The Imperial Origins of the Irish Act of Union

Historians have been reluctant to situate the Irish act of union in an imperial context. James Kelly, in a pioneering study of unionist opinion published in 1986, asserted that the development of unionism in the second half of the eighteenth century was intimately related to domestic politics, and could be explained by the “disenchantment” of Britons and some Irish loyalists “with the conduct of the Irish parliament, and concern about its commitment and ability to safeguard the connexion between the two island kingdoms.”  Since 2000, the distinguished French historian, William Doyle, and the Irish historian, James Livesy, have independently concluded that the union should be situated in a European rather than an Atlantic context. The union, they have maintained, was part of a broader trend toward state centralization, which occurred at the expense of the composite monarchies that had characterized early modern European political organization. This paper will argue that such interpretations have neglected the imperial dimension of unionist political thought, which was particularly salient between the recommencement of European war in 1739 and the rejection of a British-American union by the thirteen colonies in 1778. The strategic and financial demands of war during this period encouraged some intellectuals and politicians, intent upon defending Britain from the French threat, to re-conceptualize the constitutional and financial relationship of the Atlantic empire to the home country. This effort to re-conceive the empire led to the articulation of an imperial unionism, which identified the incorporation of some or all of the British colonies and other dependencies into the imperial center as the most attractive solution to the problems posed by governing a growing empire in an age of conflict. British-Irish union was one component, and perhaps the most prominent, of this comprehensive vision of imperial reform.