Country Houses and the Distinctiveness of the Irish Imperial Experience

Abstract

In Irish literature, when country houses are considered in the context of the British Empire, they have typically been interpreted as symbols of Ireland’s role as a subject colony that was ruled by an alien elite. The ‘Big House’ is seen as the progenitor of the economic oppression of the Irish peasantry and as the headquarters of British efforts to impose their culture on Ireland.¹ This view, though often rendered in complex and elegant form, runs through literary treatments of Irish country houses, from Maria Edgeworth in the eighteenth century to Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth to Elizabeth Bowen in the twentieth. Irish historians, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the social and economic role of landed estates in Irish domestic context, with a particular emphasis on landlord–tenant relations and the ‘land question’.² What has been less the subject of either literary depiction or scholarly examination, however, is the role of Irish country houses as the embodiments of Irish participation in empire overseas.