Laboratory

Abstract This chapter examines Ireland as laboratory of and for empire, a place of testing, where some experiments worked and others failed, where some were directed by the Crown or imperial agents and others emerged organically. Section I examines concepts of empire and how Ireland served as a test bed where ethnocentric ideas were worked out and iterated over time in accordance with changing imperial priorities. Building on the discussion of anglicisation in Chapter 2, Section II explores the imprint of Ireland across the governance, policies, and physical landscape of the English empire. Section III looks at how ‘tools of empire’ were trialled in Ireland and then adopted, albeit having been adapted to suit local circumstances, throughout the early modern Anglophone world. In the final two sections arguments developed in early modernity are extended into the modern period using Ireland and India as a case study. Thus the focus of Section IV is on the structural and human links between Ireland and India that continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moving from discussions of being servants of empire, Section V looks briefly at the Irish as subversives within it—how Ireland served as an exemplar for resistance to imperial rule and how a colonised people helped to bring down the British empire.