British Empire lecturer Jane Ohlmeyer: ‘Ireland was the template for what happened in Israel and Palestine’

Story by Kim Bielenberg  •

 There must be few women in the world who are more qualified to write about Ireland’s role in the British Empire than Jane Ohlmeyer.

She was born in Zambia when it was Northern Rhodesia, a British protectorate. She moved to Northern Ireland at the age of seven, right at the start of the Troubles. And she is professor of history at Trinity College Dublin, an institution that sent thousands of its graduates traipsing across the empire as civil servants, missionaries, engineers and scientists.

As she tells me from her book-lined office via Zoom: “Trinity was an instrument of empire, a tool of empire — established to Protestantise and ‘civilise’ the inhabitants of Ireland.”

It was hoped by Queen Elizabeth I that Trinity College would stop the locals being “infected by poperie [sic] and other ill qualities”.

Most of all, what makes Ohlmyer qualified for her task is that for 30 years she has studied Ireland’s role in the empire, beginning when the topic was hardly as fashionable as it is now.

In the past three years, imperial history has become more popular, prompting universities and other institutions to investigate their past and — literally in the case of Trinity — look at the skeletons in their closets.

This resulted in the eventual return by Trinity of 16th century skulls, stolen from Inishbofin in the 19th century, and ‘denaming’ the university’s Berkeley library amid concerns that the eponymous philosopher owned enslaved people and supported slavery.

Ohlmeyer says the sudden interest in imperial topics is a response to the murder of the George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It was very much driven by students, and we as an academic group in Trinity were very keen for the college to open its eyes to the after lives of empire,” she says.

To Ohlmeyer, it’s not about judging, but understanding the past, and being transparent about it.

You don’t even have to walk through the front gate of Trinity College to get a sense of the university’s imperial history. The entire imposing facade looming over College Green in the centre of the city was, the historian points out, built from the proceeds of the imperial tobacco trade.

Looking out over College Green at the front of the university is a statue of Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher.

On the one hand, as Ohlmeyer writes, he thought the empire was morally indefensible, and believed that Ireland and India were “similarly victimised”.

On the other hand, according to the book, both Burke and his brother had interests in sugar and slaves in the Caribbean and as MP for Bristol he looked after the interests of the slave-trading merchant community.

Ohlmeyer says the Irish discussions of our imperial past seem healthier than in Britain where “culture wars have become toxic politically”.

Her book mostly covers the 200 years between the mid-16th century up until the middle of the 18th century, but there are many references to later periods in Ireland’s involvement in empire.

Irish nationalists may have influenced their Indian counterparts in the struggle for independence in the 20th century, but there was also a strong Irish presence in imperial rule.

By the 1890s, as she notes, Irishmen comprised roughly two-thirds of the British army in India.

While Irish Protestants featured heavily in the officer class, rank-and-file troops tended to be Catholics, who joined up for economic reasons.

During India’s First War of Independence, six Irish regiments were involved in the brutal suppression of the insurgents, Ohlmeyer says.

Ireland did not just send soldiers to India. In the Indian Civil Service, Irish universities accounted for 33pc of graduate recruits by 1865.

Ireland was England’s first colony and was considered a prototype for the way other colonies were ruled. Mapping was considered a vital instrument of colonial power and this was fine-tuned in Ireland in the 17th century before being extended to other corners of empire. The use of Ireland as a testing ground continued right until the end of empire, and we can see the effects of this until the present day.

“Ireland was a colonial template,” Ohlmeyer says. “The same legislation that partitioned Ireland was also used to partition India and Pakistan, and also Israel and Palestine.”

In one of her fascinating digressions, the professor dispels the myth that potatoes were brought to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh, and suggests that they arrived early in the 17th century via Spain, and early on, the spud was considered a luxury food.

A recipe for potato pie from Birr Castle, she notes, includes sugar, dried fruits, rose water, cinnamon, freshly churned butter and eggs.

​‘Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Modern World’ is published by Oxford University Press on November 9

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