Hello, and sorry for the delay with this. I’ve been finding it especially difficult to write this past month; I sit at my computer, staring at Word, and the words simply do not come out, for whatever reason. Starting to improve now, though! And I thought it would be good, for an experiment, to address a topic that’s been consuming much of my thought as late, and which is also politically sensitive, as demonstrated by Twitter. This is mainly a response to their naive course of defence, to be comprised of however 1,000 word articles it takes to make the point. Thanks, as always, for taking an interest.
History is not value-neutral, and nor can any historical judgment be said to be ‘objective’. The fact of this, though, is far from obvious on first consideration; it doesn’t present itself to those engaged in history for the purposes pleasure or curiosity, nor to most in receipt of a standard university degree, unless they have engaged substantially with historiography. This shouldn’t be surprising, given how the purpose of the historian is usually defined and inculcated in aspiring practitioners: as resurrecting the historical event in-itself, ‘as it was’ (in Ranke’s dictum), through the information provided by authentic primary documents. It is the role of the professional historian to rigorously scrutinise this material through a dispassionate, ‘scientific’ lens, arrived at (supposedly) through a rigorous dissection of their own prejudices, in order to draw a ‘truthful’ picture of the past in-itself, divesting it of all accumulated distortions thrown upon it by those in service to party, ideology, or personality – those engaged in the writing of history from outside the profession, as unprincipled ‘amateurs’, in other worlds. The purpose of the historian is to draw back the veils of time and myth so as to present the past for ‘what it was’, rather than how some have appropriated and distorted the past in suit of their own political ends.
A consideration of how the rural landlord featured in the Irish historical consciousness provides a concrete illustration of this ‘moral agenda’ in action. The fact that during the nineteenth-century most of the Irish Catholic nationalist population lived precariously on small, rural land holdings rented from landlords of mainly Protestant and unionist stock, a peculiar arrangement (a legacy of the Cromwellian confiscations) that prevented most Catholics from purchasing their farms or establishing themselves on the land, ensured the villainization of landlords in the eyes of nationalists. Add to this the resentment inspired by the social memory of landlords during the Great Famine and the Land War period and the texture of this grievance will become clear; as too the feasibility of Sinn Féin’s eagerness to exploit this grievance in their endeavour to build a national movement in the period 1916-21 (as would be continued by the anti-treaty IRA during the civil war, 1922-3, leading to the burning of many estate houses across the country).
This established conception of the landlords in Ireland during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, as a ruling colonial elite oppressing the Irish Catholic ‘nation’ subsisting beneath, persisted into the twentieth century. Here, it was confronted by adherents to the ‘scientific’ mode of historical enquiry inaugurated in Ireland by R.D. Edwards, of UCD, and T.W. Moody, of TCD, with the founding of the professional, standardising journal, Irish Historical Studies, in 1938. Through a critical lens calibrated to regard any historical interpretation betraying ‘nationalist’ sentiment as anathema to ‘scientific’ history, or to rescuing the past from the grasp of myth and revealing it for ‘what it was’, as it ‘truthfully’ occurred, historians concluded that Irish landlords were not a class of heartless, colonist vampires sucking the life from the Irish people. Quite to the contrary. This standard image was a product of retrospection through a nationalist hue; a quick generalisation doing more to enshroud than reveal but had nevertheless established itself at a level of standardised discourse. Interpretative orthodoxy, positing a simple Manichean binary between usurping and alien Protestant landlords and oppressed Catholic tenants, suited a popular narrative, the nationalist myth of the opulent landlord standing over the impoverished tenant, but not the evidence.
It was not until the 1970s that professional Irish historians began to puncture the accumulated myths to present a more nuanced interpretation; one firmly grounded in a wide range of primary sources, most particularly estate records. What emerged was a new, ‘revised’ orthodoxy; one that did not deny the existence of rapacious landlords or attempt to mollify the exploitive and morally bankrupt system upon which they operated, but rather to present a more nuanced picture, one that embraced historical complexity rather than circumventing it, revealing the social texture of nineteenth-century rural Ireland to be far more complicated than previously imagined, or what the established myth would permit. This had rested, hitherto, on a presumption of social homogeneity, whereby two separate classes – the Protestant landlords and the Catholic tenants – could be easily defined and clearly distinguished. There was little consideration given to the fact that larger, aristocratic estates were very differently managed to smaller, less viable estates, as revealed by a careful examination of estate records. Or, moreover, that for every estate characterised by neglect of the landlord against their tenants there was another estate characterised by investment and improvement. For every malevolent landlord there was a benevolent counterpart; for every landlord who evicted his tenants without compassion, there was one prepared to risk their financial stability to aid their tenants during times of economic crisis. Where once there was interpretive homogeneity cultivated by ‘amateurs’ in service to popular sentiment, there was now a narrative that embraced historical complexity and contingency; one that only went as far as the evidence permitted, in service to ‘fact’ over opinion.
From this, one can elicit the moral agenda standing behind the role of the professional historian, most probably without their realising it: that of reaching for ‘objectivity’; of presenting an event for how it ‘actually’ happened as opposed to how servants of party would have you believe it happened. Implicit to this line of thinking is a central conviction presupposing there to be one ‘true’ interpretation buried beneath a mound of ‘biased’ narratives awaiting excavation by the impartial historian. Through this lens only one narrative matters, but this will not be obvious to most historians given that it forms the central axiom upon which their profession rests. The conscientious practitioner of ‘revisionist history’ in Ireland was engaged in a morally righteous process of re-evaluating received historical opinions, in the light of new primary evidence, in order to present a more faithful account – ‘faithful’, as conceived in this case, as leaning towards historical ‘truth’. In gazing up to the sky in aspiration to objectivity, however, the historian tends to overlook the fact that the ground upon which they stand is far from stable, natural, or uniform.
This we shall consider in part two