SRS Annual Welsh Lecture
Speaker: Dr Ruth Canning (Liverpool Hope University)
Respondent: Professor Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University)
Chair: Dr Mark Williams (Cardiff University)
This lecture will explore sixteenth-century Ireland’s place in English expansion, its enduring colonial legacies, and the challenges of historical revisionism. Often referred to as Britain’s ‘laboratory for empire’, sixteenth-century Ireland witnessed the development of policies, practices, and ideologies which shaped English colonial ventures overseas. Renowned English ‘adventurers’, like Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Francis Drake, gained (bloody) experience and fortunes on Irish soil before embarking on their famed transatlantic expeditions. From conciliatory strategies to violent coercion, and small military settlements to large-scale private enterprise plantations, Ireland was England’s testing ground for the methods, tools, and moral justifications of conquest and colonization. Yet, in the ever-growing body of scholarship reappraising England’s colonial past, Ireland remains conspicuously absent and its status ill-defined.
Early modern Ireland also provides a valuable lens through which to examine how indigenous populations are portrayed in re-evaluations of England’s colonial past. Whilst earlier narratives framing the Irish as barbarians in need of England’s civilising influence have been thoroughly debunked, more recent interpretations tend to depict the colonised as passive victims overwhelmed by an unstoppable, and technologically superior, English war machine. Yet, this characterization misrepresents the historical reality. As this paper will argue, the Irish were formidable opponents, deeply aware of English and European politics, and proficient in the latest military developments.
Ruth A. Canning is a Senior Lecturer in History and Liverpool Hope University. A historian of early modern Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations, Dr Canning’s research examines the socio-political impact of war on identity formation and civilian populations. Her monograph, The Old English in Early Modern Ireland: The Palesmen and the Nine Years’ War, 1594-1603 (Boydell, 2019), was awarded the 2019 National University of Ireland Publication Prize in Irish History.
Lloyd Bowen is Professor of Early Modern Welsh History at Cardiff University
Mark Williams is Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University