English colonization discourse fixed racist images of the Irish as savages needing rule.

Evidence

James Anthony Froude, in his history of The English in Ireland, provides his reader with what is both a detailed political history and a demonstration of the extent and sort of images of the Irish that had become fixed in the minds of Englishmen. Froude began by informing his reader that when the “military aristocracy” of the Normans invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, “the Irish … were, with the exception of the clergy, scarcely better than a mob of armed savages.” Having defeated the defenders of the island, Froude continues, the Normans had three courses of action toward the conquered peoples: extermination, armed occupation, or armed colonization. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s earlier note that Ireland is the English colonial mirror precedent for the racialization applied later to Africans and other colonized peoples. — connects to: Britain shifted Ireland from racial toward national oppression after 1801. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 136