University of Galway History Seminar: Bogs and Barracks: Stringy Sovereignty and the Eighteenth-Century Irish State 

University of Galway History Seminar

Dr Patrick Walsh 

(Trinity College Dublin)

Bogs and Barracks:

Stringy Sovereignty and the Eighteenth-Century Irish State

Abstract

Beginning in a bog in west Cork this paper is about the fragmented processes of colonial state formation in eighteenth-century Ireland. The story I want to tell is told from the fragmented edges of the state rather than from the centre, from isolated peninsulas on Ireland’s Atlantic edge, from boggy mountainsides in upland regions and from villages and communities often bypassed in stories of modernisation and centralisation. It deliberately decentres the state to explore the impact of the institutions of the fiscal-military state in Ireland at its outer limits. In doing so I am motivated by a desire to shift away from a temptation to replicate a metropolitan English historiographical model onto different Irish circumstances. Instead, this paper while cognisant of the development of the fiscal and especially military apparatuses of the Irish colonial state takes its inspiration from David Gange’s brilliantly suggestive Fragmented Atlantic Edge to think about how we might write about state formation from the outside in. Secondly it draws on legal historian Lauren Benton’s concept of ‘stringy sovereignty’ with its emphasis on the elasticity of state power in more remote and upland regions and the consequent need to pay attention to the ways that this shaped colonial and state practice to consider anew the ways in which the eighteenth-century state operated in Ireland. 

Biography

Dr Patrick Walsh is assistant professor of eighteenth-century history at Trinity College Dublin, where he is also co-PI of the Trinity’s Colonial Legacies project. His previous books include The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly (2010) and the South Sea Bubble and Ireland, Money, Banking and Investment, 1691-1721 (2014) as well as edited collections on the British and Irish Fiscal States (2016) and Irish Taxation, Politics and Protest, 1662-2016 (2019). 

Registration

This is a hybrid event, organised in collaboration with the Centre for Antique, Medieval and Pre-Modern Studies (CAMPS). The paper will be delivered, in-person, in Room G010, Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway and streamed simultaneously on Zoom: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/j/91402861252. 

To attend via Zoom, please register at: https://forms.office.com/e/k4w5Jn9pUC.

This talk will also be preceded by a social event – join us from 3.30pm for tea, coffee, snacks, and a mid-semester chat. A big thank you to CAMPS for their support.

This talk is part of the University of Galway History Seminar series, in collaboration with the Centre for Antique, Medieval and Pre-Modern Studies.