Ireland was Britain’s first colony and the Irish its earliest racialized group.

Evidence

Britain has really only existed as a nation-state since the eighteenth century, by virtue of the civil pact (rooted, in fact, in an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ascendancy), which associated significantly different cultures—Scotland and Wales—with England. The Act of Union with Ireland (1801), which ended in Partition, never succeeded in integrating the Irish people or the Celtic-Catholic element into the British imaginary. Indeed, Ireland has been Britain’s earliest “colony” and the Irish the first group to be systematically “racialized.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 325

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s scaffolding project: the claim that the Irish were the first systematically ‘racialized’ group prefigures how racialization works on later postcolonial migrant groups — a bridge to Said’s Orientalism and downstream Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 26; Britain shifted Ireland from racial toward national oppression after 1801. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 136; Ireland’s Catholics were a colonially constructed racial caste before emigrating — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 130 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when exactly does the term ‘racialized’ shift to describe the Irish — and what mechanisms (physical appearance, religion, class) carried that racialization in the pre-empire era?