This essay deals with the structure and organization of religion in Ireland in 1891, the year of Charles Stewart Parnell’s death. Using the replies to the questions on religion in the census of that year, it describes how the inhabitants of Ireland organized themselves for the worship of God in denominational groups. The evidence of the census is inherently problematic, however, since it recorded the confessional patterns of belonging in Ireland rather than the belief systems of its inhabitants. Thus, many of those recorded in the census as adherents to mainstream confessional groups had rather esoteric beliefs. This was certainly the case with Parnell, who although outwardly an orthodox Anglican actually held deist or pantheistic beliefs. For this reason, the essay explores marginal groups who attracted adherents because of their belief systems rather than for the social or political validation achieved through affiliation to mainstream religious denominations. Thus, the essay focuses on the Brethren, with whom Parnell has close family contacts; the Mormons; and the Christian Israelites, as well as on the beliefs and organization of a number of even smaller religious groups in Ireland.

Introduction

Social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory posits that at particular historical moments a unique set of economic, political, and social institutions come together to provide the conditions necessary for a period of sustained, vigorous capital accumulation, particularly by regulating class conflict and competition (Kotz 1987). Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982: 25) further suggest that “… different social structures of accumulation may incorporate (or exclude) differing sets of social institutions” with a tendency of the institutional ensemble to become more complex and include more institutions over time.

To date, SSA analyses of the post-World War II SSA in the United States have been limited to the four pillars that comprise the SSA – limited capital-labor accord, capital-citizen accord, pax Americana, and containment of inter-capitalist rivalry (Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf 1990) – or “core institutions” (Kotz 1987; McDonough 1994) that impinge most directly on the accumulation process. Scant attention has been given to other institutions that may play an important supportive role in facilitating capital accumulation.

This chapter provides an analysis of one such institution – the criminal justice system – across phases of the post-World War II SSA in the United States. Several SSA authors have discussed prisons and the new “garrison state” (Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf 1990; Gordon 1996), rising expenditures on the criminal justice system (Lippit 1997), and the war on drugs (Houston 1992) as characterizing the most recent phase of the post-World War II SSA, but none have theorized the role of the criminal justice system in the capital accumulation process.

In the late 1670s the Bristol ship Diligence made regular trips to north-west Ireland. It was only one of a small flotilla of ships from Bristol which forayed in the late seventeenth century to the apparently isolated ports of Killybegs and Sligo. These ships carried a range of goods essential to the survival of those who lived at the edge of Europe. The hold of the Diligence contained bottles, window glass, gunpowder, lead, leather, sugar, hops, drinking glasses and wool cards. Other ships bound for Sligo and Killybegs in the 1670s had molasses, oil seed, tobacco, madder, logwood, figs, tobacco pipes, bellows, shot and brass manufactures. The contents of the holds of these ships contained a wide range of materials, but the cargo which most had in common was books, ranging in quantity from 14 lb to a hundredweight. This brief glimpse of the trade of some of the remote parts of north-west Ireland is a reminder that in the late seventeenth century the inhabitants of even the more distant areas of Ireland found themselves drawn into a world in which the printed word was a commonplace. Fed initially by imports from Chester and Bristol, the demand for books by the end of the century was more frequently met by the output of a reinvigorated Dublin press. As contemporaries became more confident in handling this great outpouring of print, their attitudes to their world were increasingly moulded by it, and in turn they shaped the texts with which they came into contact by reading them in a variety of ways.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most Englishmen believed that over the previous two hundred years England had acquired an empire. By this they meant that English men (although a few mentioned women and children) had established colonies first in Ireland and then across the Atlantic world and that a process of social and economic convergence, which would be termed ‘Anglicisation’ by later historians, was well under way. They gave rather less attention to the mechanics which underlay this development and in particular to what happened when English models of authority, so delicately negotiated at home, were transplanted abroad. The more perceptive among the commentators noted that despite apparent social and economic convergence there were significant differences in the structures of order in the diverse parts of the ‘empire’. In particular, Ireland, close to home and with a long history of close contact with England, seemed to be strongly at variance with English norms of order despite almost two centuries of attempts to transplant English ideas of authority there. In the 1680s the earl of Anglesea, attempting to write a history of Ireland, drew attention to the divergent norms of order across the wide sphere of English influence.