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Anti-Imperialist Economics: An Irish Perspective



The turn of the 20th century saw global revolutionary struggles to emancipate subjugated peoples from imperial forces. These struggles were certainly antagonistic but not devoid of their own positive constructs. The narratives of national independence, while explanatory in one context, obscure economic doctrines as insignificant or unconsidered. The case of the Irish Revolution is often characterized in this way. It is suggested that romanticism successfully inspired Irish aspirations against the English, but such sentimentalism lacked comprehensive and practical economic policies. If there were any such policies, they are suggested to be because of Irish provincial isolationism. Far from what is alleged, the Irish Revolution’s economic doctrines were derived from global, substantiated, and policy-oriented influences.


Arthur Griffith is the intellectual source of Irish revolutionary economics. He was the founder of Sinn Fein and first internationally recognized president of an independent Ireland. These roles prove his significance within the hierarchy of the Irish Revolution as the source, although his intellectualness emanated from his unceasing and scholastic ability as a life-long journalist.[1] No other Irishman had the scope of research and the quantity of written works. It must be noted that James Connolly was another influential source on economics. His socialist perspective certainly shaped Irish revolutionary discourse. Michael Collins said, “I admire…[Connolly] the most.”[2] However, Connolly’s socialism never gained much share of Irish minds. Collins would go on to be more deferential to Griffith, most evident when he said, “Griffith. Beyond Griffith no one.”[3] He mirrored Griffith’s ideas more so than those of Connolly’s in his 1922 work “The Path to Freedom.” This investigation will use Griffith as its subject and compare his ideas through time and space. Griffith stated that he derived his ideas from the early-mid 19th century German economist, Friedrich List. List is known today as the founder of protectionist tariff policy and the more general school of development economics. Within the last three decades, development economic scholars have returned to List, who had become dismissed by the economic mainstream. Heterodox scholars, like Ha-Joon Chang, have now convincingly proven List’s theories by revealing that the success of developed nations, most notably the more recent East Asian nations, are derived from their application of List’s works. Thus, this investigation will seek to analyze List’s original principles, Griffith’s synthesis, and Chang’s validation of them.


It must be noted that at the turn of the 20th century J.A. Hobson’s 1902 “Imperialism: A Study” was a popular examination and critique of imperialism. Hobson explained how private interests, unsatisfied with their capital’s domestic rate of growth, sought to invest in foreign lands where the growth rate could be increased. After investing and incurring the risk of such a venture, those private interests would seek to offset their personal risk by selfishly manipulating their domestic government to militarily dominate the foreign lands.[4] Rather than any civilizing mission, the system of imperialism exploited, slaughtered, enslaved, and stymied foreign peoples. His scope was global by necessity because of the vastness of Britain’s imperial empire but South Africa loomed large in his formulation. Prior to this work, he was a journalist who reported on the conflict between the English and Boers in South Africa. Through this journey he became fiercely pro-Boer and their example served as a major building block in his overall theory.


His work articulated a generally accepted understanding of imperialism and had tremendous influence on revolutionaries around the world. Vladimir Lenin explicitly offered his gratitude to Hobson in his final text “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”[5] However, Lenin’s appreciation of the analysis didn’t stop him from criticizing Hobson as a “pacifist and reformist…bourgeois…non-Marxist”[6] which indicates the universal non-ideological merit of Hobson’s contribution. Other revolutionaries of a different variety most likely came across Hobson such as Arthur Griffith. Both men ventured to South Africa in the late 1890s, however Griffith’s stay was from 1897-1898 while Hobson’s was a few months in 1899. Griffith sought employment while Hobson was sent to write about the conflict. Both men developed a strong sympathy for the Boer’s struggle of independence from English tyranny. Griffith went on to demonstrate in pro-Boer protests in Dublin. Hobson would continue to reference the Boers and devote entire texts to their case study. Hobson, as a prominent articulator of general imperialism and the specific plight of the Boers, could very well have been the zeitgeist that informed Griffith’s views on the nature of imperialism as an economic system and how to break out of it. However, probable this assertion might be, it is unquestionably circumstantial as no direct citation exists from Griffith to Hobson as comparable to that of Lenin’s.

While it is enlightening to mention Hobson’s possible indirect influence, the main thrust of this current investigation will be concerned with the direct references by Griffith. In his work, “The Resurrection of Hungary,” Griffith wrote:

I am in Economics largely a follower of the man who thwarted England’s dream of the commercial conquest of the world…His name is a famous one in the outside world. His works are the text-books of economic science in other countries…I refer to Friedrich List, the real founder of the German Zollverein – the man whom England…hated and feared more than any man since Napoleon…the economic teacher of the nations…whose work on the National System of Political Economy I would wish to see in the hands of every Irishman.[7]

This is no causal footnote but an absolute allegiance to List’s school of thought. Instead of national navel gazing, Griffith looked outward to a German who was also an internationally recognized intellectual. List’s pen transcended the page and found parity with Napoleon’s sword in its power to alter the trajectory of nations. Finally, rather than a native work of Yeats or Pearse, it was a foreigner’s that Griffith desired to be ubiquitous in Ireland.

There is no doubt that Irish revolutionary economics is derivative of List. Other authors have mentioned this fact in their description of Griffith’s economics.[8] Of what existing literature there is of this fact, it treats it as very miniscule. These acknowledgments take up less than a single page in most of the sources. Some like Daly and McCartney claim that Griffith “misinterpreted”[9] List’s ideas and “overestimated” his influence.[10] None of these authors bother to elaborate on their descriptions or criticisms. There is no systematic analysis comparing Griffith’s and List’s writings to elucidate any depth or clarity as to what Irish revolutionary economics was. Additionally, the authors’ works suffer from a lack of global history methods. What criteria have they used to produce such dismissiveness if they have not included global sources? Daly cited Alice Amsden and Theda Skocpol for their pivotal contributions in the description of successful nation-state led economic development, in countries like Taiwan, that echo List, however, Daly treats them as discrete and isolated. Rather than connect List to Griffith to Amsden and Skocpol, Daly failed to appreciate the implication of their holistic value. She instead concludes that Ireland was actually better off not industrializing under those methods because its rural provincial and weak-state identity would have gone through a psychological crisis. Instead of accepting the tragedy of Irish economic history, Daly sought an Aristotelian[11] coping mechanism.


The two central themes of List’s work concern production and nationalism. Griffith affirmed the centrality of “the productive powers of the nation”[12] in his introduction to List. These themes answer fundamental questions of: what is value? how does one create value? And who creates value? According to List, value is productive capacity created by individual initiative guided by the state within distinct nations. List stated, “the power of producing wealth is therefore infinitely more important than wealth itself; it insures not only the possession and the increase of what has been gained, but also the replacement of what has been lost.”[13]List defined productive powers as the application of labor with:

the accumulation of all discoveries, inventions, improvements, perfections, and exertions of all generations which have lived before us; they form the mental capital of the present human race, and every separate nation is productive only in the proportion in which it has known how to appropriate these attainments of former generations and to increase them by its own acquirements, in which the natural capabilities of its territory, its extent and geographical position, its population and political power, have been able to develop as completely and symmetrically as possible all sources of wealth within its boundaries.[14]


It's hard to find fault in his explanation but he was in a heated debate about it in his era. He argued against the narrow view of Adam Smith and his disciples that exchange value was all that mattered. List suggested their individualistic myopia didn’t account for collective institutions. Hyperbolically, if a highly skilled London craftsman were dropped on a deserted island, his skills wouldn’t produce much value. The value he produces is a function of his socially organized context. List considered the optimal socially organized context to be the nation.


Griffith resolutely agreed and quoted List’s definition of a nation in his work:

Between each individual and entire humanity, however, stands THE NATION, with its special language and literature, with its peculiar origin and history, with its special manners and customs, laws and institutions, with the claims of all these for existence, independence, perfection, and continuance for the future, and with its separate territory; a society which, united by a thousand ties of mind and of interests, combines itself into one independent whole, which recognises the law of right for and within itself, and in its united character is still opposed to other societies of a similar kind in their national liberty, and consequently can only under the existing conditions of the world maintain self-existence and independence by its own power and resources…A nation in its normal state possesses one common language and literature, a territory endowed with manifold natural resources, extensive, and with convenient frontiers and a numerous population.[15]

For Griffith, there was no question that Ireland was a nation. It had a unique language, literature, and history only obscured and erased by English conquest. Critics might balk at Griffith’s assertion of Ireland’s extensive resources and numerous population which they would argue is unfortunately just not the case. However, this is due to perception rather than deterministic geographic and demographic constraints. The utilization of natural resources is a matter of not just material reality but human will. Ireland best expressed this in its refusal to accept English pessimistic perspectives on its resource potential. It once was fated to be dependent on English coal imports for energy production until deliberate effort was put into studying its water resources. While Griffith’s text didn’t mention hydroelectricity, his general principles inspired others. Collin’s said, Ireland “possesses in her mighty rivers white coal…I can see in the future very plainly prosperous cities, old and new, fed by the greatest river…the Shannon.”[16] Amazingly, the construction of the Shannon Hydroelectric scheme at Ardnacrusha was undertaken against all conventional wisdom as a vestige of Griffith’s and Collin’s legacy. “In 1931 Ardnacrusha generated 96 per cent of the total national generation”[17] and “had enough capacity to meet almost all of Ireland’s electricity”[18] up until the 1950s when demand outstripped its capacity. The Financial Times commented that the Irish were “the shrewdest of psychologists. They have thrown on their shoulders no easy task of breaking what is in reality an enormous inferiority complex, and the Shannon Scheme is one—and probably the most vital—of their methods of doing it.”[19] The Shannon scheme proved the merit of Griffith’s and thus List’s advice, and reveals Ireland’s resource critics to be uninformed at best and pernicious at worst.


Similarly, Ireland’s low population was because of English colonialism. Ireland sent millions of immigrants to the United States of America and other far-off lands. Today, the Irish represent the largest ethnic diaspora in the world. It was only in the past few decades that Ireland’s net migration reversed from being negative for more than a century.[20] Doesn’t this prove that there’s a lack of employment opportunities and geographic space for the population it may produce? While that might seem intuitive, it would be incorrect. Ireland’s employment and productivity capacities were constrained by English colonial demands. One, the English preferred Ireland to be a cattle grazing export economy. Cattle grazing required more land and necessarily less people on it. This meant that family tillage farming was deliberately repressed which reduced the ability for agricultural employment. “There was nothing natural about the Irish live cattle trade…This system of production had deep historical roots…In 1687, Sir William Petty suggested Ireland should be a cattle ranch for Britain…[And even after independence, the] government’s economic policies favoured graziers and livestock exporters but ‘offered little to those facing emigration or inadequate living standards.’”[21] Industrialized manufacturing was also limited to avoid competing with England’s industries. These colonial ideas held sway as dogma over Ireland’s economic perspectives even after they were free. In review, it appears that Ireland met all the criteria of List’s definition of a nation.


Griffith decolonized his mind whereas other Irish people shackled themselves to English imperialist ideas. List also emphasized how ideas could be weapons of conquest. He stated that England promoted the wrong economic ideas:

under the cosmopolitical expressions and arguments which Adam Smith had discovered, in order to induce foreign nations not to imitate [its successful productive] policy…It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade.[22]

Unlike Napoleon’s military might that altered the fate of nations, List portrays English ideas as a subtle tool to disrupt the development of other nations. England wanted to be the core of a global imperial system where it dumped its manufacturing products on the lesser developed agricultural peripheral nations. England discovered that soldiers weren’t solely needed. If the native populations believed in their duplicitous theories, their power could be retained and furthered. Even Hobson acknowledged the centrality of ideology when he stated, “the spectatorial lust of Jingoism is a most serious factor in Imperialism…Jingoism becomes a nucleus.”[23] Imperialism could be suggested to have its foundation in ideology and thus anti-imperialism must as well. The ideology of anti-imperialism must seek to unravel and unseat theories that hold back the development of the nation. Griffith expounded, “England has represented Ireland to the world as a naturally poor and incapable country…but the Irish people are the one people on the earth to-day whose education, commerce and industry having been repressed, are held up by the repressors to the scorn of the world as lazy, idle, poverty-stricken and illiterate people.”[24] He attempted to revise this mischaracterization by listing the terrible history of legal prohibitions and wealth confiscations by England. Above all, Griffith’s goal was to instill the confidence and will for the Irish nation to develop.


Griffith articulated specific protectionist policies that were pioneered by List. Within the context of fostering national productive powers, Griffith employed several of List’s recommendations: industrial subsidies and tariffs, consular service, merchant marine, and national finance among others. List wanted to equalize the playing field of competition against global economic forces. Griffith said, “protection does not mean the exclusion of foreign competition – it means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meeting foreign competition.”[25] If England took such measures to lead in industrialization, why shouldn’t any other nation? It would take short-term sacrifice but prioritizing native fledgling industries would offset the lead of more advanced nations and grow internal productive powers. According to List, there was no way to attain industrialization, as an agricultural nation, through free trade. Without protectionist policies, the agricultural nation would not have the stimulus to overcome the foreign manufacturers that could always sell more for cheaper. Griffith reiterated:

a nation cannot promote and further its civilization, its prosperity, and its social progress equally as well by exchanging agricultural products for manufactured goods as by establishing a manufacturing power of its own…Let the Irish people get out of their heads the insane idea that the agricultural and manufacturing industries are opposed. They are necessary to each other, and one cannot be injured without the other suffering hurt. We must further clear their minds of the pernicious idea that they are not entitled or called upon to give preferential aid to the manufacturing industries of their own country…if that idea were not met and combatted there would be an end to all hope of the development of an Irish manufacturing arm.[26]

Griffith crafted his own anti-imperialist economics by rejecting the English imperialist theories of a weak-state and comparative advantage.[27] List’s description of Germany’s economic status in 1841 vis-à-vis England mirrored Griffith’s Ireland, in that ideas, not material constraints, were holding it back from development. Before Hobson’s commonly accepted critique of imperialism from the top-down[28], List was novel in his advocacy of anti-imperialism from bottom-up.


Major features of List’s development agenda had to do with protectionist tariffs and subsidies. He said, a nation must “establish and maintain a separate tariff system of its own.”[29] He added, that public goods and certain industries should be “subsidized by the Governments”[30] too. This was not a policy of cronyism for corrupt monopolies but one that elegantly decided the levels and durations of tariffs and subsidies that were necessary. List wrote, protectionist policies wouldn’t “be the right one for all time. The tariff legislation must advance as the nation industry advances.”[31] Griffith echoed, “we must offer our producers protection where protection is necessary.”[32] The application of these policies would ensure the availability of native manufacturing goods rather than being crushed by foreign competition. This would secure the source of value – the ability to produce. Griffith continued, “we can allocate money to train up the people in crafts useful to the country, and we can subsidize and offer Bounties to New or Struggling Industries.”[33] Those employed in manufacturing industries would gain skills and build collective institutions that would compound development. After enough time these manufacturers would be advanced enough to supply the entire domestic market as well as export to foreign nations.


Griffith saw Irish industry’s destiny laid in exporting with the help of a consular service. As List said, “a vigorous…consular and diplomatic system out to be established.”[34] Griffith affirmed, “Irish Consular representatives would…lead to the opening up of profitable and extensive markets for the Irish producer…[in] Argentina and Chili in South America, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Russia, Japan, Denmark, Italy, and Austro-Hungary.”[35] Does this sound like self-imposed isolationism of rural cottages? In stark contrast to the mischaracterizations, Griffith’s economics were global and industrial. The Ireland that Griffith dreamed of was not satisfied with “frugal comfort”[36] but sought sophisticated advancement. The consular service would be complemented by a merchant marine. Griffith said, “List urged…that it was vital…[to] possess a [mercantile] marine of their own.”[37] There is no need for these two policies if the goal of Griffith’s was to shut Ireland away from the world.


Finance was an issue that Griffith sought to withdraw from the world back to Ireland. Griffith wanted to nationalize finance to globalize Irish exports. He remarked that £50,000,000 of Irish bank deposits were idle or invested in English and other colonies development.[38] The emancipation of Ireland had much to do with the emancipation of that money to be deployed in native Irish industrialization. According to Griffith, “with the establishment of…a National Bank, the financial jugglery…will come to an end, and the shriveled veins of Irish commerce be refilled with the blood of life.”[39] List claimed, “independent nations [must have] a national system of money and credit”[40] and must establish a national bank.[41] Griffith thought the Irish nation-state “would control the banking…and, consequently the banks dare not, if they would refuse to obey its mandates.”[42] This represented a clear policy of establishing a state-run central bank and unshyly regulating finance to best serve domestic development. List would also describe how reliance on international finance could lead a developing nation to its downfall. He used the early 1800s example of English creditors manipulating the U.S. to its whims through this means.[43] Both List and Griffith believed that national control of money and banking was paramount to breaking free of imperialism.


Other policies included building key infrastructure like railways, public education, state funding of the arts, and establishment of a new court system. These and more were all part of a multi-dimensional and synergistic plan to achieve the singular objective of increasing Ireland’s productive powers. Griffith and List both agreed that non-materialistic things like the arts, law, morality, language, etc. were all interdependent with those productive powers rather than being outside the economy as classical liberal economics would portray. In summary, Griffith explained how he would implement all of these policies:

First, by ourselves individually; secondly, through our County, Urban, and District Councils and Poor Law Guardians; thirdly, by taking over the control of the inefficient bodies known as Harbour Commissioners; fourthly, by stimulating our manufactures and our people to industrial enterprise; and fifthly, by inviting to aid in our development, on commercial lines, Irish capital.[44]

It’s clear that Griffith’s economics were not a vacuous sentiment but a clearly outlined system of policies. Collins affirmed Griffith’s ideas, while explicitly contrasting them to de Valera’s vision, when he wrote:

How are we to develop Irish resources? The earth is our bountiful mother. Upon free access to it depends not only agriculture, but all other trades and industries. Land must be freely available. Agriculture, our main industry, must be improved and developed. Our existing industries must be given opportunities to expand. Conditions must be created which will make it possible for new ones to arise. Means of transit must be extended and cheapened. Our harbours must be developed. Our water-power must be utilised; our mineral resources must be exploited. Foreign trade must be stimulated by making facilities for the transport and marketing of Irish goods abroad and foreign goods in Ireland. Investors must be urged and encouraged to invest Irish capital in Irish concerns.[45]

While some Irish revolutionaries may have had adjacent sentiments, it is unquestionable that the systematized doctrine of the movement was Griffith’s and thus List’s. These policies didn’t derive from any provincial backwardness but instead from an internationally acclaimed scholar who himself devised his general system from an exhaustive accounting of the economic histories of many other nations. List devoted the first hundred pages of his main text to the histories of the Italians, Hansards, Netherlanders, English, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, Germans, Russians, and North Americans. The attractiveness of List’s ideas is found in this utilization of history to discern the correct development policies in contrast to those imaginary axiomatic ones of his intellectual enemies: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the cosmopolitan school.


In recent times, List’s ideas have been forgotten. The mainstream economics discipline became dominated by the cosmopolitan ideas. After the U.S. became a hegemonic power in the 20th century, it picked up the same tactic of England’s empire and began promoting cosmopolitan economics to secure its imperial status. List was categorized as a misguided isolationist whose policies went against the axioms, regardless of the success shown by history. Scholars of all stripes, especially in the English-speaking world, are submerged in this predisposition and thus reflexively malign Griffith’s economics. However, in the past few decades a heterodox school of thought has emerged that challenged the mainstream narrative. Its best exponent has been Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. His 2003 work, “Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective”, brought List back out of the shadows. His title is a direct quotation from List’s 1841 work. Chang quoted List’s passage, “when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.”[46] This highlighted the ideological imperialism that advanced nations attempt to inject into the collective consciousness of less developed peripheral nations. According to Chang, List “was proven right by subsequent historical events”[47] of successful development by various nations applying his ideas and was therefore “vindicated.”[48] In the style of List, Chang utilized and expanded the collection of historical examples with all the advantages of modern methods of study. He notably featured List’s native Germany, U.S., and Japan in their 19th century development paths. He went further to include 20th century examples, like South Korea, Taiwan, etc., that implicitly or explicitly followed List’s school of thought. As James Fallows also suggested, List’s ideas “were carefully studied, adapted, and applied in parts of Europe and Asia.” [49]

Chang’s examples were devoid of pessimistic determinism. South Korea is an analogous nation to Ireland. It’s about the same size and has a history of colonialism. South Korea’s landmass is only 30%[50] larger but has been able to sustain 12 times the current population of Ireland, while having pursued Listian industrial-oriented development. Chang said, “I looked at the policies that had been used by the now-developed countries (NDCs) during their development, from fourteenth-century England down to the East Asian [newly industrialized countries] NICs in the late twentieth century. My discussion confirms to a remarkable extent the observation made by List 150 years ago.”[51] Chang advised the U.N., World Bank, European Investment Bank, Asian Development Bank, and various government heads of state and agencies. His perspective is no longer on the outside and has become impossible to ignore. His intellectual colleagues include Eric Reinert, Mariana Mazzucato, and Joseph Stiglitz that are all emphasizing Listian concepts and achieving increasing levels of mainstream acceptance.


This investigation has revealed the true nature and legitimacy of the economics of the Irish Revolution. It existed in a zeitgeist of anti-imperialism and national liberation. It was formulated by Griffith, inspired by List, and validated by Chang. These authors utilized methods of global history to ascertain the key causes and effects of successful and failed economic development. Griffith didn’t relegate Ireland to isolated backwardness but invigorated it towards global progress. By putting these works and authors in concert, this investigation’s contribution is a revision of pessimistic perspectives on Irish revolutionary economics that are juxtaposed to those of the unassailable acceptability of political emancipation. This revision will enable a new optimistic, yet realist, perspective, to sit alongside and be bolstered by the unvarnished political aspect. Irish revolutionary economics, now refreshed and justified, can be used in current-day economic policy debates in Ireland.

 

Footnotes

[1] Ferriter, Diarmaid, Diarmaid Ferriter on Arthur Griffith = Newstalk 106-108 FM Part , https://youtu.be/jsz5L-1ppbc [2] Costello, Francis, Michael Collins: In His Own Words, p. 8 [3] Costello, p. 33 [4] Hobson made efforts to distinguish imperialism from colonialism. He considered colonialism justifiable if surplus population was being sent to cultivate vacant lands. However, this paper will tend to use colonialism and imperialism interchangeably unless otherwise noted. [5] Lenin, Vladimir, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, pp. 4, 9: “I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, the book by J. A. Hobson, with all the care that, in my opinion, that work deserves…[Hobson] gives a very good and comprehensive description of the principal specific economic and political features of imperialism” [6] Lenin, pp. 8, 9, 75 [7] Griffith, Arthur, The Resurrection of Hungary, p. 142 [8] Kenny, Colum, The Enigma of Arthur Griffith ‘Father of Us All’, p. 133-134; Foster, R.F., Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923, p. 186; Daly, Mary E., Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922-1939, p. 5; Maume, Patrick, Young Ireland, Arthur Griffith, and Republican Ideology – The Question of Continuity, p. 166; Barry, Frank, and Anna Devlin, Protection Versus Free Trade in the Free State Era – The Finance Attitude, p. 6; McCartney, Donal, The Political use of History in the Work of Arthur Griffith, p. 13; Jacobsen, Kurt, Changing Utterly? – Irish Development and the Problem of Dependence, p. 281 [9] Daly, p. 5 [10] McCartney, p. 13 [11] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51356/51356-h/51356-h.htm; Friedrich Nietzsche, in his “The Birth of Tragedy”, described the decline of tragic art as a function of Aristotelian reason being applied to justify a tragedy. Nietzsche argued this was wrong and the correct reaction to a tragedy should be the acceptance of no justification “in the interest of a moral conception of things.” [12] Griffith, p. 142 [13] List, Friedrich, The National System of Political Economy, p. 106 [14] List, p. 110 [15] List, pp. 132-133; Griffith, pp. 142-143 [16] Collins, Michael, The Path to Freedom, http://www.generalmichaelcollins.com/on-line-books/the-path-to-freedom-index/chapter-5-building-up-ireland/ [17] Cullen, Bob, and Andy Bielenberg, Some Notable Features of the Design and Operational History of Ardnacrusha, The Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State: An Inspiration Milestone, p. 141 [18] The Story of Electricity in Ireland, http://ireland2050.ie/past/electricity/ [19] “The Shannon Scheme—Striking British Tribute,” Clare Champion, 5 November 1927; Sutton, Mckayla Kay, Illuminating the Irish Free State: Nationalism, National Identity, And the Promotion of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme, p. 73 [20] Ruhs, Martin, and Emma Quinn, Ireland: From Rapid Immigration to Recession, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ireland-rapid-immigration-recession [21] McCabe, Conor, Sins of The Father: Tracing the Decisions That Shaped the Irish Economy, pp. 867, 1049 [22] List, p. 252 [23] Hobson, J.A., Imperialism: A Study, p. 282; Hobson referred to the wide democratic support of native Englishmen for English imperialism that only benefitted a small speculative class rather than what was taught to those subjected to English imperialism. However, the point stands as substantiation that deceitful ideas fueled the objectives of imperialism. [24] Griffith, p. 166 [25] Griffith, p. 146 [26] Griffith, p. 144, 146 [27] Comparative advantage was a classical economic theory, still employed today, which suggests nations should specialize in types of trade that best suit their unique characteristics. For example, England in manufacturing and an English colony in agriculture. Comparative advantage would suggest such a relationship is not determined by imperial relations but by deterministic qualities inherent to the specified nations. [28] Hobson spoke from the perspective of a native English citizen rather than an oppressed subject. [29] List, p. 133 [30] List, p. 291 [31] List, p. 273 [32] Griffith, p. 146 [33] Griffith, p. 161 [34] List, p. 290 [35] Griffith, p. 151 [36] De Valera, Eamon, The Ireland That We Dreamed Of; “Frugal comfort” was a line from this 1943 speech that became a general negative term to describe the economic isolationism of Fianna Fail. [37] Griffith, p. 149; List, p. 113, 134 [38] Griffith, p. 150, 159 [39] Griffith, p. 160 [40] List, p. 204 [41] List, p. 204 [42] Griffith, p. 158 [43] List, pp. 195-207 [44] Griffith, p. 147 [45] Collins, http://www.generalmichaelcollins.com/on-line-books/the-path-to-freedom-index/chapter-5-building-up-ireland/ [46] Chang, Ha-Joon, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, p. 4; List, p. 252 [47] Chang, p. 5 [48] Chang, p. 5 [49] Fallows, James, How the World Works, The Atlantic, December 1993 [50] https://data.worldbank.org/ [51] Chang, p. 125


 

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