Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (26 page)

Slavery might, after all, have shattered the peace of this resplendent empire in the 1830s or 1840s, as it tore apart the new American republic shortly afterwards. For if the Stamp Act in the 1760s produced a near-unanimous outcry from American colonies incensed by even so modest an infringement (as they saw it) of their property rights, how much more violent would have been American resistance to a British attempt to emancipate America’s slaves? Such a metropolitan intervention in the affairs of the colonies, had it come, as it did for Britain’s other colonies, in 1834, might have united American colonists with far greater vehemence around an economic institution of vastly greater significance than tea. As it was, the conflict over slavery in the 1860s was one from which Britain was able to stand aside; the result was a victory for the northern states, and emancipation. Had the conflict been fought within a transatlantic polity, American victory might have had the effect of entrenching that peculiar practice even more deeply in the life of the nation.

The world of the actual draws a veil over happier possibilities as well as over the darker ones, and our need to reconcile ourselves with the world in which we live forbids us to raise that veil. Yet an alternative methodology might explain many momentous episodes in British history as improbable and unforeseen events which some men found ways of portraying, in retrospect, as inevitable: 1660, 1688 and 1776 fall into that category. Equally, attempted actions which had a considerable chance of success are explained away by the hegemonic ideology, diminished in retrospect to the level of wild gambles, like the French invasion attempt of 1744 or the potentially French-backed Irish rebellion of 1797-8. In both cases, a plan made a domestic rising contingent on foreign military intervention that never materialised; but had the pieces fallen into place, as they did in 1660, 1688 and 1776, the historical landscape could have been transformed.

Implicit counterfactuals underpin all historical reconstructions of grand events, and only strongly purposeful ideologies condemn the open appraisal of alternatives as disreputable, inspired by impractical nostalgia. Yet the theoretical structure of nostalgia may be little more than an awareness of options not taken and potentialities never realised. Nostalgia has an emotional content too, sometimes securely grounded in the minutiae of past life, sometimes uncritically reliant on national or sectional myths. But whatever its emotional content, whether well- or ill-judged, the methodological significance of nostalgia suggests that popular understandings of history tend to be non-teleological.
¹¹⁰
It is with good reason, as Raphael Samuel reminds us, that the
bienpensant
instinctively reacts against popular attitudes to the past and seeks to denigrate them: however much popular nostalgia reflects an authentic empirical contact with the conditions of existence of past time, its unteleological structure robustly contradicts the thin-lipped commitments of the modern age.

Mankind has generally given little attention to counterfactuals. It is, of course, unprofitable to regret the might-have-been, whatever the logical status of such a stance:

Part of the reason for this mental block is psychological: a major decision once taken, a major counterfactual once actualised, has to be rationalised in retrospect as inevitable, as rational in the circumstances. Values are then adapted to outcomes to praise the new situation. A larger reason may, however, be methodological. W. B. Gallie offered one such account (perhaps over-complacent) of how disruptive contingencies were absorbed and accommodated in historical explanations, an account which implied that even an ‘unparalleled, hope-shattering disaster’ in the realm of contingency did not entail the enforced choice of an alternative counterfactual.
¹¹¹

Yet, examined more closely, the contingent and the counterfactual are only congruent at the outset of any historical enquiry. Soon, they begin to pull in different directions. The counterfactual assumes clearly identifiable alternative paths of development, whose distinctness and coherence can be relied on as the historian projects them into an unrealised future. An emphasis on contingency, by contrast, not only contends that the way in which events unfold followed no such path, whether identified by the merits of a case, by the good arguments or inner logic of principles or institutions; it also entails that all counterfactual alternatives would themselves have quickly branched out into an infinite number of possibilities.
¹¹²
Mankind cannot greatly lament the path not taken if that counterfactual is quickly lost, itself dividing into a myriad of options determined by the kaleidoscope of contingency. These difficulties ought to be reasons for placing them in the foreground of our enquiries; in fact, the need for consolation overrides the desire for explanation. Historians impressed by the force of contingency and their colleagues who stress counterfactuals can, after all, equally contend that, if Eve had not offered Adam the apple, something else might have gone wrong anyway.

Alvin Jackson

In short, dear English reader, the Irish Protestant stands outside that English Mutual Admiration Society which you call the Union or the Empire. You may buy a common and not ineffective variety of Irish Protestant by delegating your powers to him, and in effect making him the oppressor and you his sorely bullied and bothered catspaw and military maintainer; but if you offer him nothing for his loyalty except the natural superiority of the English character, you will - well, try the experiment, and see what will happen!

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,
John Bull’s Other Island

 

 

 

Home Rule was marketed by Gladstone as a patent cure for all the troubles of the Anglo-Irish relationship; and, since 1914, when the last of the three great Gladstonian measures of devolution was shelved, Home Rule has teased the consciences and (in some cases) the pride of British liberals. Home Rule, essentially a grant of limited self-government, was defined as a means of simultaneously satisfying Irish national aspirations, of binding Ireland to the empire, of correcting the sins of English conquest, and of ridding the congested imperial Parliament of its heroic but often prolix Irish members: as Winston Churchill remarked in the Commons in 1912, ‘we think that the Irish have too much power in this country and not enough in their own’.
¹
Moreover, Home Rule provided Gladstone (whose devolutionist convictions had been made public in December 1885) with a last great mission, and with a policy which (as with so many initiatives devised by this most intellectually subtle of politicians) served many purposes, both personal and political: Home Rule seemed to cast the complexities of late Victorian Liberalism inside a simple legislative format; Home Rule offered the chance of aligning a highly disparate party behind the leadership of its Grand Old Man.

The defeat of the two great measures of 1886 and 1893 robbed Gladstone of a Wagnerian climax to his political life, and left his followers confused and disoriented. The relegation of the third Home Rule measure in 1914 similarly robbed constitutional Nationalists of a crowning triumph, and appeared to create a political space for militant republicanism in the shape of the 1916 rebels and - after 1919 - the volunteers of the Irish Republican Army. Little wonder, then, that in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, of the bloody Anglo-Irish war (of 1919-21) and of more or less sustained violence in Northern Ireland (especially between 1969 and 1994) the liberal conscience has turned to ponder the great counterfactual problem of modern Irish history: whether a successful Home Rule measure might have created a tranquil and unitary Irish state, and whether such a measure might have brought the simplification and betterment of Anglo-Irish relations. But such speculations are not merely the preserve of tortured Gladstonians: latter-day Tories, weighed by the burden of Northern Ireland, and embarrassed by the ferocious Unionism of their forebears in 1886, 1893 and 1912-14, turn apprehensively to the Liberal polemicists of this era, and to their arcadian vision of Ireland under Home Rule. This essay is a further contribution to the undead history of the Home Rule agitation.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Home Rule agitation came to prominence, Ireland was a constitutional anomaly.
²
The formal basis for the government of Ireland was the Act of Union (1800), a measure which abolished the medieval and semi-independent Irish Parliament and created a United Kingdom Parliament, with substantial Irish representation, at Westminster. But if (as Unionists came to allege) Home Rule was a constitutional halfway house, then this accusation might equally have been applied to the Act of Union - for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland effected in 1800 was as incomplete as the grants of legislative autonomy proposed by Gladstone in 1886 and by Asquith in 1912. Many vestiges of the pre-Union administration remained, and throughout the nineteenth century Ireland, though formally an integral element of the United Kingdom, was in practice quite distinct. Moreover, if the institutions of government were, in British terms, distinctive, then the mentality of the governing class, centred in Dublin Castle, was equally quixotic and colonial. Ireland was represented only at Westminster, and was governed (in theory) from London: but there was a lord lieutenant, or viceroy, in Dublin, appointed by the crown, and the vestiges of a distinct executive. Ireland had a separate Privy Council and a largely separate judiciary, headed by a lord chancellor and a lord chief justice; there were separate law officers, and even - after 1899 - something akin to a separate Irish minister for agriculture (the vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction). At the heart of this administrative miasma was a concentration of senior civil servants, often Englishmen, generally decent if narrow officials, who brought a peculiarly provocative mixture of condescension and self-confidence to their postings. Irish government was thus an overlay of ancient, semi-autonomous institutions, the relics of its status as a separate kingdom, combined with the new institutions of Union: the whole composition was shaded by a vibrant imperialism.

The paradox of Irish government in the nineteenth century was that, though there was an elaborate array of institutions, and though ministers and officials were comparatively benign, and though - certainly at the end of the century - local officials and policemen were generally Irish Catholics, this administrative panoply was deeply unpopular. The Union, imperfect in terms of the institutions of government, proved to be an equally imperfect focus for popular political affections. The reasons for this may only briefly be summarised. First, the Union was driven on to the statute books in the aftermath of a bloody government victory in 1798 over republican rebels; it was designed in the first instance to serve the needs of British security, and to protect the existing propertied interest in Ireland. Though a long-standing political interest of its architect, William Pitt, the Union was made possible by British military supremacy.
³
Second, it was Pitt’s original intention to combine the measure with a grant of complete civil equality for Catholics, but this politically essential sweetener was later dropped. The Catholic hierarchy, who had tentatively supported the Union proposal, given the likely prospect of concessions, felt themselves to be the victims of British perfidy: and the Catholic community generally, who might have been associated with the Union experiment from its inception, were instead largely excluded. The consequences of this alienation were far-reaching. From the late eighteenth century on, Catholic political and economic confidence was growing, bolstered by an upturn in the Irish economy, by some liberal Protestant endorsement, and by limited legislative concessions from the government (such as the re-enfranchisement of Catholic forty-shilling freeholders in 1793). Related to this general economic expansion was the rapid growth of the Irish population, and in particular the very rapid growth of the Catholic labouring class. This process of consolidation continued into the nineteenth century, and involved political victories such as Catholic ‘emancipation’ in 1829 (the achievement of more or less complete civil equality) and the disestablishment of the Anglican state church, the Church of Ireland, in 1869: indeed most of these victories were won at the expense of the old ascendancy interest, and in the teeth of its opposition. Even with this cursory survey, the weakness of the Union will be at once apparent: despite the intentions of Pitt, the measure effectively served British and ascendancy interests; and the emergent regime practically excluded the community which was simultaneously the most populous and the most dynamic and the most assertive.

This exclusion served to bolster the national sympathies of Irish Catholics.
⁴
In no sense was the creation of a strident Catholic nationalism preordained, however. Although, with the benefit of hindsight, many nationalist writers saw continuities between Catholic Confederate protest in the 1640s, the Jacobite cause in the 1680s, the United Irish cause in the 1790s, and the varieties of nationalist protest in the nineteenth century, the reality of Catholic politics was considerably more complex than any vision of a national pageant.
⁵
If, as Elie Kedourie has famously argued, imperialism begets nationalism, then the circumstances of British rule in Ireland to some extent propagated a formidable coalition of national forces.
⁶
This need not have produced a popular republicanism (Irish republicanism almost certainly achieved a majority following only at the time of the War of Independence): many popular Irish politicians, from Daniel O’Connell, the masterbuilder of emancipation, through to John Redmond, the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary party, combined a desire for Irish self-government with loyalty to the British crown, or a commitment to Irish participation in the empire. But the failure of successive British governments to accommodate this distinctive (and otherwise highly successful) tradition of Irish patriotism-cum-loyalty lent credence to the demands of a more militant and thoroughgoing nationalist lobby. A vestigial British connection with Irish government was certainly possible from the point of view of these constitutional nationalists: that this connection failed was as much because of British policy in Ireland and indeed historical chance as the inexorable rise of a separatist republicanism.