Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [113]
Anti-Catholic riots were frequent all over eighteenth-century Britain, from Glasgow to Birmingham to Bath. The most horrific of these were the Gordon Riots of 1780. Initially demanding repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics new rights of participation, an enraged London mob of 60,000 quickly turned violent. “The conflagration was horrible beyond description,” reported one eyewitness. “Sleep and rest were things not thought of; the streets were swarming with people, and uproar, confusion, and terror reigned in every part.” The Gordon Riots lasted a full week. In the end, at least a hundred Catholic churches and private homes were torched and looted. Nearly three hundred people were killed—many burned alive.24
Could Englishmen and Scots bring themselves to accept the Irish as fellow Britons? Could Protestant Britain extend religious freedom and political rights to the “ignorant,” “indolent,” and “despotic” papists? After the Gordon Riots, Britain took significant strides in that direction. In 1800 a new Act of Union incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom. In 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act granted Catholics the right to vote and to hold parliamentary office—although, like Jews, they were still excluded from the oldest universities and the highest offices. By 1831, there were some 580,000 Irish in England and Scotland, which represented approximately 5 percent of the labor force and a twelvefold increase since 1780. When the Houses of Parliament burned in 1834, one of the principal architects of the new Palace of Westminster, destined to be one of Great Britain's iconic symbols of imperial power, was a devout Roman Catholic.
Nevertheless, in Ireland, the on-the-ground reality for Catholics remained one of unrelenting subjugation and degradation. The Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not only barred Catholics from public office, restricted their education, and denied them the vote, but effectively stripped them of their property. This, together with successive waves of “plantation”— the colonization of Ireland by government-sponsored Protestant settlers—had created a British ruling class throughout the country. By the time they were “emancipated” in 1829, the vast majority of Catholics lived in poverty, subsisting on potatoes and buttermilk and paying rent to a handful of English nobles who owned over 90 percent of Ireland's profitable land. Irish culture, and the Irish language in particular, was demeaned and increasingly marginalized. In the 1840s, Ireland was struck by a devastating potato blight. Although referred to as a “famine,” the truth was that significant supplies of life-saving food continued to be produced. Unfortunately, Ireland's British landowners continued to ship this produce abroad at considerable profit, leaving a million (almost exclusively Catholic) Irish to die of starvation.
Thus, Ireland's Catholics were not overwhelmed by Britain's newfound “tolerance” in the nineteenth century. The Act of Union of 1801 was perceived—probably correctly—by most Irishmen not as an inclusive embrace but rather as a political ploy to abolish their parliament. Even the rights achieved in 1829 rang hollow to many Irish Catholics, who continued in reality to be subservient to and wholly dependent on their Protestant overlords. In Easter of 1916, while Britain was preoccupied with war, armed Catholic rebels rose up in Dublin, seizing buildings and declaring independence. The rebels were put down, but in the 1920s the British agreed to the creation of the Irish Free State (while retaining Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom), which in 1949 became the Republic of Ireland.25
From the Irish point of view, independence was an achievement long sought and hard won—a source of pride and (putting aside the Northern Ireland problem) a cause for celebration. From the empire's point of view, the loss of Ireland was politically