In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to consider more fully the distinct experiences of separate Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh relationships with the British empire.Footnote 1 For over two decades, proponents of the ‘New British History’ have attempted to view the domestic history of Britain and Ireland in the context of the experiences of the four primary ethnic groups, the Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh.Footnote 2 Yet, the history of the British empire (integral to the unfolding of the history of Britain and Ireland) has until recently been treated separately. Traditional accounts of metropolitan-focused imperial history have tended to view the history of the British empire almost exclusively from the perspective of England or, more specifically, from London. By focusing upon the binary interactions between ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’ such accounts have helped consign the history of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh involvement to the margins of British imperial history, while simultaneously obscuring the crucial role of indigenous peoples and the colonies themselves in the imperial process. A failure to pluralize the imperial experience at a domestic level implicitly emphasizes England's role and importance in transmitting ideas, capital, and power from metropolitan core to colonial periphery. It was precisely because Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales were never homogeneous economic, political, or religious entities that the empire might act as a powerful solvent for the different ethnicities and identities of these regions, binding them together and finding a common purpose through a distinctly ‘British’ endeavour. However, recent research has demonstrated that far from dissolving such heterogeneity and unifying the diverse peoples of Britain and Ireland, the empire actually formed separate relationships between each and reinforced national identities. Increasingly, historians are now moving away from a study of the simple bilateral relations involving ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’ to the more complex multilateral relationships engendered through separate Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh involvement with the empire. Many studies typical of the ‘new imperial history’, for example, have demonstrated that Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh personnel in fact viewed the empire in different ways and interacted with indigenous people and culture accordingly.Footnote 3 By charting these varied responses, historians are now beginning to build a fuller explanation for the timing and development of overseas expansion as well as the factors leading towards decolonization.
In an attempt to draw attention to some of the nuanced ways in which the different regions of Britain and Ireland contributed to the experience of empire, this article focuses on the relationship between Ireland, empire, and colonial science during the nineteenth century. It examines Ireland's engagement with the geographical construction of British rule in India, particularly in relation to surveying and geological exploration. Contrary to older narratives that have often underplayed the crucial role of Ireland in British overseas expansion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this article views Ireland as an important sub-imperial centre that provided the empire with a vital repository of manpower, knowledge, and skill from which to draw during British attempts to establish primacy in South Asia. The article argues that under the Act of Union (1801–1922) Ireland played an increasingly prominent role in relations between science and empire. During this period Irish scientific institutions played a decisive role in the emergence of colonial knowledge and the construction of British imperial rule. At the same time, Irish migrants (both Catholic and Protestant) were at the forefront of exporting systems of scientific knowledge and practice to different parts of the empire where they were adopted and used, albeit in highly modified forms. In particular, the article examines the importance of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland upon the organization and technical structure of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTS). The article also focuses on Thomas Oldham and his network of Irish geologists who were recruited by the British government to carry out exploration and research on the Geological Survey of India between 1851 and 1878. In doing so, the article examines what roles direct Irish involvement played in the emerging scientific and technological agencies of colonial state formation and in defining the expanding roles and responsibilities of the modern British state in India. Finally, through an examination of Irish involvement in colonial science in nineteenth-century India, the article attempts to centre Ireland within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of knowledge that played an important role in the making of modern science.
I
Although there have been plenty of recent studies on aspects of ‘Scotland's empire’ – most notably on the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Presbyterianism on the manner in which the Scots circulated their ideas and cultivated distinctive relationships with indigenous peoples abroad – the case of Ireland and empire is still very much a new field of inquiry.Footnote 4 This is partly because of the persistence of the nation-state as the traditional framework of historical analysis.Footnote 5 Historians have tended to focus upon domestic rather than international considerations to explain the origins of national development and the formation of national identities. In the context of Irish history this is significant. Although not officially a ‘colony’ of the British empire, Ireland was nevertheless subjected to extensive colonization by the English and Scottish during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 6 Following the 1798 rebellion, further attempts were made to make Ireland more British by joining it legislatively to the kingdom of Great Britain through the Act of Union.Footnote 7 The Irish parliament was dissolved, Irish MPs now sat at Westminster, with closer links to the executive, and a new apparatus of British rule in Ireland was created centred upon Dublin Castle. As such, Ireland was now part of the metropolitan core of the British empire, albeit not straightforwardly so.Footnote 8 Irish people, both Catholic and Protestant, from the north and south, were engaged in the business and workings of empire as merchants, soldiers, administrators, doctors, missionaries, and educators. Ireland was thus both ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ at the same time, ‘colonizer’ but also ‘colonized’.Footnote 9
However, because nationalism in Ireland was generally equated with anti-imperialism, the role that Ireland played in the empire (and conversely the role that the empire played in Irish history) has been largely ignored.Footnote 10 Throughout the twentieth century, Irish historians and historians of Ireland alike sought to produce narratives that traced the historical course of the nation from the onset of colonialism through to independence, virtually ignoring Ireland's substantial involvement in the empire. While ongoing debates concerning the exact nature of Ireland's colonial status persist, its role as an important supplier of goods and commodities, personnel, ideas, and finance for the British empire is only beginning to be explored.Footnote 11 Such a focus on the nation-state as a neatly bounded, excisable dimension fails to recognize the essentially shifting and permeable nature of all national boundaries.Footnote 12 Moreover, studies that treat the nation as fixed do not sufficiently consider the broader global currents fashioned through involvement in imperialism that have helped shape national development and national identities.Footnote 13 While it is not necessary to dispense with the idea of the nation entirely – indeed this article ‘readmits’ the nation on several occasions by highlighting the role of Irish people and institutions in imperial history – it is important nonetheless to emphasize the need to look beyond national boundaries to the linkages and connections that bound the British empire together in a wider imperial system. To be sure, it seems that an enduring preoccupation with the nation has contributed in no small part to a general reluctance by historians to engage in one of the most important debates within the social sciences in recent times concerning the origins, nature, and consequences of globalization. Although historians have recognized how the experience of empire was central to the creation and form of nation-states,Footnote 14 only recently have scholars, such as Anthony Hopkins, used globalization as a theme of serious historical analysis.Footnote 15 What were once thought of as separate and discrete national histories are now being brought together, woven into a broader narrative of ‘interconnectedness’ and ‘interdependence’ and are read as global history.Footnote 16
Christopher Bayly, for example, has recently traced the rise of global uniformities in the ways in which states, religions, political ideologies, and economic activity developed during the long nineteenth century. For Bayly, the ruptures to the world order caused by increased conflict between rival European imperial states after 1780 contributed in no small measure to this rapid period of growth in global uniformity. As increased levels of overseas expansion, warfare, and migration grew, tying world events together, so too did the ways in which people began to see one another and how they began to define themselves. According to Bayly, this became evident not only in the way powerful institutions such as churches, systems of education, and justice were organized and run, but also, for example, in how different peoples began to relate and communicated to one another, how they dressed and what they ate.Footnote 17 Other scholars, such as Tony Ballantyne, have similarly emphasized the importance of the historical cultural and intellectual dimensions of globalization.Footnote 18 He has argued that the 1760s in particular was a ‘globalizing decade’ when a whole host of imperial states, notably Britain, embarked upon voyages of exploration, commercial development, and territorial expansion. As imperial powers consolidated their newfound colonial possessions and negotiated informal economic arrangements and relationships with various non-colonized lands, resultant warfare, scientific activity, and commerce fashioned the emergence of new bodies of knowledge and cultural networks.Footnote 19 Within these networks, the encounters between imperial agents and indigenous peoples generated an entirely new system of global information gathering and exchange that eventually underpinned alternate conceptions of race, language, and religion.Footnote 20
Rising levels of global ‘interconnectedness’ generated by the growth and expansion of European imperial states after the 1760s had several profound implications. Foremost among these was the notion that areas of the world previously unconnected were now brought into regular contact with one another through what Ballantyne has described as systems of ‘mobility and exchange’.Footnote 21 These encounters, although highly uneven, given the unequal nature of the power relations of colonialism, in turn played an important part in changing the way people both in the imperial sphere and in the colonies began to view themselves and their roles in the wider world. A desire to understand exactly how such encounters and exchanges helped shape modern ideas of government, economics, law, and civil society has encouraged scholars working in related fields to frame their analyses in broader more dynamic trans-national contexts.
Recently, both the historiography of the history of science and the history of ideas have lent credence to the idea of the ever-protean and shifting nature of scientific thought and ideological production. The processes of marking boundaries and drawing maps, formulating new methods of legitimizing colonial rule, and creating histories of possession were all constantly shaped and informed by the different geographical locations and cultural encounters involved in the imperial process. David Arnold, for one, has placed great emphasis on the multi-centred origins and mobile nature of science during the long nineteenth century, arguing that the history of science in India is not simply a story of ‘European discovery’ and dissemination, but rather one that recognizes how science ‘manifests itself across time and cultures in myriad forms, reflecting as much as informing a given society's cultural, economic and political modalities’.Footnote 22 Kapil Raj has equally contested the idea of the simple transfer of ‘Western’ ideas and practices on to receptive and passive colonial societies. In his account of the construction and spread of scientific knowledge in the context of colonial South Asia, Raj has emphasized the reciprocal nature of the processes of circulation and negotiation between colonizer and colonized. Far from being a site where information was uniformly gathered before being transferred and processed in the metropole, South Asia was itself ‘an active, though unequal, participant in the emerging world order of knowledge’.Footnote 23 Crucially, it was through the ‘intercultural encounter’ between European and South Asian intellectual and material practices in the ‘contact zone’ that ‘certified knowledges’ came into being. Although the unequal power relations engendered by the colonial state in India ensured that these bodies of knowledge followed different paths and trajectories and were appropriated and integrated differently in European and South Asian contexts, they were, nonetheless, borne out of the same processes of circulation and exchange. Moreover, that ‘place’ matters and that geography has a bearing on science has been the subject of extensive treatment in a recent study by David N. Livingstone.Footnote 24 Livingstone has argued that the ‘where’ of scientific activity – ‘the sites where experiments are conducted, the places where knowledge is generated, the localities where experiments are carried out’ – is central to any understanding of how certain sets of ideas, information, and practices have impacted upon the world on a global scale. In this regard, scientific activity does not disperse evenly from one space to another. Just as images and ideas are invariably modified and differently interpreted as they pass from person to person, from community to community, from culture to culture, so scientific activity is persistently shaped and reshaped through its encounters in multiple locations.Footnote 25
Although the historiography of the history of science in South Asia continues to embrace these wider trends in imperial and global history, it has focused almost exclusively to date on Indo-British interactions, thus obscuring an understanding of the substantial involvement of Ireland in this process. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a wide variety of university graduates from Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales made their way to India via employment with the East India Company. There, as administrators and military men, they honed their skills as ‘gentlemanly scholars’, frequently collecting plants, geological specimens, and artefacts to raise their profile and reputation, especially upon their return home. Later, as doctors, surveyors, botanists, and geologists of the Crown Raj, encounters with colleagues and indigenous counterparts enabled them to circulate, negotiate, and reconfigure their skills in the ‘contact zone’. In turn, their skills were absorbed into both the commercial and colonial institutions they represented, impacting not only upon ‘metropolitan’ science but also on the practice of science globally.
II
The current lack of literature on the Irish dimension to the twinned relations of science and empire (and the making of geographical knowledge) is surprising given that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Irish people and scientific institutions played an increasingly prominent role in Britain's attempts to expand the boundaries of its empire eastward. Following the American War of Independence, Britain increasingly looked towards Asia and the Pacific in search of new lands, markets, and resources to expand its economic and political influence overseas. During the late eighteenth century, ongoing hostilities with France encouraged the British to invest heavily in science in an attempt to gain an advantage over their principal imperial rivals. Perhaps the greatest expression of this at the time was found in the Royal Navy's (later the Admiralty's Hydrographic Department's) attempts to establish a marine charting initiative world-wide.Footnote 26 Around this time, instruments designed for methodical observation were perfected, map-making techniques harnessed, and inquiries into a plethora of native languages, customs, population distribution, production, and trade patterns initiated. Alongside the Ordnance Survey, these early hydrographic endeavours played an important role in the advent of scientific disciplines such as geology, botany, and cartography, all of which were integral to British plans to establish colonial rule in India. At the forefront of these attempts was the British East India Company, whose rule in India (c.1765–1858) coincided with some of the most critical developments in the history of modern science, from the rise of Enlightenment natural history to Darwin's Origin of species (1859).Footnote 27
Irish involvement in the East India Company began in earnest during the Seven Years War (1756–63) when large numbers of Irish soldiers and officers were recruited into the Company's European regiments.Footnote 28 Although early Company interest in the Irish (particularly Catholics) rested in hope that the Irish would make good the alarmingly high mortality rates among British troops in India, this attitude changed towards the late eighteenth century as Irish involvement gradually began to inform the recruitment of military personnel in the pursuit of science. This connection between the ‘military orientalism’ of the Company and Ireland was especially pronounced during the Company's attempts to map India, where from the mid-1820s to the late 1830s, aspects of the organizational and technical structure of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland were used to inform the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. During this period a range of East India Company agents and government officials looked to the example of Ireland in an attempt to reinforce the epistemological rationale behind the GTS. In this context Ireland was considered an important site where new technologies, methods of scientific practice, and organization were developed and then ‘exported’ to other parts of the empire.
Of course, whether Ireland was somehow a ‘laboratory’ for colonial scientific practice in nineteenth-century India is a moot point. The simple one-way transmission of ideas or practices from ‘metropole’ to ‘periphery’ has for a long time been open to criticism. This ‘diffusionist’ model, owed in large measure to George Basalla's much debated article on ‘The spread of western science’ (1967), has been overthrown by recent scholarship in the history of science that has emphasized the mobile nature of scientific ideas during this period, thus debunking the notion of static labs and ‘receptive’ or passive societies.Footnote 29 Moreover, Matthew H. Edney's argument that the GTS was a ‘flawed ideal’ is an important one, in that both science and political control were socially mediated processes and that the ‘transplantation’ of ideas, while high on imperial ambition, was always fragile and incomplete in implementation. Besides, the establishment of political control in India was never a simple unilateral process involving only the colonizers. Indians, themselves, persistently resisted and negotiated the terms in which the British defined their boundaries and established their hegemony. According to Edney, the surveys and geographical investigations of the GTS were little more than exercises of ‘scientistic ideology’ designed to create an image of a ‘British India’ for the benefit of an expanding empire.Footnote 30 Notwithstanding this, however, Irish personnel for the most part supplemented such attempts by the British to establish their authority in India and as Edney has observed, scientific activity in Ireland, particularly work on the Irish survey, at times represented ‘the epitome of what they hoped to achieve in India’.Footnote 31 While not necessarily a ‘laboratory’ or ‘testing-ground’ for ‘colonial science’, Ireland was nevertheless an important reference point in the geographical construction of British rule in India where the ideologies and mechanics of imperial rule were first implemented.
In the early nineteenth century, the GTS was considered to be one of the greatest sources of scientific knowledge in the empire, and at once reflected the East India Company's determination to establish the ideological imperatives behind British colonial rule in South Asia. The Indian surveys of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries formed part of a grand utilitarian venture that sought to locate and extract India's revenues, improve strategic planning, and quicken the movement of its armed forces across hazardous terrain.Footnote 32 For the most part, early Company surveys were based on the astronomical observation of latitude and longitude. However, the techniques of Enlightenment mapping were notoriously unreliable and inaccurate, and towards the end of the eighteenth century Company officials began to look to Europe where they believed more effective procedures in mapping and surveying were being carried out. By far the most important development in cartography during the late eighteenth century was the adoption of triangulation as a technical solution to the problem of obtaining more accurate and precise physical geographical knowledge of the Indian countryside. In contrast to maps constructed solely through astronomical observation, triangulation offered a newer, more sophisticated technology whereby geographical information could be made certain and comprehensive for the first time.Footnote 33
Central to the introduction of the triangulation method of mapping in India was the work of Valentine Blacker.Footnote 34 The Irish-born son of Protestant landowners from Co. Armagh and a prominent military engineer, Blacker was part of a leading group of officials and surveyors who successfully petitioned the East India Company for triangulation to be extended across the whole of India during the 1820s. The very fact that Blacker made a notable contribution to the ‘military orientalism’ of the East India Company in its attempts to improve military strategy and knowledge is not all that surprising given that Irish military life was already firmly rooted within the context of British imperialism and the global personnel networks fashioned by it by the turn of the century.Footnote 35 Blacker had first come to India in 1798 after securing a commission in the Madras cavalry through his uncle, Major General Sir Barry Close, and had taken part in British campaigns against Tipu Sultan in Mysore in 1799.Footnote 36 Close was a relative of the acting British resident of Mysore at the time, Arthur Cole, whose prominent family connections and ties to Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh had already earned him the patronage of the governor general of India, and fellow Irishman, Richard Wellesley. With the help of strong family connections and influential patrons Blacker secured employment in the quartermaster-general's office at Fort St George in Madras, of which he became head in 1810. In Madras, Blacker was responsible for carrying out various military reconnaissance missions around south India, with the purpose of supplying military intelligence for the Company by compiling detailed geographical and topographical accounts of the Indian countryside. He earned particular distinction for the scientific work he conducted with the Madras army during British operations in the Deccan in 1815 and soon gained commendation from Company officials in London following the publication of his military history of the third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–19) in 1821.Footnote 37
Indeed, the Company's appointment of Blacker as surveyor-general in India in 1823 was strategic. His appointment as surveyor-general coincided with the Company's campaign of territorial expansion on the subcontinent in the first quarter of the nineteenth century that sought to consolidate Britain's power base throughout southern India.Footnote 38 Alongside the survey's superintendent, George Everest, Blacker played an important role in taking the Indian surveys on to a new level and in converting the Company to the ideal of an all-India triangulation.Footnote 39 The application of the technique of triangulation on Indian surveys in the 1820s was by no means a new phenomenon. During the 1810s, both William Lambton, then superintendent of the Indian Survey, and the Court's military secretary, James Salmond had advocated the use of triangulation in India. Both Lambton and Salmond had based their observations on the work of earlier Indian surveyors such as James Rennell and Colin Mackenzie and had been early advocates for the widespread use of triangulation-based surveys in the southern provinces of the Madras Presidency. As an infantry officer based in New Brunswick following the American War of Independence, Lambton had been involved in the process of surveying the new boundary between Canada and the United States. In 1796, he was posted to India where he first perfected the new techniques of geodesy in surveying the region following the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. While Lambton was integral to the establishment of the GTS on a firm scientific footing in this period, Blacker was charged with the task of devising new ways in which to organize and expand the activities of the GTS. In particular, he was responsible for persuading the Court of Directors to give their full financial backing in support of an all-India triangulation.Footnote 40 He wanted the Company to ensure that the entire triangulation process was extended far beyond the coastal series in the east and west of the subcontinent across the plains to the Himalayas in the north. In persuading the Court to extend the GTS across all of Company-ruled India, Blacker, Everest, and Salmond used the example of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1824–46) as an important frame of reference for the proposed expansion of the GTS. They hoped to apply the techniques and institutional organization of the Irish Survey to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.Footnote 41
The origins of the Irish Ordnance Survey dated to the early years of the nineteenth century when Irish landowners began to lobby Westminster for the creation of a thoroughly modernized national survey and land valuation system for Ireland.Footnote 42 In 1824, the issue gathered considerable momentum in parliament through the efforts of a Co. Limerick landowner and prominent liberal Irish MP, Thomas Spring-Rice. After publicly denouncing the system for evaluating taxes in Ireland, Spring-Rice duly advised parliament that a new map and cadastral survey of Ireland was needed in order to equalize taxation and avoid future disturbances within Ireland's rural communities. After some deliberation, the government acquiesced, legislated accordingly, and instructed the military Board of Ordnance to carry out a new national survey of Ireland. From the outset, the origins of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland were inextricably intertwined with the ideologies of Union and empire. The Spring-Rice report of 1824, which was drafted in response to the government's new initiatives, presented the new survey of Ireland as a ‘great national work’, motivated by a benevolent utilitarian spirit and charged with the task of ‘improving’ Ireland.Footnote 43 Unsurprisingly, the report emphasized the Irish survey's civil as opposed to military origins and nature. The Ordnance Survey of Ireland was to be a grand imperial exercise that involved all sections of nineteenth-century Irish society, particularly its rural communities, where it was hoped that ‘native’ participation in the scheme would elicit Irish gratitude, bolster imperial authority and thereby contribute to future political stability on the island.Footnote 44
In theory, at least, the work carried out on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland would serve to legitimize colonial rule while at the same time reinforce Anglophonic views of history. This is a point that has been developed by Ian J. Barrow whose recent work has argued that colonial mapping rendered the empire a ‘concrete territory’ that conveyed to others the ‘naturalness’ of British authority as well as ‘a British sense of entitlement to overseas power’. According to Barrow, a whole range of imperial cartographers and surveyors used their maps and representations of history as a means of legitimizing colonial rule. By articulating and manipulating the past by using specific cartographic perspectives and idioms (including the insertion of little vignettes and symbols denoting British imperial culture), they were able ‘to demonstrate a history of territory and … to justify the possession of land’.Footnote 45 While this was clearly an important early consideration for the nascent colonial power, cartographic enterprises in nineteenth-century Ireland at times appeared to work in the opposite direction. From an early stage in its development, there was recognition on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland of the limitations involved in the mapping process. Throughout its early years, staff continually stressed the importance of the ‘cultural’ dimensions of the Irish surveys and instead sought to combine the mathematical certainty of maps with a wide range of other geographical data. As opposed to laying the foundations of a ‘concrete territory’ under British rule, the Irish surveys worked as a means of diffusing knowledge, stimulating the development of resources while encouraging social and economic improvement within Ireland.Footnote 46
At the centre of the Irish survey's activities was Colonel Thomas Colby, a competent administrator, scientist, and inventor who served as director of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain between 1820 and 1827.Footnote 47 Colby, who was also deeply interested in ethnography, was convinced that the trigonometrical survey in Ireland could provide an important ‘foundation for statistical, antiquarian, and geological surveys’ to be executed in other parts of the British empire.Footnote 48 To this end, he instructed all officers employed on the Irish survey that, in addition to the routine work of carrying out measurements and recording results during the course of mapping, they were to record all relevant information pertaining to ‘communications by land and water, manufactories, geology, antiquities or other matters connected with the survey’ while in Ireland.Footnote 49 Both Colby and his assistant, Thomas Larcom (later under-secretary of Ireland, 1853–68), impressed upon the staff of the Irish survey the need to present well-researched and well-written reports that contained valuable ethnographic information on Irish society and culture.Footnote 50 As in India, it was believed these reports would offer colonial administrators a unique insight into the topography, socio-economic structure, historical development, customs, and languages of local communities.Footnote 51
This emphasis on uncovering the cultural, social, and linguistic history of Ireland through the activities of the Ordnance Survey was something that continued apace when Larcom replaced Colby as the survey's director in 1828. Like Colby, Larcom was profoundly interested in the historical and cultural background to the socio-economic conditions that existed in nineteenth-century Ireland.Footnote 52 Under Larcom, engineers on the Irish survey were instructed to investigate the ‘natural state’ of the landscape, its physical geography and natural sciences (botany, geology, and zoology), as well as its ‘artificial state’ of historical monuments, towns, public buildings, landed estates, industries, mills, infrastructure, and communications. This strong historical and antiquarian focus on the Irish survey was encouraged initially by the participation of a number of Gaelic literary and manuscript scholars including John O'Donovan, M. J. O'Reilly, and Eugene O'Curry who were employed in the Survey's Topographical Department to carry out place-name research among Ireland's archives and libraries.Footnote 53 In order to give a ‘full face portrait of the land’, Larcom was particularly keen that engineers supplement their statistical reports with detailed information concerning local customs, people, places, and the Irish language.Footnote 54 By amassing a dense archive of geographical knowledge in Ireland, Colby and Larcom were convinced that their work on the Irish Ordnance Survey would secure its status as a central reference point for future surveys, to be emulated and copied elsewhere ‘in England and wherever England's power is known’.Footnote 55
Lieutenant Denison, a correspondent of Larcom's based in Madras in the 1830s, for example, wanted the scheme to be extended throughout the British empire, and believed that the Royal Engineers should be used to collect such information wherever they were located.Footnote 56 Moreover, the direction of the flow of ideas was not always from Ireland to India. Larcom's plans for statistical accounts to accompany maps in Ireland in the early 1820s, for instance, were influenced by earlier Indian endeavours where he employed similar themes and language in the publication of Heads of inquiry (1832).Footnote 57 In the context of the GTS, however, Everest, who had replaced Blacker as surveyor-general in 1826, was quickest to recognize the significance of the work being carried out in Ireland and soon established an important working relationship with Colby. He believed that certain aspects of the organizational structure and technological innovations of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland should be replicated on the Indian survey.Footnote 58
By 1827, Blacker and Salmond had succeeded in their attempts to convert the Court of Directors to the idea of supporting an all-India triangulation. In a memorandum to the newly appointed governor-general of India, Lord William Bentinck (1828–35), the Court outlined their new cartographic policy for the subcontinent. Central to this new policy was the belief that certain surveying practices of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland could be transplanted to India. Bentinck, for one, was convinced that under Everest, the GTS could be used as an effective means of ‘improving’ India in the same way Colby's survey was intended to ‘improve’ Ireland. In September 1827, the Court of Directors wrote to the Calcutta council informing them of their belief that the Irish survey contained ‘information or suggestions which may be useful in the prosecution of Indian surveys’.Footnote 59 Certainly, the institutional success enjoyed by Colby and Larcom on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland seems to have been a factor in persuading the Company to invest in the newest and most precise scientific measuring apparatus for the GTS.Footnote 60 Significantly, these innovative mapping instruments had been tested and developed by Colby in Ireland between 1826 and 1828. Impressed by the accuracy and precision of this new instrumentation, the Court donated them to Everest for work on the GTS in 1829.Footnote 61 Indeed, during furlough in Europe, Everest spent some time visiting the Irish survey in order to witness what he described as ‘the working of the machinery’ of Colby's ‘beautiful system’ in Ireland.Footnote 62
Everest was greatly impressed by the institutional structure of the Irish survey.Footnote 63 Following discussions with Colby and Henry Kater, a metrologist and former assistant of Lambton's who had since returned from India and had developed close ties with the Ordnance Survey, Everest informed the Court that the Irish survey could act as an important imperial precedent for the Indian survey in terms of the provision of adequate labour and instrumentation. Everest viewed the Irish survey as a sort of ‘colonial’ prototype, a provider of policy precedent that the Company could draw upon in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India. In this respect, nineteenth-century Ireland and India were somehow perceived to be similar components of empire where ideas and procedures developed in one country were frequently employed to influence the formulation of very similar ideas and procedures in another. Following his visit to Colby and Larcom in 1829, Everest confidently informed the Court of Directors that by ‘observing’ developments on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland it could be possible to introduce ‘into the Department of Survey in India any improvements which might thence suggest themselves’.Footnote 64
One aspect of the Irish survey that Everest was particularly keen to adopt for the Indian survey was the subdivision of labour and the organization of its personnel, informing the Court that he wished to deploy the formation of an organization similar to that which had been created by Colby in Ireland.Footnote 65 This would involve the employment of military officers, preferably engineers, as suitable overseers of all survey work in India. At the same time, much of the ordinary, laborious work undertaken by local Irish civilians, who were recruited variously as labourers, draughtsmen, engravers, and collectors of statistics on the Irish survey, could be undertaken by a body of Eurasian civil assistants in India who would have lower expectations of salary and status than army officers.Footnote 66 By exposing Indians to scientific practice in a similar way to the experience of Irish Catholics working on the Irish survey, Everest believed the government would promote the development of a loyal and conscientious workforce that was committed to British rule in India and to the benevolent and ‘improving’ nature of the Empire. Everest's desire to develop the British surveys in India by using the example of Colby's system in Ireland was later taken up by Thomas Best Jervis, another prominent metrologist who had carried out a survey of the southern Konkan while serving in the Bombay engineers between 1819 and 1830.Footnote 67 Jervis was particularly keen on the idea of creating a single survey organization in India that would incorporate other scientific studies into its domain, most notably those that centred on various geological, tidal, and magnetic investigations. As part of this broader initiative, he argued that the Company should adopt a method of organization for the division of labour on Indian surveys such as that used by Colby in Ireland. By training a body of Indian labourers to carry out much of the repetitive surveying work, Jervis pointed out that not only would this free officers to concentrate on the more important computations and other ‘scientific’ concerns, but the survey itself would function as a great benign force in India, helping to remove the barriers of caste and integrate the various different strata of Indian society into the imperial system as a whole. In order to become familiar with this process, Jervis requested that all future engineer cadets and sappers bound for India should first spend some time working under Colby in Ireland.Footnote 68 Jervis, like Everest, also greatly admired the fine ethnographic detail that accompanied engineer's reports while working on the parish surveys under Colby and Larcom in Ireland, believing that the statistical and historical memoirs of surveyors could be required in India where they could be used to augment future tax revenues.
Moreover, the close attention to recording all available antiquarian and ethnographic information by officers on the Irish survey was cited by Everest as being of particular utility to the Indian government. He informed the Court of Directors that the Indian survey could learn much from the ‘great pains that are taken [in Ireland] to decide the orthography of the names of the towns and villages’. According to Everest this was a collaborative initiative where surveyors in Ireland elicited knowledge from gaelic-speaking locals and other ‘various authorities … within reach’ in order to cite properly and register the correct mode of spelling of Irish place-names.Footnote 69 Despite Everest's obvious admiration for the ethnographic dimensions of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, however, it was the actual institutional organization of the Irish survey itself that he coveted most. According to Everest, the epistemological rationale for the GTS was being severely undermined by the poor condition of the Indian surveys' instruments and equipment.Footnote 70 Everest informed the Court that ‘the Department [in Ireland] is well and amply supplied with cases of instruments, brass protractors, drawing apparatus, telescopes, levelling instruments and in fact every article that can possibly be required’.Footnote 71 He argued that if the GTS was to be successfully expanded along the lines proposed by Blacker in 1824, such technologies would have to be procured for India. In response, the Court agreed to buy new instruments as well as to increase the number of the GTS's parties. Lord Ellenborough, president of the Board of Control, was particularly receptive to Everest's memoir on the application of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland's techniques to India, writing to Bentinck to inform him that he greatly looked forward to Everest executing a number of similar surveys focusing on the Indus and the Punjab throughout the late 1830s and 1840s.
III
While the East India Company clearly borrowed from Irish precedents in its attempts to map India, the transition from amateur to professional status and official support in ‘colonial science’ in India was aided considerably by a large number of Irish university graduates who competed intensely for places in the various imperial structures of the Crown Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 72 During the 1850s the introduction of open competitive examination for entry into the Indian Civil Service by the secretary of state for India, Sir Charles Wood, allowed many middle-class Irish and Scottish university graduates to obtain imperial posts otherwise previously denied to them through lack of traditional connections.Footnote 73 The large number of successful Irish candidates who obtained employment in India at this time was aided considerably by Irish universities and colleges who were quick to seize this opportunity and subsequently tailored their curriculum to the specific requirements of the entrance examinations.Footnote 74 Trinity College Dublin and Queen's College Belfast were particularly prominent in their ability to supply the British empire with a variety of specialized, highly trained professionals. In part, this mirrored a desire among the rising Irish middle classes (both Catholic and Protestant) to obtain careers in the empire, but it also reflected a strong interest within Irish universities and colleges at the time to promote learning in oriental languages, Indian history, geography, zoology, and the natural sciences.Footnote 75
Indeed, the development and impact of key personnel scientific networks based along ethnic affiliation in the empire can be clearly seen in the example of Thomas Oldham and his work on the Geological Survey of India (GSI). Head-hunted by the East India Company in 1851, Oldham and his coterie of Irish geologists (mostly Trinity College Dublin graduates) were responsible for reorganizing and restructuring the GSI into a thoroughly modernized scientific institution, and inaugurating the first systematic and sustained approach to the investigation of India's stratigraphy and mineralogy. Under Oldham's directorship, the field of geology shed its amateur status and became an integral branch of the new colonial administration in the 1860s and 1870s. Until his retirement in 1876, Oldham completely transformed the institution, meeting international standards in geological collecting and producing research that was best reflected in its publications, Memoirs of the GSI, Records of the GSI, and the regular Annual reports. In this capacity, both the GSI and the GTS bore witness to the varying degrees of direct Irish involvement that played a significant part in the emerging role of scientific and technological agencies in colonial state formation and in defining the expanding roles and responsibilities of the modern British state in its Indian environment. While Oldham's actions in India were not of course determined by his Irishness, his particular education, scientific training, and early experiences in Ireland all melded in significant ways to shape his politics and personal responses to both Indians and the colonial authorities who employed him.
As the son of a broker with the Grand Canal Company from Co. Dublin, Oldham attended Trinity College Dublin in the mid-1830s before departing briefly for Edinburgh in 1836 to complete his studies in civil engineering.Footnote 76 Before accepting the newly created post of superintendent of the GSI in 1851, Oldham had spent almost ten years working in the trigonometrical branch of the Irish Ordnance Survey, compiling information and drafting reports on the physical aspects, mineralogy, and economic products of Ireland. By the time he came to the attention of the East India Company, he was already a distinguished professor of civil engineering and geology at Trinity College Dublin.Footnote 77 Upon his arrival in Calcutta in March 1851, Oldham quite literally began setting up the entire GSI on his own. To a significant degree the lack of adequate manpower and resources placed at Oldham's disposal reflected the Company's limited practical commitment to institutionalized scientific research in India during the early 1850s. Within days of his arrival Oldham wrote to Sir Andrew Ramsay, the director of the Geological Survey of England and Wales, requesting that he investigate the possibility of recruiting some ‘well-qualified Irish geologists’ who, he stressed, ‘would be more than happy to receive the salary that is on offer [in India]’.Footnote 78 Ramsay did not have to use much persuasion. The first of a large personnel network of Irish geologists to join Oldham on the GSI was Joseph Medlicott, son of a Church of Ireland rector from Loughrea, Co. Galway.Footnote 79 Indeed, from 1851 to 1920 almost twenty Irish geologists joined the GSI, while during the same time there was only a sixteen-year period when an Irish geologist did not act as the Indian Survey's director.Footnote 80 Most were graduates of Trinity College Dublin, and had previous experience working with one another at various levels on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. In 1854, for example, Joseph Medlicott was joined on the GTS by his brother, Henry Medlicott, after spells on both the Irish and English surveys, while another prominent Indian geologist, Valentine Ball, was a friend and coeval of the Medlicott brothers from their time together in Dublin. William King, the son of a professor of geology at the Queen's College Galway, joined Oldham's staff shortly afterwards, while Oldham, himself, secured several appointments for his family members, most notably for his brother Charles and son, Richard Dixon Oldham, who later carried out important early work on the study of seismology and earthquakes in India.Footnote 81
From the outset, geological explorations undertaken by Oldham and his colleagues assumed a direct economic bearing.Footnote 82 With the development of steam travel in the 1830s, the economic and military value of geological investigations meant that the search for workable coalmines, in particular, became a priority for Company officials obsessed with balancing books and keeping costs at a minimum.Footnote 83 The pursuit of scientific inquiry for solely economic purposes in India, however, quite frequently resulted in increased levels of conflict and tension between Company authorities and sections of its employees during the mid-nineteenth century. This can be clearly seen in the experience of Thomas Oldham, who embroiled himself in several disputes with Company and Crown officials throughout his Indian career, largely because of perceived metropolitan interference in and condescension towards colonial initiatives, but also partly because of his particular intellectual background and earlier experiences in Ireland. As a middle-class Irish Protestant, Oldham had a particular mindset that was informed by the intellectual milieu long associated with Trinity College Dublin.Footnote 84 Having worked with Colby and Larcom on the Irish survey in late 1830s and 1840s, Oldham's work on the GSI reflected a strong tradition of Irish antiquarian and historical research that was at times at odds with the utilitarian ethos and evangelical spirit of the East India Company. During the first half of the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in Irish antiquarian and historical research melded with contemporary investigations by socio-scientific societies into the political and social condition of the Irish people. On the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, for example, Colby and Larcom began collecting information for the Survey's parish memoirs intended to provide knowledge about the origins and nature of Ireland's social problems, as well as information necessary to address and resolve them.Footnote 85 Having witnessed first-hand conditions in pre-Famine Ireland while undertaking fieldwork, Colby and Larcom were deeply disturbed by the poor state of the Irish peasantry and quickly became involved in Irish political affairs. After studying the literature, and participating in debates about possible causes and remedies, they concluded that Ireland's poverty, unemployment, and popular discontent were due to the nature of its underdeveloped economy, agriculture, and infrastructure, and subsequently accused elites and policy-makers of negligence, ignorance, and mismanagement. Colby, in particular, rejected claims that Ireland was responsible for its own problems, that its natural resources were inadequate, and that its population was incapable of improvement. He argued, on the contrary, that Ireland's assets were neglected, its potential ignored, and its ability thwarted by a combination of bad government and ineffective legislation under the Union.Footnote 86
In part, such views also reflected the beginning of an important shift in outlook within sections of the wider intellectual community towards the second half of the nineteenth century that began moving away from Anglocentric models of socio-economic development of putative universal applicability.Footnote 87 In the aftermath of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s, there was a stark realization within Britain that the prescriptions of early nineteenth-century classical political economists had failed to transform Ireland into a land of improving landlords and prosperous farmers.Footnote 88 Throughout the 1850s, the once unwavering belief in the efficacy and applicability of Anglocentric theories that held British structures of land tenure as a ‘superior model’ for elsewhere began to be scrutinized and questioned. Around this time, a range of scholars, most notably sociologists and anthropologists, began adopting new models of inquiry that challenged the normative assumptions of the utilitarians and classical political economists. This scholarship ultimately gave a new theoretical respectability to a set of popular contemporary ideas that sought to preserve and fortify local custom and agrarian structures rather than impose the imprint of British-based concepts, laws, and practices on to overseas possessions.Footnote 89 In turn, this had an important impact upon the way the Irish middle class (many of whom came from declining landowning backgrounds and had sought employment in the Indian Civil Service after 1855) viewed tenurial relations in India, where they were responsible for influencing a measure of pro-tenant legislation in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 90
Alternate views of history, land, and famine impacted upon the careers of Irish administrative and scientific personnel in India alike.Footnote 91 Oldham's work compiling individual soil-maps for counties in the south-east and north-west of Ireland on the Ordnance Survey in the late 1840s coincided with some of the worst instances of famine and pestilence in Irish history. Before departing for Calcutta in 1851, Oldham's correspondence with Sir Andrew Ramsay was laden with several references to the poor working conditions for geological undertakings on the Irish survey, as well as the ongoing plight of the Irish peasantry.Footnote 92 A deep interest in recording and noting down the socio-economic condition of the Indian peasantry was also something that characterized much of Oldham's early writings on geological explorations in Bengal. In the year before the publication of the first volume of the GSI's Memoirs in 1859, Oldham was instructed to investigate the economic potential of the iron mines of Cuttack and Talcher in the province of Orissa in Bengal, with a view to opening them out ‘to the steady march of industry’.Footnote 93 In his findings, Oldham reported to the government that while there were no beds of ‘workable coal’ to be found in the district, the level of poverty encountered in many of the iron manufacturing villages greatly concerned him. He stated that the mining of iron ore was a task that seemed to be ‘pursued only by a particular caste of the [Talcher] people, who always appear to be among the poorest and the most wretched of the inhabitants.’ Oldham maintained that the labour of the poor was being crudely exploited by wealthy Bengali mahajans who by a system of advances and payments became the proprietors of the iron smelting furnaces and fuel. What Oldham referred to as the ‘truck system’ in operation in Talcher reduced ‘the poor workmen to slavery’ to the point where they find it almost ‘impossible to obtain even a starvation allowance of food of the poorest kind without the aid of the mahajans’.Footnote 94 Certainly Oldham was not convinced that the government's approach to geological investigations in India was thoroughly appropriate and was critical of the state's handling of the Indian peasantry in general.Footnote 95
While the issue of Indian welfare was clearly a persistent feature of the tense relations that existed between Oldham and the government in the early years of his career in India, perhaps the greatest point of conflict that arose between members of the GSI and the Crown concerned the gathering and ownership of geological research and intelligence. During the Company period the agenda for geological collecting and research in India had been largely determined by a whole host of institutions and scientists based in London. However, following the appointment of Oldham and his coterie of Irish geological assistants from the 1850s onward, the nature of collecting and organization of geological research changed, especially with the emergence of public museums in India. Through Oldham's influence, the most important of these museums, the Indian Museum in Calcutta (1814), began to compete with its principal metropolitan equivalent, the British Museum (1753), for the possession of Indian geological collections in an effort to establish Calcutta as a centre for scientific collecting and research in its own right. The result was a series of conflicts between the two which was responsible not only for bringing about a fundamental shift in the administration of colonial science on the subcontinent, but also in the position of the ‘colonies’ themselves in terms of generating and disseminating colonial knowledge throughout the empire.Footnote 96
Central to this important shift in cultural power in India from the 1860s was the new breed of colonial scientist who arrived towards the end of the Company period and who was prepared to challenge the dominance of the British Museum and its perceived unfair demands and impositions on ‘colonial’ scientific institutions.Footnote 97 Although Oldham's protest was clearly one of a colonial scientist protesting against the domination of the field of geology in India by the metropole, his Irishness was at least partially significant in shaping his expressed political views and objections at the time. Devoid of any sense of cultural dependence upon England or a patriotic desire to shore up the position of London as the empire's scientific ‘centre’, Oldham and several of his Irish assistants publicly challenged the imperial authority of the British Museum in its attempts to create a national geological collection of its own at the expense of the colonies. This involved raising the international profile of the GSI and establishing crucial links with similar scientific institutions abroad. Through a system of exchange of Indian specimens, publications, and geological intelligence, for example, Oldham forged a particularly close association with William Haidinger and the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna, with whom he collaborated in compiling a complete series of scientific publications for the geological library in Calcutta.Footnote 98
However, Oldham's efforts to establish Calcutta as an imperial centre for knowledge-making in its own right was initially hindered by the British Museum's antagonistic strategies in controlling and policing the colonial scientific field in India during the 1860s and 1870s. During this period problems arose between the government of India and members of the Indian Museum in Calcutta over the possession of rare meteorites found in Dharamsala and Gorackpore in 1860–1. Dismayed by the British Museum's attempts to influence the government of India to subordinate the activities of the Indian Museum and to acquiesce to their demand that all meteorites found in India be sent to London for more thorough examination, Oldham became embroiled in a dispute with his metropolitan counterpart, Nevil Story Maskelyne. An efficient scientist and administrator, Maskelyne was head of the Mineralogy Department in the British Museum and had been one of the principal catalysts in persuading the government to control and regulate the collection of Indian meteorite specimens. In a blatant attempt to counter this activity, and to demonstrate the GSI's intent on taking control of the collection of Indian meteorites independently of the British Museum, Oldham influenced the government of India to purchase an extensive collection of meteorites from a private dealer based in Manchester in 1865. With the acquisition of this large collection of over 220 meteorite specimens for Calcutta, Oldham succeeded in immediately elevating the status of the collection of aerolites at the Indian Museum to a par with the British Museum in London and the Imperial Geological Institute in Vienna. In a direct challenge to the set of instructions issued by Maskelyne to the various official bodies involved in geological investigations in India, Oldham also published his own set of guidelines for collecting in 1866, requesting that any future finds be forwarded not to Maskelyne at the British Museum, but be sent directly to him and his colleagues at the Indian Museum in Calcutta.Footnote 99
In his attempts to expose the domineering modus operandi of the British Museum and to challenge its right to appropriate Indian scientific knowledge for metropolitan interests, Oldham engaged the GSI in a wider contemporary debate regarding the issue of ownership of intellectual property rights deriving from research and collection conducted in British colonies. His arguments and objections resonated in other scientific fields. During the same period, zoologists and botanists raised similar issues and protested against ‘unfair’ and ‘unwarranted’ encroachments by the British Museum and other metropolitan societies on their activities. At the network level, many of these ‘colonial’ scientists developed close personal links with one another, forging important relationships that worked to satisfy the demands of burgeoning ‘national’ institutions. Significantly, Oldham's experience as a geologist on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland played an important role in the formation of this network. In India, Oldham utilized his extensive web of professional scientific contacts to foster a sound international reputation for the GSI, as well as to establish a forum with other colonial institutions for airing similar grievances throughout the empire. In Australia, for example, Frederick McCoy of the National Museum of Victoria, an Irish geologist who had worked with Oldham in the Geological Department of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, shared a comparable disposition as a contemporary colonial scientist working within the confines of a metropolitan-dominated field. As with Oldham, McCoy virulently complained against interference by directors of the British Museum with regard to the organization of science activity and research in Australia and played an equally important role in promoting cultural interests and intellectual autonomy within Britain's colonial possessions in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 100
IV
In conclusion, this article has provided further evidence of the important role that Ireland and Irish people played in the construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. Although historians have long acknowledged the unique contribution of the Scots to imperial affairs, scholars have only recently begun to investigate the Irish dimension to the ‘second British empire’ in any significant detail. Despite an increasing interest by historians in developing a four nation approach to the history of the British empire, there is little doubt that the Irish are still an important overlooked group in British imperial historiography. The fact that Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh personnel viewed the empire in different ways and interacted with indigenous people accordingly points to a greater need to pluralize the imperial experience within British imperial historiography. In order to recover the full range of responses to British overseas expansion, as well as understand the complex factors leading towards decolonization, further research needs to be done on such figures and links. In any attempt to map the multilateral connections that bound the constituent parts of the British empire together during this period, however, there is a need to move beyond the nation-state framework. Tracing narratives of linkage and reciprocity between nineteenth-century Irish and Indian history is important as it illuminates many overlooked but no less significant aspects of Ireland's national development under the Act of Union. Furthermore, such an approach demonstrates the manner in which the various different constituents of the British empire were connected to one another within a wider imperial system during the long nineteenth century.
Indeed, what emerges implicitly from an historical study concerning the interconnections in ‘colonial science’ between two very different regions of empire, such as Ireland and India, is a conception that neither place was a specific bounded entity within the context of the nineteenth-century British empire. Rather, both places constituted what Alan Lester has recently described as an ‘imperial space’ or ‘the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories’.Footnote 101 As a crucial sub-imperial centre of the British empire, Ireland possessed the ability to by-pass the traditional ‘metropolitan’ core in the supply of scientific personnel to India. Ireland not only supplied the Indian empire with key personnel; it also functioned as an important reference point for scientific theory and practice, ultimately laying the path for new legislation and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people in turn supplied much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. They were part of emerging late nineteenth-century Irish professional networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper.Footnote 102 Many of these men knew each other from their student days at Irish universities, through membership of Irish scientific learned institutions or from their work together on scientific projects in Ireland. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions, especially universities and learned societies, were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge in South Asia. On the whole, Irish scientific personnel supplemented British authority in India, but there is evidence to suggest that at times they resisted it, bringing with them different ideas of history and science that may well have affected how this knowledge was interpreted and used by both Europeans and South Asians. Moreover, these networks of Irish scientists, whose experiences in India confound the ‘colonizer/colonized’ binary, effectively functioned as Irish ‘knowledge communities’ or networks of intellectual exchange in their own right, disseminating antiquarian, ethnographic, and scientific knowledge throughout the British empire.
By focusing on the integrative power of various types of networks fashioned through such connections, this article has provided further evidence to support the view that areas of the world once thought to be distinct and separate have actually been interconnected throughout the course of time and space. This foregrounds the contention by scholars of globalization that empires and imperial relations have given rise to the most sustained and pronounced historical periods of social and cultural contact between peoples from different geographical regions. The relationships mapped out in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century and challenge us to re-think how we view imperial relations and accommodate the multiple trajectories and exchanges to which they gave rise.
