humanizes the figures of the past
by juxtaposing their life stories with his own. There is a danger, of course, in attempting to draw
parallels between past and present lives, but Sachs avoids forcing explicit comparisons while
offering the juxtaposition as a way of illuminating the broader human condition. The “lesson-
from-the-past” that is proposed for readers to contemplate is how nineteenth-century Arcadians
both imagined and established landscapes that synthesized the tensions of urban and rural, work
and repose, motion and rootedness, life and death, and nature and society. The narrative arc
drawn is from the antebellum height of Arcadianism, to reconciliation with the trauma of the
Civil War, to the decline of Arcadian thought with the ascendance of Progressivist efficiency,
rational management, and utilitarianism. Yet the decline of the tradition did not spell the death
of the consciousness cultivated by antebellum writers and artists. Sachs explains, “The Arcadian
tradition, though it lost momentum in the last third of the nineteenth century, never died or
disappeared, because Americans remained undecided about modernity, and about its tendency
to wipe the slate clean and plow under the past and rebuild from the ground up…We have never
been entirely modern” (p. 350).
The historical geographer will spot important geographical concepts—cultural landscape,
iconography, nature-culture, identity—but these ideas are mostly implicit rather than explicit in
the narrative of Arcadian America. Sachs acknowledges his debt to the work of William Cronon, but
he does not recognize or apply the analytical and theoretical perspectives of relevant geographers
such as Denis Cosgrove, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Wilbur Zelinsky, Donald Mitchell, Robert
Reviews 415
David Sack, and the like. Yet it would not be fair to criticize Sachs for not following disciplinary
pheromones outside of his area of interest and expertise. Sachs is an American Studies scholar
with a rich knowledge of literary and artistic sources, and the historical geographer has much
to learn from the touchstones of his field. Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border (1917),
for instance, is rarely on the radar in American historical geography, yet Sachs’ exploration of
Garland’s life and work suggests that such sources can inform geographical understandings of
the construction of cultural and symbolic landscapes. In A Son of the Middle Border, Garland “takes
a grimly honest look at both the triumphs of frontier development—which were always fleeting,
and always fraught—and the clear difficulties of pioneering, the disadvantages of coming of age
under a regime of oppressive agricultural labor, far removed from centers of urban culture and
intellectual diversity” (p. 215). Similarly, geographers will benefit from greater familiarity with
H.W.S. Cleveland. In his treatise Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West (1873),
for example, Cleveland “went beyond aesthetics, to consider labor conditions, housing patterns,
ecology, economics, sanitation, recreation, transportation, and the troubling rise of a distinctly
American consumerist capitalism, which seemed likely to have a massive impact on spatial
dynamics” (p. 246). Sachs proposes that Cleveland’s work represents the first urban planning
textbook.
Through his scholarship on the likes of Garland and Cleveland, Sachs reveals the richness
of the Arcadian tradition and its potential for application to the field of historical geography.
More common to the geographical tradition is the fieldwork that Sachs employs. As he visits
cemeteries, Indian burial mounds, and Civil War battlefields, Sachs demonstrates the importance
of interacting with such constructed spaces of commemoration. Sachs’ use of memoir to reflect
upon these spaces is likely to be the most controversial aspect of Arcadian America. Sachs is
remarkably candid in sharing his personal life as fodder for reflection. Some might question
whether this approach is self-indulgent or tangential. At his best though, Sachs offers a model for
geographers who strive to incorporate everyday spaces into an understanding of nature-society
relations. Sachs provides geographers with a reminder of the need to personalize and reflect upon
such experiences and to draw upon the humanities more thoroughly.
Andrew Milson
University of Texas at Arlington

Maps of Paradise. ALESSANDRO SCAFI. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 176,
maps, illustrations, index. $40.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-2260-8261-5.
Maps of Paradise is a distillation of Alessandro Scafi’s larger 2006 work Mapping Paradise:
A History of Heaven on Earth. Gone are pages of explanatory text, numerous examples, scores of
black-and-white illustrations, and scholarly apparatus like endnotes. In their stead is a shortened
book with enough verve for a wider audience yet enough scholarship for students and academ-
ics. In nine chapters Scafi—lecturer in medieval and Renaissance cultural history at the Warburg
Institute, University of London—demonstrates how the idea of paradise was conceived, illustrat-
ed, and mapped from ancient times to the present. Each chapter contains several sections of ex-
position with an array of images, a “Visual Interlude” discussing a particular (and exemplar) map
in more detail, and, finally, a short bibliographic essay. The result is a visually impressive and
thought-provoking study showing how people perceived, situated, and mapped Eden over time.
The first chapter explores how the ideas of Eden, gardens of delight, and golden ages in
the Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Islamic worlds blended together to create the notion
416 Reviews
of a terrestrial paradise. Scafi scrutinizes and analyzes the Bible, the Quar’an, and classical texts
demonstrate the evolving concept of paradise. The word itself is traced from its Median roots as
pari-daiza (“a walled enclosure”) through Persian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the languages of
Europe. The second, third, and fourth chapters take paradise from the written word to the car-
tographic image, describing how mapmakers placed past paradise, an event in space-time (the
temptation and fall of Adam and Eve), onto a spatial representation of the world. Scafi contends
that though the idea of placing an event on a map may seem odd to the modern mind, it is no
different than the idea that satellite map exactly represents the ever-changing surface of the earth.
The latter is, like the former, merely a snapshot in time; a representation of the earth, not the earth
itself. Scafi uses examples like the 1442 Mapa Mondi of Giovanni Leardo (which shows “paradixo
terestro” as a walled city in the farthest east); eleventh- and twelfth-century Beatus maps show-
ing scenes from Genesis in the orient; and the walled Garden of Eden scenes on the easternmost
reaches of the Ebstorf world map from the thirteenth century.
It is on these medieval maps of the world (the mappae mundi) where Scafi’s explanation
and analysis really shines. He notes that “On a medieval mappa mundi, a place took its importance
from the event that had occurred there” and the location of an “event-place” was “governed by
the rule of contiguity, not mathematically measured distance or direction” (p. 56). Thus, the map-
pae were not meant for travel or exactness, but were storytelling devices, with the beginning out
East, at the top (the map is properly “orient-ed”), the more recent past in the middle, and modern
times in the West. This is why the terrestrial paradise of Genesis was usually placed on the eastern
edge of the landmass. Moving west, many mappae mundi depicted scenes from Persian or Alexan-
drine history. Around the Holy Land, in Jerusalem, the center of the map, references to Jesus and
the crucifixion abound: it is the central event of Western Christian history. Finally, the western
edge of the earth shows Europe of the day. The Hereford map, as an example, portrays Eden at
the top and then progresses, as the eye moves southward through biblical and secular history
with representations of such things as the Tower of Babel, Alexander the Great’s camp, and the
crucifixion of Jesus. In Europe, contemporary cities and kingdoms dot the landscape. The map
also portrays the end of time, with references to the Christian end times and the return of Christ.
Such maps, then, were spatial and temporal representations of the world, and the paradise of
Eden can, without contradiction, coexist coterminously in time and space with those still living.
Chapters five through eight discuss the mapping of paradise during eras in which maps
became more scientifically produced spatial representations of the landscape. As the Renaissance
was dawning, mapmakers were incorporating notions of Greek climatic zones, Ptolemaic latitude
and longitude, and nautical rigor into their cartography. Where was the Edenic paradise to be
exactly placed in such geographies? As maps began to incorporate rhumb lines, graticules, more
precise renderings of coastlines, and contemporary knowledge of faraway places, paradise was
moved around or removed from the charts of the day. On Fra Mauro’s ca. 1450 world map, for
instance, Eden is moved to a roundel vignette in the lower left corner of the work. It is divorced
from the map itself, as “Fra Mauro’s intention was to map the regions of his own day, not to chart
the process of humankind’s history” (p. 94). Beginning in the late sixteenth century, scholars,
theologians, and mapmakers placed the historical paradise in historical Mesopotamia, ferreting
out proof in the biblical text and ancient authors. Others used the same clues to advocate for
Armenia or the Holy Land as the location of Eden. By the nineteenth century, the paradise of the
Bible was seen by many not as a factual truth, but a spiritual metaphor. Historians and archae-
ologists now sought the sources of Eden in the myths of the ancient civilizations of the Middle
East. Although most scholars had abandoned the notion of ever finding the physical paradise,
fundamentalist and fringe scholars still came up with theories, and maps, about the location of
paradise. Some posited that it was the land under the Indian Ocean, under the Mediterranean
Sea, or even in the sky.
Reviews 417
Scafi ends his book with a short meditation on maps of Thomas More’s Utopia and the
popularity of a good place (“Eu-topia”) that is also no place (“u-topia”), i.e., paradise. Scafi’s
contention is that the cartography of paradise reveals more about the cultural and intellectual
lives of the peoples involved in mapping the place than it does about Eden itself. Maps of Paradise
is another in a long line of works that portray maps not as just illustrations but cultural artifacts.
Because the notion of paradise is so long lived in Western thought, Scafi is able to write both an
intellectual history and a history of cartography following one idea through time. Maps of Para-
dise serves as a wonderful and colorful adjunct to those who already have his similar 2006 work
Mapping Paradise; it is a great introduction for those who are unfamiliar with Scafi’s earlier work.
Gene Rhea Tucker

Temple College

Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915. JESSICA ELLEN SEWELL.
University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Pp. xxxiii+232, maps, diagrams, illustrations, index. $75.00
cloth. ISBN 978-0-8166-6974-5.
How does a social movement use and shape urban space? How is the movement, in turn,
shaped by the space it inhabits and moves through? In Women and the Everyday City, Jessica Ellen
Sewell approaches these questions at the level of a single city—San Francisco—and sometimes
even at the scale of the city block. Combing through diaries, memoirs, city directories, photo-
graphs, and advertisements from the period 1890 to 1915 (which covers the 1906 earthquake and
aftermath), Sewell invites readers to roam the streets of downtown San Francisco in a woman’s
boots, learning to read the public built environment for signs of respectability and welcome (up-
holstered seating, flowers, tea), or their opposites (smoking, alcohol, dark wood). For the first
several chapters, Sewell explores the details of women’s increasing presence on sidewalks, on
public transportation, in shops, in restaurants and cafeterias, in theaters and movie houses, and
at parades and public rallies, along with the changing shapes and locations of such places, and
the evolving etiquette applied to behavior within them.
Sewell makes good use of women’s personal writings, and this grounding in actual ev-
eryday experiences is important to her central argument. Throughout the book, the imagined
or ideal version of a public space, the built physical version, and the experience of being in that
public space, are all held as distinct, but all influencing each other in a complicated dance, which
continues into the present. “Women in public are, to an extent, still a source of collective anxiety
today,” notes Sewell (p. xxiii). Similarly, abundant but carefully selected illustrations (including
clear, well-labeled maps) support her arguments throughout, in ways that geographers will cer-
tainly appreciate.
Perhaps Sewell’s rigid, repeating structure of ideal-built-experienced makes these chap-
ters feel more dissertation-like than some readers might prefer. It is no doubt difficult to make
a chapter titled “Errands” (Chapter 2) much more exciting than actual errands are, for most of
us. But the cumulative effect of so many well-presented details creates a convincing landscape
for the penultimate (and the most successful) chapter, “Spaces of Suffrage.” Here, the individual
elements are finally added together, and the reader immediately grasps the subtle differences
between a “parlor tea” and a “precinct meeting,” and how a residential threshold might become
a powerfully symbolic location. The clever strategies of suffragists to promote their cause (mes-
sages on napkins in ice cream parlors, lectures to the captive audience of passengers on a ferry,
for two examples) become more than clever when seen geographically, as efforts to claim public
418 Reviews
space. While this reader wanted to know more about how other movements such as labor and
temperance compared to (or even informed) the suffrage movement with their own uses of pub-
lic and private spaces, “Spaces of Suffrage” is a standout chapter that might easily be read on its
own, but which draws considerable richness from the chapters that precede it.
Sewell’s main actors are all white women in middle adulthood, middle-class or elite in
social status. This has obvious limitations. Other researchers have found that age is an important
factor in how cities are experienced, but that subject is not raised by Sewell’s sources. For class-
room use, this book might best be assigned with a book that has a stronger emphasis on race
and marginalized women. Susan Craddock’s City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San
Francisco (Minnesota University Press 2004), for example, might make an excellent companion
reading. Although the focus of Sewell’s work is squarely on (some) women’s experiences, there
is much here to interest scholars beyond feminist geography. Street car design, public transit
planning, culinary history, and the history of advertising all play a part in this story. The nearly
car-less San Francisco described here may seem alien, or even utopian, to some students, and (like
so much in this book) should promote discussions about how cities change, for whom, and why.
Penny L. Richards
UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference.
JENNY SHAW. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. xv+251, illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8203-4662-5.
In the decades prior to the emergence of the plantation complex characteristic of so

many European-held islands in the Caribbean, the region, like many other Atlantic locations of
encounter, settlement, and development, was marked by social, cultural, and racial fluidity. Jenny
Shaw’s study of Irish Catholics in the nascent period of England’s Caribbean empire captures
this notion perfectly. She begins with the premise that in this shifting social environment, most
Irish migrants were viewed as “others” by English elites and consequently accorded a status
little different from Africans; both groups were marginalized, and by many measures would fit
into the category of unfree labor. How the Irish confronted and worked within long-established
English social structures, Shaw contends, allowed them to navigate hierarchies and, ultimately,
separate themselves from Africans.
The alltagsgeschichte methodology Shaw employs requires reading into the empty spaces
left by archival sources which primarily represent the views of English colonial elites. The daily
experiences of both Irish and Africans are, for the most part, missing from the record, and she relies
on a creative reading of the sources to build her narrative, focusing on the “presence of absences”
and a reliance on an “informed imagination” (p. 9). While the problems with such an approach
are evident, happily there are few, if any, instances in which Shaw’s suppositions push beyond
responsible argument. Telling the story of the lived experiences of Irish West Indians whose
ethnicity and social status located them in the nebulous space between freemen and slaves also
requires confronting the overriding problem of the institutionalization of the plantation system
in the eighteenth-century British West Indies, which set out clear markers of difference based
around race and demography: black and enslaved versus white and free. Discovering the Irish
space in this didactic world, and reading backwards into the everyday life history of this group,
Shaw argues, is essential to illustrating the larger processes through which such a two-tiered
hierarchy was created. In so doing, she also calls attention to the smaller, but no less important,
social gradations that persisted long after slavery and race became the defining characteristics of
otherness.
Reviews 419
Shaw begins her study with a look at how the Irish were defined as different by English
elites, who accorded them a status of inferiority based on dress, sexual mores, and religion. The
same categories were applied to Africans, with the object of preserving a particular labor hierarchy
in the pre-slavery period. Before the mass importation of Africans, both they and the Irish were
equally critical to the success of the plantation enterprise and thus were viewed similarly insofar
as justification of their roles as laborers was concerned. Even so, Shaw traces the beginning of the
creation of difference between Irish and Africans to planters’ anxieties that both groups might
make common cause in rebellion and the creation of separate laws governing slaves and servants.
Chapter two is a further elucidation of this argument, exploring the role of the census, and how
European races were merged into the singular category “white.” While this erasure of European
difference served the needs of imperial elites by implying an orderly colonial population, it also
provided the Irish with a legitimized means of separation from Africans with whom they shared
common life and labor experiences.
Why such an intentional creation of difference seemed necessary is detailed in chapter
three as Shaw explores the plantation communities in which both Irish and Africans lived and
worked in a creolized milieu of shared experiences. Woven into this tapestry of similarities were
shared living spaces, labor activities, and most probably, sexual interrelations. While superficial
variances between Africans and Irish existed, such as tastes in food and clothing, this commonality
of everyday life sparked English fears of a solidarity that might threaten the established order.
To reinforce the concept of difference, Shaw contends that aside from census categories, elites
also created disparate regulations and punishments for servants and slaves. By distinguishing
Irish servants from African slaves in this fashion, elites began the process of co-opting the Irish
through the use of blackness as the primary sign of difference. For the Irish themselves, their
whiteness provided a path away from inferior status, and Shaw asserts that the Irish largely
accepted this framework, even going so far as to reject extant similarities with Africans in order
to free themselves from the label of “white slave.”
Yet even with assimilation into the English power structure, the Irish found avenues
of resistance that ultimately enhanced their pursuit of societal distance from African slaves. In
chapters four and five, Shaw shows how the maintenance, however surreptitious, of Roman
Catholic belief, and occasional alliance with rebelling slaves, encouraged the fears of English
planters of French or Spanish invasions abetted by Irish Catholics, or slave revolts in which
Irish laborers might participate. As such, Shaw argues that the English had more to gain by
emphasizing Irish difference from slaves, even at the expense of tolerating a quiet Catholicism
and often sparing the Irish from the exceptionally violent reprisals directed against rebellious
slaves than enforcing rigid, impermeable social categories. For Shaw, this indicates Irish success
at self-definition and status assertion within the spaces created by colonial power structures.
This fascinating study is one of the latest in a decade-plus body of literature on the
colonial Caribbean which acknowledges the towering place of race, slavery, and imperialism in its
history but also manages to explore the subtleties and nuances that shaped the region’s historical
experience. While the Caribbean Irish population has received some scholarly attention, notably
in works by Hilary Beckles and Donald Akenson, Shaw’s study elevates their importance by
casting them as lead actors in the shaping of English West Indian culture. Suitable for specialized
upper division and graduate courses on the Caribbean or Atlantic World, or courses dealing with
race and identity, this work is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on marginalized
populations in one of the most important sites of colonial activity in the Americas.
Jefferson Dillman
Temple College
420 Reviews
Imprints on Native Lands: The Miskito-Moravian Settlement Landscape in Honduras. BENJAMIN

F. TILLMAN. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011. Pp. xi+187, maps, photographs,
diagrams, tables, appendices, index. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8165-2454-9.
This is a work firmly fixed in the classic tradition of Latin American cultural and historical
geography that draws explicitly on the approach of Sauer, West, and Jordan. Based on Tillman’s
extensive field work in the Honduran Mosquitia, this work serves as one of the best examples
of “doing” cultural and historical geography in recent years. Its wellspring is the monograph
approach championed by Sauer and others, which identifies the geographer’s task as being to
choose a piece of territory and study it in detail, becoming intimately familiar with it in terms of
the physical, cultural, and historical dimensions to answer the fundamental question “how did
this place come to look like this?” Tillman addresses this question, and much more, in this study
of the cultural encounter beginning in the 1800s between the Miskito Indians of Honduras and
the German-based Moravian Church.
Tillman breaks his study down into six themed chapters, clearly addressing each theme in a
comprehensive fashion. After a brief introduction to the field methodology employed in the study,
the author begins with a description of the physical environment and the historical background
of Mosquitia, which incorporates the Caribbean coast of both Nicaragua and Honduras. This
savannah grassland stands in sharp contrast to the tropical highlands that dominate most of
Middle America, and has historically been relatively isolated from the influence of the Spanish
during the colonial period, opening the door to influences by other European powers. After his
description of the physical landscape, Tillman shifts his focus to the Miskito themselves, discussing
the various notions of the origins of this people, which incorporates Caribe as well as African
influence through the escape of slaves from Caribbean sugar plantations and wrecked slave
ships. This historical background is well presented and clearly lays out the ethnogenesis debates
concerning the Miskito, as well as their very interesting form of governance. This chapter also
introduces the Moravian Church, contextualizing it as part of the Protestant dynamism of Europe
in the fifteenth century in general and its growth in Germany, and illuminates the proselytizing
drive that brought Moravian missionaries to this corner of Middle America.
With the physical and historical setting laid out, Tillman then explores the various aspects
of Miskito culture that have been affected by the arrival of the Moravian missionaries, focusing
almost exclusively on the Miskito of Honduras. The treatment follows the classic cultural
and historical format of a Berkeley School monograph, including chapters on the settlement
landscape, sacred places, house types, the agricultural system, and cemeteries. Using as many
primary sources as can be found, each chapter describes and then discusses changes brought
about by the arrival of Moravian missionaries. In most cases, the author also discusses changes to
each particular aspect of culture—whether settlement form, house types, cemeteries—that have
been further affected by changes that have come to Mosquitia due to its encounter with the global
economy as well as with the movement of mestizo culture from western Honduras to the east, as
land hungry ladinos move into the relatively sparsely settled Mosquito Coast.
To illustrate the various aspects of culture and history in which Tillman is interested, he
employs a wealth of photographs, data, and sketches that fully illustrate unique aspects of the
Miskito/Moravian landscape. The author also includes appendices that lay out his field work
data, including population data, plant names, settlement names, toponyms, and other data, all of
which can serve as a touchstone for future researchers. There is even an appendix on the names
of house parts used in Mosquitia, including the English, Miskito, and Spanish terms, which will
be very helpful to researchers following in Tillman’s footsteps.
Reviews 421
The greatest strength of this study is its close adherence to the style of the Berkeley/
Louisiana State University/University of Texas cultural and historical geography as practiced
by Sauer, West, and Jordan. But, just as this is its greatest strength, it also represents it greatest
weakness. Drawn from that classic monograph style of cultural and historical geography, Tillman
does not engage at all with the so-called “cultural turn” in geography, which sought to read
into the landscape issues of class, gender, race, ideology, and power. Thus, writers critical of the
Sauerian approach, including Duncan, Gregory, Jackson, Cosgrove, and Mitchell, are not given
a nod. At one level, this is understandable, since those writers can make the formulation of an
historical/cultural approach to a place like the Honduran Mosquitia more problematic, but the
work represented by these authors could have informed Tillman’s conclusion. In particular Tillman
implies that in many ways the Miskito of Honduras are undergoing a new colonial encounter as
the ladinos move from the highlands to the savannah, demanding access to land and resources
that have been held by the Miskito for hundreds of years. How will this new colonial encounter
play out? What will be the role of the Catholic Church as it displaces the traditional religious
entities, including the Moravians? In addition, the narrative could have been enriched by an
encounter with postmodern cultural and historical geography, which in many ways provide a
framework for the indigenous mapping projects that Tillman quite rightly states will be critical to
Miskito resistance to the encroachment of outsiders into their land.
Theoretical criticisms aside, this work is wonderfully written, clear and cogent, and well-
illustrated, which brings the words on the page to life. More importantly, this work serves as a
reminder of what field work can accomplish and how it can be presented in a way that sheds
light on a place that may have been neglected. Moreover, the author has laid out the historical
and landscape changes that have occurred due to movement of Moravian missionaries into the
region, and the further changes that may well occur as that influence wanes. This book, then,
serves two important purposes: first, as a description of the fascinating cultural and historical
geography of a place, and second as a model for how to conduct and present fieldwork to a wide
audience. The author makes the Honduran Mosquitia come alive and does something that all
well written geography should do: it makes you want to go and see it for yourself.
Dean Sinclair
Northwestern State University

Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. CHET van DUZER. London: The British Library,
2013. Pp. 144, maps, index. 20.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7123-5890-3.
Chet van Duzer boasts an impressive background of cartographic analysis, and in his
newest work he turns his attention to the eye-catching but woefully understudied topic of sea
monsters on Medieval and Renaissance maps. He defines sea monsters as “an aquatic creature
that was thought astonishing and exotic,” noting that most originated from the classical idea that
each land creature its equivalent in the sea (pp. 8-9). The underlying argument of the work is
that cartographers used sea monsters on their maps for two main purposes, to serve as a graphic
record of literature, and as decoration (p. 11). In this regard, Duzer offers a sublime examination of
the genealogy of individual sea monsters and the artistic techniques of placing them on maps, but
ultimately fails to place his analysis in a broader framework which would make the book more
accessible to a wider historical audience. As such, the book suffers from a bit of an antiquarian
feel.
422 Reviews
Sea Monsters is divided into roughly forty distinct topics ranging from the analysis of
individual maps, to “How to buy a Sea Monster,” and “The Curious Career of the Flying Turtle.”
Inserted throughout are excursuses which provide an examination of a type of sea monsters, such
as whimsical or dangerous ones. These excursuses aside, the book follows a strict chronological
order beginning with a brief discussion of classical antecedents before moving on to an analysis
of the medieval Mapppaemundi T-O maps, ending at the seventeenth century when sea monsters
began disappearing from maps. One wonders, though, if Duzer would have been better served if
he was less rigid in this temporal approach, and opted for a geographical or thematic organization.
For example, he analyzes two works by the famous cartographer Gerardus Mercator, a 1541 globe
and a 1569 world map, but in between these two discussions are sections on remoras, a possible
forged globe, sawfish, the Flying Turtle, and a Giacomo Gastaldi map (pp. 86-103). Additionally,
two sections on whales are interrupted by a section on “A Nest of Sea Monsters at the Bottom of
the World” (pp. 50-54). As most of these sections are rather short, the overall cohesion suffers as
the reader darts from topic to topic and location to location.
The organizational issue points to a larger concern, specifically that Duzer could have
done better placing his analysis of the maps within a broader framework. Throughout the work
there is superb discussion of individual maps, but he does not draw back his lens to focus on the
larger picture. There are references to broader implications throughout, but they are only hinted at,
and often superficial. For instance he observes a strange paradox where sea monsters were often
located on the least explored areas of map, and thus often hindered map improvements as they
served to impede travel and exploration (pp. 12-19, 118). He observes that the 1569 Mercator map
has no sea monsters positioned above 50° N and most of them were placed in South America and
the Pacific as these areas became the new “realms of marvels” (p. 105). Duzer offers these insights
without much discussion but it raises obvious questions. How well were these areas explored
as of 1569 and how effective were sea monsters in preventing exploration? It is undoubtedly a
difficult question to answer, but it is not even addressed.
The above critiques are not intended to be overly critical as the work demonstrates
some superb examples of erudition and research. The highlight is Duzer’s ability to trace the
lineage of these sea monsters, not only from other maps, but from contemporary written sources
specifically. Throughout the work he shows how cartographers often incorporated the latest
“scientific” publications as the basis for their sea monsters. This is evident with a sea pig depicted
on Olaus Magnus’ 1539 map. Duzer is able to distinguish this sea pig from similar ones found
on a Genoese world map and a Madrid manuscript on Ptolemy’s Geography, instead he traces
the true source to a 1537 pamphlet published in Rome which describes a creature found in the
“German Ocean” the same year (p. 85). He employs this standard of scholarship for the all the
maps under consideration. It is also refreshing that Duzer is completely transparent about that
which he does not know. He concedes that an image of Jonah on a medieval mappamundi “is
something of a mystery” and that a nest of sea monsters on a fifteenth century map “is a startling
innovation that defies ready explanation” (pp. 19, 54). The other trait which is sure to catch the
eye of the readers is the beautiful images. The author and the British Library both deserve great
praise for creating such a visually stunning work.
Duzer notes that his work is the first one to treat the topic of sea monsters because of
the difficulties associated with the primary sources, so one can sympathize with his struggles.
Nevertheless, one feels that this may have been a missed opportunity to really lay the groundwork
for future analysis. It is clear that he has the skills necessary for this, as he displays such scholarship
and erudition in his treatment of individual maps. A great example of the missed opportunity is
in his discussion on Magnus’ map of northwestern Europe which contained “the most important
and influential sea monsters” of any Renaissance map (p. 81). The Italian scholar Luigi de Anna
Reviews 423
has suggested that these monsters were intended to scare off foreign fisherman from Scandinavian
waters. Duzer comments only that, “if this intriguing suggestion is correct,” then this map had
economic significance not shared by other maps (p. 86). The analysis stops there, and the fact
that he perceives the idea as “intriguing” rather than profound or insightful hints that he has his
reservations, but he fails to elaborate. His conclusion also points to an economic element. Citing
a 1625 map which depicts whale fishing he concludes, “whales, the largest creatures in the ocean,
are no longer monsters but rather natural marine storehouses of commodities to be harvested”
(p. 118). Throughout the work Duzer hints at the connections between sea monsters on maps and
broader economic and social trends, but ultimately decides not to expand on their relationship. In
short, cartographic specialists will value the erudition, general audiences will appreciate the great
imagery, but a general historical audience may not be satisfied.
Robert Tiegs
Louisiana State University

Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community. NEIL WHITE. University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Pp. xiv+229, index. $49.50 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4426-4327-7.
A historical “company town” featured a single corporate employer that owned or

managed virtually all local institutions. Company towns were usually established in economically
peripheral regions, and while no exact definition of a company town exists, most company towns
were closely tied to some extractive industry, such as logging or mining. Existing scholarship
on company towns argues homogeneity: the company possessed a legal, economic, and social
stranglehold on the day-to-day life of a town’s residents, and corporate interests always trumped
personal power. The life cycle of a company town around the world would follow the same basic
plot: “capitalist expansion, corporate control, and resident dependence” (p. 3).
Neil White challenges this view of uniformity, contesting the “stereotyped view of
company towns” (p. 5) that has defined the structuralist approach since the 1970s. White argues
that company towns were not at all homogenous, and that individual decisions and decision-
makers across the class spectrum played an enormous role on the historical development of
a town. The author does not ignore the power of a company or the dependence of a town’s
residents. Rather, White is able to divorce the corporate displays of power from the everyday
experiences of residents.
His thesis is argued through a comparative examination of two company towns: Corner
Brook, a pulp and paper mill town in western Newfoundland, Canada and Mount Isa, a remote
mining town in the outback of northwestern Queensland, Australia. These two towns were
selected for a variety of reasons: both were founded in the early 1920s, both were located in
countries that relied heavily on exporting raw materials, both were founded in former British
dependencies, and both were closely associated with British capital.
Wider global systems of economic development are apparent. For example, in the first
few decades after Corner Brook’s founding, a British armament firm, the U.S.-based International
Paper, and the Bank of England were just a few of the power brokers financially involved
with the town’s mill enterprise. Both Corner Brook and Mount Isa were initially dependent on
foreign investments for profit, yet in the midst of such palpable external influence, the residents
of both company towns possessed agency. This agency was apparent in the decisions made by
individuals associated with the town, and White explains additional influences upon each place
that were never codified in a formal business plan. Local topography, managerial stubbornness,
community reaction, local politics, and even chance shaped future events in each town.
424 Reviews
Geography also played an essential role in influencing company towns. Corner Brook was
established by a last-minute change to secure better port access to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Mount
Isa’s mining potential was initially stymied while waiting for a railroad to reach the outback
interior. Similarly, both sites were surrounded by unplanned, unaffiliated “fringe towns” beyond
the company’s authority. Of additional interest is the fact that while the “company” associated
with each company town often changed over the years, individual and community actions were
mostly unaffected by corporate ownership transactions. Eventually, the companies began to sell
company-owned homes and turned away from paternalism by the 1960s as part of a wider global
trend towards more efficient corporate systems.
The book contains six major chapters, each with a dominant theme: Corner Brook’s
industry, Mount Isa’s industry, urban morphology, labor, civic life, and personal relationships. The
powerful role of the company is seen overtly (in reactions to labor unrest in both communities)
and symbolically (in the naming of town streets for corporate executives.)
White’s prose is engaging. The narratives of changing commodity prices, economic
conditions, and industrial regulations were surprisingly readable. The author is at his best when
describing the complex network of social and personal interactions, including the conflict at
Mount Isa through the eyes of labor, entrepreneurship and community in Corner Brook, and the
demographic situation of Mount Isa and its resulting gendered atmosphere. Intertwined with
townspeople’s concerns about prohibition or recreation is a retelling of social power that crosses
class borders and avoids a simple taxonomy. White notes that “social processes made company
towns, and made them distinct from one another” (p. 30), and the author has done a commendable
job at expressing these diverse perspectives.
Academic scholarship of company towns has increased in recent years. Margaret
Crawford’s notable Building the Workingman’s Paradise (1996) set the stage for the current wave
of broad scholarly investigations of company towns, including Hardy Green’s The Company
Town (2010), and Company Towns in the Americas (2011), an edited volume by Oliver Dinius and
Angela Vergara. Important regional-focused approaches include Linda Carlson’s Company Towns
of the Pacific Northwest (2004). Additionally, many works exist that analyze the history of a single
company town, with varying form. White’s book artfully finds its place between these broad
surveys and specific town histories.
While White has an exemplary approach, the book’s overall effectiveness could be enhanced
with a wider analysis of additional company towns. Corner Brook and Mount Isa are divergent
in location, economy, and social environment, but these sites might benefit from comparison to
experiences from company towns in the United States or Latin America. A broader inclusion
would enable additional analysis of towns with similar resources: for example, a comparison of
Mount Isa to Arizona copper mining towns. However, the author’s preemptive rebuttal that a
two-town analysis “allowed for a broad and deep engagement with the history of each place” (p.
6) is borne out in the text, and a reader should not object to the two-town model.
White notes that the structuralist approach to understanding company towns “is woefully
silent on the human agents and social processes that created community…” (p.7). If the purpose
of this book was to rethink the old image of company towns, the author has succeeded. Neil
White has effectively argued the diversity in community of the historical company town, and this
work holds valuable significance for scholars of historical geography.
Patrick D. Hagge
Arkansas Tech University
Reviews 425
The Last Days of the Rainbelt. DAVID J. WISHART. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 2013. Pp. xviii+202, maps, charts, graphs, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95
cloth. ISBN 978-0-0832-4618-8.
In this twenty-first century it is hard to imagine the central High Plains, part of the western
Great Plains, as a region of dense agricultural settlement with booming population growth.
Traveling across the region, one is struck by the endless prairie horizons, the smallness of the
towns, which are few and far between, and the thinness of the population density. Many counties
average less than two people per square mile and most have for decades experienced an overall
population decline.
In The Last Days of the Rainbelt, David J. Wishart presents a different picture of the High
Plains and in the process brings to life a seldom-told story in the region’s history. Professor Wishart,
a historical geographer at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, is a highly respected scholar of
the Plains. Historical Geography readers may already be familiar with his earlier works, including
An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians (1994), Encyclopedia of the Great
Plains (2004), and Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians (2007). If so, readers will be pleased to
know that this new study continues the high-quality scholarship that Wishart is known for.
In the introduction, Professor Wishart explains that during the late nineteenth century, a
prevailing scientific notion held that the climate of the Great Plains was being transformed by the
process of pioneer settlement. In other words, the semi-arid plains were becoming wetter because
farmers were tilling the prairie soil – hence the saying “rain follows the plow.” Today, this type
of thinking seems preposterous, but in the 1880s, overconfident settlers used it to justify their
movement onto the dry, High Plains. Settlers referred to this area as the “Rainbelt” because they
expected the rains to come shortly after their arrival.
Following the introduction are four chapters arranged in chronological order. Chapter 1,
spanning 1854-1885, details the movement of settlement up to the edge of the Rainbelt. Professor
Wishart divides the central Plains into four settlement zones, and focuses his study on the
Rainbelt counties of southwestern Nebraska, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado, which are
in zone four. He explains that the eastern zones were basically the Midwest extended, especially
in terms of farming techniques, which proved woefully unsuited when transferred to western
zones. Chapter 2, spanning 1886-1890, details the mad rush by setters into the Rainbelt. It took
just five years for Rainbelt counties to triple, and even quadruple, in population. In many areas,
new towns and farming communities were founded literally overnight.
Chapter 3 provides a glimpse of life in the Rainbelt around 1890. Professor Wishart describes
how settlers found water, built rudimentary homes, planted their first crops, and socialized
with distant neighbors. Chapter 4, spanning 1890-1896, details the inevitable failure of Rainbelt
settlers and the desertion of their communities. The early 1890s were terrible drought years in the
Rainbelt and farmers quickly went under due to repeated crop failures and burdensome debt.
Wishart devotes a considerable portion of this chapter to the stories of rainmakers. These men
were charlatans and hucksters who, using secret rainmaking machines, defrauded desperate
farmers and communities out of tens of thousands of dollars. A short epilogue concludes the
study and brings the story of the Rainbelt up to the present time.
Professor Wishart thoroughly mines an impressive collection of sources. Period newspaper
accounts, historical climatic data, land office records, county histories, census returns, period
government reports, and settler diaries all contribute to his story. A central and indispensable
source, though, is a collection of old Rainbelt settler interviews conducted during a five-month
period in 1933 and 1934. They were part of a short-lived New Deal program called the Civil Works
Administration (CWA). Wishart explains that he came across their leather-bound volumes many
426 Reviews
years ago while searching dark corners of the Colorado Historical Society archives. It was that
“discovery” which piqued his interest in the Rainbelt. All sources are thoroughly documented
with endnotes.
The research in the book is impeccable and Professor Wishart does a masterful job of
weaving an engaging narrative out of the many disparate sources. This, I think, is the book’s
main strength. The value of the CWA interviews cannot be overstated and Wishart acknowledges
that they are what differentiates his book from earlier attempts to tell the story of the Rainbelt.
For instance, without the CWA interviews, most of what appears in Chapter 3 would have been
impossible to recount. The pioneer settler interviews are the best information about the Rainbelt
experience and Wishart skillfully weaves facts and insights from them into a cohesive narrative
that brings the communities back to life.
Another strength of the book is its presentation. The University of Nebraska Press
produced a small (16cm x 24cm) and attractive volume, and priced it affordably. This was
probably because of its short length (only 202 pages, plus front matter). I can easily picture this
book for sale at a plains historical attraction gift shop or for checkout at a public library. The price,
subject, writing quality, and size make it attractive to an educated, popular reader. I regard this as
a strength because it always benefits the historical geography discipline to have some of its best
work accessible to as wide an audience as possible. And this book accomplishes that.
The one shortcoming of the book that I can identify is, unfortunately, a result of its attractive
presentation. Sixteen custom maps are used in support and all are critical for understanding the
research. But because of the small format, they are printed at a very small scale and therefore
can be hard to read. The same is true of fourteen period photographs. My eyesight is better than
someone of advanced age (though I am no longer a teenager, either) and even I had difficulty
reading the small text and details. But this shortcoming is relatively minor and easily outweighed
by the book’s numerous strengths. I highly recommend it.
John T. Bauer
University of Nebraska at Kearney

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1

Co-Editors…………………………………………………………Maria Lane, University of New Mexico

Book Review Editor………………………………………John T. Bauer, University of Nebraska-Kearney

Special Guest Editor…………………………..Gerry Kearns, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Editorial Production Fellow…………………….................………..Tina Faris, University of New Mexico

Christian Brannstrom…….………………………………………………………….Texas A&M University

My working meetings with Michael were intensive seminars in historical geography. He

Remsen NEW YORK

KENTUCKY 0 50 100 150 miles

schools, armies, factories – described by Foucault; in both cases a process of

at 9-10 o'clock that m orning,

Tyfi R te He rests overnight

Next m orning cart and driver

The second day ends as weary horse and

Map 2.3 Journey of David Griffiths, carrier, to

A) The filler dumps raw materials into the stack mouth

Geography undergraduate students at Middlebury College have been my collaborators

during march sometime

Figure 14. A sketch of evacuees from Auschwitz, by Erik B. Steiner. By permission.

feeling of being alive.

sky above. It was glorious.

to fear. One becomes blunted.

. Frau Glaser welcomed

antly, at every moment, have

t optimistic. In the evening we drank a whole bottle of Haut Sauterns.

the world again

The little house with much .- .

and secures help a little.

elves, and sometimes it even

Unpleasantnesses are more bothersome tha

Something hard and

On top of all the

Every day brings new restrictions. Only today, Saturday, December 3,

Dreadful autumn wea

heart of hearts I am quite

few weeks have been the most

sunk greatly again. News came that the Russia

poor. My heart, my eyes. In adittion,

to sleep I think: will they come

there for an endless

the right side of

ther, dreadfully depressed about everything, still muddling along.

eternal desperation of lack of money. The never ending worry is terrible.

something that . , of , in the , in the

when we can make up for it?

end of the Third Reich.

more uncertain whether evidently come to the end of my life.

. And to me it is I shall be able to beneﬁt from the peace, since I have

source: The diaries of Victor Klemperer

graphics created at Middlebury College by Hannah Day, spring 2010

Whig) view of increasingly scientific cartography championed by Norman J. W. Thrower

Historical Geographies of Ireland: Colonial

and ramifications in the aftermath of the systematic subjugation of a society by a colonizing

Cad a dhéanfaimíd feasta gan adhmad? (What shall we do for timber?

provided by such distinguished ancestral families–with their European continental connections

Atrocity punctuates the history of sixteenth century Ireland. Countrywide from

Mé an murdhuchan (I am the guillemot

Á fhágbháil ‘na aonar fúibh, (The great rooms of O Loughlin’s house

At the news from Fál’s [Ireland’s] high plain I cannot sleep

Uirscéal as sin tuigthear libh: (Consider a parable of this: