Reformation to Industrial Revolution by Christopher Hill

Author:Christopher Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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After negro slaves,* Ireland was the principal victim of the navigation system which gave England her world hegemony. The brutal Cromwellian conquest and transplantation of the Irish was at least accompanied by attempts to incorporate Ireland within the English economic system. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and of the Convention Parliament in 1660 put Ireland on an equal footing with England; the Cavalier Parliament demoted her to the status of a colony, and a colony whose raw materials competed with those of the mother country. Irish ships were not permitted to trade with the colonies direct, and Ireland was near enough to England for the laws to be enforced against her traders with a vigour that could not be shown across the Atlantic. The import of Irish sheep and cattle into England was forbidden (1667) and of Irish butter and cheese (1681), in the interests of English graziers. After a brief experience of independence in 1689–90, the unhappy country was again brought under England’s heel. The Irish woollen industry was killed by the prohibition in 1698 of export of Irish wool or cloth except to England, enforced by a regular naval blockade. Landed and monied interests in England were agreed that it was to their mutual advantage to destroy the Irish cloth industry, as well as to keep the cost of wool low by prohibiting its export from England or Ireland: so closely allied did the two interests now believe themselves to be.

After the Cromwellian and Williamite conquests three-quarters of the soil of Ireland belonged to Anglo-Irish protestants or absentee Englishmen; by the mid-eighteenth century £750,000 in rent left Ireland each year, tribute from the poverty-stricken peasantry to their English overlords. Absentee land-owners took little interest in estate management: there were few improving landlords. The Roman Catholic majority of the population was deprived of all political rights. The one compensation allowed to Ireland was English encouragement of the linen industry after 1696. It had proved impossible to manufacture linen in England itself which would compete with the Dutch industry. Fortunately the protestant Ulster area proved suitable, and the Dutch industry was killed, to the satisfaction of English merchants.

The effects of the navigation system on Ireland, a lordlieutenant said as early as 1666, would be to reduce the country to ‘barbarism and poverty’. Locke grimly commented on ‘Boyle’s cure for nose bleeding with a dead man’s skull’ that the latter was ‘more plentiful in Ireland’. There were famines in Ireland in 1726–29 and 1739–41, 400,000 being estimated to have died in the latter, one in five of the population. Hunger and under-nourishment were rife even in ‘good’ years. Ireland was saved only by the rapid extension of potato cultivation. The Irish emigrated in thousands, to America and to England; they were to play a large part in the radical movements of both countries. So few were English protests against the ruthless exploitation of Ireland that we should remember with gratitude the individuals who spoke up against it, from the Leveller Walwyn

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