Ireland
British Isles' colonized island; persistent test case of imperial policy
Also known as: Ireland, Irish
The British Isles' colonized island and the persistent test case of imperial policy — a recurring secondary theme in The Anglo-American Establishment and T&H (T&H 121).
Quigley's Framing
Ireland appears in Quigley's work as the British Empire's oldest and most intractable governance problem — the case where the doctrines of indirect rule, settler colonization, and forced integration that the The Milner Group later applied across the Empire had been worked out and repeatedly failed over four centuries. The 1916 Rising, the Anglo-Irish War, and the 1922 partition are treated as the moment at which the British political class finally accepted that the Irish problem had no governance solution within the imperial framework.
Strategic Role
AAE gives unusual attention to the Group's internal divisions over Irish policy — the Round Table journal's role in the Home Rule debate, the tensions between Lord Lothian's later sympathetic line and the more imperialist factions, and the Group's eventual reconciliation to the Irish Free State as a Commonwealth member. The case is, for Quigley, the leading counterexample to the Group's broader record: a place where their characteristic policy formula (federation, indirect rule, education of a comprador elite) did not produce the desired result.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 121 Quigley
Ireland is the British Empire's oldest and most intractable governance problem.
- anglo-american-establishment Quigley
The Round Table journal's role in the Home Rule debate divided the Milner Group internally as no other imperial question did.