Audrey Horning,Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic

Abstract

Reviewed by: Geoffrey Plank, University of East Anglia, UK

In 1536 the Irish Parliament appointed Henry VIII head of the Irish Church, and in 1541 Henry proclaimed himself King of Ireland. His authority on both fronts was fiercely contested however, and the subsequent, halting, incomplete efforts to assert royal authority and spread Protestantism in Ireland defined Irish politics for a long time to come. During the reign of Elizabeth I, to advance these two goals and secure profits for investors, several efforts were launched to establish English ‘plantations’ in Ireland, and in the early seventeenth century after the Nine Years’ War and the defeat of the Catholic Hugh O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone and his confederates, there was a renewed British effort to establish plantations in Ireland, centred on Ulster. The Ulster projects were far more successful than the earlier efforts, though many of the plantations were torn apart in the 1640s during the War of the Three Kingdoms. In the aftermath of that conflict they were reconfigured and rebuilt.

These English and, later, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland coincided with several of the earliest English projects to found colonies on the far side of the Atlantic. Indeed, several of the leaders of the Elizabethan plantation projects in Ireland had previously participated in failed efforts to establish a permanent colony at Roanoke, in present-day North Carolina. Even in the sixteenth century, some observers commented on the parallels between these two theatres of policy. The comparison between Ireland and colonial America has acquired increased resonance ever since. In the twenty-first century, partisans on both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland invoke the comparison to advance their own perceived interests. Academic historians routinely invoke the comparison too. Historians have asked whether early modern Ireland was a ‘kingdom’ or a ‘colony’. Recently ‘Atlantic’ historians, with their own frames of reference, have identified Ireland as a kind of practice ground for transatlantic imperialism, playing a role for England similar to the role the Kingdom of Granada played for Spain.

In Ireland in the Virginian Sea archaeologist Audrey Horning argues forcefully that most of the recent comparisons between early modern Ireland and colonial America have been simple-minded and polarizing. Sweepingly comparing the archaeological and historical records of the two places, she emphasizes the powerful influence exerted by local populations – the Irish and the indigenous peoples of coastal North America – in shaping plantation schemes. In Ireland, Catholics participated in plantation projects, and not just as workers or tenants but sometimes as leaders. The early Virginia colony, in geographical terms, was very much a successor to the Powhatan’s chiefdom, and shaped by Powhatan-era precedents. In both Ireland and America, the local people helped shape the plantation efforts, but their manner of interacting with the planters was quite different. A far wider cultural gulf separated the Native Americans from the English, contributing to polarization and warfare by the 1620s.

In her discussion of Virginia’s War of 1622, Horning quotes Edward Waterhouse’s account of the first day of fighting:

As in other dayes before, they came unarmed into our houses, without Bowes or arrowes, or other weapons, with Deer, Turkies, Fish, Furres, and other provisions, to sell, and trucke with us, for glasse, beades, and other trifles: yea in some places, sate down at Breakfast with our people at their tables … (170)

The Native people then, to the surprise and horror of the colonists, attacked them when their guard was down. Ironically, this is the most compelling narrative evidence Horning presents suggesting amicable, cooperative relations between colonists and the indigenous people surrounding Virginia. Local Algonkians may have routinely eaten breakfast with the planters, as Waterhouse implied, but unfortunately the historical record is at best fragmentary. At the outset of her work Horning declares her intention to personalize her narrative, to bring to the fore routine interactions between men and women we might identify dichotomously as ‘colonizers’ and ‘natives’. She is much more successful doing this in the context of Ireland.

In general, story-telling is not Horning’s strong suit. This book is a plea for us to accept the complexity of Irish and American historical experience, and at times it seems almost as if Horning seeks to demonstrate complexity by making her presentation complicated. She jumps around chronologically and geographically, and shifts abruptly from detailed discussions of archaeological sites to broader narratives of the plantations schemes. Ireland in the Virginian Sea is sometimes difficult to read, but it is worth the effort. It is full of information and valuable references, providing historians, in particular, with an entry into a body of archaeological scholarship that should upend many of their previous assumptions. I, for one, will never make a one-sentence comparison between Ireland and colonial America again.