Rocking the Boat: A Response to Hiram MorganAuthor(s): Andrew HadfieldSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 14, An Ghaeilge: The Literature and Politics of Irish(Autumn, 1993), pp. 15-19Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735702 .
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Rocking the Boat: A Response to Hiram Morgan
ANDREW HADFIELD
liiram Morgan's assessment of the recent historiography of Early Modern Ireland (Irish Review 11) is in many ways a model example of
balanced and lucid analysis, an especially praiseworthy achievement
given: a) the often bitter exchanges in print between Irish historians
which sometimes appear to outsiders to be motivated by personal
animosity and egotism as much as a desire to enlighten readers, and b)
that it was presented in a journal designed 'to serve a general rather
than a specialist readership'.
Morgan argued that a perception of Ireland as 'an English stepping stone to North America' was based on an observation of the long-term effects of policy rather than a consideration of the original motives of
the policy makers who, according to Morgan, saw Ireland as a crucial
part of a 'multiple-kingdom' and used colonisation as one possible method of solving a fundamentally constitutional problem. Morgan claims that what colonisation did take place in Ireland resembles
contemporary European enforced population displacements rather
than trans-Atlantic migrations and that discontented Irish aristocrats
adopted 'nationalist ideologies as did other embattled aristocracies'
rather than behaving like 'Amerindian chiefs even though English commentators may have denigrated them as such'. Historians who
have pushed the colonial comparison have all too often been guilty of
reading position papers or plantation surveys without due regard for
their context and thus providing 'a skewed view of history which
ignores the meat and drink of politics ?
warfare, marriage alliances, faction fighting, litigation and prosecution, the bribery of officials, the
selection of JPs and sherrifs, the billetting of troops, the holding of
parliament and the constant manoeuvring at Court' [my emphasis].
Similarly, these same historians have frequently ignored the differ?
ences between the colonial situation and the Irish one: whereas the
Gaelic Irish were marked out for assimilation as 'model Englishmen', the Amerindians were 'more likely to be killed or enslaved than
assimilated'. More seriously still they have been guilty of believing the deliberate lies of the New English who 'must have known that the
allegation of nomadism was false' [my emphasis] just as they 'were
well aware that the Irish diet included cultivated oats as well as dairy
15
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16 ANDREW HADFIELD
products' and would have considered their own lower classes as
equally superstitious as the Irish. Morgan concludes with two further
European parallels which powerfully back up his argument; other
sixteenth-century travellers to Ireland like the Armada survivor,
Captain Francisco de Cuellar, regarded the native Irish to be savages, so one can conclude that such an observation was not part of a colonial
attitude; today, the revolutions of Eastern Europe have thrown up a
dozen other 'Ulsters', the result of the continent's numerous multiple
kingdoms. Much of this analysis I can agree with and I am grateful to Dr.
Morgan for forcing me to think through many of my hazy and ill
formulated suppositions. Nevertheless it seems to me that there are
problems with the thorough-going revisionism elaborated here.
Morgan's analysis reminded me of Karen Kuppermann's Settling with the Indians: the meeting of English and Indian cultures in America, 1580-1640 (1980); this useful work set out to demonstrate that those
Englishmen and women who went to the Virginia colonies mixed
happily with the natives and perceived them as equals rather than the
savages propagandists at home saw the Amerindians to be. Whilst
Kuppermann clearly had a strong case in arguing that historians who
had simply gone through the mass of propagandist writings and
concluded that the Indians were either described as tabulae rasae or
irredeemably savage cannibals had ignored the concrete situation of
the settlers, she provided some extremely distorted readings of
evidence and was forced to conclude improbably that the 1622
uprising was more or less an unfortunate accident.
Kuppermann's problem was that she could only work in the world
of either/or and not the world of both/and. This seems to me to be Dr.
Morgan's error also. I have no problem at all in accepting his positive
proposals ?
although there is a danger that viewing Ireland only as a
'multiple-kingdom' is to see matters solely through the eyes of the
crown. This, if I have read matters correctly, is at the heart of Brendan
Bradshaw's objections to Steven Ellis's attempts to dismiss nationalist
historiography, a debate raging in recent issues of Irish Historical
Studies. But when we are told that 'native aristocrats did not behave
like Amerindian chiefs even though English commentators denigrated them as such' [my emphasis], it seems as though Dr. Morgan has
started to believe some forms of propaganda whilst dismissing others.
As Peter Hulme has pointed out in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the
native Carribean, 1492-1797 (1986), the English in the New World seem to have misread persistently the motives and actions of the complex and high-ranking officials with whom they had to deal. There is a
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A RESPONSE TO HIRAM MORGAN 17
danger of a European ethnocentrism in assuming that to make this
sort of comparison ? Irish:Amerindian
? is to insult the former by association. It is the case that
? theoretically at least
? the Irish were
given the status of subjects and were supposed to be assimilated,
certainly after St. Leger's policy of Surrender and Regrant in the 1540s.
But it has to be said that Amerindians were not simply marked out for
destruction; the most cursory glance through the pages of Hakluyt's
Principal Navigations reveals the deep-seated ambivalence in the ways in which natives of the New World were represented by English observers. On the one hand they were seen as willfully damned
savages who had failed to advance, or, as some put it, 'natural slaves'; on the other they were seen as blank sheets of paper, a sort of
pre-Lockean fantasy, creatures so devoid of ideas that anything could
be scrawled upon them. The crucial distinction between Irish and
Amerindian was that one group existed within the boundaries of
state, the other outside and so each were believed to be subject to
different types of laws. However, this does not mean that they were
ipso facto envisaged differently; and Morgan's statement that the
English 'never seriously considered' making Amerindians into model
Englishmen 'who were more likely to be killed or enslaved than
assimilated' could surely be also applied to the history of sixteenth
and seventeenth-century Ireland which contains more than a few
wars, famines and massacres.
My point here is not that Irish and Amerindian were the same sort
of peoples or that the English always represented them in identical terms but that in dealing with unfamiliar and alien peoples the
comparison was sometimes made. To pick an example at random:
Luke Gernon, an English judge in Ireland, writing to a friend in 1620, assures his correspondent that the Irish are not like the cannibals (a
word which could only have associations with the New World in the later sixteenth century). Why does he bother to write this unless it had
occurred to one of them that they were similar? Barnaby Rich got himself into deep water when he made the same comparison in The
New Description of Ireland (1610) and was forced to apologise; Sir John Dowdall, during a seige in the Nine Years War, also referred to the
Irish as 'cannibals'. Many other examples could be cited but I am in
danger of merely repeating what Canny and Quinn have already documented at length.
But Dr. Morgan's explanation for this sort of comparison is that it is
propaganda, used by the settler class to promote their own interests, even though they 'must have known that they were telling deliberate
lies'. This is to beg numerous questions; the past conditional is a
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18 ANDREW HADFIELD
dangerous tense for the historian. How do we know that they knew?
How confident can we be of reconstructing the context of an utterance
so perfectly that we can know exactly what was intended? When Lord
Deputy Mountjoy came across fields of corn growing in Ulster
towards the end of the Nine Years War and remarked that it was
'incredible in so barbarous a country' it seems, pace Dr. Morgan, more
difficult to dismiss this as a deliberate lie, especially if one notes that
the comment appears both in a document collected in the state papers and the travel book of his secretary, Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617). Neither Mountjoy nor Moryson appears to have known with
any certainty that Ulsterman were not nomadic. The same sort of
comparisons can be found in the writings of numerous other New
English settlers, soldiers and officials. What needs to be pointed out is
that chroniclers and propagandists in both England and Ireland were
copying the comments of Gerald of Wales written in the 1180s during the first English invasion of Ireland, something recognised on both
sides of the Irish sea. John Hooker in his translation of Gerald's
Conquest of Ireland, included in the second edition of Holinshed's
Chronicles (1586), berated English historians for their refusal to acknowledge that their information came from Gerald;
Geoffrey Keating in his famous and often quoted comparison of
English historians to the dung beetle wallowing in ordure and
ignoring the truth and beauty of the land, chastised them because they were all copying from Gerald.
Dr. Morgan asserts that allegations of Irish paganism must be
refuted and suggests that many English writers would have perceived their own lower classes as equally superstitious. Two points need to
be made: first, English writers did not tend to claim that the Irish they encountered were pagan but that they were catholics whose faith had
become so diluted, heretical and perverse that it was condemned by
Spanish and Italian visitors to Ireland. In other words, a discourse of
savagism or barbarism has become entwined with a perception of
religious difference, something noted by Seamus Deane in his
pamphlet Civilians and Barbarians (1983). The second point, that
English writers regarded their 'own lower classes' in similar terms is
undoubtedly correct; a comparison of official tracts aimed to deal with
the catholic revolts known as The Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-7) and
The Northern Rebellion (1569-70) reveals many similar descriptions and representations of the enemy. But this does not necessarily mean, as Dr. Morgan assumes, that Ireland was not sometimes perceived as
a colony; again, our logic does not have to be either/or instead of
both/and. Stephen Greenblatt has observed that 'one man's tinker
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A RESPONSE TO HIRAM MORGAN 19
was another man's Indian' and many commentators on colonial texts
have observed that in the colonial scene 'race' and 'class' often offset
each other. Think of the Pocahontas legend and the way it has been
used and still is; think of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Things do not
always have to be either exotic or domestic. Representations and
discourses can overlap and, I would argue, this is exactly what
happened in English representations of early Modern Ireland. On the
one hand Ireland was seen to be a kingdom under the sovereignty of the English crown; on the other it was believed by many to be
populated by a recalcitrant, disloyal people who threatened the very
legitimacy of that rule. Yet, these were sometimes portrayed as
savages and Ireland could often be represented as a colony (in its
modern rather than its sixteenth-century sense; to Dr. Morgan's credit
he is careful to distinguish between these definitions, unlike many
historians). Land and people were very carefully separated, an old
colonial story. Dr. Morgan's piece deserves attention and is full of useful sugges?
tions for further research and comparative analysis. But I part
company with him when he provides a list of 'the meat and drink of
politics' which tabulates only events and not modes of representation or what some would call discourses. This is to separate 'fact' from
'fiction' in a way which is dangerously over-confident. As Natalie
Zemon Davis has argued, the archives are not free of fictions because
evidence cannot exist without being narrated and once something is
narrated it becomes a story and has to develop narrative strategies which relate it to fiction. Every piece of writing has to be composed. There is no such thing as an eye-witness account beyond represent? ation ? which is not to concede everything to Hayden White, whose
Metahistory (1973) appeared to suggest that as all facts are completely relative the historian can choose to write how he or she wishes.
Rather, it is a question of acknowledging that everything is mediated
and that the question of evidence and its use is by no means cut and
dried as the recent symposium in the Chicago journal Critical Inquiry demonstrated. Dr. Morgan is right to criticise historians who have
examined tracts and papers regardless of their context in order to
arrive at grand generalisations about subjects like colonialism and I
for one shall look at some of my own work with a colder eye as a
result. But this does not mean that we can dismiss the way that things are written up or fictionalised and return to an Eden of fact.
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