For over two decades, Manchester Studies in Imperialism has been a trailblazer in the realm of imperial history. Positioned firmly at the forefront, this series has illuminated the annals of history and transformed our understanding of empire.
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The Studies in Imperialism series has embarked on a transformative journey, reshaping not only British history but also the vast landscape of imperial histories. It has boldly expanded boundaries, delving into uncharted territories, and shining a light on subjects that were once overlooked. More importantly, it has masterfully unveiled the intricate and inseparable relationships between these domains.
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Within the pages of Manchester Studies in Imperialism lies a treasure trove of scholarly exploration. It unveils the rich tapestry of cultural encounters between colonisers and the colonised, shedding light on the intricate web of power that flows through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge. It unravels the complex construction of identity, both at the heart and on the peripheries of empire.
2025 Manchester Studies in Imperialism
This chapter represents some initial investigations into whether there was an identifiable British imperial barrack-building policy in the eighteenth century. It will consider to what extent comparisons can be made in relation to the nature and purpose of barrack-building in Ireland and Jamaica in the early-to-mid eighteenth century, and the extent to which the country-wide barrack-building project that commenced in Ireland in the late 1690s might have provided a template or example for a nascent imperial barrack-building project in other parts of the emerging British empire. Such considerations will be predicated upon assessment of some of the imperatives for building barracks, such as the need to house a standing army required to fight wars, defend imperial possessions and gain new ones, and the more mundane though crucial matters of discipline, health and military logistics for an imperial army. These considerations will be made within the context of continuing anti-standing army sentiment in Britain and elsewhere in the empire during the eighteenth century.
Lambert Blair rose from relatively humble origins to control vast amounts of human and economic capital in the British empire, acting as a teenage agent and trader and then, in his adult years, controlling a large share of sugar and cotton plantations, as well as more than 1,000 enslaved people, in Berbice, across an area that would later become British Guiana. He was the perfect example of a trader in the West Indies, an archipelago full of what Sir James Marriot once called ‘renegadoes of all nations’. Lambert is sketched in anecdote in a well-known travel journal by Dr George Pinckard from 1796, published in 1806. In Pinckard’s three-volume work we are given an image of a generous, even gluttonous, planter. He is variously described as a ‘rich planter’, ‘opulent’, with an enviable mansion and the wherewithal to dispense his generous bounty. This chapter aims to restore further flesh to Lambert’s apparently ample frame, and to try to piece together his imperial career in order to understand better the unique position of Irish enslavers and traders in the Greater Caribbean.
The Caribbean was the crucible of Atlantic slavery and the plantation system that sustained it. The impact of Irish people on the evolution of the Caribbean archipelago is not well understood; nor is the reverse impact of the Caribbean on Irish mentalities, networks, towns and landscapes. Researching Ireland’s role in slavery’s transatlantic web of commerce, improvement and monoculture agriculture is complicated by the overwhelming watershed of the Irish famine of 1845–9, which continues to distort the interpretation of earlier events, and the popular correlation of Cromwellian indentured servitude with inherited matrilineal chattel slavery. Irish-Caribbean identities stretched from indentured servants to great planters, and Irishmen were also subversive players in British imperial contexts. This introductory chapter seeks to discuss and interrogate these complex threads, advertise the developing historiography, and advance new arguments about the relationship between Ireland and the Greater Caribbean.
The relationship of Ireland to colonial slavery in the Atlantic world embraced not only the movement of people and ideas, the flow of tropical commodities, and the financing and supply of provisions, but also direct participation in slave-ownership. The first phase of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project (LBS) based on the slave-compensation records contrasted levels of slave-ownership in Ireland at the end of slavery with those in Scotland and England, and suggested some structural constraints that help explain the comparatively low level of Irish absentee slave-ownership. In the second phase, LBS has been building a history of slave-ownership in the British colonies between c. 1763 and its termination in the compensation process. This recent material both provides rich detail on ‘paths to ownership’ for those in possession of property in people in the 1830s, and identifies a new cadre of slave-owners in Britain and Ireland. At the same time, the generosity of other scholars and of family and local historians has enabled us to flesh out many of the previously skeletal entries on Irish slave-owners based on the slave-compensation papers. This chapter draws on the second-phase LBS material and related expansions of the first-phase material to highlight new findings for Irish slave-owners, to develop the analysis of the ‘backwash’ of slave-ownership in Ireland, and to suggest future lines of enquiry once the current phase of empirical research is complete.
Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean draws together essays and arguments from a diverse group of contributors who seek to explore the many and varied ways in which Ireland and the Caribbean share an interlocking Atlantic history. This shared history is not always a comfortable one. Despite being victims of the first English empire, Irish people enslaved others throughout this period, and can be found at the cutting edge of extractive colonialism. They profited, exploited, traded, and trafficked with the very worst of European opportunists. Irish merchants and enslavers operated in the grey zone between empires. They could be found trading within the Danish, French and Dutch empires, as well as within the British empire, with which they were more properly connected. Irish people also shared an experience of colonialism themselves, and this opens a series of interesting avenues and rich ironies for the contributors to untangle and interrogate. The Caribbean had an outsized impact on Ireland itself, as many of the chapters argue. Irish estates were modelled or named for Caribbean precursors, just as the colonial engineering of the Irish landscapes affected those in Jamaica, Trinidad and elsewhere. The relationship was reciprocal and complex. This collection builds on the sterling work of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London, as well as the pioneering scholarship of Nini Rodgers. It brings together literary scholars, architectural historians, historians of colonialism, and art historians. The result is a novel exploration of the deep and complex relationship between two island archipelagos in a period of peak colonialism.
This chapter compares the creation of the penal laws and slave codes in Ireland and the Caribbean respectively as codes of law for social repression. Both were products of negotiations between imperial and colonial groups, and developed as accumulations of laws, practices and precedents through the operation of colonial legislative power. They therefore reflected the unevenness of power in early modern empires, described by Lauren Benton as a ‘search for sovereignty’. A comparison of the most egregious set of punishments in both sets of laws – castration – shows how these measures were driven by colonial interests for social or political reasons, and intermittently opposed by the British Government, often for its own pragmatic reasons. Because imperial power was so uneven, the experience of subaltern peoples in Ireland and the Caribbean therefore varied greatly, but in both cases reflected a common political dynamic.
In the early seventeenth century many small Irish ports – Waterford, Youghal, Cork and Kinsale – played a modest if distinctive role in transatlantic maritime ventures, benefiting from their close and ancient links with Bristol, Liverpool and London. But from the 1650s, one Munster port, that of Cork, surged ahead to become a strategic source of foodstuffs, both for the long-distance mariners of many nations and for the growing European populations settling in the Caribbean. Thereafter, despite a century-long imposition of English legislation greatly restricting Irish colonial trade, Cork grew to become one of the largest seaport cities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, much of its growth being generated by the Caribbean demand for the beef, butter, pork and pastoral by-products processed within the city. Yet relatively few Cork-owned ships appeared in the Caribbean, and virtually none in West Africa: Cork merchants prospered primarily on the commission trade servicing the orders of English, Dutch and other principals. So was the relationship between Cork and the Caribbean – and, at a larger scale, Ireland and the Caribbean – entirely indirect? In two respects, no: several merchant houses in France and Spain that had decidedly Irish origins were heavily implicated in the maritime slave trade, some of these developing off-shoots in the islands. Second, and more importantly, Ireland supplied vast numbers of auxiliary seamen for the Caribbean-bound vessels that dropped anchor in Ireland, and in the early days large numbers of indentured servants were dispatched from Irish ports to tropical destinations. Many of these obscure travellers survived, scattered and settled on the islands, a restless and largely Catholic substratum within plantation society.
The British Caribbean islands were one of the more important military stations for the roving British army in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Many Governors were drawn from the military, emphasising a metropolitan determination to concentrate on security over civil matters. This was especially the case during wartime, when the islands became susceptible to attack. Despite Ireland’s sometimes tense political relationship with the British administration, Irish Governors in the Caribbean islands maintained an inflexible imperial policy. When General Sir Eyre Coote was appointed Governor of Jamaica in 1806 at the height of the wars with Napoleonic France and Spain, his main purpose was to ensure that the defence of the island would withstand an expected invasion. At the same time, he and his masters in London expected the colony to pay for the island’s defence, which the island’s planter-dominated Assembly resisted. The situation was even more tense as the abolition of slave-ownership was now to be implemented, which tended to excite both the planters and the black population of the island for different reasons. The chapter examines Coote’s two years as Governor of Jamaica and his increasingly difficult relationship with the island’s Assembly. It argues that Coote’s tenure as Governor was hampered by the Assembly’s increasingly assertive position, which allowed it to withhold support for Coote’s initiatives.
This chapter proposes an exploration of the lives of Irish enslavers on the Spanish borderlands of North America and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. It first documents how, following the redrawing of the contours of the Greater Caribbean at the close of the Seven Years War, Spanish authorities had increasingly turned to Irish subjects for assistance in administering territories inhabited by culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse communities. In this fluid context, new opportunities arose for members of the multilingual Hiberno-European networks: soldiers, priests and merchants of Irish extraction soon acquired prominence and put down roots in the region. The chapter then moves to the turbulent environment of the 1790s, when the outbreak of revolution in Saint-Domingue increased tensions in Spanish North America and the Caribbean. Fears of insurrection exacerbated government responses and conditioned the attitudes of the Irish living under Spanish rule. In order to navigate these changing circumstances successfully, Irish enslavers often appealed to their loyalty to the Crown and to their economic utility. The chapter addresses the role of multilingualism in the shaping of a generation of Irish agents in the service of Spain who were dependent on the preservation of an imperial status quo, and highlights the Hispanic dimensions of the Irish Age of Revolutions.
Historians generally remember Jamaica as Britain’s leading sugar producer in the eighteenth century, but, from its first capture in 1655, it was equally valued as a gateway to the Spanish empire: the largest, richest and most highly coveted market in America. In the seventeenth century, planting made slow progress, but plunder and contraband trade grew apace. Although Roman Catholic Irishmen did not have political rights in the island, and seem to have played little part in agriculture, they were more visible in the smuggling trade, as they provoked less hostility and suspicion among the Spaniards than the hated English. Although their participation rates cannot be measured with any precision, individual cases such as Menasseh Gillingham, an experienced smuggler who helped negotiate the terms of the asiento treaty in 1713, show that Irishmen played a significant role in forging links between Jamaica and Spanish markets. However, given the ease with which the Irish crossed the borders between the empires, they did, at times, change allegiance. The most notorious guarda-costa of the seventeenth century, and the scourge of Jamaican traders, was Philip Fitzgerald, an Irishman who defected to Havana in the 1670s.