Lesson video

Hello, welcome back.

It's me again Mr Benger and today we're going to be doing our fourth and final lesson of our inquiry, what did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? You should all know that off by heart by now.

Today, we're going to be looking at colonialism in Ireland and not just that, we're going to be finally getting the chance to answer our inquiry question to show off your knowledge, everything you've learned in these four lessons to compare what colonialism looked like in 19th century.

India, Australia, and Ireland.

So grab your pen, grab your paper, find somewhere nice and quiet to work and concentrate.

And let's get started.

I want to start today's lesson by telling you a bit about this very interesting man.

A man called John Pope-Hennessy.

He was an MP.

So a member of the UK parliament, which is in London, and then he became a governor of British colonies.

He was the governor of colonies as far away as The Bahamas and Hong Kong.

However, this governor of British Imperial colonies had some very interesting and strong views about the British empire and British colonialism.

And these after the Indian rebellion of 1857, which remember we looked at in lesson two, John Pope-Hennessy actually criticised very strongly the nature of British colonialism in India.

And he said this.

He said, as long as we send our officers to India who seem inclined to treat to the natives, the Indian people as slaves, who seem unable or unwilling to appreciate the noble qualities of that unfortunate people, and who add the grossest military outrages and insults to the civil misgovernment and financial burdens we have imposed upon them, so long will our rule in India, be a blot upon civilization.

He says quite a lot of things there, but we can pick them apart and we should be able to actually understand them if we look a bit more closely.

He accuses the British of treating the natives as slaves.

He accuses them of being unwilling to appreciate the qualities that these people and their cultures have.

So he's criticising here, British culturalism.

The idea that Britain showed no respect to these other cultures.

He criticises British political dominance saying that Britain has inflicted really bad, gross military, outrages on the people, such as terrifying punishments like this, which he disagrees with.

He says that the British have misgoverned, have governed these places, or India in this case very badly.

And he says that Britain has added to their financial burdens basically by taking their money.

And so he characterises overall British colonialism as a blot upon civilization.

So, whereas we've seen previously that a lot of British people thought that Britain was spreading a great civilization around the world.

John Pope-Hennessy, who was a British MP, and governor actually said that it was a blot upon civilization.

He became the governor of an island called Mauritius, which is over here in 1883.

And he was there for six years.

And what happened there can tell us a bit about this governor who criticised the British empire that he actually worked for.

He criticised a British rule in Mauritius saying that it didn't respect the rights of the people.

He supported the rights of the Mauritian people, the people who lived there who wanted Mauritius for the Mauritians.

They wanted more control over their lives.

They wanted to be treated more fairly.

And actually he was accused by many English people of having pro-native sympathies, basically meaning that he gave too much support for the people who lived there.

And he was accused by some English people of persecuting of going against English Protestant officials.

The British government even ordered and even launched an official investigation against this governor, John Pope-Hennessy, because he had angered his fellow colonial officials so much by supporting the people who lived on the Island instead of supporting his fellow English, British UK officials.

Now, why did this man, even though he works for the British empire, why was he so critical of it? Well, this partly tells us about the idea, that not all British people agreed about British colonialism.

Not everyone in Britain agreed that it was a great thing for the people.

Not everyone agreed that it was ruling fairly around the world.

But also another important fact about John Pope-Hennessy is that he was an Irish Catholic.

So we have Britain here and we have Ireland over here.

And John Pope-Hennessy was Irish and he was Catholic.

Whereas a lot of colonial officials would have been English and Protestant.

Many Irish people had a different perspective on British colonialism compared to many English people.

But why would someone from Ireland perhaps be more likely to criticise the empire and colonialism from someone from England? That's what we're going to find out now.

So in explain, trying to explain why many Irish people like John Pope-Hennessy had this complex relationship with the British empire and British colonialism, will actually help us to explain and to answer our inquiry question because in order to understand why someone like John Pope-Hennessy could both work for the British empire and also criticise it.

And in order to understand why Irish people might be more likely to have these more complicated relationships with the empire, we have to learn a bit about what British colonialism looked like in Ireland, because even though Ireland, in some ways became a partner of Britain in the 19th century, as we will find out, Ireland was also living under British colonialism and had been for many, many years.

Let's start to unpick this by having a look at a quick timeline and a quick run through of the story of Irish history and in particular Ireland's history in connection with England and Britain.

So let's talk through this timeline now, the timeline of the colonisation of Ireland.

How Ireland became a colony of England.

So the English have had some involvement in Ireland since the 11th century.

However, it was under the Tudors in the 16th century, starting with Henry the eighth, who you can see in the portrait there, that large scale efforts were made to impose direct rule and influence over Ireland.

Even though the Irish people were almost all Catholic, the Tudors made Protestantism, the official religion of the country.

Through the governments, encouraged thousands of Protestants to move to Ireland from England and Scotland, and then settle there in Ireland.

These Protestants would then take land away from Irish Catholics.

Over the next 200 years through wars and violence, Protestants secured control over more and more land.

By the 18th century, Ireland was controlled by what was known as the Protestant ascendancy.

You can see that word ascendancy there.

Ascendancy just means that the protestants were dominant.

They had a lot of power.

And so even though most people in Ireland were Catholic Protestants dominated Irish politics, owned most of the land and laws were passed that prevented Catholic people from holding much political power in the Irish government.

After an Irish rebellion in 1798, Britain decided that a new solution was required in Ireland.

In 1801, Ireland and Britain were officially United to form a new country, the United Kingdom of great Britain and Ireland, Irish people could vote for members of parliament who would sit in the London parliaments as equals with British MPS.

However, it was not quite as simple as this.

Most Irish people were still not treated as equals.

But we will look at that a bit more later.

And we move on here to Irish partition and independence.

So in the 20th century Ireland become split into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland gained independence from Britain and the British empire.

Let's go or have a go now at this key developments check on the colonisation of Ireland.

So have a read, pause the slide, have a read of those statements on the right.

See if you can place them in the right place on your own version.

If you draw this out, your own version of this timeline diagram here.

So pause the video, have a go at putting those in the right place.

Okay, let's have a look at some answers then.

So I'll switch slide now.

Okay, so check your answers, give yourself a tick for the ones that you got correct.

And that you didn't quite get in the right order.

Pause your video now to have a go at doing those checks.

Okay, so we've seen how Ireland became a colony of England and Britain.

However, remember our features of colonialism here.

The question is to what extent.

How much these still apply to Ireland after Ireland officially became part of the UK at the beginning of the 19th century.

Being part of the UK meant that Ireland was now officially united with England and Scotland and Wales.

And the question was, was this union when they became United, was it an equal union? Was Ireland an equal? Or was it an internal colony? An internal colony, meaning that it was still an unequal partner within the UK itself.

So was it a colony that was within the UK itself? That's what we're going to be looking at this lesson.

We're going to be looking at the ways in which Ireland was both part of the UK and ways in which it was still seen as separate and below the rest of the UK.

So we're going to be looking at it in this order.

We're going to first look at politics in Ireland and how Ireland was both united and excluded within the UK.

We're going to look at the economy and we're going to look at the impacts of colonialism in terms of famine, but also the impact of being united with the rest of the UK in terms of opportunities within the British empire.

And then we're going to look at culture and the ways in which Ireland was both colonised, it both lived under colonialism and it was a coloniser.

It actually helped to support colonialism all over the world in the British empire.

So it was sort of both things at the same time.

One historian has called Ireland a bit of a halfway house that wasn't quite absorbed within the UK, but was also you know, was partly absorbed, but was also separate.

We firstly going to start looking at the issue of political dominance.

So what was the nature of politics in Ireland in the 19th century, when it was part of the UK, but also in some ways not fully accepted.

So we've already seen how at the beginning of the 19th century in 1801, when Ireland became part of the UK, Irish people became allowed to vote for MPS to represent them in the UK parliament in London.

They were supposed to be able to sit equally alongside MPS from England and Scotland and Wales, and to have an equal say in how Ireland and the rest of the UK was going to be run.

However, as I said earlier, it wasn't quite as simple as this because most Irish people were still not treated as equals firstly until 1828.

Irish Catholics were banned from being MPS.

This man, this picture here is the man Daniel O'Connell.

He's an Irish politician who did a lot of work to campaign and to promote the idea that Irish Catholics should be allowed to be MPS.

And in 1828, he and the Irish Catholics succeeded, but even after 1828, when Catholics were allowed to be MPS, there were still far more Protestant, Irish MPS, even though most people in Ireland were Catholic.

Secondly, Ireland was still treated like a colony in many important ways.

For example, there was a colonial style, Viceroy who had power in Ireland.

Remember we've seen before that India was also ruled by a Viceroy lord.

Ireland had a Viceroy as well.

As a result many Irish people by the end of the 19th century were saying that they wanted home rule.

They wanted to be able to rule themselves rather than be part of the United Kingdom.

Let's test our understanding of what we've just learned about Irish politics.

Look at the four options, pause the video and decide which of these options best describes Irish politics in the 19th century.

Okay, yes the correct answer is option three.

Ireland was represented in the UK parliament, but was still not treated equally.

By the late 19th century, many Irish people wanted a home rule to rule themselves.

Okay, moving on then, to look at the economic aspects of colonialism and Ireland's relationship with the UK.

To what extent was this a relationship of economic exploitation that we've seen as a big feature of colonialism in the British empire? Well, to start, we're going to look at this, the great famine of 1845 to 1850.

And between these years, Ireland suffered a devastating famine in which around 1 million people died and another 2 million people left Ireland.

The famine was to a large extent, the products of extreme inequalities in Irish society.

A small number of wealthy, mostly Protestants, landowners owned most of the land, while Ireland's lower classes of mainly Catholic peasants lived in poverty.

The famine was made worse by the response of the British government.

So at this time the famine, most poor Irish people lived on potatoes, but there was a blight, something that spread through and stop the potatoes growing and therefore they couldn't get enough to eat.

The response of the British government was very weak and poor.

And one of the main forms of help offered by the British government was work relief, a strategy that we've already seen before, being used by the British government in India, in response to famines there in the late 19th century.

So it was actually, here it's actually before, it was used in India, but obviously we've seen them in previous lessons.

Many starving Irish people died while working out in the cold of winter in return for small amounts of money.

The British government's poor response to the famine seem to suggest that Britain didn't view Ireland as an equal part of the UK.

Nevertheless, some Irish people took advantage of opportunities that came from being part of the United Kingdom and the British empire.

Members of Ireland growing middle classes, for example, pursued careers as colonial civil servants and officials.

Others settled in British colonies, such as Australia in search of opportunities.

And so for example, our man here familiar John Pope-Hennessy was Irish and an Irish Catholic, but he managed to get a career high up in the British empire.

Of course not all Irish people managed to do this or had the opportunity to do this, but some Irish people did find opportunities in the British empire.

To test our understanding, which of these options best describes the economic position of Ireland in the 19th century.

Look at the four options, pause the slides and decide which one do you think best describes the situation? Okay, so I've said it's option four.

The great famine of 1845 to 1850, reveal deep inequalities within Irish society and the UK.

Nevertheless, some Irish people found opportunities within the British empire.

Moving on to our final aspect of colonialism.

We're going to look at culturalism and racism.

Now we've seen this before, throughout India and Australia.

How, and to what extent did it operate in Ireland? Well, many in Britain did not show much respect towards Irish culture and Irish people.

They believed that Irish society was backward and needed to be civilised by British influence.

One interesting example of British attempts to civilise Irish people, was the introduction of British sports.

The British believed that sports like crickets, football, tennis, and rugby taught colonised peoples British values of fair play, team spirits and following a clear set of rules.

However, Irish people did actually enjoy a lot of these sports.

However, they also promoted traditional Irish sports, such as Gaelic football, which you can see there on the screen.

They promoted and kept playing these sports like Gaelic football as a form of resistance to British colonial influence.

And yet, despite actually in some ways, trying to resist being colonised by the British empire, about having colonialism forced upon them and British ways of life forced upon them.

The Irish themselves were colonisers.

They were responsible for implementing colonialism on people throughout the British empire.

Again, not all Irish people were involved in this, but there were quite a lot of them.

And so many Irish people also played a large role in forcing colonialism upon peoples throughout the British empire, working as colonial officials and as settlers, as said earlier in colonies like Australia.

The Irish place in British colonialism was therefore complex with different Irish people or even the very same person, both supporting and opposing, feeling a part of and feeling separate from British colonialism.

John Pope-Hennessy, who we saw earlier is one example perhaps of these complex identities in that, he was working for the British empire, but he also criticised a lot of things that English people didn't want him to criticise.

We've got Irish people feeling like they are being colonised by Britain, but at the same time, a lot of Irish, other Irish people were moving to places like Australia, settling there and being involved in the shocking removal of Aboriginal people from their land.

And so to sum this up, which of these options, our final one best describes Irish culture and identity in the 19th century? Look at these four options and choose which one do you think fits best? Pause the video to give yourself time to think.

Yes, okay, so the answer is option two.

The British attempt to civilise the Irish people because they disrespected their culture.

Irish people resisted by playing their own sports for example, but Irish people were also involved in colonialism themselves throughout the British empire.

Okay, so we're now ready to have a go at our comprehension questions, only three questions today because after these questions, we're going to then be doing an activity to answer the inquiry question.

So have a read of these three questions, pause the screen if you want to, but also these questions will appear in the reading.

So if you pause the video, read the slides on the next page, where those questions would also be, and answer the comprehension questions.

And so if you pause now, have a go at doing that, then come back to the video in a moment.

Okay, let's go through the answers now.

So question one, which English monarchs first started to introduce Protestant power and influence in Ireland? An acceptable answer is the Tudors.

A good answer that Tudors tried to take more direct control over Ireland and introduce Protestant power and influence.

They encouraged British Protestants to settle in Ireland.

Question two, what is meant by Irish home rule? Acceptable answer the Irish ruling themselves, or self-government, a good answer.

Irish home rule was the idea that the Irish people should rule themselves.

Many Irish people supported this because they believed that Irish people were treated unequally within the United Kingdom.

And indeed in many ways they were treated unequally as we've seen.

So pause the video now if you want to add anything to your notes.

And finally question three.

What devastating event occurred in Ireland between 1845 and 1850? An acceptable answer is the great famine, and a good answer between 1845 and 1850, the great famine occurred in Ireland.

Around 1 million Irish people died.

This famine was largely a product of extreme inequalities in our society.

The poor response of the British government made the famine even worse.

Okay, so well done everyone.

You've done amazing work to get to this point in our inquiry, where we're nearing the end and we are now ready to answer the inquiry question.

This question that professional historians have been debating and writing about and researching for many years.

The question again, what did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? Let's remind ourselves where we've got to.

So what we did is we went through these four lessons.

We started with our introduction.

We then looked to India, then Australia, and then Ireland.

We saw that British colonialism did have some broad common features in terms of political dominance, economic exploitation, and culturalism and racism.

But we saw that in India, in Australia and in Ireland, that even though they were all present, they all operated in different ways to different people and in different contexts.

And so when we think about this question, what the colonialism look like in the 19th century, we have to remember it didn't look the same to everyone and in every place, even though there are some broad common features we might talk about and that we have talked about.

To get us started off, let's just remind ourselves who are the people that we have focused on, who experienced, resisted, and responded to British colonialism in each place? So can you do a quick match up task? Shouldn't take too long.

Pause the video now, match the place to the people who experienced colonialism there.

I'll give you a moment.

Okay, so in India, the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.

We looked at Australia, Aboriginal people and Ireland, we focused on the Catholics.

Now an important thing to note is these are not the only communities who experienced colonialism in these places, but they are the ones that we have focused on.

Okay, so getting closer to being able to answer our inquiry question now.

We'll remember that, or you'll remember that in lesson two on India, we had to go at this task to have to sum up the different ways that colonialism worked in India.

To prepare for our final task you might want to find your notes, find what you wrote down for this task.

Then you remember last lesson, the Australia lesson.

We started to compare colonialism in India to settler colonialism in Australia.

And we had a go at this Venn diagram, looking at the similarities, and then the ways in which each place was different and unique in terms of the way colonialism operated and was experienced.

So you might want to find what you did for this task as well, before we get going on our final task.

Pause the video if you need to find any of these things.

And then here is our final task.

This is how we're going to show off all of the knowledge that we've gained throughout this inquiry.

So using this table here, you will be able to show off your knowledge and use it to answer this really challenging inquiry question we've been trying to break down, and that you've done so well to get this far in understanding.

And so how does this table work? Well, as you can see down the left hand side here, we've got our three examples, our three colonies, India, Australia and Ireland.

Meanwhile on the top, we've got our key features of colonialism, political dominance, economic exploitation, culturalism and racism.

And we've got resistance because in all of these places, people who live there resisted these key features of colonialism.

Now, what we're going to do, is we're going to take our features and all the different details and different things that we've seen in these different colonies.

And I just want you to sort them into the right place on the table.

Now you might have other examples and other things that you want to put on your table, that I haven't listed here.

And you're also very free to do that.

So please use any details that you found as well, but how are we going to do this? Well, I'll give you an example here is that what I've decided to do, is I've put Viceroys under political dominance and all of these places had Viceroys or governors, and therefore I have placed them in all three.

And so that shows me one of the aspects of colonialism.

Now I've also decided, that the distant rule was a feature of rule in India.

And so I've placed distant rule in my India row.

And I've decided that distant rule is an example of political dominance, because it's about how they ruled the country, how they exercised power through the hierarchy.

But I've also decided that distant rule shows clearly the culturalist and racist attitudes of the British rulers, because they wanted to stay separate from and above the Indian people.

I might even add an example there, if I've got some extra knowledge.

Well, I know that distant rule meant that they for example, didn't live often near the Indian people, or the British officials married British women instead of marrying Indian women, whom they were discouraged from marrying.

And so I can put extra detail if I want, but to start off, just see if you can place these in what you think are the parts of this table that they fit best.

Now, you might find that some of them fit in more than one box and that's fine.

You can put them in more than one box, but first, just think, where do you think they fit best? So, as I've done here, I think it fits best in these two.

You might think that it also fits somewhere else.

So have a go for yourself.

Now pause the video.

Draw your own version of this table and have a go at sorting as many features as you can into the different places so we can analyse what colonialism looked like in India, Australia, and Ireland.

Okay, really well done.

Welcome back, thank you for working so hard on that activity and thinking so hard about where you're going to place each thing, which country it applies to, which aspects of colonialism, it's best an example of.

I'm going to show you one I did earlier.

So what I did, so you might want to compare what you've done to mine.

Start to think.

Well, have you placed things the same as me? Have you placed them a bit differently? And then, well, we'll just have a look through it.

So for India, this is how I've done my India row.

So I've put the Indian famines there.

An example of economic exploitation.

Also the tea plantations I've said are an example of economic exploitation.

Although you could have linked it to the law because tea plantations, the planters used the law to protect them, even when they treated Indians very badly as workers.

And so tea plantations are also an example of culturalism and racism.

So you could also have put it there, because in the tea plantations, the Brit white, British planters treated the Indian workers very badly, largely out of culturalist and racist attitudes.

I placed the frontier wars in all of them, because I think the frontier wars were so important to Australian colonialism.

The frontier wars are an example of Aboriginal resistance because the Aboriginal people didn't just let the white settlers take their land.

That's an example of culturalism and racism because of the ways that British people and settlers kicked the Aboriginal people off the land, claiming that they deserved to be kicked off the land.

And so you can see these things can go in a number of places.

Now that we've got our table like this, you might want to pause if you want to go and check your own and maybe rethink, or you might be very happy with what you've got.

And then once you've done that we can move on.

Now, what we're going to do now is we're going to use our table to do some analysis.

Now we've got our table with all of our features in different places, we know, or we we've decided where we think they go.

An interesting thing is this box in green here, some Irish people were involved in all of these.

So remember Ireland was a colony in that it experienced British colonialism, but Irish people were also involved in running colonies in Australia and India.

And in Australia, they were there as settlers.

And so we can see that some Irish people were involved in all of this.

That's one way we can use our table for analysis.

But the main way I want us to do it is like this.

So one way we can use our table to analyse our question of what colonialism look like more, in a more sophisticated way is to make it links within each colony between our different aspects.

So we've seen as we've gone along, that a lot of these things are linked together.

So in India for example, can you show how political dominance was linked with economic exploitation and then linked with culturalism and racism? For example, now I'll give you one example here of a link that I found.

So I've said that distant rule was the British style of rule in India.

This was based on culturalists and racist attitudes, which meant that British officials wanted to stay separate from and above the Indian people.

Links to this, Indians developed self-help strategies, such as making their own bank because the distant British wouldn't help them.

So they had to help themselves.

And so I've made a link about how these different aspects of colonialism could be linked together.

Can you think of any links, for example, how political dominance of distant rule and the law might be connected to famine? For example, can you find links of your own? Another thing that we can do with this table, is to look for similarities and differences between the colonies.

Remember we said to answer this question of what colonialism looked like in the 19th century, we have to realise that it wasn't the same in every economy.

And so looking down a table, we can compare, well, how did economic exploitation, for example, look different in India, Australia, and Ireland? And how did it look similar? We could do the same for political dominance or resistance, for example.

And so here is an example that I did here.

So British colonialism, involved economic exploitation in all of these places.

In both India and Ireland, poverty led to famine.

And in both places, the British response was poor.

In all of these places, land was taken from native people, but this was particularly intense in Australia, where Aboriginal people were forced off their land and confined in small areas called reserves.

However, in Ireland, some people found economic opportunities in British colonialism, pursuing careers as officials and colonies around the world.

And so we can see that I've identified some similarities and differences between how colonialism looks in these places.

And so I'll bring up my first example again.

Can you have a goal on your own table of finding similarities and differences, looking down each column and, or finding links within each country or colony of how colonialism worked combining these factors.

So have a go on your own table.

You can either write around the outside if you've got space, or you can write it on a separate piece of paper and just look at your table, look down the columns, look across the links and similarities and differences.

So pause the video now, have a go at that.

How many links can you find? How many similarities and differences can you find? And can you explain them in some nice full sentences? I really look forward to seeing what you come up with.

So pause the video now and have a go at that.

This is our final task of the inquiry.

Okay, really well done.

We've now reached the end of our inquiry.

You are now able to answer that question.

What did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? You're able to answer this really significant and challenging question.

And I thank you for allowing me to share this history with you.

As always in history though, there's so much more to learn, and I could only show you some of the aspects of British colonialism.

So while we've covered so much in these four lessons, there's so much more out there that we need, that we can learn.

There are other lessons here on Oak that can help you learn about the British empire and British colonialism.

One example is the inquiry, there are set of lessons that come straight after mine on Oak, which we'll show you about British colonialism in Africa.

So if you found this interesting, then please go and have a look at that and go look around Oak for all the other lessons that will help you to uncover this history.

So now that we're at the end that our inquiry, there's only a couple of things left for me to say.

The first is that I would love to see the work that you've done in this inquiry and especially your final task.

So please share your work with Oak National.

If you'd like to please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

Second, stop the video and have a go at that final quiz.

Our final quiz of the inquiry about Ireland, and finally well done for your hard work today and in all of these lessons, really thank you.