Enlightenment Ireland and the Concept of World Peace

Abstract

Ireland’s paradoxical status within the British empire has been thoroughly researched and theorised. Ireland can now be imagined as both a subject nation and a recruiting ground for imperial profiteers. The thin red line emerges as disproportionately green while research into the slave trade reveals heavy Irish investment. Meanwhile eighteenth-century European imperialism flourishes alongside the earliest theorisations of “World Peace”, whether figured spatially as “universally peace” or temporally as “perpetual peace”. The Abbé Saint-Pierre’s influential work Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) attracted the appreciative attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Scholars debate the credibility of such projects, but their influence was considerable. Saint-Pierre’s notion of a European union which can arbitrate to prevent war fascinates, but it ignores conflicts arising from competitive global colonisation and by freezing pre-existing frontiers it may crush nationalist aspirations. What is Ireland’s place in the imagining of a world without war in the eighteenth century? To what extent is Ireland complicit in the entrenched injustices of a Pax Britannica and to what extent does a projected demilitarised world offer prospects for genuine self-determination? Looking at verse which celebrates the conclusion of various eighteenth-century conflicts, this article considers celebrations of the idea of “Peace” from Irish literary (and sub-literary) sources and attempts to consider the mixture of hopes and fears that animate understandings of how particular conflicts are concluded. The ways and means whereby “peaces” are extended in the literary imagination give a clue to versions of “enlightened” Irish futurity.