Sectarianism in Ireland did not descend from the heavens, nor did it arise from some primordial antagonism between Catholics and Protestants. People created it deliberately, violently, and in the interests of a rising colonial bourgeoisie. Joan Redmond’s new study, published by Cambridge University Press, enters a field long shaped by myth, propaganda, and apologetics. Her work is serious, empirically grounded, and attentive to the symbolic dimensions of religious conflict. Yet the evidence she assembles points beyond the interpretive framework she adopts. What is needed is not another account of “religious violence,” but a materialist analysis of how colonial property relations forged the sectarian order that continues to scar Ireland today.
The central weakness of the conventional narrative and the strength of Redmond’s departure from it rests on the assumption that religious division was somehow natural to Ireland. In reality, the decades after 1603 witnessed a profound social revolution. Following its famine-driven victory in the Nine Years’ War, the English state began systematically transforming Irish society through plantation. Ulster, confiscated after the Flight of the Earls, became the laboratory where land, labour, and political authority shifted from Gaelic and Old English proprietors to a new class of English and Scottish undertakers, servitors, and London financiers. Protestantism identified this class as loyal to the Crown, while Catholicism identified those dispossessed by it. Sectarian identity was not the cause of conflict but the ideological form through which a deeper struggle over property and power was expressed.
Redmond’s attention to symbolic violence the burning of Bibles, the stripping of ministers, and the desecration of churches is valuable. But symbols do not exist apart from material relations. The Protestant bible burned in Tyrone belonged to a settler occupying land taken from Irish families within living memory. The desecrated church was often a former Catholic church whose revenues the established Church of Ireland had seized. The humiliated minister was a tithe-collector and local agent of the colonial state. These acts were not simply religious gestures; they were political attacks on the apparatus of expropriation. Treating them primarily as expressions of religious hatred risks mistaking form for content.
The 1641 Rebellion, the focus of Redmond’s study, demonstrates this dynamic with particular clarity. The Depositions, eight thousand witness statements collected by a colonial administration preparing for reconquest, are filled with accounts of atrocity. They document genuine horrors, including the drowning of Protestants at Portadown, but they also served a political purpose: justifying the largest land confiscation in Irish history. The Adventurers’ Act of 1642 turned the reconquest into a speculative investment scheme, pledging millions of acres of Irish land as security. Here, the connection between colonial violence and capitalist accumulation appears in its starkest form.
Redmond rightly places Ireland within a broader Atlantic and European framework, but this positioning calls for a more radical conclusion. Ireland was not peripheral to the emergence of the capitalist world system; it was central. Plantation, expropriation, and sectarianisation were mechanisms of primitive accumulation, just as much as the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Virginia or the enslavement of Africans in Barbados. The sectarian order forged in the seventeenth century was not an aberration but a structural product of colonial capitalism.
The legacy of this process endures. Partition, Stormont’s sectarian architecture, the Troubles, and even the consociational logic of the Good Friday Agreement all bear the imprint of the seventeenth-century colonial order. Ruling elites created sectarian identities and reproduced them because they served property. Understanding their origins means recognising that they can be overcome not through appeals to reconciliation or shared identity, but by dismantling the social relations that produced them. Redmond’s book contributes to this understanding, but its own evidence demands a more explicitly materialist reading. Sectarianism was made. And what has been made can be unmade.
The Plantation as Social Revolution
Redmond’s most valuable contribution is her rejection of the lazy media cliché that Catholics and Protestants have hated each other “since time immemorial.” She rightly places the emergence of sectarian division in the decades following 1603, when the English state, having just secured a famine-driven victory in the Nine Years’ War, undertook the most radical social transformation in Irish history: the Ulster plantation. The Ulster plantation was not a religious mission that merely happened to involve land.
It was a massive act of expropriation. Plantation was neither a cultural encounter nor a theological dispute nor a clash of identities. It was the violent transfer of the means of production- land, livestock, rents, and tithes- from Gaelic and Old English proprietors to a new class of English and Scottish undertakers, servitors, and London financiers. Protestantism served as the ideological badge of this rising colonial bourgeoisie, while Catholicism marked the dispossessed. Sectarian identity was not the cause of the conflict; it was the form through which a deeper antagonism over property and power was expressed.
This is the decisive point Redmond approaches but never fully grasps. Her emphasis on symbols Bibles, churches, clerical vestments risks treating religion as an autonomous force rather than as the ideological expression of a colonial social order. Symbols matter, but they do not float free of material relations. The burning of a Protestant bible in Tyrone was not simply an attack on scripture; it was an attack on the settler who held land taken within living memory from Irish families. The desecration of a Protestant church was an assault on an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes and redirected to the established Church of Ireland. Stripping a minister was humiliating a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state, often himself a beneficiary of confiscated land. These acts were not random eruptions of religious hatred. They were political attacks on the apparatus of expropriation.
To treat them chiefly as expressions of sectarian animus is to mistake form for content. Religion was not the engine of the conflict; it was the language through which struggles over land, labour, and survival were waged. In an age when the Church dominated intellectual life, every social struggle necessarily assumed a theological form.
The insurgents of 1641 believed their actions had sacred meaning, but their material aim was to reverse dispossession and reclaim the foundations of life. Redmond’s symbolic interpretation captures the surface of these events, but not their underlying logic. The plantation system had created a society in which religious identity corresponded directly to property relations: Protestant meant proprietor, while Catholic meant dispossessed. Violence against Protestant symbols was therefore violence against the colonial order itself.
This is why sectarianism cannot be understood as a timeless cultural division. It was forged in the crucible of plantation, sharpened by famine, and intensified by the tri‑kingdom crisis that culminated in the English Revolution. The symbolic dimension of violence matters, but only when situated within the political economy that gave those symbols their explosive charge. Without that materialist grounding, the history of seventeenth‑century Ireland risks being reduced to a drama of competing identities rather than recognised as a struggle over land, power, and the violent birth of a colonial capitalist order.
1641: Class War in Theological Form
Redmond’s focus on the 1641 Rebellion is justified. The Depositions’ eight thousand witness statements, overwhelmingly Protestant, form one of the most revealing archives of early modern colonialism. They are saturated with fear, atrocity narrative, and the desperate insistence on Protestant innocence and Catholic barbarism. But they also served as a political instrument. Compiled by a state preparing for reconquest, they documented settler losses, substantiated compensation claims, and justified future confiscation. Their very structure reveals their purpose: to create a moral and evidentiary foundation for the wholesale transfer of Irish land into Protestant hands. In this sense, the Depositions are not simply a record of violence; they are part of the machinery of colonial expropriation.
This is why the central interpretive question cannot be avoided: were the insurgents of 1641 fighting about religion, or was religion the form through which they expressed a struggle over land, power, and survival? In an age when the Church dominated intellectual life, every social movement necessarily took theological form. The Irish insurgents believed in the sacral meaning of their acts. Still, the objective content of their struggle was the attempt to reverse expropriation and reclaim the material basis of life. The theological language of rebellion, the ritualised attacks on Protestant symbols, the invocation of divine justice: all expressed a deeper conflict rooted in the violent restructuring of property relations that plantation had imposed.
The drowning of Protestants at Portadown, endlessly reproduced in Protestant martyrology, was horrific. But its political function was equally clear: it became the ideological justification for the largest land confiscation in Irish history. The atrocity stories of 1641 were not merely accounts of suffering; they were instruments of policy. They provided the moral vocabulary through which the English Parliament passed the Adventurers’ Act of 1642, turning the reconquest of Ireland into a speculative investment scheme. Investors subscribed funds to suppress the rebellion in exchange for future title to Irish land. In this way, the atrocity narrative became the bridge between violence and capital accumulation. The stories gathered by the commissioners, amplified by pamphleteers such as Sir John Temple, were the fuel for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, and for the Cromwellian settlement that transferred most Irish land to Protestant ownership.
Redmond acknowledges the symbolic dimension of violence but underplays its economic logic. The rebellion was not a sectarian spasm. It erupted from a class struggle shaped by plantation, intensified by famine, and sharpened by the tri‑kingdom crisis. The insurgents were not driven by timeless religious hatred but by the memory of dispossession, the experience of exclusion, and the immediate threat of further confiscation. The symbols they attacked Bibles, churches, clerical vestments were not abstract emblems of Protestant identity but concrete expressions of colonial power. To burn a bible was to strike at the ideological justification for expropriation. To desecrate a church was to assault an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes. To strip a minister was to humiliate a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state.
The rebellion must therefore be understood as a political and economic uprising expressed in religious form. Its violence was shaped by the material conditions created by plantation: the loss of land, the imposition of rents and tithes, the exclusion from office, and the constant threat of further confiscation. Redmond’s symbolic reading captures the surface of these events but not their underlying logic. Without a materialist grounding, the history of 1641 risks being reduced to a drama of competing identities rather than recognised as a struggle over land, power, and the violent birth of a colonial capitalist order.
Ireland and the English Revolution
No account of 1641 can be adequate without situating Ireland within the English Revolution. Redmond gestures toward this but does not integrate it into her analysis, and the omission is decisive. The rebellion did not unfold on a static Irish stage; it erupted at the precise moment when the English state was being torn apart by a revolutionary crisis that redefined the relationship between property, sovereignty, and political power across all three Stuart kingdoms. To treat 1641 as an insular religious convulsion is to miss the structural forces that shaped it and the colonial logic that determined its outcome.
The English bourgeoisie, mobilised through Parliament, was the most implacable enemy of Irish Catholics. This was not because of theology, but because Irish Catholic landownership blocked the consolidation of a new social order grounded in private property, commercial expansion, and parliamentary sovereignty. The Adventurers’ Act of 1642, a speculative investment scheme that pledged 2.5 million acres of Irish land as security, is one of the clearest examples in world history of colonial conquest as primitive accumulation. Investors financed the reconquest in advance, expecting land as repayment. The Irish Catholic population became collateral in a financial instrument. Here the relationship between violence and capital is laid bare: atrocity narrative provided the moral justification, parliamentary legislation provided the legal mechanism, and military conquest provided the enforcement. Ireland became the terrain on which the English Revolution exported its contradictions.
The Confederation of Kilkenny, often romanticised in nationalist historiography, must be understood within this framework. It was not a proto‑national movement but a coalition of Catholic landowners seeking to preserve property and religion through negotiation with the Crown. Its internal divisions Old English grandees versus Gaelic leaders and clergy were class divisions, not cultural ones. The Old English elite, long integrated into the structures of English rule, sought accommodation with Charles I to secure their estates. The Gaelic leadership, shaped by more recent and more brutal experiences of dispossession, pushed for a harder line. These tensions reflected differing relationships to land, power, and the English state, not differing “identities.” The Confederation’s failure was not the failure of Irish unity; it was the failure of a landed class trying to defend its interests amid a revolutionary transformation that rendered its position untenable.
Redmond’s narrative stops at 1649, but her evidence points directly to Cromwell. His invasion was not a religious crusade; it was the military enforcement of a capitalist revolution whose domestic progress was inseparable from colonial brutality abroad. The same Parliament that abolished monarchy and executed a king also authorised the reconquest of Ireland as a financial venture. Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford were justified explicitly as vengeance for 1641. Still, their real function was to break resistance to a land settlement designed to secure the interests of the Adventurers, the New Model Army, and the emergent Protestant Ascendancy. The Cromwellian settlement that followed transferred most Irish land to Protestant ownership, completing the expropriation process that plantation had begun.
Situating 1641 within the English Revolution is therefore not an optional historiographical flourish; it is key to understanding the rebellion’s causes, course, and consequences. Ireland was not a peripheral theatre but a central arena in which the English bourgeois revolution realised its colonial dimension. Redmond’s evidence demonstrates this repeatedly, even if her interpretive framework does not. A materialist analysis reveals what a symbolic or identity‑centred approach cannot: that the violence of 1641 and the violence of Cromwell were two moments in a single process, the violent birth of a capitalist order whose foundations were laid in expropriated Irish soil.
Ireland Between Two Worlds
One of Redmond’s strengths is her insistence on Ireland’s Atlantic and European context. But this can be pushed much further, because Ireland in the seventeenth century was not an isolated theatre of religious conflict but a nodal point in a rapidly expanding imperial world. Ulster and Virginia were twin laboratories of English colonialism. The same ideological justifications barbarism, idleness, the civilising mission were deployed in both. In Virginia, Indigenous peoples were described as wandering, unproductive, and in need of English discipline; in Ulster, Gaelic society was condemned as disorderly, backwards, and incapable of proper husbandry. In both cases, the ideological vocabulary served the same purpose: to legitimise the violent transfer of land to English proprietors and to naturalise the emerging colonial order.
The parallels were not accidental. Many of the same individuals, companies, and intellectual currents shaped both projects. The City of London’s livery companies, which took over the plantation of Londonderry, were simultaneously investing in transatlantic ventures. English promoters of colonisation wrote treatises that moved seamlessly between Ireland and America, treating both as spaces where English civility could be imposed upon supposedly degenerate populations. The plantation of Ulster and the settlement of Virginia were two fronts of a single imperial expansion, driven by the same economic imperatives and justified by the same ideological repertoire.
At the same time, Irish Catholic elites were deeply embedded in the Counter‑Reformation world. They served in Spanish tercios, in the armies of France, and in Imperial forces during the Thirty Years’ War. Irish colleges in Salamanca, Louvain, and Rome produced clergy who moved between Ireland and continental Europe, carrying with them the intellectual and political currents of the wider Catholic world. Ireland was therefore not simply a colony but a crossroads: a site where English imperialism collided with continental Catholic power, where global confessional conflict intersected with local struggles over land and authority.
This global positioning reveals a deeper truth: Ireland was not peripheral. It was central to the violent birth of the capitalist world system. Plantation, expropriation, and sectarianisation were not anomalies; they were characteristic mechanisms of primitive accumulation. Marx’s description of primitive accumulation the forcible separation of producers from the means of production, the creation of a landless labouring class, and the use of state violence to restructure property relations fits Ireland with almost uncanny precision. The Ulster plantation was one of the earliest large‑scale experiments in this process. It created a new class of Protestant proprietors, dispossessed a Catholic majority, and established a colonial state apparatus capable of enforcing the new order.
Sectarianisation was part of this machinery. It provided the ideological framework through which expropriation could be justified, and resistance delegitimised. By fusing religious identity with property relations- Protestant as proprietor, Catholic as dispossessed- the colonial state created a durable social division it could mobilise to stabilise its rule. Sectarianism was not an unfortunate by‑product of plantation; it was a structural outcome. It helped produce a population divided against itself, unable to unite against the colonial order, and perpetually vulnerable to manipulation by ruling elites.
Seen in this light, the seventeenth century becomes not merely a period of Irish turmoil but a foundational moment in the formation of global capitalism. The techniques of expropriation, the ideological languages of civilisation and barbarism, and the fusion of religious identity with property relations were all exported from Ireland to other colonial theatres. Ireland was both a proving ground and a model. To understand its history is to understand the origins of a world system built on dispossession, coercion, and the violent remaking of social relations.
The Long Shadow of 1603–49
Redmond argues that the period forged long‑lasting legacies. She is right. The Protestant Ascendancy, the Penal Laws, the Act of Union, the partition of 1921, the sectarian architecture of Stormont, the Troubles, and even the consociational logic of the Good Friday Agreement all bear the imprint of the seventeenth‑century colonial order. The structures created in the aftermath of plantation a landed Protestant elite, a dispossessed Catholic majority, and a state apparatus designed to maintain that hierarchy did not simply vanish with time. Successive political regimes reproduced, adapted, and modernised them. The Ascendancy became the governing class of the eighteenth century; the Penal Laws codified the exclusion of Catholics from property and power; the Union entrenched Protestant dominance within a wider imperial framework. Partition in 1921 then froze these relations into a new constitutional form, creating a Northern statelet whose institutions were designed to ensure permanent Protestant control. Stormont’s architecture was not an accident of political negotiation but the direct descendant of the colonial order established in the seventeenth century.
The Troubles, too, cannot be understood without this genealogy. The conflict was not the eruption of ancient hatreds but the violent expression of unresolved colonial contradictions. The spatial segregation of communities, differential access to housing and employment, policing structures, and political institutions all reflected the long shadow of plantation. Even the Good Friday Agreement, often celebrated as a triumph of peacebuilding, bears the imprint of this history. Its consociational logic, dividing political representation into “unionist” and “nationalist” blocs, institutionalises the very sectarian categories forged in the seventeenth century. It stabilises peace by managing division rather than overcoming it, a solution that reflects the depth of the historical structures it seeks to contain.
But the lesson is not fatalistic. Ruling elites created sectarian identities and reproduced them because they served property. They were never spontaneous expressions of popular feeling; they were political technologies. From the seventeenth century onward, elites used sectarian division to fragment the labouring population, prevent unified resistance, and secure the social order. Whenever workers in Ireland have united the Belfast dock strike of 1907, when James Larkin led Protestant and Catholic workers together; the Outdoor Relief riots of 1932, when unemployed workers marched across sectarian lines the state responded by stoking division. Employers, politicians, and clerical authorities alike intervened to reassert the boundaries between communities. Sectarianism has always been a strategy of rule, not an inevitable feature of Irish society.
This is why the history Redmond describes, despite its limitations, contains a profoundly emancipatory lesson. Sectarianism is not eternal. It is historical. It was forged in specific circumstances: plantation, expropriation, colonial administration, and the needs of an emerging capitalist order. What was made can be unmade. The same forces that created sectarian division the restructuring of property relations, the consolidation of state power, the ideological mobilisation of religion can be confronted and dismantled. The moments when workers united across sectarian lines show that the divisions are neither natural nor insurmountable. They are maintained because they serve the interests of those who benefit from a divided population.
To understand sectarianism historically is to recognise its contingency. Recognising its contingency is recognising the possibility of its abolition. The seventeenth century forged the structures that still shape Irish society, but it also reveals the means by which those structures can be overcome: through the collective action of those whose lives have been shaped and constrained by the
Beyond Identity, Toward Social Relations
Redmond’s book is a serious scholarly intervention. But its interpretive frame, privileging identity, symbol, and religious meaning, reflects the dominant academic retreat from class analysis. This retreat is not unique to her work; it is characteristic of much contemporary historiography, which has become increasingly wary of structural explanations and increasingly enamoured of cultural ones. Yet the evidence she assembles cries out for a materialist reading. Sectarianism was forged in the crucible of plantation, expropriation, and capitalist expansion. It emerged not from competing identities but from the violent restructuring of property relations that transformed Ireland in the seventeenth century. To treat sectarianism primarily as symbolic conflict is to mistake the surface for the depth, the ideological form for the social content.
A genuinely scientific history must strip away the mythologies of all sides and reveal the social relations underneath. This means recognising that the plantation was not simply a cultural encounter but a massive act of class reorganisation: the transfer of land, rents, tithes, and political authority from one social group to another. It means understanding that the 1641 Rebellion was not a spontaneous eruption of religious hatred but a political uprising expressed in theological language. It means acknowledging that the Cromwellian conquest was not divine vengeance but the military enforcement of a capitalist revolution whose domestic achievements were inseparable from colonial brutality abroad. Redmond’s work, despite its limitations, provides ample material for such a project. Her detailed engagement with the Depositions, her attention to symbolic violence, and her insistence on Ireland’s Atlantic and European context offer rich evidence for deeper analysis, even if she does not pursue it herself.
The challenge, then, is not to dismiss Redmond’s approach but to push beyond the categories in which it is framed. Identity, symbol, and religious meaning are important, but they are not primary. They are the ideological expressions of underlying social relations. A bible burned in Tyrone was not merely a religious affront; it was an attack on the settler who held confiscated land. A church desecrated was not simply a violation of sacred space; it was a blow against an institution whose revenues had been seized from Catholic parishes. A minister stripped was not merely a humiliation of a religious figure; it was the punishment of a tithe‑collector and local agent of the colonial state. These acts cannot be understood without reference to the material conditions that gave them meaning.
To recover those conditions is the task of historical materialism. It requires situating Ireland within the global processes of primitive accumulation, recognising the role of colonial violence in the birth of capitalism, and tracing how sectarian identities were constructed to stabilise a new social order. It requires seeing the seventeenth century not as a drama of competing religious communities but as a moment in the formation of a world system built on dispossession, coercion, and the remaking of social relations.
Redmond’s book, for all its interpretive limitations, offers the raw material for such a reconstruction. It documents the violence, fear, symbolic acts, and political manoeuvres that accompanied the transformation of Irish society. What it does not do, and what must be done, is to place these phenomena within the broader logic of colonial capitalism. That task falls to readers willing to push beyond the cultural frame and recover the structural forces that shaped the period. A scientific history must reveal not only what happened but why it happened and, in doing so, illuminate the social relations that continue to shape Ireland today.
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