Cultivating Civilized Subjects: British Agricultural "Improvement" in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

This study argues that the rhetoric of improvement constituted a significant justification and motivation for British imperialism from the time of its early colonial projects, particularly those undertaken in Ireland. As the first chapter discusses, British interest in husbandry and agricultural science was spurred on not only by the profit-potential of its colonial acquisitions but also by the potent conviction in British cultural superiority. Jethro Tull's husbandry manuals, amongst others, demonstrate that agriculture and the attendant logic of rationalized economics encapsulated British beliefs in specific modes of labor and socialization. Plantation, in Ireland and elsewhere, was simply the physical manifestation of the ideology of improvement while efforts to "rationalize" native cultures and economies, as with Ireland's clachan system, served as its civilizational counterparts. The remainder of the dissertation looks closely at the role of improvement in Anglo-Irish relations with the Catholic Irish peasantry. The early part of the eighteenth century witnesses the rise of Anglo-Irish "patriotism" whose espousers were conflicted, on the one hand, by their growing awareness of their own subordination to British colonial policies and, on the other, by the prevailing belief in the inferiority of Gaelic culture. Anglo-Irish patriots like Jonathan Swift were forced to confront the violence of colonialism and the failure of improvement in Ireland in the form of recurrent famine. Their often ambivalent responses to such crises witness the complex relationship between the emergent theories of political economy and identity constitution. At the close of the century, Maria Edgeworth's writings and those of her father's illustrate the troubling extent to which British colonialism linked improvement and civility; as liberal advocates of the British Empire, the Edgeworths perceived it as the conveyor of an enlightened capitalized sensibility. Yet, their writings also evince concern about the refusal or failure of the peasantry to improve, presaging the concretization of identity occasioned by the increasingly transparent rhetoric of political economy coupled with the biologicization of difference in the form of racial theories. In tracing the genealogies of improvement rhetoric and political economy, Cultivating Civilized Subjects locates British imperialism's attempts to naturalize difference within the discourse of capitalist development