Ireland’s Role in British Colonial Capitalism: “Men of Capitals” and Pitt’s Irish Proposals, 1784–1785

In April 1785, the British prime minister, William Pitt, proposed to give Ireland “compleat liberty and equality” with Britain “in matters of trade.” Historians cast the stakes around Pitt’s “Irish” proposals in terms of ideologies about trade, but this paper focuses on the concrete economic issues involved. It shows that Pitt’s proposals emerged from years of debates in which contemporaries conceived of the British Atlantic economy in terms of an integration of trade, shipping, and credit that evokes a British system of colonial capitalism. Ireland’s dependent relationship to that system, and the perceived failure of “free trade” to overcome its poverty, generated a battle among Irish “improvers” over rival plans to attract “men of capitals” to Ireland. Pitt played an important role in this fierce Irish debate by favoring one plan, but the British prime minister and his main Irish advisor, Thomas Orde, were never convinced by that plan’s logic of improvement, supporting it instead for fiscal reasons. That calculus made Pitt’s proposals vulnerable to attack from economic interests in Britain that took Ireland’s plans for economic improvement more seriously.