The building blocks of colonialism: state archives from the mid-seventeenth century in Ireland.

Keywords: archive, colonialism, Ireland, landlordism, state
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

Ireland in the early modern period has been considered the laboratory for the English government’s colonial experiments. In this, the pen was core in forging the colonial world view which justified the appropriation of land and the subjugation of native communities. Though colonial discourse in the early seventeenth century tended to restrain from the abusive language of the 1500s in Ireland, texts during and after the 1641 rebellion reflected the utter disdain for Catholic communities that later justified Cromwell’s drastic measures resulting in an almost outright transfer of land to Protestant ownership in the 1650s. This paper argues that the archives of the 1641 rebellion targeted information in ways that facilitated a reframing of earlier colonial discourse in the mid-seventeenth century and in doing so, it opened the way for the production of a state archive involving multiple forms of document transmitted in narrative, tabulated, and mapped form. Examining the ‘archive-as-subject’, this paper traces the shape, form, and production of the mid-seventeenth century state archive and considers the extent to which it, not alone empowered the practices of colonialism, but created them in the late seventeenth century. In doing so it comments upon the subsequent landed era as viewed through the case study of Stradbally, Co. Laois, and considers landlordism as a colonial agency that was arguably founded upon the private archives of the landed elite.