Rundale

By Aidan Beatty and Conor McCabe

This is an edited version of the introduction to a recent issue of Irish Studies Review

Reproduced with the permission of Taylor and Francis

A good time to be studying capitalism

In the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, American historiography underwent a significant shift. Previously dominated by cultural and social history methodologies, a new wave of capitalist histories emerged. Unabashedly presentist in motivation, these works returned capitalism and class to the centre-ground of American history. Works such as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, and Destin Jenkins’ Bonds of Inequality all raised serious questions not just about capitalism but also about adjacent issues of race, gender, religion, and the environment.

Simultaneously, with the increasing return of socialism to the mainstream of American life, works drawing on Marxist frameworks have also proliferated, such as Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit.  The blatant connections between capitalism and the climate crisis have only made the need for a serious understanding of the former more obvious.

At least in the United States, it is a good time to be studying capitalism.

Irish capitalist studies – yet to be discovered?

Ireland suffered an arguably worse crash in 2008 than the United States (and indeed probably worse than most of the global North). And yet an Irish capitalist studies remains undiscovered. Within Irish history-writing, this is probably not too surprising. Conservatism – both methodological and subtly political – still predominates. Irish historians remain wedded to “the State,” both in the obvious methodological sense that it is the primary category of analysis, but also in the ways that, financially and professionally, many scholars are reliant on the state.

In all the recent events of the Decade of Commemoration, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone discussing capitalism. However, capitalism was always a central concern for key figures during the so-called Revolution, from the state-developmentalism and import-substitution industrialisation of Arthur Griffith to the overt anti-capitalism of Connolly, Larkin and Markievicz and the small-holders republic of de Valera. While it may not feature much as a claim in most Irish historiography, modern Irish history cannot be understood outside of the capitalist contexts in which it unfolded.

Ireland as colonial capitalist laboratory

Ireland was a key laboratory of capitalism from the early modern period onwards: from the Cromwellian plantations that remade patterns of landownership, to the construction of Ireland as a dependent market before and after the Act of Union to the obsessions with personal responsibility during the Famine and economic restructuring and social engineering after that. These had a profound effect on the economic and social class relations on the island.

While normally depicted via a blunt sectarianism – the trope of a capitalist Protestant north versus an agrarian Catholic south – the extractive nature of British capitalist interests in Ireland demanded an indigenous middleman or comprador system to facilitate the process. This was not unique to Ireland. It was (and remains) a core feature of colonial extraction.

Where Ireland differs is in its historiography. To use an analogy from Marx, it rarely ventures into the hidden abode of production, “on whose threshold hangs the notice ‘no admittance except on business.’” Indeed, it is not at all a coincidence that when Marx wrote Capital in 1867 and sought to create a general theory of capitalism’s origins and development, Ireland was the only non-British space he discussed at length. There is no modern Ireland outside of capitalism.

Postcolonial literary studies

Irish literary studies have certainly laid a better groundwork. With the turn towards postcolonial studies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, scholars such as Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons and Declan Kiberd began to think critically about where Ireland fits into broader systems of power and wealth. More recent works – Mary McGlynn’s Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, Deirdre Flynn and Ciara Murphy’s edited collection, Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, Sharae Deckard or Malcolm Sen’s work at the intersections of literary studies and ecology – have deepened and improved on the earlier wave of Irish postcolonial literary studies.

And yet, by remaining so wedded to the high-cultural, this entire body of scholarship always runs the risk of walling itself off from the profane real world. Joe Cleary’s Outrageous Fortune is rare in its attempt to embed cultural studies into a genuinely materialist understanding of Irish capitalism and Ireland’s idiosyncratic place within the capitalist world-system.

Irish capitalism – a special issue

Our recent special issue of Irish Studies Review aims to lay the groundwork for future studies of Irish capitalism. Crossing over from historical studies to literary and cultural criticism, the collected articles covered a large spread of Irish culture, society and religion from the early-modern period onwards.

In all these papers, the determining role of capitalist social relations, capitalist ontologies and Ireland’s status in the capitalist world-system are emphasised. They also contain elements of a long overdue interrogation of the myriad facets of the middleman/comprador system which today routes itself through law, finance, housing, accountancy and politics.

The comprador system is usually defined as a group that services foreign capital and its needs, one that includes state agencies; consultancy firms; and accountancy and legal advisory firms. This system has a very particular and historical dimension in Ireland due to the country’s deep colonial past. Its nineteenth-century dynamics were given an institutional form when the Irish Free State was formally recognised in 1922. These continue to exert an inordinate influence on state policy and direction, having morphed themselves into a loose regulatory and tax avoidance logic.

Historical and intersectional approaches

One of the genuinely positive aspects of the now-completed Decade of Commemorations has been the strong emphasis placed on gender and gender history. It is clear that, at least for most Irish Studies scholars, gender has become not just an accepted category of analysis, but a necessary one. Likewise, influenced in part by the murder of George Floyd and the world-wide protests that erupted in 2020, Irish scholars increasingly recognise the need to incorporate race into our work. Our central motivation is for capitalism to also be recognised as a necessitous part of Irish Studies work. Indeed, bringing capitalism into the conceptual frameworks of Irish Studies would deepen our knowledge of gender and race in the Irish context.

It has long been understood, internationally if not always in Ireland, that capitalism is productive of specific kinds of gender and sexual relations.  This can cautiously be compared to the manner in which capitalism “produces” race. Indeed, in his seminal 1983 text Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson devoted extensive space to the role that Ireland played in the emergence of Racial Capitalism. Likewise, Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race – equal parts polemical and influential – has a heavy investment in early modern Ireland as a place that seeded ideas of race across the spaces of Atlantic capitalism. And yet this interest has never really been reciprocated by Irish historians, who have seemingly ignored any possibilities of incorporating Robinson or Allen’s insights into their own work.

Positioning capitalism in Irish Studies

The most important foci of Irish Studies – colonisation, racialisation, identity, gender, land-ownership and housing crises, republican ideologies, taciturn fathers, sectarian divides, Catholic codes of sexual respectability, marriage and inheritance, famines, migration, proletarianisation in the Diaspora, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, secularisation, tax evasion, the Celtic Tiger – are all, in one way or another, products of capitalism and of Ireland’s status within a fluid network of capitalist states.

Put bluntly, Irish Studies scholars need to start thinking about capitalism.