John Patrick Montaño's The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland, like other works in Cambridge's series Critical Perspectives on Empire, aims to produce work that is both cognizant of postcolonial theory and grounded in empirical methodology. In this vein, Montaño's stated aim is “to concentrate on the various meanings of land used and landscape in Ireland and in so doing to develop a new instrument that will clarify our understanding of Tudor policies in Ireland as well as the strategies of early English colonialism” (25).
Despite Montaño's stated desire for clarity, his impassioned approach to the topic means that the book quickly changes from a project that aims at telling us something about the Tudor regime's doings in Ireland to an attempt to interpret everything about the Tudor regime's doings in Ireland. As a result, the author overstretches, and the book falls somewhere between being a monograph and a survey text. When the criteria of factual significance required for a study of colonialism in Tudor Ireland are seamlessly transformed into the criteria through which the whole of the period in Ireland's history should be understood, we face a problem. To my mind, Montaño never manages to explain this elision plausibly.
A relatively large proportion of the book is given over to sections of narrative, which not only serve to frame Montaño's thesis but also briskly and assertively occupy space where one might expect analysis, reflection, and argument. Another result of this briskness is that Montaño tends not to engage fully with works that might be antagonistic to his project. By contrast, historians who help advance his thesis that the ideology and strategies first elaborated in Tudor Ireland continued to develop, reappearing with slight variations on several continents throughout the British Empire (16, 19), receive major billing.
Montaño casts the story of Tudor Ireland as a “culture war” between Irish ways and Irish laws and the scientific and materialistic prejudices of royal officials. The character of their civil strategies is ascribed to general English ideas of cultural superiority, views that pastoralists were barbarians and willful. There is not much new here, but the data is not as well contextualized as it might be. Montaño posits unanimity where things were in fact much more complex. For example, in his conclusion, Montaño asserts that reform-minded English officials were “approaching a consensus” by the 1570s that it was right and necessary to sweep Irish customs and culture out of Ireland. Needless to say, the verification of generalizations about something supposedly in a state of becoming is intrinsically very difficult, if not impossible. This proposition is certainly not verified by the quote Montaño uses to supplement it—a statement from Lord Deputy Mountjoy made in March 1601 during a time of total war in Ireland, when so many of the assumed verities on which Tudor Irish politics had been built were on the verge of a largely unforeseen but total breakdown. A very different context obtained in the 1570s and throughout much of the country in the 1580s. Unfortunately, neither the Composition of Connacht nor its significance gets much attention here.
Montaño is at his best introducing us to the literature about plantation and land use, mulling over the plans, surveys, projects, accounts, and subscriptions that have long been a staple of the Tudor historian. It is interesting to see a new survey of this material. Here Montaño is on surer ground. We already know that the contemporary orthodoxy made much of tillage and disparaged pasture. These metropolitan prejudices were also prevalent when dealing with the land and inhabitants of the North of England, Wales, and Cornwall. The periodic plans for colonies in Ireland also presumed that the imposition of agrarian reform in limited planted areas would lead almost osmotically to a civilizing effect on the Irish. Yet given political and financial realities in Ireland, and the legacy of former failed attempts at limited colonies designed to aid the Crown's political ends in Ireland, most of this theorizing never got beyond the drawing board.
The Tudor regime in Ireland was an underfunded and unstable apparatus that took as its official rhetoric the goal of “reforming” the country and the queen's subjects there, thereby securing not only the sister-kingdom against foreign invasion but also providing increased income from taxation and economic improvement. The main aim, in short, was to advance anglicization of the politics and population of Ireland by means of the unfolding of English law throughout the country. This program, like many received commonplaces, did not excite passionate enthusiasm but could comprehend a number of strategies. One of these was the establishment of provincial administrations and councils meant to facilitate governmental reach into the provinces based on structures employed in Wales and the North of England. These were designed to complement the keystone of Irish politics, the unfolding of a system whereby Gaelic-Irish potentates, previously outside the remit of Irish common law, were recognized under it and entered into formal tenurial arrangements, holding their lands in fee from the monarch—a process later called “Surrender and Regrant” by historians. Intense political interaction between Crown officers and Irish potentates ensued from this enfranchisment, issuing in ad hoc alliances, the formation of cartels, corruption, opportunism, and the liberal use of violence.
Plantation was conceived of in the light of Ireland's underpopulation and the episodic voiding of Gaelic-Irish or English-Irish tenurial claims by virtue of escheat or attainder, especially in the aftermath of, often unanticipated, political tumult: war in the midlands in the late 1540s, the downfall of Shane O’Neill, and the second Desmond Rebellion. These attempts, as mentioned above, were infrequent, troublesome, and ultimately unrewarding. Some of these plans were ambitious, but even the Munster plantation was mired by legal challenges by the native population before being engulfed in the conflict that wracked the last five years of Ireland's sixteenth century.
Little wonder then that the Tudor regime's corporate memory did not conceive of plantation as any sort of panacea. For all that, in the mainstream of political thinking, there was no necessary incompatibility between the durable workaday common-law-based operation of the Tudor state, which officially respected both tenurial rights and plans for colonies. And while there was a distaste for the Irish and their manners among the English, this disdain worked less as motivation to action for Crown servitors in Ireland than did the lure of peculation and the demands of personal honor. In spite of this, the political aspect of Irish life, brutal and venal as it was, had a surprising durability. Arguably the biggest obstacle to the satisfactory development of this rough political process was not official pessimism about the potential for civilizing the Irish, rather it was a factor to which Montaño devotes no attention at all: religion.
In summary, Montaño's book is useful when focused on primary sources about Irish colonization. But in order to understand the political nuance and complexity of the period— the context in which this material has to be understood—this work should be supplemented by the work of Ciaran Brady, Brendan Kane, and James Murray, as well as Brendan Bradshaw's and Ciaran Brady's essays on Sir William Herbert. The best survey text for the whole period remains S. J. Connolly's Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630.
