Podcast Corner: William Dalrymple delves into links between colonisation of Ireland and India
William Dalrymple presents the Empire podcast.
As an Irish person, you might baulk at the idea of an English person doing a podcast on the colonisation of Ireland. That feeling’s not eased in the opening few minutes of episode 233 of Empire (Goalhanger Podcasts), when William Dalrymple admits: “I've always been aware that I don't know as much about Irish history as I should do.”
But he continues: “I was very much brought up by my-half Irish, half-Scottish nanny on tales of the potato famine and was taken down, I remember, to the public library in North Berwick at the age of about six or seven, and shown these woodcuts of Irish mothers turning to cannibalism and this sort of stuff. It was in the Great Hunger of 1847.”
And as a history podcast, you don’t get to episode 233 without doing justice to the subject.
Dalrymple and co-host Anita Anard are joined by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer as they go as far back to the 12th century to explain how England took a grip of its near-neighbour, which was never conquered by the Romans and had a reputation as barbarians. Anard explains how, “Ireland came up time and time again in research when it came to Indian nationalism.”
It’s a link that might be obvious to an English historian with their eye on Empire, but it’s not one we hear too often in Ireland. “You had members of Irish nationalism holding up Indian nationalists who had either launched bombs or put trains off tracks or given up their lives or been hanged,” says Anard.
She adds: “And the first official visit that happens to a free India is de Valera who comes over representing Ireland to India.” (Episode 235, ‘The Viceroy, the Psychopath, and the Merchant: The Irish in Empire’ delves deeper into these Irish ties with India.)
Ohlmeyer says that Ireland is a laboratory for all other colonialism. “Ireland is England's first colony and they use Ireland literally to try out policies, ideologies, but also men, mostly from England, learn the business of Empire by cutting their teeth first in Ireland and then going into the Atlantic world and of course then into India and elsewhere. So Ireland is a place where we're a colony - we were a colony, but we also then made Empire and of course… helped to unmake Empire in the 20th century.”
Over the course of the 45-minute episode, they get through some 400 years, up to Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and the Tudors. The following episode is about Hugh O’Neill being forced to flee Ireland and the first plantations, and then it’s on to Oliver Cromwell, the “devil from over the sea”.
Fascinating stuff all round.
