Big Whigs in the Mobilization of Irish Peasants: An Historical Sociology of Hegemony in Prefamine Ireland (1750s-1840s)

Abstract

This paper explains the manipulation of small-holding peasants by middle-class groups in their conjoint struggles against Anglo-Irish landlords during a precapitalist conjuncture of external pressures on the institutional practice of class rule in Ireland (see Femand Braudel [1980] On History, Chicago: University of Chicago; Theda Skocpol [1979] States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Small-holding peasants and middle-class groups sought to reform the feudal practice of jurisdictional privileges by the greater gentry of Anglo-Irish landlords. A middle-class group of Irish nationalists exercised their “hegemony” over small-holding peasants during a social movement for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s (see Antonio Gramsci [1975] Selections from the Prisons Notebooks,New York: International Publishers). The outcomes of this social movement included the political empowerment of Catholic “whigs” to reform the feudal practices of corporations in Irish towns and the frustration of peasant interests to reform the feudal practices of Anglo-Irish landlordism in the countryside.