Abstract

"The Political Economy of Colonial Capitalism: Ireland as Colony or Kingdom in a Shattered British Empire, 1774-1785?"

Mary O'Sullivan, University of Geneva (mary.osullivan@unige.ch)

In 1785, the British prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, proposed a sharp break in Britain’s repressive commercial policy towards Ireland to “unite and connect” what he described as “our reduced and shattered empire of which Great Britain and Ireland were now the only considerable members…”. Political historians have disentangled important threads of the complex political story that led to the failure of Pitt’s “Irish proposals” but they have paid limited attention to their economic context. In this paper, I argue that the rupture that the American revolution and war provoked in the British Atlantic economy is vital to understanding the challenges that Pitt confronted when he turned to his “great Irish question” from the summer of 1784. It led to major conflicts about ‘colonial capitalism’ -- specifically about who could profit from the complex web of trade arrangements that connected and separated economies within the British empire – that created major opposition to Pitt’s proposals in Britain and Ireland. Contemporaries may not have used the term “colonial capitalism”, but what they described, especially their insistence on a cheap and disciplined workforce and “men of capitals” for financing credit, was “irresistibly evocative of this word and of no other” as Fernand Braudel put it. The paper’s emphasis on colonial capitalism raises an important challenge for political historians who tend to dismiss “capitalism” as anachronistic even for the 18th century. And it suggests that even as late as the mid-1780s, British capitalism was understood by those who tried to imitate and perpetuate it as a form of merchant capitalism that depended on imperial privileges. The papers draws on a wide variety of primary sources including parliamentary records, pamphlets, political correspondence as well as the original records of British imperial trade for the period from 1774 to 1785.