colonial legacies
Gemma and I have been lucky enough to take part in one of Alice Procter’s Uncomfortable Art Tours, at the National Portrait Gallery in London. There Alice exposed the justification and glorification of colonialism, imperialism and naked racism in one visual narrative after another.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, not least because Alice’s sharp, no-holds-barred critique was audible well beyond our group, including to the gallery’s docents. But alongside the immediate satisfaction given by the picking apart of Britain’s patriarchal and imperialist pretensions, a familiar melancholy arose, that these narratives were so powerful in the past, and continue to be powerful in the present, long after they should have crumbled.
What occurred to me repeatedly, as Alice talked us through the history of English, then British, imperialism, from the reign of Elizabeth I to the reign of Victoria, was its operations in Ireland (absent as a reference point in her tour, for understandable reasons).
I have a long-standing interest in Ireland’s complex relationship to colonialism, which has informed artwork (the disappeared) and writing (The Elephant in the Room and Troubling Ireland). As quarto, too, Gemma and I have worked with people for whom colonialism’s legacy is a live issue. Projects in Coleraine town, County Derry and around Lough Neagh have had to take into account the scars left on landscapes and communities by the Ulster Plantation.
Alice began her tour with a portrait of Elizabeth I, decked in white satin and pearls, an embryo image of Englishness for global consumption. Although Alice identified the beginnings of England’s colonial enterprise in this era, she suggested it was based, then, on desire for trade monopolies rather than political power.
Elizabeth sponsored several plantation projects in Ulster, most of which came to nothing. The Ulster Plantation, intended as a wholesale reorganisation of the rebellious province after the defeat of Hugh O’Neill and his allies in the Nine Years War and their subsequent flight to Europe and failure to return, was undertaken in the early years of his reign by her heir, James I of England and VI of Scotland. He assigned land taken from Gaelic chiefs and clans to those English, Scots and Welsh who were brave, greedy or desperate enough to set themselves up in war-ravaged and unsettled Ulster on the prospect of a fortune or even just a better life.
Working some years ago with Coleraine-based community researchers on the City of London’s role in planting then County Coleraine, now County Derry, I learned how Ulster’s great old-growth forests of Glenconkeyne and Killetra, stretching from the western shore of Lough Neagh to the foothills of the Sperrin Mountains, had all but disappeared within 50 years of the Ulster Plantation. Forests were not only seen as ‘the seat of rebellion in the north’, but also as rich resources to be monetised.[1] Among the first planters were venture capitalists, asset-strippers, men who were seeking easy money. Timber was among the most valuable commodities Ulster had to offer. Eager to make what they could from the deal they had been all but forced into by the king, the London Companies allowed wholesale destruction of the forests. Ulster timber contributed to the rapid expansion of English trade, colonial and otherwise. It went into ships, but more often became the staves of the innumerable barrels and buckets that carried provisions and goods from shore to shore across the known world for English sustenance and profit.[2]
More recently we worked with Lough Neagh Landscape Partnership, documenting fishing traditions and boatbuilding, industrial practices and folklore on the largest inland lake in Ireland and Britain. Here we discovered that the bed of Lough Neagh, subject of some sharp practice among various land-grabbers in the plantation era, remains today under the control of Lord Shaftsbury, under The Shaftsbury Estates of Lough Neagh Limited. More than one million tonnes of sand are lifted from Lough Neagh annually. This lough-bed sand turns a substantial profit for its absent owner, thanks to a levy on each tonne dredged. We heard from a sand-barge pilot that Lord Shaftsbury’s levy went from 16 pence to £1.50 per tonne in the course of his 20 years on the lough.[3]
Again through Lough Neagh Landscape Partnership, we moved on to work with communities to the south-west of the lough, sitting in and around a once-vast bog that had been reserved by James I in the Ulster Plantation for the upkeep of his Royal School in Dungannon. From then on, locals who had been cutting turf there to heat their homes and cook their food had to pay for the right to continue doing so. Once the forests were gone, turf was the parish’s main fuel until well into the 20th century. The Department of Education had eventually acquired the depleted bog, though in the 21st century it is a laissez-faire landlord. Industrial-scale turf extraction on the bog is carried out with and without planning permission. The bog’s few breeding pairs of curlew, the remnants of a decimated Irish population, are anxiously monitored. Communities are in discussion about the meaning and use of the bog in the locality, its roles in local economies, carbon sequestration and sustaining biodiversity. Traditionally nationalist and republican in their politics, used to neglect and marginalisation from Stormont, conscious of the struggles of their tenant-farmer antecedents to gain lands taken into planters’ hands in the 17th century, they are wary of outside claims to ownership and control.
Back in the National Portrait Gallery Alice finished her tour at a statue of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in which their costumes are sprinkled liberally with Celtic symbols. Celtic revivalism was a feature of the Victorian era, in which the Irish, Scots and Welsh fringes of the United Kingdom were refigured, romanticised and fetishised as representative of societies and cultures less worldly, more creative, more emotional, more innocently natural, than the staid Anglo-Saxon, weighed down by power and commerce. This, I suppose, was a form of cultural appropriation. The English at this time were willing to draw on and decoratively display so-called Celtic symbols because the threat of ‘Celtic’ rebellion had been neutralised (only for the time being, it turned out). The use of the term ‘Celtic’ also placed English admiration safely in the realms of pre-history and mythology.
The British Empire reached its height with Victoria, and little of its significance and power remains. Its so-called glories have been repeatedly invoked, however, since at least 2016 and the vote to leave the European Union, and arise again and again in the recent culture wars. The meaning and legacy of imperialism in the not-so-United Kingdom is a pressing issue again. For the Northern Irish, imperialism is complicated by the undoubted privilege of our white-skinned ancestors, Protestant and Catholic, in global terms. White skin permitted the move from colonised to coloniser. Empire’s legacy is of a different order for those carrying the experiences of the colonised in India, Pakistan, the West Indies and Caribbean, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
[1] Eileen McCracken, ‘The Woodlands of Ulster in the Early Seventeenth Century’, pp15-25 in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol.10, 1947, p21.
[2] James Stevens Curl, The Honourable the Irish Society and the Plantation of Ulster, 1608-2000: a History and Critique, Chichester, Phillimore, 2000.
[3] Personal communication from sand barge pilot, 7th November 2017.