In the last years of the seventeenth and first years of the eighteenth century a countrywide network of permanent residential army barracks were built in Ireland. Their purpose was to house the single largest part of Britain's peacetime standing army. Such an undertaking was unique within the British Isles, and represented the development of a military innovation that was still in its infancy in European terms. Even the word ‘barracks’ was ‘still an unfamiliar term in this period’ and originated from the small temporary huts known as barraques (French) or barracas (Spanish) which soldiers constructed from wood and other materials gathered from the area surrounding their encampments. Only Spain and, to a greater extent, France had engaged at any level with the idea, France developing as extensive a countrywide network in the eighteenth century as that seen in Ireland. The scale of the French project was necessarily much larger, providing barracks in over 300 towns by 1742 and capacity for 200,000 soldiers by 1772.

In Ireland accommodation was required for around 12,000 soldiers in normal peacetime circumstances. From an imperial perspective the importance of the barrack system was that it provided a home for a substantial part of the standing army, a first port of call for soldiers for service overseas, and a model for the introduction of this military innovation throughout the empire. The barracks that were to be built in Ireland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century also differed from the much smaller number built in the Scottish highlands in the first half of the eighteenth century, which were fortified structures placed at strategic points for pacification purposes, or those in England which, on the rare occasions such structures were built, were situated on the coast. The Irish barracks were to be, for the greater part, residential buildings. Therefore many more could be built at a lesser cost with a greater spread throughout both rural and urban locations.

The Irish military establishment served a number of purposes. It provided a barracks for the single largest part of Britain's standing army in peacetime. It provided an army in Ireland for internal defence and policing and security from external threats. Last but not least, it provided soldiers for different European and colonial conflicts and concerns – an army for empire. This latter function however has either been overlooked or misunderstood by historians. It is therefore necessary to enter into a consideration of the draughts of soldiers and number of regiments sent abroad from Ireland, the number paid for out of Irish revenues, the locations to which they were sent, their purpose abroad, and their contribution to the British Empire and its expansion during the period 1692–1770.

It has been argued that the ‘priorities of the eighteenth-century British army were at home or in Europe. It was only slowly turned into an instrument for protecting Britain's colonies or subjugating those of other powers.’ For the first half of the century, colonial wars were ‘limited ones largely waged by colonial forces … or the troops of the East India Company’. However, from the middle of the century onwards ‘there was a marked increase in the deployment of the army overseas’. During the Seven Years’ War, 20,000 British regular soldiers served in North America, while that number had increased to 50,000 by the time of the American War of Independence. This level of commitment was not overly significant when considered in relation to the number of men voted by parliament for the army each year: the average figure was 76,404 during the Nine Years’ War; 92,708 during the War of the Spanish Succession; 62,373 during the War of the Austrian Succession; 92,676 during the Seven Years’ War; and 108,484 during the American War. Peacetime figures were significantly less, though from the 1760s onwards the costs ‘rose sharply with the augmentation of the garrisons kept permanently in the West Indies and North America’.

Ireland's major contribution towards the empire in the period 1692–1770 was the financing, housing and general maintenance of a peacetime standing army that was capable of going to war in Britain's interest at short notice. The central focus in practical terms for facilitating that contribution was the general maintenance of the army in Ireland on an annual basis, and it was this activity that was reflected in the government's annual military establishment and the regular debates and considerations of the Irish parliament. This chapter is concerned with the size and regulation of the army and its logistical and financial administration, and the centrality of these concerns within Irish political life. It provides an assessment of the strength and readiness of the army in Ireland and the cost. It also includes a consideration of recruitment policies.

In discussing the British military in the eighteenth century, John Brewer pointed out that no country ‘could afford to sustain the expense of continuous fulltime mobilization’. Instead, in peacetime the army needed to be reduced in size. For the first half of the century the British peacetime army numbered ‘about 35,000’, and after the Seven Years’ War it increased to 45,000. This army was stationed in

This assessment highlights the central importance of Ireland, which provided a home for, and covered the cost of maintaining, the single largest part of the British peacetime professional army and the core of the wartime army.

Ireland's contribution to empire in the period 1692–1770 has been examined thus far in terms of the sustaining of the army both at home and abroad and in the innovative undertaking to build and maintain a countrywide network of barracks. But that contribution would not have been possible without a more immediate and fundamental commitment of money to the public purse for the purposes of covering the expense of the army and barracks. To fully measure that military contribution, it is necessary to assess exactly how much money was spent on that enterprise, what percentage of Ireland's public funds that expenditure represented, where the money came from in the first place, and the degree of innovation, experimentation and political and public commitment evident therein towards making that financial contribution. This chapter examines these matters in relation to public income and expenditure in general and to taxation in particular.

Income and Expenditure

Annual income and expenditure in Ireland rose steadily during the period 1692–1770. In the early seventeenth century, government income from Irish revenue sources fluctuated between £15,000 and £27,000. With expenditure always being greater, constant subventions of between £8,000 and £67,000 were required from England. The revolutionary circumstances of the 1650s saw wholly exceptional income levels attained with internal sources producing on average £264,900 per annum with a further £213,758 provided from England. The collapse of the Protectorate in 1659 saw the internal annual yield from the existing permanent or hereditary revenues drop to somewhere between £35,000 and £70,000. In the short-term further subventions were received from England, but the continuation of such a situation was no longer acceptable in the long term. The solution was provided in a Restoration financial settlement voted to the Crown in the 1660s which established the foundations for a secure tax base able to sustain improving public income yields in the following decades.

The Restoration settlement led eventually to the highs of the 1650s being exceeded by the 1680s in both gross and net annual yields, which peaked at £325,228 and £286,516 respectively in 1686.

In 1770 Ireland was on the cusp of a new era with regard to politics, religion and society. Internal and external pressures brought about the commencement of the repeal of the penal laws against Catholics in the 1770s and Patriot politics finally secured significant constitutional alterations in the relationship with Britain in 1782. The American and French Revolutions also encouraged existing and created new and varying degrees of radicalization within certain sectors of Irish society in political terms. One result of these various changes was the outbreak of rebellion in 1798, more than 100 years since countrywide violence had last engulfed Ireland. Another was the passage of the Act of Union in 1800, which put an end to the Irish parliament and the associated constitutional anomalies of the preceding centuries. These two events were synonymous with a seismic shift in Irish–British relations, as the subordination of Ireland as a dominion or province of the empire was finally clarified, confirmed and concluded. Thereafter, Ireland's role in the empire began to change, as did the variety of ideas about Irish identity, separateness and, eventually, nationality, with dramatic and at times violent results at political, constitutional, religious, social and economic levels.

The 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union therefore also marked the end of a very particular phase in Ireland's role within the empire. In 1770 the army in Ireland had finally been augmented beyond the 12,000 limit set in 1699. Thereafter Ireland was able to make an even more telling contribution of men and money to the empire in the final thirty years of the eighteenth century. The American War of Independence required more soldiers from Ireland, which, as has already been seen, resulted in among other things Catholic recruitment increasing dramatically. It also required a significant escalation in Ireland's financial commitment to the empire, which was compounded by the French Revolutionary wars. Total expenditure increased fairly steadily from £1,142,269 in 1784 to £6,615,959 in 1800. A new requirement entered Irish governmental expenditure in 1783, with £49,478 being spent on the navy.

The aim of this book is to examine Ireland's place and role in the British Empire in the period 1692–1770. The subject emerged in 2004–5 from research I had undertaken between October 1999 and September 2003 on the related topics of money, politics and power in Ireland in the years 1714–61. I have published the results of that research during the past decade in various journal articles, essays and edited collections and I am indebted to both the National University of Ireland and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for providing the postdoctoral fellowships that facilitated all of that work. This book builds upon those foundations with further research undertaken since 2004–5, combined with a return to material first examined in the 1990s.

The completion of this book has been greatly assisted by a variety of people to whom I am deeply grateful. Marnie Hay, Eoin Magennis and Patrick Walsh have read and commented upon various chapters and have provided important corrections and improvements. All three have also discussed the work at length with me and patiently listened to lengthy discourses on the trials and tribulations associated with it. I am also much indebted to Catriona Magennis for her sage advice and assistance at a particularly difficult moment in the book's gestation. All of the participants at the biennial ‘Money, Power and Print’ Colloquia have helped me to form my ideas over the years, while my two co-convenors of those events, Chris Fauske and Rick Kleer, have been unstinting in their encouragement, support and intellectual stimulation. My colleagues in the School of History and Archives at UCD have all offered encouragement and support in a variety of ways and I could not have completed the writing of the book without a crucial research semester provided in the autumn of 2011, which was facilitated by the good graces of my co-workers. I am particularly indebted in this respect, and in many others, to my friend and Head of School, John McCafferty.

As already demonstrated, the public commitment of Irish money towards the maintenance of the army and the barracks by means of parliamentary taxation constituted a key contribution to the British Empire in the period 1692–1770. However, at times of particular political or economic crisis or emergency, additional funds were required at short notice. In England, the provision of such funds via the creation and maintenance of a national debt constitutes a key aspect of the late seventeenth-century financial revolution. The emergence of an English national debt was directly related to the expansion of the empire, as the debt was created in order to finance the maintenance of a naval and military establishment capable of winning wars and defending newly acquired territories.

Parliament-sanctioned government borrowing and the build-up of a permanent national debt in order to finance war commenced in earnest in England in the early 1690s. The Nine Years’ War saw existing practices in short-term borrowing extended and the new innovation of long-term borrowing introduced, the Bank of England established in 1694 and other fiscal experiments embarked upon. At the centre of these developments was the Westminster parliament, which, as the ultimate beneficiary of the constitutional revolution of 1688–9, facilitated the move from insecure, volatile and unsustainable royal debt to secure, safe and sustainable national debt. By enshrining in statute the repayment of public debts, be it at the outset of a new loan, the creation of a new financial institution, or through the conversion of short-term unfunded liabilities into long-term funded debts, the Westminster parliament revolutionized England's public finances and the country's ability to wage war, conquer new territories and, ultimately, to build an overseas empire.

Parliament-sanctioned government borrowing and the creation of a permanent national debt built upon a legislative foundation commenced in Ireland in 1716. As had been the case in England in the 1690s, the introduction of a permanent national debt to Ireland was a highly significant occurrence directly related to security concerns of both a national and an international character, on this occasion concerning Ireland, England, Scotland and France.

Political activity in early modern Ireland was more often than not centred on the question of the constitutional relationship with England and, after 1707, Britain. That constitutional status in the period 1692–1770 is also central to understanding Ireland's place and role within the empire. This chapter aims to address the question by examining political ideology and activity in Ireland, England and Britain in relation to issues of government, parliament, authority and power in the early modern period.

Kingdom or Colony?

There are a number of fundamental considerations which help to address the vexed question of whether Ireland was a separate though dependant sister kingdom or more simply a province or colony of England and Britain. On the one hand, the plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the influx of new settlers from England and Scotland, the wars of conquest and re conquest in 1594–1603, 1641–53 and 1689–91, and the imposition of the penal laws against Catholics in the eighteenth century all bore the hallmarks of a colonizing endeavour. On the other hand, the institutions of state, the complex ethnic and religious mixed identities, the official status as a separate kingdom and the political ideology and practice suggested a different status.

Stephen Conway has described the mid-eighteenth-century Irish parliament as ‘a local institution, with severely limited powers, rather than part of the machinery of the British state’. That rather damning assessment is based upon considerations such as the fact that it ‘met only for a few months every two years. In theory, at least, it could not even begin to debate proposed legislation until the subject had been sanctioned in London’. The device of heads of bills is acknowledged as a means of initiating legislation, but it is emphasized that even still such legislation ‘remained subject to interference and ultimate approval from London’. Likewise, from 1720 the British parliament ‘claimed the right to legislate for Ireland whenever it chose to do so’.