Bonar Law

by Henry Farrell on December 10, 2009

I’m reading Fearghal McGarry’s forthcoming book on the Easter Rising at the moment, and was reminded of an interesting bit of history – the British Conservative party’s advocacy of armed rebellion against the government in 1912 over the prospect of Home Rule for Ireland.

The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law – speaking at Blenheim Palace in July 1912 – openly alluded to the threat of civil war, describing the [British] government ‘as a revolutionary government which has seized by fraud upon despotic power’, and declaring his intention to support Ulster’s unionists in using ‘all means in their power, including force’ to prevent Home Rule. Nor was this mere posturing: leading Tories, including Walter Long and possibly even Bonar Law – were closely involved with the financing and running of guns into Ulster for use against their own government. Whether Bonar Law’s militancy was motivated by a desire to consolidate his own leadership and undermine the Liberal government rather than fervent loyalism remains a matter of debate …

It seems to me that this episode – in which Conservatives, who usually conceive of themselves as the law and order party, actively advocated rebellion against their own government and helped smuggle guns – has fallen out of historical memory in the UK. Perhaps I’m wrong, or just not included in the right discussions, but my strong impression is that the British record in Ireland’s War of Independence (the Black and Tans and so on) is reasonably well known, and still sometimes discussed. The run-up to it – and the direct advocacy of armed resistance by one of Britain’s major parties – not so much.

{ 80 comments }

1

James 12.10.09 at 4:57 pm

Your interpretation is that he’s advocating resisting the British Government’s decree for home rule, but my instinct (based on my knowledge of the historical circumstances and Bonar Law, without any specific knowledge of this particular speech) would be that he was expressing support for the Ulster Unionists as strongly as possible, including in their violent suppression of SUPPORTERS of it . You (or perhaps the author) inserted “[British]” in brackets into that quote – are you sure that he meant British, and not the Government in Ulster or something more like that? That would materially change the significance of the quoted line (if not the whole speech, which I admittedly haven’t read). There was a power struggle going on between different organizations with different sources of moral and institutional legitimacy so the shading matters, I think.

2

Jim Harrison 12.10.09 at 5:50 pm

I guess nobody reads George Dangerfield’s Strange Death of Liberal England any more. As I recall, the complicity of the Conservatives in the Irish troubles is one of its major themes. I read it back in the 90s and found myself thinking that Bonar Law’s cynical politics were rather like the maneuvers of the House Republicans. I was appalled to read of the irresponsibility of the pre-WWI Tories . Maybe Gingrich, a historian of sorts, also read Dangerfield but was inspired by their example.

3

Barry 12.10.09 at 5:53 pm

I had a similar reaction; the GOP has been playing this game for a while. When they don’t have the Presidency, they rail against an oppressive federal government. Whey they do have the Presidency, they do their d*mnedest to make the federal government more oppressive and more corrupt, while trashing anybody who might even criticize it.

4

Maria 12.10.09 at 6:41 pm

Bonar Law seemed to follow in the seditious footsteps of Randolph Churchill, minus the u-turns.

5

kid bitzer 12.10.09 at 7:15 pm

there are interesting parallels here with the french oas and its armed resistance to degaulle’s de-colonization of algeria. l’algérie est française et le restera!

if bonar law had pushed it further, it could have made a great film called “the day of the bulldog”.

6

Mrs Tilton 12.10.09 at 7:31 pm

Jim @2,

I guess nobody reads George Dangerfield’s Strange Death of Liberal England any more.

I guess not. And that’s doubly a pity. One, Dangerfield ably ties together Irish unionists and nationalists, English trade unionists, rebelling suffragettes and revolting peers. Two, my golly but he writes gorgeously. Even if one couldn’t care less about Carson and Redmond et al., Dangerfield writes so beautifully it is a sheer joy to read him.

7

dsquared 12.10.09 at 8:28 pm

To be honest, more or less anything to do with Ireland basically disappeared from historical memory in Britain[1]. I don’t know why but it just isn’t taught. I think I’ve commented here before a few times that it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.

[1] presumably less so in Northern Ireland, though I dunno.

8

bernard g 12.10.09 at 8:38 pm

“are you sure that he meant British, and not the Government in Ulster or something more like that?”
What government in Ulster? There wasn’t any government except the British one.

9

Anderson 12.10.09 at 8:43 pm

Bonar Law seemed to follow in the seditious footsteps of Randolph Churchill, minus the u-turns.

Right. I’m midway through Andrew Roberts’ voluminous biography of Salisbury, right at the Home Rule debacle, and it’s quite clear that such “allusions” were present and understood at that time.

… What struck me more, oddly, was what Roberts acknowledges as Salisbury’s quite unconstitutional abuse of the Queen’s favoritism — she would forward him private letters from Gladstone, and from other Liberal cabinet members, while Salisbury was in opposition. Roberts simply observes that for Salisbury the end of defeating Home Rule justified the means.

10

Richard J 12.10.09 at 9:36 pm

To be honest, more or less anything to do with Ireland basically disappeared from historical memory in Britain[1]

Was it ever really there in the first place? That’s the basic problem in the history of Irish-British relationships, I think – not so much that the British had a deep-rooted hatred of the Irish, but that they simply didn’t care – colonialism in a nutshell, I’d guess. (For the elite, add the rider ‘so long as they paid their rents on time in full’.)

11

novakant 12.10.09 at 9:50 pm

it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.

Who, even if there might be a bit of hyperbole involved here, that’s shocking – so the English education system falsifies history? On the other hand, since I’ve known Irish people from a very young age, I always had the mental image of Cromwell eating small children for breakfast.

12

novakant 12.10.09 at 9:50 pm

it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.

Who, even if there might be a bit of hyperbole involved here, that’s shocking – so the English education system falsifies history? On the other hand, since I’ve known Irish people from a very young age, I always had the mental image of Cromwell eating small children for breakfast.

13

novakant 12.10.09 at 9:50 pm

oops, wow, not who

14

StevenAttewell 12.10.09 at 10:02 pm

And coming from an Old Labor household, I always understood Cromwell to be a reactionary bastard who suppressed the Levellers and the Diggers, but at least he chopped the king’s damn head off.

15

Hidari 12.10.09 at 10:34 pm

‘To be honest, more or less anything to do with Ireland basically disappeared from historical memory in Britain. I don’t know why but it just isn’t taught. I think I’ve commented here before a few times that it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.’

Well I’m Scottish (admittedly Scottish Catholic) and I can tell you know that there is no great love for Cromwell up here either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War#Scotland

I doubt he’s particularly worshipped in Wales either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_St_Fagans

The strong (and to outsider’s eyes, incomprehensible) regard for the ‘British Stalin’ is very much an English thing.

16

mollymooly 12.10.09 at 10:38 pm

Bonar Law seemed to follow in the seditious footsteps of Randolph Churchill, minus the u-turns.
Indeed, it was Randy who said “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.”

I think the Ulster Unionist take on this is to concede that, before partition, there was a moral equivalence between the threatened violence of northern Unionists and the actual violence of southern Republicans, while denying the equivalence extends to the later anti-partition IRA. That is, radical majoritarianism can trump constitutionality.

17

mollymooly 12.10.09 at 10:38 pm

Cromwell:England :: Napoleon:France

18

Alex 12.10.09 at 11:07 pm

Wait, there are people who regard Cromwell as pioneer of democracy???

On the subject history in English schools, the ones that still are state schools and haven’t turned into Academies or Faith schools or whatever don’t really mention much about Ireland. When I studied history not that long ago, Home rule wasn’t covered, nor was the Potato famine.

Just about the only thing that is known generally in society about Irish history is the Troubles. But that’s too modern to be covered.

As for the Empire, only the transatlantic slave trade got mentioned as a negative IIRC.

19

Anderson 12.10.09 at 11:45 pm

Oddly, the only google hit I get for “British Stalin” re: Cromwell is from someone quoting that appellation to deride it.

Perhaps the rest of us have an unduly favorable view of Cromwell because of this low internet presence for his critics. Someone needs to register http://www.cromwellwasthebritishstalin.com.

20

Phil 12.10.09 at 11:46 pm

The strong (and to outsider’s eyes, incomprehensible) regard for the ‘British Stalin’ is very much an English thing.

I think Henry VIII has a much better claim to that title. As for Oliver, 30th January 1649 counts for a lot.

21

Kevin Donoghue 12.10.09 at 11:48 pm

…Conservatives, who usually conceive of themselves as the law and order party, actively advocated rebellion….

But wasn’t Home Rule something akin to “state death” in the jargon of the “Realists” – what’s a conservative supposed to do when the old order cannot be preserved? In those circumstances you have to choose your side. You have to decide what it is you want to conserve: democratic legitimacy or the empire in this case.

If there is any particular reason why this episode has been deleted from “historical memory in the UK” it may be because the army didn’t seem to be entirely under civilian control. That’s the sort of thing people prefer to forget. But historical memory is pretty selective at the best of times: see 1066 and All That. It’s much the same in Ireland, we just edit out different episodes.

22

Tim Wilkinson 12.10.09 at 11:50 pm

so the English education system falsifies history? Written by the victors, innit. Surely they do the same in the US? But as well as omitting, shall we say, certain aspects, it also misses huge swathes out, especially for those who don’t take it as an option after the 3rd year (=age 13-ish?). I learnt approximately bugger-all history at school, apart from the vitally important Thermopylae, Salamis, Marathon and the other one – the naval one I think – starts with P.

[But then it was untypical (compared to state primaries glaringly weird), an almost camply traditionalist ex-grammar school with pretensions (and in defence of something-or-other, I have to add that I was a scholarship boy, did my 5 years sneering and then got out sharpish). The music was the only really good bit. Progressing through the Messiah: treble 1, treble 2, alto, tenor, Camel and cheap ‘Roccy black.]

More corroboration of the above: we did actually ‘do’ the civil war, but pretty much the only memorable thing was the old buffer who taught it actually saying quite seriously and often “manners maketh man”. I have a feeling Cromwell was somewhat disapproved of, but for all the wrong reasons. And there certainly wasn’t much if anything about what went on in Ireland, of all places. Just roundheads, cavaliers, kings, all that.

I mean, if you’re going to start down the road of detailing foreign massacres, there will be no time at all left for studying the royal succession from Aethelstan or whoever up to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas (taking in the symmetry of James-Charles-interregnum-Charles-James – I remember that much). Plateia, that’s it. Must be another vowel in there I think. Copying out little successive plans of naval manoeuvres on squared paper.

For yet more corrob’n, Stephen Fry told this tale on the panel show QI (Googled a transcript):

And it’s an example a friend told me, who works at the Foreign Office, that, er, that, er, dear Robin Cook, when he . . . When the Labour Party came to power, and they were going, “We’re going to be all ethical and we’re going to be all good” . . . They took down some picture in the Foreign Office of a Nepalese prince, ’cause they thought it was all Imperialist, which deeply offended the Nepalese government, and they put up, er, this big portrait of Cromwell, you know, Republican, you know, sort of Lefty figure–and the first meeting they had was with the Irish government, who took one look . . . ! And it was . . . It was like showing Eichmann to the . . . to the Israeli ambassador!

23

Tim Wilkinson 12.10.09 at 11:53 pm

what’s a conservative supposed to do when the old order cannot be preserved?

Dsquared, anyone – anything to say about the Wilson business? I’m not doing it, I’ve already got people going on about Masons at me.

24

Hidari 12.11.09 at 12:13 am

#19 and #20

I am vaguely sure (to coin an oxymoron) that in an essay by George Orwell he accepts the point of #20 (that Henry VIII was a gruesome dictator) while going on to argue that Cromwell was much worse.

More Orwell on Cromwell: ‘It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star
Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for
instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of
Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the
guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. ‘

Nineteen Eighty Four:

‘Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother’s statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell.’

25

Doctor Science 12.11.09 at 12:38 am

Alax:
When I studied history not that long ago, Home rule wasn’t covered, nor was the Potato famine.

I’m staggered. The Potato Famine was covered in *American* history.

Admitedly, I am of (partly) Irish ancestry — one grandmother was born in Ireland and participated in the Troubles — so, like novakant, I had a vaguely cannibalistic mental image of Cromwell, and William of Orange, too.

I hope I’m not the only one who’s been double-taking at the title of this post, because it sounds so much like the messages in my spam filter …

26

Tim Wilkinson 12.11.09 at 12:51 am

The fact that a Catholic trrrist(/provocatee) is still burnt in effigy all across the country every year must indicate something.

And BTW from what I could tell most of those who supported the Iraq war in the UK didn’t really have much interest in ‘WMD’, Kurds, or what have you, nor in “kickin’ ass”. It was just a war; the US wanted it and these things have to be done. The leader is best placed to pick wars in the National Interest, and to decide on a halfhearted cover story. The recent stuff it’s bad manners to look at at head on; once everyone involved is dead, you can discuss the strategies at the military history society alongside all the rest.

27

peter ramus 12.11.09 at 2:43 am

@TimWilkerson:

I always think of it as the one with the P, too. Plataea. Salamis was the naval battle.

28

Geoff Robinson 12.11.09 at 4:50 am

Wasn’t the British CP rather keen on Cromwell as a British equivalent of the Jacobins? Seem to remember this from Samuel’s beautiful NLR article on Marxist historians.

29

alex 12.11.09 at 8:32 am

Why are any of you surprised that most of history isn’t taught in schools? Most of everything isn’t taught in schools, and what is taught amounts to an extended multiple-choice test in which the wrong answers are already half shaded-out. Students get to Uni and are amazed – amazed, I tell you! – that lecturers decline to tell them exactly what to write in an essay…

30

Phil 12.11.09 at 8:53 am

#24 – I think that’s mainly Orwell on Orwell, with a side-order of Orwell on Strawman.

31

Myles SG 12.11.09 at 8:56 am

#26: “And BTW from what I could tell most of those who supported the Iraq war in the UK didn’t really have much interest in ‘WMD’, Kurds, or what have you, nor in “kickin’ ass”. It was just a war; the US wanted it and these things have to be done. The leader is best placed to pick wars in the National Interest, and to decide on a halfhearted cover story.”

And it’s the same spirit of practicality that has made me particularly fond of the English civilization. I have always thought that in the larger scheme of things, the Iraq misadventure is not as important as some more hyperbolic people tend to think; it’s more like a Boer replay than anything else. Some things aren’t right, or even smart, but they are a means to an end, whether you agree with that end or not. You don’t get much choice in the matter. It’s always useful to observe that what really made the decade immediately following the Suez debacle really dangerous for the world wasn’t so much the notion that Britain and France have become impotent and powerless, and the world doomed to a dystopian two-power condominium; it’s that Eisenhower, in his infinite ignorance, has by his anti-Anglo-French actions completely invalided Europe’s centuries-old notions of how statecraft works. Wars aren’t meant to be just or moral; they are there, they happen, and they are means to sometimes ignoble ends.

One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac.

In the long-term, perhaps people will view the Iraq War more kindly, not as any kind of success, but as a useful mechanism that deflected a great deal of tension among the great powers. The pretense of fighting terrorism has enabled China, for example, to transition from a favourite strawman of the American right, to a decently respectable power with predictably convention foreign-policy positions. One imagine that more American planes would have been shot down over some patch of ocean near China, or some bizarre, hideous Congressional inquisition begun about Chinese spying, had not the exigency of war overtaken the pettiness. That the war has allowed China and India as having decently responsible and realistic foreign-policy positions have been a good litmus test of how the world could continue in general peace (i.e. absence of war between, rather than by, major powers).

The litmus test has showed that China and India can be accommodated within the existing order, while Brazil cannot, and Russia yet unknown. It has at one stroke dissolved the inane stupidity that was the BRIC construct, which if had been taken any more seriously could have forced China or India into seriously untenable anti-Western positions if only by default. The most dangerous development in the last decade, I thought, was not terrorism but the general incredible silliness that attributed to Chinese and Indian development some sort of totemic, and wholly involuntary, representation for the Third World in general, which was bound to spark a general conflict of sorts between the West and everybody else if it had been taken seriously, making them into wholly unwilling but forced anti-Western crusaders on behalf of the rest of the world. When, however, China and India were forced to express their fundamental position, that their positions were positions of accommodation, contrasted in sharp relief against the hyperbole coming out from much else of the world, were signals that serious great-power conflict has been averred.

32

engels 12.11.09 at 9:14 am

I’m staggered. The Potato Famine was covered in American history.

But that’s perfectly logical. There’s no point in learning about bad things we were responsible for, it will only make us depressed. Otoh it’s very important to learn about bad things other people were responsible for, it helps develop one’s moral conscience.

33

ajay 12.11.09 at 10:26 am

The first time I learned about the Potato Famine in (UK) school was in biology class, when we were doing pathology – a kind of “interesting plagues of history” bit that covered the Black Death, the potato blight, the 1918 influenza pandemic and a few others. As far as I recall, we learned that the potato harvest in Scotland and Ireland had failed due to an outbreak of Phytophthora infestans (I think that’s right); the Scots had managed to pull through, just about, due to a slightly more varied diet (oats, fish, root vegetables as well as potatoes), but the Irish hadn’t, being poorer and more potato-dependent, and had mostly either died or left. It certainly wasn’t treated as a Great Massacre Of History.

We covered Cromwell and he was treated as a Good Thing if a bit oppressive. His actions in Ireland weren’t really mentioned – I think there was a vague sense that he, like pretty much every other British ruler before and since, hadn’t been very nice to the Irish. I was as startled as dsquared to find that the Irish regard him as some sort of particularly horrible person. But the Civil War was the Bishops’ War up where I was, and more to do with Covenanters than Roundheads…

34

bert 12.11.09 at 10:31 am

Arguably the function of high school history is to train people up in the shared national myths. These myths will have varying degrees of respect for historical Truth. All of them, however, will be selective, since that’s how national myths work. The Potato Famine serves a double purpose in America. It illustrates the core theme of the evils of (specifically British) colonialism. And it dramatises the diaspora story of an important subnational group.
In England, if Cromwell is about parliamentary government, William III is about limited monarchy and the Glorious Revolution. The link between his pleasantly Dutch orangeness and Ian Paisley’s offputtingly sectarian variant isn’t acknowledged.

35

Hidari 12.11.09 at 10:55 am

Follow up to #24: looking back at this post I see that I didn’t make my point clear. The original Orwell article, which I can’t find anymore, was a response to Victor Gollancz (I think) who was arguing that Henry the VIII was the ‘British Stalin’. Orwell acknowledged the force of the comparison but went on to argue that Cromwell would be an even better analogy.

36

ajay 12.11.09 at 11:13 am

34: triple purpose; it also reassures kids who are starting to grow a little alarmed about things like the Trail of Tears that white folks are victims too.

37

jake townhead 12.11.09 at 11:43 am

One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac. (Myles SG)

Blair told us ‘without doubt’ about WMD in 45 minutes.
Wilson’s file in MI5 was extensive (and secret), and so he had a lot to be paranoid about. And he successfully resisted ‘special relationship’ pressures to embroil Britain in the Vietnam War.

Very different PMs, yes, but only one had credibility.

38

Matt McGrattan 12.11.09 at 11:51 am

My experience [as another Scot] wasn’t that far off ajay’s in 33. I did do the History ‘Higher’, but the 17th century wasn’t a topic covered in much detail. so Cromwell was barely discussed at all. On the other hand, we did do a reasonable amount on emigration — primarily in the context of the Scottish Clearances, but Ireland and the potato famine was also touched — and we did 1916 [Dublin, Post Office, etc] in a reasonable amount of detail, too.

39

Matt 12.11.09 at 12:37 pm

25, 32,
The Potato famine is covered in US history because it was an important cause of Irish immigration, of course, and Irish immigration is an important part of US history. Even in the US, though, it’s usually taught as being mostly a natural disaster, with the role played by British policy largely being ignored. (Students have a strong tendency to think that potatoes originate from Ireland, if they don’t think they originated from Idaho, because most of what they know about the famine is that the major food of Ireland failed and then people went to the US. Even the maltreatment of the Irish in the US is mostly ignored. )

40

Henry 12.11.09 at 1:47 pm

I don’t know where Doctor Science was educated, but if it was in NY state in the last decade and a bit (unlikely), the reasons why it was on the curriculum were more or less along the lines that #34 stated, but with a fair bit more specificity. The Holocaust had been put onto the curriculum, and the attitude of the Hibernians in Albany was that we were damn well going to have our massacre taught to the young ones too! Their original aims were to have a curriculum focused on the ‘beware of the horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon” stuff, but the designers (one of whom is a friend), did one centered on the potato famine as a general experience of famine, connections with current problems of hunger instead. One of these days soon I will do a post though on the very interesting chapter on the potato famine in Cormac O’ Grada’s recent book on famines in general.

41

Moby Hick 12.11.09 at 2:01 pm

The founder of my hometown is famous for invading Canada. (The Fenians didn’t have a navy and went with what was British and nearby.) Nobody forgot the invasions, but nobody in any position of power thought to put him on trial for this. Eventually the U.S. started physically preventing him from invading, but that’s about it. People who considered the IRA a terrorist organization during the 70s still admired him. And technically, it wouldn’t be fair to call him a terrorist by most standards as he didn’t attack the unarmed.

42

john b 12.11.09 at 3:01 pm

most of what they know about the famine is that the major food of Ireland failed and then people went to the US

…coincidentally, if you replace US with “US/GB/Australia/Canada/NZ/dead”, this is also what demonstrably happened.

Sure, it would be better if more people in the UK and US knew about the commentators on the subject who believe it was genocide; it’d also be better if more people in Ireland knew about the commentators on the subject who believe it was an inept response to a natural disaster. For me, O’Grada is far more convincing than Boyle.

43

john b 12.11.09 at 3:02 pm

[O Grada, sorry]

44

ajay 12.11.09 at 3:22 pm

The Holocaust had been put onto the curriculum, and the attitude of the Hibernians in Albany was that we were damn well going to have our massacre taught to the young ones too!

Holocaust envy? Good grief.

45

Steve LaBonne 12.11.09 at 3:41 pm

Holocaust envy? Good grief.

You’d have to understand the mentality of the old-fashioned IRA-funding Irish-American troglodytes. (Not that you’d want to understand it…)

46

Anderson 12.11.09 at 3:58 pm

but as a useful mechanism that deflected a great deal of tension among the great powers

What’s a few thousand dead Boers or Iraqis, against deflecting tension?

Still, it seems that the world would be better off if the great powers took up golf, or masturbation, or something less lethal.

47

novakant 12.11.09 at 4:02 pm

Seems they had a pretty tough time in the US as well, lol.

48

bianca steele 12.11.09 at 4:11 pm

I remember learning in high school about the role of the Corn Laws in producing the famine, so contra @34 it is not always taught as a natural disaster. This was almost certainly in an elective course, however. A quick web search shows that it is on the standard curriculum. It is apparently placed in the context of Chartism, though, and I do remember learning about it in the context of British colonial policies and Pitt, so either our teacher included the background, or it was covered in American history.

Henry’s tidbit about the production of history curricula illuminates, a little, maybe, where in All Shall Be Well, … the main character complains that the students at the public school students where he briefly taught wouldn’t learn anything that wasn’t on the State Test. And though I definitely don’t think what’s behind the novel is “Holocaust envy,” rather an attempt to both redescribe an experience so others can understand it and to defend against over-particularism, it could be read that way. (I have an attempt at a mini-review on my blog, which might sound more negative than I intended.)

49

bianca steele 12.11.09 at 4:12 pm

S.B. Matt@39.

50

bianca steele 12.11.09 at 4:13 pm

Argh. and “standard curriculum for AP European History.”

51

Phil 12.11.09 at 4:43 pm

Holocaust envy? Good grief.

See also the late-80s upgrading of the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine into the Holodomor (a neologism which translates roughly as ‘plague of hunger’), and the claims that it killed six million people. I’m not inclined to deny or belittle the famine (my mother-in-law lived through it, apart from anything else), but there’s something a bit distasteful about an approach which involves rounding up the death-count and coining a word that begins with ‘Holo’.

52

bert 12.11.09 at 4:44 pm

“… the role of the Corn Laws …”
Deprived of free trade, multitudes die.
I believe noted Ireland expert Amity Shlaes has a view on this.

Addressing the Potato Famine in the context of Chartism seems like an odd thing to do.
It seems to me an American school curriculum would want to stick to the safe territory of nationality, and leave the subject of class mobilisation well alone.
Perhaps Bill Ayers is to blame.

53

bianca steele 12.11.09 at 4:54 pm

bert, why avoid the history of the leftward movement of European politics up through abolition of the monarchy, disestablishment of religion, universal suffrage, and so forth (not to mention, granting of civil rights to Presbyterians and Methodists)? Are we supposed, now, to regard Wilsonian self-determination of nations as applicable to the US itself–and as bad only when it results in “Balkan situations”? If so, I must have missed the memo.

54

bianca steele 12.11.09 at 4:56 pm

And … free trade and Corn Laws? Huh?

55

Matt 12.11.09 at 4:58 pm

Thanks, Bianca- I was thinking more in terms of how it was discussed in US history classes (and normal ones, not AP). I don’t remember how we talked about it when I took AP European History (we read some Swift, I know) but that was long enough ago that it might have been just how you described and I’ve merely forgotten. Most students in US high-schools, of course, don’t take any specifically European history at all, and I’d be shocked if more than 1 in 10 had any idea of what the corn laws or Chartism were.

56

Moby Hick 12.11.09 at 5:01 pm

Corn Law is Bonar Law’s cousin. Both were out to get the regular Irish.

57

bert 12.11.09 at 5:20 pm

Bianca, I’m mildly surprised that American high school students are being taught about “the leftward movement of European politics”. I’m far from critical of that fact. Indeed, I’m not offering considered criticism of any curriculum, let alone the specific one you have in mind. The references to Shlaes and Ayers were lighthearted, not snarky.

That said, you did explain that the Irish Potato Famine was being addressed in the context of Chartism. That’s not an obvious context. Certainly not at a high school level. I’m intrigued as to how that might work, but I’m afraid your comment at #53 doesn’t help. As for #54, there is some kind of tentative, tangential link between the debate about the Corn Laws and demands for tariff reform. Look it up and see what you think.

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bianca steele 12.11.09 at 5:32 pm

bert, I’m surprised that you are surprised, and I can only speculate about your reasons for being so. Why would American students not be educated to champion the extension of suffrage in Europe and elsewhere, or the other movements I listed in my earlier post? I’m sorry but I’m not going to accept on your authority that the context is “not obvious,” and it seems you don’t have much to say other than that you disagree.

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bert 12.11.09 at 6:04 pm

Chartism was a popular movement. It advocated electoral reform. It was mainland British, had British aims and a British focus.
The Irish potato famine is none of these things.
So to hear that the famine is being taught in the context of Chartism is interesting. I’d like to hear more. I have no ugly motives for wanting to hear more, but feel free to speculate. Perhaps best to do so privately, though.
In the meantime, can I offer some possible common ground? When you wrote “in the context of” you meant “alongside”, within the wider context you describe in #53.
Makes sense.
You still have a big problem with #54, though.

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bianca steele 12.11.09 at 6:12 pm

Re. your point about @53, everyone here is capable of using a search engine. In a comment already longer than most here, I was conceding that I did not quickly find what I remember learning 25 years ago in today’s standard syllabus.

Re. your point about @54, while I take the point that I am also capable of using a search engine (not to mention a library) to figure out what you are referring to, your post fit much too easily into the standard narrative “American non-academic is against something, must be a free-trade zealot who doesn’t realize free trade is best for the underclass!” for my personal comfort, and is inappropriate IMHO here. For convenience, here is what you wrote: Deprived of free trade, multitudes die. Sounds pretty sarcastic to me.

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bert 12.11.09 at 6:24 pm

“A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude”
And noone who knows me would ever confuse me with a gentleman.
Now I’m off to have dinner. Cheers, Bianca.

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Sunder Katwala 12.11.09 at 6:30 pm

It was George Bernard Shaw who wrote that “Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember”.

I wrote a long guardian comment is free piece with a fair bit about this a while ago.

Part of the issue is that the 1910-1914 period is massively at odds with all of the narratives and myths of British constitutional development; and partly that we assume the outcome of democratic broadly two-party class-based politics of 1945 to the 1990s was inevitable because it happened, which means pre-1945 20th century politics is overlooked or seen as going that way.

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soru 12.11.09 at 8:26 pm

What Sunder said, plus also the UK does seem to have an uncommonly large amount of history, and no more schoolroom time than anyone else.

Or as M. Bison put it:

Chun Li: My father saved his village at the cost of his own life. You had him shot as you ran away. A hero at a thousand paces!
Bison: I’m sorry… I don’t remember any of it.
Chun Li: You don’t remember?
Bison: For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.

64

EWI 12.11.09 at 10:09 pm

@ Hidari

(Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive)

You may be interested to learn that in Ireland he’s also known for having massacred the 600 inhabitants of Rathlin Island (men, women and children). Bet they don’t teach that one in the English textbooks.

65

Myles SG 12.11.09 at 10:46 pm

“What’s a few thousand dead Boers or Iraqis, against deflecting tension?”

And you prefer a repeat of the Great War and and the Second World War, which shook the pinnacle of human civilization achieved in the Edwardian era, instead?

Let’s keep a sense of proportion.

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Alex 12.12.09 at 2:38 am

“And you prefer a repeat of the Great War and and the Second World War, which shook the pinnacle of human civilization achieved in the Edwardian era, instead?

Let’s keep a sense of proportion.”

Wait, you think if Iraq hadn’t been invaded, there would’ve been another World War? And you want others to keep a sense of proportion?

“the Iraq misadventure is not as important as some more hyperbolic people tend to think; it’s more like a Boer replay than anything else”

That’s interesting, because the Boer war was the conflict that gave the world the “concentration camp”.

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Alex 12.12.09 at 2:39 am

I find it interesting how concern over hundreds of thousands of deaths can be described as “hyperbolic”.

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roac 12.12.09 at 2:46 pm

(Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive)

All the books I have ever read in which Drake appears say that he was conspicuous (by the bloodthirsty standards of the time) for his humane treatment of prisoners. My most recent source, the excellent The Confident Hope of a Miracle by Neil Hanson, says that he “treated captives, indigenous peoples, and runaway slaves with exemplary fairness . . .” The footnote to this sentence lists eight sources, one of them a letter from the Spanish ambassador Mendoza to Philip II. If someone has information to the contrary I would like to see it.

Details about Rathlin Island (of which I have to admit to not having heard of) confirm that Drake was in command of the ships escorting the English expedition) are pretty thin online. but don’t say anything about his personal participation in the massacre, which is attributed to Sir John Norris, the military commander. (With the full retrospective approval of the Earl of Essex, in overall command. Massacre was pretty much SOP for the English forces in Ireland at the time.)

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Barry 12.12.09 at 2:57 pm

Alex 12.12.09 at 2:39 am

“I find it interesting how concern over hundreds of thousands of deaths can be described as “hyperbolic”.”

Well, balanced against millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions which might hypothetically be lost in WWIII 1/2 (post-Cold War), what’s hundreds of thousands? And if WWIII 1/2 involved antimatter ‘planet crackers’, that might hypothetically have killed all life on Earth – 6 billion people.

And if WWIII 1/2 involved antimatter-driven timeline disrupters, then the lives all people (and para-people, pseudopeople and intelligent dinosaurs) of uncountable alternate Earths would have been lost. This could have been trillions of lives!!!!!!

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bianca steele 12.12.09 at 4:24 pm

@60 the standard narrative “American non-academic is against something, must be a free-trade zealot who doesn’t realize free trade is best for the underclass!”

Did I really write that? I like it, though. It really gets at the irrationality of the argument. I should leave more things unedited that I’m interrupted during the writing of.

On “free trade”.

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Frances 12.13.09 at 10:10 am

There is an extremely good pub in Newcastle on Tyne called the Free Trade Inn with wonderful beer and views over the river. Urban myth is that Chas Chandler took Jimi Hendrix drinking there when he was in England.

Could well be the only pub named after an economic theory?

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Mrs Tilton 12.13.09 at 11:56 am

Could well be the only pub named after an economic theory?

Don’t know whether it would fit your definition of “pub”, but there’s a Biergarten in Munich called “Zur alten Kaldor-Hicks-Effizienz”. They make really good Semmelknödel.

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bert 12.13.09 at 12:59 pm

Didn’t Dylan get called Judas at the Free Trade Hall?
Not sure if Hendrix ever played there.
There’s lots of Free Trade this and thats across the North.
Manchester liberalism, they used to call it.

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Henry 12.13.09 at 1:35 pm

bq. Could well be the only pub named after an economic theory?

Well, the “Doheny and Nesbitts School of Economics”:http://www.independent.ie/national-news/tax-breaks-for-watering-holes-where-culture-vultures-flock-218387.html is the only economic theory named after a pub.

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chris y 12.13.09 at 2:02 pm

In terms of atrocities, Cromwell’s record in Ireland was pretty much par for the course in that period – see the Thirty Years’ War, passim. I’m not really convinced how useful it is to demonise individuals for living down to the standards of a fairly barbaric age. I’m quite convinced it’s not useful to get moralistic about them using 21st century standards.

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Chris A. Williams 12.13.09 at 10:55 pm

Tim: “Thermopylae, Salamis, Marathon and the other one – the naval one I think – starts with P.” – ta, Tim, you have just given me some more ammunition in an attempt to get a decent treatment of Plataea on the radio.

I’ve been trying to get Plataea (the decisive one! biggest battle yet evah! not some irrelevant skirmish!) noted as a Thing that we Forgot To Remember for some time: if Radio 4 still exists next year I will make a pitch for it in Series 6. But I’ve not been trying it on with the Curragh mutiny as yet: my (so far as yet unsucessful) pitch for the Irish slot is “We have remembered the Easter Rising ad nauseam, but entirely forgotten the war of independence itself, which is odd”. Then some sod went and made _The Wind That Shakes The Barley_, which has knocked the stuffing out of that for a time.

[Tomorrow’s episode was going to be about the Brits gassing the Kurds, but at the last possible minute Ray Douglas went and found out that this never happened, so we’re rehabilitating Chamberlain at Munich instead. Curse these researchers and their mania for facts.]

Moving away from public history back to the topic of this thread, what I want to know are the similarities between the network that formed around the Curragh mutiny, and the group of people who, a couple of years later, decided that the country needed a Coalition government without the bother of an election, thanks. That would be interesting.

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Hidari 12.14.09 at 12:32 am

‘I’m not really convinced how useful it is to demonise individuals for living down to the standards of a fairly barbaric age. I’m quite convinced it’s not useful to get moralistic about them using 21st century standards.’

I’m sorry but this kind of argument really pisses me off. Yeah yeah yeah, to a certain, highly limited sense, ‘we’ are more ‘moral’ than ‘them’, in that, for example, when Republicans exhibit their essential racism they have to use coded language (‘dog whistle racism’), rank, aggressive misogyny is now frowned upon (and, indeed, the language of ‘feminism’ is frequently used to bash Muslims) and so on.

But the fact that murder, slaughter, rape, torture and war are a bad thing is not, in actual fact, something that was suddenly discovered on January 1st 2000 (or 2001, depending on your predilictions). Just as nowadays, these things were widely known, but, equally, there was a huge amount of propaganda by the powerful to demonstrate that it’s not really evil when ‘we’ do it: it’s only evil when ‘they’ do it. If one looks at the world as it is today, or at least over the last 20 years, (and by the world I mean the real world, not just ‘Western Europe, Australasia and North America’), some of the more striking things that have happened include:

The Rwanda Genocide
The Congolese Wars
Mass slaughter, genocide, and rape camps in the former Yugoslavia
Mass slaughter, terrorism, and concentration camps in Sri Lanka (in the ‘war’ against the Tamils)
The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (with casualties now spiralling off into the 2 million plus region)
Terrorism torture and mayhem in Chechnya
Chinese colonialism in Tibet
Insurgency, and ‘counter-insurgency’ (i.e. torture, murder) throughout India
The situation in Palestine, Western Sahara, East Timor, West Papua

Not to mention continued environmental collapse, the increasing gap between rich and poor and so on and etc.

We must remember that for the vast majority of our existence as a species, we lived in ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies where mass industrial slaughter, the rape of the environment, and vast gaps between rich and poor were unknown. It is equally clear that by these standards, we now live in an extremely barbaric age.

Also: this comparison implies that if Cromwell (and those that fought him) were suddenly transported into the 21st century they would all go: ‘Goodness me! What a paradise! Nuts, Zoo and Loaded magazines on every shelf! And the X Factor on TV! What talent! And Gordon Brown! What a superb politician!’ And so on. In other words, as usual ‘we’ are allowed to judge ‘them’ (or in the suggestion above, not allowed to judge them as, apparently, ‘they’ are too barbaric to be judged by ‘our’ superior moral standards) but ‘they’ can’t judge ‘us’.

And if we continue to hold these ideas, please don’t get all upset when, in the 24th century, historians suggest that of course Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Obama, and Chirac were savage war criminals by ‘our’ standards, but, as we all know, the early 21st century was an extremely barbaric age, and they were all just behaving in the way their savage, backward, smug little culture encouraged.

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Jim Harrison 12.14.09 at 1:15 am

How about being fair to the 17th Century? The brutality of political figures like Cromwell was bitterly denounced at the time and not just by his immediate victims. There was also a widespread reaction against the barbarism of the Thirty Years war on the continent, If you’re going to play the cultural relativism card, you ought at least to recognize that there are commonalities as well as differences in moral attitudes over the centuries and from region to region.

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Tim Wilkinson 12.14.09 at 4:08 pm

“What’s a few thousand dead Boers or Iraqis, against deflecting tension?”

Myles SG @65: And you prefer a repeat of the Great War and and the Second World War, which shook the pinnacle of human civilization achieved in the Edwardian era, instead?

OK, may as well add to the above criticism by adding that your original thesis appeared and still appears to be a confused and hopelessly speculative exercise in retrospective ignoring of now-sunk costs in human life, and in the assignment to one’s favoured cloud of whatever silver lining may be found lying about, or indeed fabricated. (At least on this occasion not a pair of mushroom clouds lined with the white silk of imminent surrender. There’s perspective for you.)

Still, I can at least now discount the appearance that you were espousing a particularly unattractive thesis: that the Boer war prevented the two world wars. This remark tips the balance decisively in favour of your acceptance that those wars did after all happen, at the relatively minor cost of conceding the irrelevance of the Boer war.

I like “shook the pinnacle”, though. It has a certain blancmangy resonance that brings to mind the vaguely topical defiant luncheon in Carry On up the Khyber.

And @31 – One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac.

Given the overall thrust of your remarks, there is some room for questioning the credibility of your questioning of credibility. I’ll eschew such meta-debate, and further otiose criticism of your arguments for (are they arguments for?) the invasion/colonisation of Iraq. Blair’s foreign policy speaks for itself.

But I wonder whether you actually have substantive criticism of the foreign policy performance of Wilson (leaving Callaghan and Brown aside). I can take a pretty good guess given your view of Suez and Iraq, but hearing the criticism itself might have been interesting.

Actually not only interesting but indispensable, since even if we did know that Wilson can reliably be diagnosed as having been mentally ill (which is what you seem to be alleging), that wouldn’t establish that his foreign policy was defective. That’s a polite charge of vulgar argumentum ad hominem*, by the way.

The biographical side-issue of Wilson’s state of mind toward the end of his career must take account of the terrible psychic consequences of perceived (in his case justifiedly perceived) persecution, which forms such a large part of the problems of those – very clearly not including Wilson – who suffer from auditory hallucinations, paranoid tendencies etc. But more importantly, and sadly, there is some likelihood that by the end of his last term in office he was suffering from ‘early confusional’ stage Alzheimer’s. His subsequent history shows it to be a salient possibility, whose actuality some highly speculative evidence tends to confirm. I don’t suggest that any decent person would make use of this horrible debility to insinuate that he suffered some prior personality defect or disorder, of course.

And of course we don’t have any good reason to give a significant degree of credence to any such scurrilous smear nor, per jake townhead @32, to think that Wilson was even given to unreasonable (an objective assessment of subjective data) suspicions. In fact he had far more reason to be highly suspicious than jake makes explicit.

———————–

*Regarding ad hominem argument: classically it consists in showing that a person holds an inconsistent set of opinions, without showing any particular member to be unsound. More vulgarly, it’s attacking character or motive rather than the substantive points. That’s you, that is. (And BTW the inadvisability of believing a proven liar is beside the point, in this case because inapplicable, but also in general since that’s a question of credible testimony, and has nothing to say about sound argument.)

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Peter Hart 12.15.09 at 1:28 pm

An interesting discussion, not least for how fast Cromwell and the Famine were introduced! Neither of which were due to ‘conservative’ policies, it might be added (perhaps this point was already made above but I was skimming a bit). At any rate, for anyone interested in the Easter Rising, I would second the mention of Fearghal McGarry’s forthcoming book, which is excellent. If anyone is interested in reading about the HR crisis, a great book for describing the tangled events and putting them into context is Alvin Jackson’s Home Rule. For Unionist resistance told (well) as a ripping yarn, see ATQ Stewart’s Ulster Crisis. Overall, an academic consensus seems to be emerging that BL and the UU leadership were intending it all as a bluff and that the threat of violence was just that: Tim Bowman’s recent book on the Ulster Volunteer Force stresses that they had no military plans at all. Of course, this is irrelevant to how Irish history then unfolded, as British-encouraged or enabled paramilitarization ultimately produced the Rising and the IRA, and massive loyalist violence occurred anyway, only against the Catholic population.

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