ABSTRACT
The production of the commodities was closely related to the financial problems of the colonial governments and the operations of the economic war against France. The imbalance of political and economic power between Anglo-Irish and Celtic society became confounded with the religious suspicion between Protestant and Catholic. The policy of settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and the nudge given to the commercial economy by early nineteenth-century administrations set the frontier of 'settler capitalism' rolling ahead, invading tribal lands, tying down the indigenous labour force, and leading to severe conflicts with the aboriginal populations. The Age of Reform worked remarkably unevenly throughout the empire. But in all of these cases it was social change and local conflicts in the colonies as much as the new wind from Britain which determined the form of colonial political economy in the later nineteenth century.
