Letters of Blood and Fire: Primitive Accumulation, Peasant Resistance, and the Making of Agency in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s to the 1930s. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bands of peasants known as “whiteboys” defended customary rights to land with intimidation and violence. This article analyzes a collection of 135 so-called threatening letters from rural parts of the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. In the letters are found traces of the cultural practices through which peasants resisting primitive accumulation sustained their sense of collective efficacy. These traces have two main forms: expressions of pan-regional collective identity and appropriations from ruling-class status/power displays. A sense of agency was central to the exercise of actual agency—an agency that retarded processes of primitive accumulation and contributed to a situation whereby the spread of the British model of capitalist agriculture was confined and peasant production survived into the twentieth century.