Irish Social Mobility: Examining Elite Responses to Crisis in the 17th-Century British Caribbean

Identifier

6569

Author

Caroline Virginia Reilly

Date

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Sociology

Committee Chair

Clayton Fordahl

Committee Member

Carol Rambo

Committee Member

SunAh Laybourn

Abstract

During the middle seventeenth century, tens of thousands of Irish people came to England’s Caribbean colonies. Cromwell captured and transported most of these individuals to Barbados and Montserrat, and those Irish persons became indentured servants to English masters on the islands. Despite living under English rule and participating in plantation economies in both colonies, the Irish inhabitants of Barbados and Montserrat display stark differences in social mobility toward the end of the seventeenth century. Rather than looking to Irish individuals’ agency in creating social difference or mobility, this research examines the roles crises and elites play in creating these disparate outcomes for the Barbadian and Montserratian Irish. I use comparative process tracing analysis to investigate how endogenous and exogenous crises affect elite responses to social instability and, subsequently, create varying levels of social mobility for Irish people on seventeenth-century Barbados and Montserrat.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

Recommended Citation

Reilly, Caroline Virginia, "Irish Social Mobility: Examining Elite Responses to Crisis in the 17th-Century British Caribbean" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2082.
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/2082