The Modern Origins of Development: The British Civilizing Mission in Ireland

Marija Radovanovic, SUNY Binghamton

My paper is a world-historical study of the modern origins of the concept and practice of ‘development’. The first task of my paper is to demonstrate that the conventional understanding and applications of ‘development’ serve to obfuscate the historical mechanisms implicit in it, of capital accumulation. The overall task of my paper is to reconstruct the social-historical origins of ‘development’ qua imperial expansion in the name of the English civilizing mission in Ireland. Ireland is both an exception in and a blueprint for the Western expansionist project. The only colony in the western world, and a Christian nation declared “savage” that needed to be civilized, Ireland was orientalized before the Orientalism of the Napoleonic conquest was articulated. With the 1570s invasion and occupation of Éire (Gaelic Ireland), ‘development’ was invented to civilize the “wilde Irish”, convert a subsistence of agriculture based on a common-field system to a commercial enterprise based on a new property regime, turn the indigenous pastoral populations into sedentary agricultural workers and transform Ireland into both market for English grains and a site for low cost production of commodities for export. The English civilizing project was underwritten by the invention of new forms of scientific knowledge, of modern mapping, planning and cartography, and modern agronomy.

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 Presented in Session 134. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part Two: Modernity and its Others