Expropriating Ireland: Land Theft, Property Relations, and Ireland's Colonial Regime

Colonialism is perhaps the most significant social force in Irish history, but its long duration and the great scope of its impacts make it difficult to address comprehensively. This dissertation makes a step in this direction through a historical materialist framework, incorporating insights from political Marxism, settler colonial studies, and Gramscian historicism. The introduction situates present-day Ireland in the context of its colonisation and stresses the importance of a historical materialist approach unbounded by disciplinary considerations. Two theoretical chapters then introduce two important concepts which help delineate the essential contours of a colonial social totality over the longue durée. In the first chapter, colonial property relations are developed from the concept of social property relations advanced by scholars such as Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and George Comninel and by engagement with Maïa Pal’s similar ‘colonial social property relations’. Ultimately, colonial property relations differ from social property relations in that rather than being part of the internal development of a single society, they are imposed by one society upon another. This theme is further developed in the second chapter, which—through a synthetic criticism of settler colonial property drawing on the work of Robert Nichols, Patrick Wolfe, and Brenna Bhandar—introduces the concept of the colonial regime. Drawing on the work of Esteve Morera and Eamonn Slater and Terrence McDonough’s interpretation of Marx’s writings on Ireland, which centres an early formulation of the concept of colonial regime, this is presented as a loose extension of Gramsci’s ‘integral state’ that is suited for historicist analysis of a precapitalist society that is not enveloped by a single state, but by a suprastate social structure. Then follows an extensive historical chapter which, beginning with a discussion of the nature of Gaelic class society before the arrival of the English, traces the development of colonial property relations and the colonial regime over the centuries, primarily through engagement with the historical and geographic literature. Following a preliminary discussion of the breakdown of English domination, the conclusion suggests that Ireland’s political economy is nevertheless still determined by the colonial system and advances a call for further, radical Irish theory and historiography.

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