ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the racialised ways bodies, forms of knowledge, techniques and resources were mobilised as part of the shaping of a modern educational regime in Ireland. It situates educational modernisation in Ireland within the rise of a capitalist British Empire/Atlantic European order, while noting expansion of transnational Irish religious educational pursuits. Underlining the ambivalence of the colonial encounter, voluntary Irish Christian developments played a role in the dispersal of modern educational techniques throughout the British Empire. Precociously modern institutions like Irish and Indian school systems, the centralised national police force in Ireland, and division of labour in Caribbean sugar plantations predated England's police force, educational nationalisation, and industrial revolution. The broad western Marxist notion that education is primarily a project of disciplining workers in order to achieve capitalist industrialisation does not entirely explain the rise of mass schooling in Ireland. Key problem in establishing capitalist mode of agricultural production in Ireland was de-centralised lowland agricultural movements.
