Race, Conflict, and Exclusion in Ulster, Ireland, and Virginia

Abstract

This chapter compares interaction between settlers and natives in the plantation projects in Virginia and in Ulster during the early decades of the seventeenth century. It shows that, notwithstanding the condescending attitude of English people toward people who were at a cultural distance from themselves, those who advocated the interests of each enterprise purported to be concerned primarily with the moral uplift of the respective native populations and outlined quite similar strategies on how this might be achieved. From there the chapter proceeds to show that when their proposed reform measures failed to deliver the desired results, or even provoked resistance, the would-be reformers rationalized their abandonment by invoking arguments that alluded to race, conflict, and the exclusion of natives from the civil polity. While the paper devotes much attention to English presumptions and native responses, it alludes also to major differences between the two enterprises and the two “native” populations. In doing so it points to the ultimate acknowledgement by the colonists in both instances that a total separation of natives from settlers was neither practical nor desirable even when they agreed that neither group of “natives” could be considered equal with themselves.