England deliberately dismantled Irish industry into a dependent rural economy

Evidence

Though it was Elizabeth’s administration that had initiated the policy, it was under James I (1603–25) that the colonization of Ireland by planters and farmers from Scotland and the western counties of England assumed significant proportions (first in Ulster, and then proceeding to the alienation of Irish lands in north Wexford, Longford, and Leitrim). By 1641, that is in the midst of the reign of James’s successor, Charles I (1625–49), William Petty, the seventeenth-century English economist and statistician, would estimate that there were 260,000 Undertakers (as the Protestant colonists were called) among the one and a half million people living in Ireland. It was also in this year that the Irish rebelled again, mounting the most serious and lethal effort to reject English rule since the Conquest. In English historiography, this rebellion became known as the massacre of 1641. This rebellion was to last for 11 years, a fire that ultimately had to be attended to by Cromwell himself. What followed was what Froude, with inadvertent irony, would have us know as the Penal Era (1652–1704). It would be during this latter period that Ireland assumed the characteristics that typified the Irish experience until the early twentieth century: colonized, absentee land ownership; Catholic persecution and Protestant privilege; the land alienation of its laboring classes; the corrupt and punitive administrations and official terror. It was again during this Penal Era that much of the restrictive legislation written by the English parliament would appear to complete the derationalization of the Irish economy: acts against the marketing of Irish cattle in England, 1681; against Irish woolens and colored linens, 1699; and against glass, 1746. Once these policies had accomplished their purpose, free trade could be re-established: … By 1801, free trade between Great Britain and Ireland was a reality; however, Irish industry, with one exception—linen, could not withstand English competition. After the Union, Ireland, therefore, became more rural, more agricultural, more economically specialized than it had been previously. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the historical arc of colonial plantation and derationalization that Robinson links forward to the Black radical tradition’s understanding of agricultural labor exploitation. — connects to: The Act of Union forced mass Irish emigration by throttling industry and agriculture — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 135