[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Austin, Andrew]

But Andrew please first define racism, for only then can we determine
whether the English colonization of Ireland was racist as you claim. 

* * *

Nicholas Canny records that England had aggressive national ambitions
going way back in history. In the mid-1600s, the leaders of England
desired to bring all of Ireland, a "savage nation," under their control.
Before 1565, colonization of Ireland was privately sponsored. Until that
time, justifications for why Irish lands were exploited for material
gain had to be generated by the private adventurer. But the government's
program "produced an outpouring of justifications for colonization and
conquest."  Even though the English had title to the land because of
their conquest of Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth century,
oppressing the Irish and restoring control over the territory was
greatly assisted by further racializing the Irish-a process that had
begun four centuries earlier. 

Canny argues that one of the outstanding features of English
colonization of Ireland was the development of a secular ideology that
propounded a theory of unilinear cultural evolution, of national
development, wherein the Irish were coded as barbarians (undeveloped)
and the English as civilized (in fact, the highest level of development
humankind had yet obtained). This processual theory, something quite new
to the English (and paralleling contemporary modernization theory),
rested upon an earlier static cultural distinction drawn between the
Gaelic and the English cultures during the 12th-13th century invasions.
The English behavior towards the Irish then took on many of the
characteristics associated with racial segregation; for example, the
Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 established an apartheid system and forbade
the intermarriage of Irish and English.  The new distinction, emerging
in the mid-1500s, organized segregation developmentally and
hierarchically, with England reckoned by far the superior of the two.
This cultural ordering, defined in racial terms, was used to justify the
killing of the Irish. In 1573, an English elite remarked, after a
program of mass starvation, "how godly a dede it is to overthrowe so
wicked a race the world may judge: for my part I thinke there canot be a
greater sacryfice to God." 

The English mixed the secular theory of civilizational development with
the sacred requirement to regard non-Christians as pagans. Not only did
Gaelic religious observances and rituals barely cover the pre-Christian
customs and traditions they had retained in their culture, but the
English confronted the Irish (who practiced Catholicism) as Protestants.
A pamphlet was circulated in 1572 titled "On the Disorders of the
Irishry," wherein it stated that Irish and Gaelic laws were "contrary to
God his lawe and also repugnant to the Queens Majesties lawes."  The
Irish were, the pamphlet charged, "open idolaters." The claim that the
Irish were pagans in the face of their practicing Christianity rested
not on the doctrinal discrepancies between English and Gaelic religion
but on their relative ranking in the secular theory of civilization. The
English distinguished between religion and civility, but they reasoned
an intrinsic relation between them: while a people could be civilized
without being Christian (for example, the Romans), an uncivilized people
could not be Christian. They would have to first be civilized; then they
could be Christianized. Canny notes that the English were well aware of
civilizations beyond their borders. They did not view the world simply
as a dichotomy between their civilized state and a world of barbers and
savages. However, they did view themselves as superior. "Supremacy was
claimed for western civilization because it combined the benefits of
Christianity with those of civility."  

Since the Irish were uncivilized-and their alien customs, habits, and
language proved it-they were automatically pagan. In turn, their pagan
status made them barbarian. What is more, the Irish were believed to be
an inferior race of humans. They were brutes, the English claimed:
uncivil and unclean. One elite stated in a report to the queen, in a
manner echoing the current culture of poverty rhetoric, "Swerlie there
was never a people that lived in more miserie than they doe, nor as it
should seme of wourse myndes, for matrimonie emongs them is no more
regarded in effect than conjunction betwene unreasonable beastes,
perjurie, robberie and murder counted alloweable."  Their
inferiorization and dehumanization, indeed, their criminalization,
removed the barriers to their being dominated and exploited by the
English colonizers. 

At the same time the colonizers claimed that their mission was a moral
one: to rescue the Irish from their paganism and their barbaric
existence-white man's burden. English propagandists proclaimed that
their religious and civic duty was to train the Gaelic beasts "in
vertuous labor and in justice, and to teach them our English lawes and
civilitie and leave robbyng and stealing and killying one of another."
The arguments the English used to justify the enslavement of the Irish
were the same as were used in enslaving Africans; and they were the same
arguments the Southern white American used to rationalize the plantation
system. When it was recognized that the Irish were being forced to labor
for the English (and this was not difficult to recognize), their
existence under tyranny was indeed admitted to. But, it was said that
the Irish "were not yet ready for liberation since they were at an
earlier stage of cultural development-a stage at which the English had
been when the Romans had arrived. They needed to be made bondsmen to
enlightened lords who would instruct them in the ways of civil society."
The colonial mind reasoned that slavery was a natural developmental
stage between barbarism and civilization. Just as the English had to
pass through bondage under the Romans to become civilized, so too would
the Irish have to pay their dues, now that England was the seat of
civilization-the new Rome.

"The events of 1565-1576 in Ireland have a significance in the general
history of colonization that transcends English and Irish history,"
writes Canny.  The English colonial ideologue honed his rhetorical
skills on the Irish. Because the Irish were cast as culturally inferior,
extralegal means of subjection were justified. These methods were
extralegal since no English subject would, at least in theory, be
treated in this fashion. 

These measures were taken to North America. There, the American Indians
were recognized not only as culturally and politically different from
European nations but were regarded as "savages" (sometimes "noble
savages,"  but more typically "bloodthirsty savages" ) and as
"heathens," categories typically denoting cultural inferiority, usually
conceived as inherent.  The English proclaimed their mission to save the
Indians from their pagan existence.  The same arguments were applied to
Africans. "Both Indians and blacks, like the Irish, were accused of
being idle, lazy, dirty, and licentious."  Regarding American Indians in
this way justified in the minds of the colonists exterminating them by
the millions. Seeing blacks as cultural inferiors legitimated their
enslavement.