Marx on nineteenth-century colonial Ireland: analysing colonialism as a dynamic social process

Abstract

Discussion of the relationship between Ireland and colonialism has often revolved around similarities and differences between the Irish situation and other, more iconic, examples of colonised societies. This tendency has been partially encouraged by the prominence within Marxian scholarship of dependency theory, which contends that the underdevelopment of colonial societies is due primarily to their integration into the capitalist world economic system. In this analysis, all colonised societies can be characterised by this integration into world capitalism, and consequently share a common source of exploitation and disadvantage. This perspective has often located its source in Marx’s writings on India and, crucially for our current concern, Ireland. This article explores a different perspective on colonialism which the authors believe can be found in Marx’s consideration of the Irish situation.

Marx on the Reciprocal Interconnections between the Soil and the Human Body: Ireland and Its Colonialised Metabolic Rifts

“…Ireland was a consistent feature for over 50 years in their writing, with published work amounting to over 500 pages (Hazelkorn 1981). This includes 100 pages of Engels’ draft History of Ireland , 80 pages of notes by Marx on Irish history from 1776 to 1801, 54 newspaper articles, and a draft with recorded notes of a speech on Ireland to the German Workers’ Educational Association in London, 1867 (Slater and McDonough 2008:158). Together, these works offer a systematic treatment of Ireland (Foster and Clark 2020), and analysis of an “extended or more severe form” of the metabolic rift that operated under capitalism in general (Slater 2018).…”

Forces of Production, Climate Change and Canadian Fossil Capitalism

“…Capitalist production "collects the urban population together in great urban centres" (Marx 1976b, 637), forcing long-distance trade and producing an antagonistic separation of town and country. Marx highlighted that the rift is global in character, writing that "for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil" (Slater and McDonough 2008).…”

Common‐pool resource governance and uneven food security: Regional resilience during the Great Irish Famine, 1845–1852

“…In Ireland, the cultivation methods and governance practices of these areas—and in turn their potential resilience to ecological risk—were filtered through the wider national context of colonialism. The non‐capitalistic nature of the Irish rental system to which all tenures were beholden under colonialism is corroborated by the absence of a supply‐and‐demand price‐setting mechanism for Irish rents (Slater & McDonough, 2008). Irish rent was instead determined by the number of intermediary sub‐tenancies, as landlords often sub‐let their properties extensively to middlemen and land agents.…”