If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730
Book review by Donald MacRaild

Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730 (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1997). pp.xi + 273. £29.95 (hardback); £14.94 (paperback). ISBN 085323 952 5 and 2.

Those with an interest in the Irish abroad will know Donald Akenson's writings well. Ever since his research on the Irish in rural Canada began to appear, Akenson has blazed a trail across the Irish Diaspora, offering challenging new perspectives on a wide-range of problems. One of his most remarkable achievements, Small Differences: Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, 1815-1922 (1988), strikes a delicate balance between, on the one hand, analysing the similarities between Protestants and Catholics both at home and abroad (usually through the skilful use of socio-economic hypotheses) while, on the other hand, explaining the importance attached to those `small differences' that over-hang Ireland's modern history. This challenging tradition is maintained here with the publication of the Joanne Goodman Lectures of the University of Western Ontario (1997).

The central thesis of If the Irish ran the World might infuriate some readers: Akenson demonstrates that the Irish were just as cruel as the English when it came to empire-building. The Montserrat `laboratory' was chosen as an Irish empire within the English empire - a place where Irish settlers were the dominant incoming ethnic group. This tiny island was one of only two jurisdictions where, before the creation of the Free State, the Irish held political and cultural sway because of their superior numbers (the other was Ontario in Canada).

The title of the book suggests an important counter factual hypothesis: what would it have been like if the Irish, rather than the English, had ruled the world? What if the Irish had been the modern world's foremost empire-builders? It would be wrong to claim that Akenson is the new Fogel, because, for him, the really important counter factual questions are those which defy quantification. He is not concerned to assess the `social saving' of slavery or even the economic value of empire. Akenson asserts that a more important (but difficult) counterfactual question might look like this: `how would world history have differed without, say, Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed.' Akenson goes on to explodes the myth of the kind Irish slave-holder by showing how Ireland's own little empire on Montserrat was much like England's: brutal and oppressive; iniquitous and racist. Native peoples and slaves, it seems, did not like Irish oppressors any more than those elsewhere in the Caribbean liked English, French or Spanish overlords. Indeed, the central message of Akenson's book would seem to be that all imperialism is a bad.

If the Irish ran the World is not just a polemic, a counterfactual vision of empire. While Akenson demonstrates that some Irish migrants were perpetrators of violence rather than its victims, this is not really the sole, or even main, function of the book. He manages to reconstruct a marvellous micro-history, a vibrant and sometimes tumultuous story of empire building, economic systems, social tensions and ethnic/racial struggles. Akenson makes excellent use of local sources, including important censuses of 1679 and 1729 (the latter being only one its kind for the sugar islands). Details of these sources are found in the sort of exhaustive appendices which are de rigeur in Akenson's books. He also pulls together maps and other materials, and makes full use of the records collected in the 1920s and 1930s by the Reverend Aubrey Gwynn (`the godfather of historians of Montserrat'). Akenson leads us through Montserrat's crucial phases of development, from early arrivals, threats from other empires, the arrival of African slaves, to the development of a commercial plantation economy.

At the heart of Akenson's study is the complex weave of identities and cultures which arehidden withing the term `Irish'. There were at least four sorts of Irish in seventeenth-century Ireland (`native Irish', `Old English', `New English' and `Ulster Scots'). In Montserrat, each of these usually acted differently, although they did operate in concert if it was necessary. This mixture suggests, as Akenson points out, `the worst thing one can do is to employ "the Irish" as some kind of racial cog in the machinery, characterising them as a riotous, unruly, and contumacious lost, as if this was a universal characteristic, and one which derives from Irishness.' These words should not be restricted to the tiny island of Montserrat in the early-modern period because the central message they convey - that `this kind of ethnic explanation unfortunately almost always become racist' - is of universal importance. As well as being a fine study of the Irish abroad, If the Irish ran the World fits into a larger historiography, that of empires, slavery, and forced labour.

Akenson stresses the important relationship between indentured and slave labour, and in the process questions some of the received wisdoms of other accounts. In his own words: `On Montserrat, black slave labour did not replace white indentured labour. If it replaced anything, African slave labour replaced free white labour and small proprietorship, but even then not by economic force majeure.' These groups, in fact, left before Montserrat's supply of land was exhausted, probably `with resources in hand, to prospect for their fortunes in other corners of the expanding New World.'

For many years, Donald Akenson has sought to challenge `an assumption that has run through most historical writing about Ireland during the twentieth century: this is the assumption of Irish exceptionalism.' If the Irish ran the World is no different. Besides being important for Irish migration history, and in addition to its wider implications for the study of empire and encounter, this book should also remind us of the terrible natural disaster that has recently befallen the people of this small and isolated island.

Don MacRaild
University of Sunderland
England

This review was written for Immigrants and Minorities, and appears here with the permission of Donald MacRaild.