Ebook: An Irish Empire: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire

Imperial historians have long appreciated the interactive character of the culture and politics of the British Empire with those of the congeries of nations that make up the United Kingdom. In his book Welsh and Scottish Nationalism published in 1954, Sir Reginald Coupland, the Beit Professor at Oxford who had been heavily involved in the constitutional discussions leading to Indian independence, recognised that decolonisation in the Empire would test the bonds of the metropolitan state. He attempted to make a clear distinction between the Irish experience, in which the Enghsh had been economically exploitative and politically arrogant, with that of the Welsh and the Scots. 'The unity of Britain', he wrote, represented 'a great political and psychological achievement', transforming a Balkans into a multinational state, the triumph of a liberal and humane English tradition.
Writing soon after the Irish Republic had left the Commonwealth, Coupland's book represented a plea for Union, powerful advocacy for the notion that neither the Welsh nor the Scots shared the grievances of the Irish and therefore had no need to continue the break-up of Britain. Nevertheless, in modem times, the inter-relationship of events in Ireland and the search for devolution or independence in Wales and Scotland has continued to be appar¬ ent. Proposals for constitutional development in Northern Ireland inevitably raise questions about comparability elsewhere. Such connections have been made for more than a hundred years. From at least the 1880s, Scottish national¬ ists watched the development of federalism and dominion status in the Empire with some interest and argued for 'Home Rule All Round', the application of imperial placebos to the metropolitan body politic.
But the relationship between the component parts of the United Kingdom and the imperial experience is even more complex than that suggested by these constitutional and political issues. A tangled skein of economic, social and cultural threads, many of them connected to the rich experience of emigration, with its powerful emotional resonances of despair and hope, joined different parts of the imperial core to the so-called periphery. Other linkages were set up through aristocratic and bourgeois expatriate activity in land ownership, administration, industrial and trading relations, military service and pohcing, together with the attendant cultural baggage which travelled with such people.