Ireland and India: Early analogies in British agriculture and trade

The turn of the nineteenth century was an important period for both the British empire and British intellectual history. Under the strain of revolutionary threat and food scarcity in the late eighteenth century, many in Britain began to modify their mercantilist visions of political economy and empire. Mercantile ideas began to give way to liberal, free trade modes of thinking, giving birth to what many historians have termed the "second empire". A vast historiography exists that discusses various aspects of this transformation including works by Karl Polanyi, Gordon Mingay, Eric Voegelin, P.J. Cain, A.G. Hopkins, amongst many others. I place the consolidation of imperial rule in Ireland and India at the launch of this so-called "second empire" and examine how ideologies of empire included them. Initially, there does not appear strong grounds for comparing Ireland and India due to the many differences in culture, religion, and method of colonization. However, beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule in both India and Ireland began to use very similar tactics. Chapter one compares these tactics, beginning with negotiations with Grattan's Parliament in Ireland and Cornwallis reforms in India. Chapter three examines the British agricultural improvement movement as both an intellectual and structural phenomenon that contributed to imperial networks and the motivation for agricultural development in Ireland and India. The rest of this paper examines the intellectual inclusion of India and Ireland in theories of empire and economy by examining key works by Arthur Young, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus. The domestic experience of the British landed elite caused this fixation with agriculture and production increase. However, India and Ireland played an important role in the emergence of a discourse on political economy that focused on agriculture, especially as they represented the problem of the wealth of land, and how to preserve it, in the context of commercialization and an expanding globalizing economy. It is this combination of domestic and imperial experience which contributed specifically to Ireland and India's development as agricultural producers in the British empire.