Captain Rock: the Irish agrarian rebellion of 1821–1824 James S. Donnelly Jr (The Collins Press, £19.96) ISBN 9781848890107

Published in 18th-19th Century Social Perspectives

The ‘Captain Rock’ campaign of 1821–4 is one in a series of outbreaks of agrarian unrest that began in the 1760s and continued until the eve of the Famine, when starvation finally made concerted action impossible and the landlords closed in to make the evictions and clearances they had long desired. The Rock years were particularly intense in their misery and violence. The correlation between the anguished state of the peasantry and the violence of their protests is not hard to make, although impossible to chart precisely. The outbreak that began on the Courtenay estate near Newcastle West, Co. Limerick, and continued for over three years is regarded as the most formidable of what are generically known as the Whiteboy movements that for about 70 years were concentrated in the south and west of the country—Munster, in effect, with parts of Leinster, particularly Kilkenny, also being involved. In the 1790s other areas had seen violence on a much larger scale and of much greater intensity, directed by the government, supported by the local yeomanry and gentry; as usual, no forms of agrarian or ‘seditious’ violence matched or came near to matching state violence, the whole point of which was to maintain what John Leslie Foster MP in his testimony to a House of Lords committee of 1825 described as the ‘radically vicious structure of society which prevails in many parts of Ireland’ and which was, in his view, the ‘remote’ (as opposed to the ‘immediate’) cause of the disturbances under investigation. In the transition from the colonial to the imperial system in Ireland, an immense and detailed investigative apparatus looked into the conditions of life created in the more ramshackle colonial one. The official collection and minute recording of evidence on such a scale is one of the signs of the arrival of the modern, bureaucratic state—of which Britain was then the most advanced. The collection of such data began to indicate the possibility of what would later be called sociology. Nothing compares with this information (the historical novel is the only rival) in revealing the time-lag between developments in Britain and those in Ireland. In the new age of modernity, much trumpeted after the defeat of Napoleon (a matter of some desolation to those Irish forever hoping for foreign aid from beyond the seas to relieve them of the plague of British rule) and the triumph of Britain after a quarter-century of war in Europe, Benjamin Constant claimed that ‘l’existence individuelle est moins englobée dans l’existence politique’. But not in Ireland. In fact, the Rockite disturbances seemed to indicate an intensification of the ‘old’ world; everything political was economic and everything economic was political, and both were also religious, as they had to be when so many people were doomed almost to perdition by the savagery of a land system that was of a piece with the notoriously sectarian political system. The startling—and still imperfectly understood—rise in the Irish population, dating from the mid-eighteenth century, and the competition for vanishing resources made terrible conditions worse, and in those areas where the population grew fastest and the various tithes and taxes—for instance on potatoes, the basic food—were heaviest, the consequences were more disastrous for the most deprived. So while there are important local differences, and important differences in the scales of relative poverty and comfort, it seems to be the case—hardly surprising—that the worst violence arose out of the worst conditions.