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14
A erword
Settler colonies, ethno-religious violence
and historical documentation:
comparative re ections on
south-east Asia and Ireland
In the early modern period, extreme violence o en accompanied con ict in
disparate regions of the world. In Tibet, the Fi h Dalai Lama cracked down
hard on rebels. In , he issued these orders:
Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut;
Make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter;
Make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks;
Make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by re . . .
In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their name.
In Southeast Asia, too, between and speci c groups of Christians,
Muslims and Buddhists all perpetrated genocidal massacres against others
and even against members of their own communities. Religious demarcations
sometimes worked in tandem with quests for land and power to divide people
who may or may not have been ethnically di erent.
Yet ethnic di erence also served as a motivation for extreme violence.
Cultural collisions were common in an age of conquest and a scramble for
territory. As maritime European powers expanded, land-based Asian empires
grew as well. English expansion in Ireland and elsewhere in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries occurred in the same era as the rise of new south-east
Asian dynasties, which achieved major territorial reach in Burma, Siam, Viet
Nam and Java. Many of these conquests were extremely violent. Early in
the sixteenth century, Iberian conquistadors used genocidal massacres in the
name of religion as a route to power in the New World, and some of their
successors tried in the same way again in Cambodia in the s. In the s,
the Javanese monarch Amangkurat I slaughtered over , of his kingdom’s
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Islamic teachers and their families. And in the s, the conquering Burmese
monarch Alaung-hpaya conducted ethnic massacres and destruction of the
Buddhist monkhood of the defeated Mon kingdom.
roughout these varied regions of the world, subjugated peoples contested
domination of their communities, settler occupation of their lands or seizure
of their resources. ey too o en adopted violent means to launch their own
new kingdoms, regain lost kingdoms, or purify threatened realms of unsuit-
able people or ideas. For instance, while imperial monarchs in Java and Burma
slaughtered political, religious or ethnic opponents to extend or stabilise their
control, rulers of the smaller Mon and Khmer kingdoms in lower Burma and
Cambodia, for their part, conducted genocidal massacres to reverse territorial
losses or eliminate encroaching settlers. In most of these cases, even supposedly
paci stic Buddhists, for instance, deployed their faith to attack and massacre
their neighbours. Examining such distant cases of ethno-religious violence
during the broad historical era of the early modern con icts in Ireland may
illuminate some of the transnational contexts for the political and territorial
quests that o en lay behind murderous wars.
In south-east Asia a er , the ‘Age of Commerce’ created vast trading
fortunes and opportunities. Some groups got in the way. Yet even over several
centuries in this large area of the world, cases of genocidal massacres were
not the norm but in fact quite exceptional. Ethnic politics certainly intensi ed
but still fell short of full polarisation, even though war and killing were
common enough as new dynasties expanded and sought political and cultural
uniformity. Universalist Islamic and Buddhist aspirations, regional loyalties,
personal patronage, dynastic claims over myriad subject peoples, and a good
deal of intermarriage, all served to limit ethnic violence to some extent.
Some of those factors might already be familiar to readers of earlier chapters
of this book.
I shall turn here to how a possibly global phenomenon played out in two
regions of eighteenth-century south-east Asia. In the Burmese and Cambodian
deltas, indigenous farmers clashed with perceived outsiders settling on their
land. Students of seventeenth-century Ireland may again recognise some
common themes.
I
In the vast, polyethnic region that was pre-modern Burma, its three major
groups, Burmans, Mons and Shans, spoke di erent languages but all practiced
eravada Buddhism and wet-rice cultivation. e long Irrawaddy River
linked Burma’s two main regions: the northern, upland interior, inhabited
largely by Burmans and Shans, and the southern delta and coastal regions,
home of Mons, Burmans and Karens.
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In , an expanding northern dynasty took the Mon capital Pegu in
the south, and then moved the capital upriver to Ava. Ethnicity, along with
regionalism, now began to entail a political loyalty. Burman–Mon competition
for land and resources on the southern frontier led rival groups to seize on
ethnic markers as symbols of di erence in the interest of more e ective group
mobilisation. From , Burmans gained total control of the northern court
and began to associate Burman ethnicity with religious orthodoxy, even against
fellow eravada Buddhists such as the Shans and Mons, whose distinct lan-
guages and hairstyles they now highlighted as alien.
In the s, as Burman farmers moved south into the Irrawaddy delta and
the northern Ava court replaced local Mon o cials with Burman appointees,
Mons revolted. Dutch observers wrote that the Mons of Pegu ‘at present are
tormented above all others’ and predicted that they ‘would in all probability
put to death the Burmans’. But by the mid-eighteenth century, Mons were
reduced to only of the delta’s population. Along with Burman settlers
came Karens from the east.
Mons increasingly saw themselves as a people subjected to alien rule. Finally,
in , they rebelled twice. High taxation was a major initial grievance. e
Ava court brie y re-established control, but in a second revolt in November
, Karens and Mons assassinated Ava’s Burman appointee. ey acclaimed
a Karen leader, Smin Dhaw, as king of a once again independent Pegu. Smin
Dhaw quickly sent , Mon and Siamese troops to take the Ava-controlled
port of Syriam (see ‘Siriao’ on map). On December , Pegu’s army entered
Syriam ‘in tumult and violence’, wrote the English East India Company’s
agent there. e victorious commander quickly issued orders to all Europeans
‘to keep at home’.
e victorious Pegu forces wanted no witnesses to their bloody occupation
of Syriam. A week or two later, Smin Dhaw wrote to the English representative
to explain what his army had done in the city. In his letter, the new king of
Pegu complained rst of ‘the very great oppressions the poor Peguers formerly
labour’d under by the Buramore [Burma] government and the massacre
[the latter had] intended on the casts of people called Siamers and Peguers’.
Smin Dhaw then explained that ‘having advice that the Burmar Prince of
Syrian design’d to take and imprison all the Peguers, Siamers, Tavays and all
strangers [Europeans] and resolved to burn them by treachery, I Samentho
[Smin Dhaw] was obliged to send my soldiers to kill all the governing Burmars
that were in Syrian; and as now the said governing Burmars are destroyed’.
Corroboration of this reached British Madras the next month. A er eighty
years of Burman rule, the report said, ‘the Natives tired with Cruelty Rose
upon ’em and killed or , Burmars in Syrian only, wholly owing to a
Struggle for Liberty’. In the a ermath of this massacre, the British learned,
‘[t]he port of Syrian is Quiet’.
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Smin Dhaw insisted he wanted peace. But con ict continued. e English
agent claimed: ‘I saved the lives of above two thousand Burmars and have since
been endeavouring by all means to regulate and moderate the Government.’
Smin Dhaw’s forces marched north. A British agent reported that they ‘will
not rest’ till they had conquered Ava. Indeed, Smin Dhaw’s successor, an
ethnic Shan who vowed to restore the sixteenth-century Pegu kingdom, nally
did capture Ava in . e revived Mon kingdom, led rst by a Karen and
then a Shan, had temporarily triumphed.
But a new Burman leader, Alaung-hpaya (–), quickly gathered strength.
A er the fall of Ava, he later recalled, ‘the Mon rebels carried o people,
selling and reselling them as slaves’. In his own campaigns, Alaung-hpaya
spared Burman prisoners of war, but he executed Mon captives. Determined
to become the universal Buddhist monarch, he distributed a prophetic letter
from Sakka, the king of the second Buddhist heaven, dated April : ‘He
shall exalt the Faith . . . the Mons and Shans shall serve him.’
Alaung-hpaya attacked the Mon capital in . A er a year-long siege,
Pegu fell on the morning of May . According to a Mon account, Alaung-
hpaya’s army razed the city and massacred the garrison, ‘with bodies piled
so high in the gates that people within the city could not escape’. e victors
also slaughtered Mon civilians, especially the Buddhist monkhood, many of
whom had led the resistance. Another Mon chronicle asserts that ‘Alaungpaya
took revenge on the Mons . . . He ung most of them including over ,
monks [under] the elephants, killing them all.’ e northern Burman kingdom
had nally subdued the southern Irrawaddy delta.
II
In the sparsely settled, largely brackish ood lands of the Mekong delta,
competition for rice land and resources from around the turn of the eighteenth
century increasingly plagued relations between local Khmers (Cambodians),
who were eravada Buddhists, and Vietnamese settlers, whose eclectic cul-
ture included elements of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, spirit
cults and, in some cases, Christianity. e southern Vietnamese kingdom of
Đàng Trong, known to Europeans as Cochinchina, was expanding southward
down the coast. It intervened militarily in Cambodia ve times between
and . About , Vietnamese households had independently
settled near the Mekong delta by the start of the eighteenth century. From
its capital upriver at Udong, the Cambodian court claimed the delta region,
inhabited mostly by Khmers, and contested further Vietnamese encroachment.
Vietnamese assisted the Khmer prince Ang Im to gain the Cambodian throne
in , and to regain it in . Four years later, a Siamese invasion from
the west forced Ang Im’s court to pay tribute to Siam.
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A er a decade of peace, massive violence exploded in . French mis-
sionaries in the Mekong delta reported witnessing a genocidal Cambodian
attack, led by a self-proclaimed Buddhist monk, on the Đàng Trong-controlled
port of Hà Tiên: ‘People say that the war originated because of a certain
woman who claimed to be the daughter of their god sent to punish the excesses
of the Cochinchinese against the Cambodians, magic is mixed up in it and
a great deal of prestige. She raised a considerable army of Cambodians . . .
thus armed and protected by several mandarins [they] marched against the
Cochinchinese and made an enormous carnage of them[;] they counted more
than ten thousand of them lost as they were not at all ready to oppose her.’
From there the genocidal massacres spread. ‘[T]hus they ravaged all the
provinces of the south of Cochinchina, putting all to re and blood, killed
the great mandarin of the place called Say Gon [Saigon], and burned down the
ne church of a Franciscan father.’ Yet, ‘ ey were not content with this.
ey killed all those [Cochinchinese] that they found in Cambodia, men,
women and children.’ Đàng Trong armies responded with two unsuccessful
attacks on Cambodia in –. e Khmer court at Udong retained control
of most of the Mekong delta.
In , the Khmer king Ang Snguon (r. –) escalated the killing in
a new outbreak of genocide. A French missionary in Cambodia reported that
war ‘raged more than ever’ there, and that ethno-political con ict with Đàng
Trong had produced more massacres of Vietnamese. ‘It is also war outside,
against the Cochinchinese who are not far away . . . ere have been great
cruelties on both sides. e Cambodians have massacred all the Cochinchinese
that they could nd in the country, including three mandarins; several
Christians were caught up in this murder . . . At rst they took no prisoners,
but killed all those they could nd. Now they are sent as slaves to the king of
Siam, to repay him for the help he has given to the king of Cambodia.’
A few months later, another missionary, Monsieur d’Azema, identi ed
the author of this massacre as King Ang Snguon himself. ‘[L]ast year the
king had his son, who had been at the court of Cochinchina, killed on
some suspicion of rebelling against him.’ en at the end of July , it was
Ang Snguon who launched the attacks on every Vietnamese residing in
Cambodian territory, including the delta; ‘he gave orders or permission to
massacre all the Cochinchinese who could be found, and this order was
executed very precisely and very cruelly; this massacre lasted a month and
a half; only about twenty women and children were spared; no one knows
the number of deaths, and it would be very di cult to nd out, for the
massacre was general from Cahon to Ha-tien, with the exception of a few
who were able to escape through the forest or ed by sea to Ha-tien’. Of
Cambodia’s ‘numerous’ Vietnamese residents, d’Azema reported nding no
survivors, ‘pagan or Christian’.
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D’Azema was also able to observe other Cambodian authorities’ approval
of this ‘general massacre’. In Phnom Penh, ‘the great mandarin of this place,
who is the rst a er the king, and who governs everything’, summoned the
missionary for an audience. It was only then, and from d’Azema, that the
mandarin learned that Đàng Trong had expelled the Christian missionaries
there ‘on almost the same day’ that Cambodia had commenced the mass
killing of Đàng Trong residents in its own territory. Although Cambodia had
proved unreceptive to Christian proselytisation, the Khmer mandarin quickly
pointed to Đàng Trong’s expulsions of missionaries as justi cation for the
massacres. D’Azema reported with apparent surprise: ‘He even told us that
God was punishing the Cochinchinese for their iniquities, and especially
for the impieties committed against our holy religion.’ e Khmer mandarin
o ered to have a painting done of a European priest with ‘his foot on the
throat’ of a Vietnamese. D’Azema added that other ‘pagans of the kingdom,
king, princes, great and small’, also took the news of Đàng Trong’s mistreat-
ment of missionaries and burning of churches as justi cation for their own
massacres of Vietnamese. Cambodian Buddhist mandarins ‘raised their hands
to the sky saying that God is just, that he had used them [the Cambodians] to
avenge us [Christians]’ against the Vietnamese.
Outbreaks of genocidal violence in early modern Southeast Asia fall into
several categories. Expanding land-based indigenous kingdoms could resort
to extermination, like Alaung-hpaya’s massacres of Pegu’s ethnic Mon monk-
hood in –. But rulers of vigorous smaller kingdoms were equally
capable of selecting members of an encroaching ethnic group for annihilation.
reatened by settlement, conquest, internal division or all three, the Mon
monarch in and the Khmer king in each ordered precisely targeted
genocidal massacres. Whether genocidal massacres did happen in any par-
ticular case depended on deliberate decisions made by speci c leaders, who
may or may not have chosen to manipulate ethnic or religious tensions. And
whether the evidence of that survives can be a matter of chance. ese cases
from Southeast Asia demonstrate that historical circumstance, and context
can yield compelling evidence of what transpired, and of the intent of the
perpetrators, even if they are a world away.
III
It is fruitful to juxtapose these south-east Asian examples with William J.
Smyth’s close ‘cultural geography’ of the events in Ireland in . We might
investigate whether eighteenth-century Mon and Khmer cultivators in the
Irrawaddy and Mekong deltas perceived their actions against Burman and
Vietnamese outsiders in ways similar to the Irish rebels – in Smyth’s words,
as a war ‘about restoring rights to ancestral lands’, about ‘access to adequate
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resources and livelihoods’ and against ‘further displacement’. For instance,
the ‘violent reaction’ of Mon and Khmer rebels seems to have been pro-
voked by a similar fear of being ‘totally overwhelmed’ by ‘great numbers’ of
‘newcomers’, and, in particular, of the ‘impact of new immigrant communities
being established in what they saw as their . . . countrysides’. e two south-
east Asian uprisings also contain echoes of the earlier Irish example of a ‘war
spurred on by prophecies’, and of an attempt at the ‘erasure of English culture
and its symbols – the wiping out of the cultural capital of the coloniser’. e
Irish experience also pre gures the participation of women leaders, including
their role ‘in advocating war and executions’, at least in the case of the
Cambodian violence that was led by ‘a certain woman who claimed to be the
daughter of their god’. Perhaps in the Mekong delta, too, an ‘extraordinary
world’ had emerged in which ‘women could recreate themselves’. It is instruc-
tive to read the Lords Justices and Council of Ireland explaining in the
killing of Irish women, on the grounds that ‘many women’ were ‘manifestly
very deep in the guilt of this rebellion, and, as we are informed, very forward
to stir up their husbands and kindred to side therein’.
A comparative look at the events, as detailed in Smyth’s chapter,
also tells us many things that we don’t know and may never know about the
material nature of the Mon and Khmer predicaments. Historians of south-east
Asia are yet to uncover much speci c evidence about the overall numbers of
Burman and Vietnamese newcomers in the two deltas, about the extent and
proportion of settler landholdings there or about gender ratios among the
settlers. By contrast, Smyth shows that in the Irish case the depositions
and other contemporary evidence can yield rather rich data on all these key
issues. But even given the relative paucity of the south-east Asian manuscript
sources, it is possible that they have yet to be fully exploited in the light
of such comparative insights. Several other points Smyth makes are worth
pursuing in a search for recurring factors that may indicate a likelihood of
violence against settlers. at outcome, he writes, was common in Ireland
in under certain geographic and demographic conditions: rst, in ‘an
exposed salient or island of English/Protestant settlement in a dominant Irish
area’, and, second, ‘where the settlers were well represented but outnumbered
by c. two-to-one’. It might still be possible to retrieve that kind of data from
existing sources on the Irrawaddy and Mekong delta con icts (especially in
the latter case, given the rather rich compilations assembled by Vietnamese
authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and, if so, to investigate
whether or not the patterns of settlement and violence were similar to those
in Ireland a century earlier.
Only now are the depositions becoming ‘universally accessible’ and
open to discussion, as Aidan Clarke shows in his chapter in this volume.
e combination of the depositions’ unique content, including eye-witness
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accounts that Nicholas Canny calls ‘so clinical in detail as to be entirely
plausible’, and the -year interval before their complete and accurate
publication, raises three important issues for historical analysis of secret
or long-suppressed archival collections. ese issues are in some ways
complementary, sometimes contradictory, yet all three are possibly universal
in the study of mass violence and its recurrence.
First, historical silence and forgetting, the concealment or erasure of
evidence of violent crimes and the pain they cause, facilitates impunity. is
is not just a legal matter. Unashamed or unpunished perpetrators, and their
followers or successors, are more likely to repeat such deeds. e importance
of full disclosure and open access to the evidence is critical, and not only for
historians.
Second, violence or su ering in icted on individuals or a community,
especially when conducted with impunity, o en becomes seared into that
community’s memory, even when silenced or subconsciously suppressed.
Later, traumatic memories may well propel victims or their sympathisers
or successors back onto the historical stage to wreak a new and vengeful
contribution to a continuing cycle of violence. In , Samuel Gorton, an
elderly English settler in Rhode Island, pleaded with Governor Winthrop of
Massachusetts not to start a new cycle by launching a war against Indians in
New England. As a warning, Gorton explained the violence in Ireland
as a long-delayed response to the earlier Elizabethan conquest. He wrote to
Winthrop: ‘I remember the time of the warres in Ireland (when I was young,
in Queen Elizabeth’s days of famous memory), when much English blood
was spilt by a people much like unto these [Indians] . . . And a er these Irish
were subdued by force, what treacherous and bloody massacres have they
attempted is well knowne.’ Sadly, the Puritan forces ignored Gorton’s advice
about the lesson of , and, within months, they perpetrated genocidal
massacres of previously non-hostile Narragansett Indians in Rhode Island.
ese intertwined seventeenth-century cases illustrate my rst two points:
the contributions to continuing violence of both recidivist perpetrators and
vengeful victims.
ird, the depositions may fairly be characterised, without casting
any doubt on their accuracy, as an example of a ‘single-purpose’ archive,
rather than the product of general documentation of routine o cial or other
activity. As Clarke notes, in – the clerical Commission for the Despoiled
Subject collected all , depositions pursuant to a very speci c ‘o cial
duty’ – ‘registering the losses of despoiled Protestants’. ese depositions
include , ‘sworn statements of Protestant refugees taken by a group of
eight clergymen, headed by Henry Jones, acting on the authority of three
successive commissions issued by the Dublin government’ in –. To
these were added , ‘similar statements from English Protestants’ taken
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in Munster in – ‘under the authority of a special commission’ that was
also apparently ‘modelled on the original commission’. Such an assembly
of targeted depositions was not unique in that era, but it is clear that this
enterprise was conducted to a speci c purpose. Joseph Cope points out that
the depositions ‘simply do not preserve the pauses, clari cations or leading
questions that may have occurred in this context, much less the practical
rami cations of the power imbalance between witnesses and examiners’.
Moreover, Catholics were rarely asked to contribute their testimony. Canny
has described the depositions as ‘a body of material which is emotional and
which seeks to represent Irish Catholics in the worst possible light’.
Single-purpose archives by de nition do not record the full context. For
example, none of the depositions details the brutal atrocities committed by
the English Protestant planter Sir Charles Coote, military governor of Dublin
in –. Evidence of his violence survives only in other sources and
archives. According to a manuscript account written in the s, ‘that human
blood sucker Sir Charles Coote gave his opinion once in the Councell table in
Dublin, before those Comotions, that all the Irish women should be deprived
of their papps, and the men gelded, to render the one incapable of future
generation and the other of nurishinge’. In early December , seven
Catholic lords of the Pale complained that Coote had urged the Lord Justices
and Council ‘to execute upon those of our religion a generall massacre’.
A few weeks later, these lords reiterated that Coote had even ‘o ered to
performe . . . a generall massacre upon all of our religion . . . had the Council
consented thereunto’. On December, the seven Catholic lords wrote again
to the Lords Justices and Council in reference to ‘Some words mentioned
in our former Letters which Wee were informed Sir Charles Coote should
have spoken att Councell Board’, and noting now that ‘the bitter e ects that
followed are a Cleere proofe of Sir Charles his Intencions against professors
of our Relligion and a further motive to con[vince?] us in the Assurance that
such words Issued from him’. e lords then went on to list Coote’s actions:
‘Wee beheld [with] noe small a right the Inhumane Acts perpetrated upon
the Inhabitants of the County of Wicklow . . . [and] the late massacre of Santry
and also Mr Kings house and whole substance burnt by Sir Charles Coote’.
e next month, the rebel commander General Preston also denounced ‘the
cruell proceedings of our enemies by destroying by re and sword, men,
women, and children, without regard had to age or sex’.
ese partisan views are partly corroborated in the contemporary account
of the Lords Justice themselves, who described their troops’ activities in strik-
ingly similar language. ey wrote on June : ‘We have hitherto where
we came against the rebels, their adherents, relievers, and abettors, proceeded
with re and sword, the soldiers sometimes not sparing the women and
sometimes not children.’ In his work, An Impartial Collection of the
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Great A airs of State, John Nalson wrote: ‘I have heard a Relation of my own,
who was a Captain in that Service, Relate, that no manner of Compassion or
Discrimination was shewed either to Age or Sex, but that the little Children
were promiscuously Su erers with the Guilty, and that if any who had some
grains of Compassion reprehended the Soldiers for this unchristian Inhumanity,
they would sco ngly reply, Why? Nits will be Lice, and so would dispatch them.’
In a long manuscript composed in , Nicholas Plunkett levelled more charges
that are precise. He wrote that in November the Lords Justices, Sir William
Parsons and Sir John Borlase, had issued orders to Sir Charles Coote and
others ‘that these souldiers should kill the catholick People without distinc-
tion of age or sex. And when the question was put to Sir William Parsons in
particular, whether women and children were to be killed? He answered, that
not one of the Irish must be spared, who was grown a span long. Upon this,
Partyes marched out. Sir Charles Coot was ordered to go rst to the County
of Wicklow: where he performed such barbarous murthers (that tis a horror
to name them) upon men, women and children, sitting quietly at home in
their poor Cabbins, minding their little country a ayrs . . . e children and
grandchildren of these massacred men and women, have at this day a Liveing
History of this Cannibal’s butchery in the said County.’
A digital search of the depositions for information relating to these
charges was unresponsive. at is hardly surprising. Although Sir Charles
Coote was killed in action on May , his sons Charles jnr. and Chidley
played continuing roles not only in the ghting but also in assembling some
of the depositions on Protestant su ering, partly in order to claim compensa-
tion for their family’s losses. ere is even evidence of Sir Charles himself,
before his death, suppressing evidence from a deposition in March .
Nonetheless, selectivity or omissions of this kind do not address the question
of the collection’s accuracy – only its purpose and comprehensiveness.
Researching this single-purpose archive took me forward to the Cambodia
of the s. Some key points to be made about archival collections that docu-
ment violence or repression may extend even to the present day. When the
Vietnamese armed forces overthrew the Pol Pot regime in January , they
uncovered a secret prison and its previously unknown archive. e latter
notably contained a special category of documents, over , ‘confessions’,
also created for a single purpose. But in most ways, the archive of the prison
that the Khmer Rouge regime called ‘S-’ is very di erent from the
depositions. From to , the S- jailers not only assembled these
‘confessions’ in a highly selective manner, they extracted them under torture
or the threat of torture. e confessions total in various dra s perhaps ,
pages of handwritten and typed autobiographical accounts (o en including
the torturers’ marginal notes in red ink), as well as other Khmer-language
documents detailing the torture methods used, and also including tables, charts,
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ledgers and extensive lists of victims whom the prison commandant had
ordered to be ‘smashed’ (komtech, here meaning ‘kill’). e documentation
of the terror is conclusive even if none of the prisoner-authors survived to tell
the story of how they had been compelled to write their ‘confessions’. e
Khmer Rouge murdered all but a dozen of the approximately , inmates
of S-, apparently including every single one of the , prisoners whose
confessions are extant. As David Chandler has written, there are real questions
about the purpose of this S- archive ‘when its contents were kept secret, so
much of the material was untrue, and all of the prisoners were killed’.
Interpreting the confessions themselves has been a challenge. Nearly all
the prisoner-authors wrote fantastical ‘admissions’ that they had been spies
or agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviet KGB or the
Vietnamese communists (and quite o en all three simultaneously). To the
satisfaction of their S- torturers, this proved that they were ‘traitors’ who
deserved execution. But the concern was more about getting the prisoners
to commit such confessions to paper, than about their speci c content. It
is not at all clear that the CPK’s security police, the Santebal, ever believed
these accusations, of which of course it was the real author. Rather, S-’s
preordained purpose was to subdue and execute its prisoners. at involved
assembling an archive of lies, that the jailers conjured up and the prisoners
penned before their execution.
Yet there is more to the confessions than the guilt they proclaim. e
documents are structured as lengthy autobiographies, which served not only
to humiliate their authors, but also to detail their links to their political col-
leagues, who then became Santebal suspects and so would also be arrested. For
the torturers, the charge of membership in a supposed ‘CIA-KGB-Vietnamese’
network clearly did require at least some evidence, which in turn required
detailed career histories. In outline only, these are largely reliable. In the case of
nearly every prisoner, the dates, places, positions, military or political units, and
associates listed in their confessions appear to be authentic, drawn from the
prisoner’s own memory. is is true even though the content is o en ludicrous,
particularly accounts of supposed conspiratorial conversations. e structure
of the autobiographies does provide an extremely rich source of evidence for
an institutional history of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), indeed,
for a unique ‘inside story’. I doubt that accessible archives of any other
political group in Southeast Asia (possibly even currently inaccessible archives)
would provide anything close to comparable information about the party’s
organisation. e historical data are so informative and detailed that two com-
mentators have even suggested that ‘the archive was assembled to provide the
Party Centre with raw material for a massive, unwritten history of the Party . . .
e model that Pol Pot and his colleagues were following, it seems, was the
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as published in ’.
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In fact, the Khmer Rouge displayed little interest in reading or writing and
certainly none in publishing historical works. Stalin put on public show
trials for many of the innocents he murdered, but Pol Pot’s victims simply
disappeared into deathly silence. e confessions themselves also consign
the political history of the CPK to obscurity. Indeed, that was their purpose.
Proving that the prisoners were simply ‘traitors’ meant denying them any chance
to explain their dissidence or their actions. In fact, the torturers o en required
prisoners to make declarations that they had no reason for dissent, beyond
membership of a conspiratorial network, or sometimes, sexual depravity. One
jailer instructed a prisoner to confess his ‘sexual activities with your own
child in detail’. e prisoner courageously wrote to Pol Pot denying the charge
and defending his young daughter’s honour, but the letter was suppressed.
Few prisoners were allowed to present any evidence of genuine disagreement
or political dissidence. e confessions contain almost no hint, memory or
discussion of alternative policies or indigenous opposition. eir precise
purpose was indeed to conceal any evidence of such a history within the
CPK by accusing the prisoners of foreign subservience, and documenting
the allegation with their tortured assent.
us, what the archives do not tell us is as important as what they do.
Perhaps more so, in this case, if other evidence demonstrates that authentic
dissidence did exist. A need to cover it up might in turn explain the existence
of S-. It would tell us why the regime was determined to arrest and kill so
many people: to obliterate internal disagreement by both forcing the dissidents
to erase it from their own histories, and then killing them.
e truth, then, depends on examining other evidence. We must avoid con-
cluding from the confessions alone that no genuine dissidence existed, as
Elizabeth Becker did when she asserted that the S- archives ‘show’ that ‘the
entire Party was implicated and involved in “Pol Potism” ’. at is like saying
the depositions demonstrate that no Irish Catholics su ered violence at
English or Protestant hands. Worse, o ering the confessions as proof of the
absence of substantial policy disagreement is to ignore the limitations on human
expression in a death camp. at would be to concede yet another success
to the totalitarian CPK system. e system was successful in eliminating dis-
sidence in any action (by striking it from the party) and on paper (from the
confessions). Historiography should not mimic its successes.
Especially in single-purpose archives, the absence of evidence cannot
constitute evidence of absence. For instance, a er the Santebal executed
the prominent le ist intellectual Tiv Ol, it then arrested his wife Leng Sim
Hak, also a CPK member, who had spent the previous two years running
a Phnom Penh hospital. Grasping at straws to stay alive in S-, Leng Sim
Hak omitted from her autobiographical ‘confessions’ any mention of her
having led, two years earlier, a CPK Women’s Association delegation to Hanoi
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before the o cial Khmer Rouge declaration of war on Vietnam. Not only
would this information have quickly sealed her fate, but her torturers would
also have required confessions of her alleged recruitment in Hanoi by
Vietnamese intel ligence or the KGB. As it was, her torturers seem to have
been unaware of the trip but condemned her to death anyway, concluding:
‘ e important thing is that she was with her husband throughout.’ at
is no evidence of the couple’s treason, or of their supposed agreement with
CPK policies.
A single-purpose collection is possibly much easier to generate than the
more conventional archives. But such a concentration of documentation is
also much easier to hide or destroy. e Khmer Rouge regime created S-
in total secrecy. Its existence was unknown even to most members of the
ruling CPK, until that regime fell. e archive’s purpose was secret collection,
not public dissemination. Indeed, when the CPK regime faced defeat by the
Vietnamese, Pol Pot’s deputy Nuon Chea ordered the S- commandant, Duch,
to destroy the archive. Duch stayed behind for several hours a er Vietnamese
forces entered Phnom Penh that morning, but, instead of destroying the
archives, he preferred to murder the few remaining prisoners. When he later
rejoined his colleagues on the ai border, Duch told a furious Nuon Chea
that he had failed to burn the prison’s archives before his ight. e cover-up
had failed; the documentary evidence of their massive crimes survived. In
, Duch was found guilty of crimes against humanity, while Nuon Chea
is facing charges of genocide.
Even without destruction of its contents, a single-purpose archive is also
easier to discredit, if only because its selectivity and partisan omissions are
likely to stand out. Canny shows that this problem contributed to the long
neglect of the depositions: ‘Instead of countering it with an interpretation
of their own, those who were uneasy with Temple’s version of events strove
to discredit the authority on which it was based by asserting that the
depositions were so biased in their reportage that they could not be admitted
as evidence.’ omas Fitzpatrick challenged this view in but for decades
his research was not investigated.
As Canny points out, ‘despite these apparent biases this Protestant
testimony cannot be ignored, because it represents the only detailed evidence
of what happened in Ireland in and a er October ’. And this evidence
is not only unique but also more nuanced than might have been expected.
Many deponents and commission o cials not only detailed the su ering of
Protestants, but also took pains to identify their attackers, and therefore o en
‘recorded the gist of the justi cations for the onslaught o ered to them by
their assailants’, making it possible for historians ‘to suggest explanations for
the involvement of di erent social elements from within the Irish Catholic
community’.
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It is thus possible to document some of Sir Charles Coote’s actions even
though in the s apparently not a single deponent denounced any of his
crimes. For instance, when the Cromwellian High Court of Justice gathered
a further series of testimonies in –, the Dublin butcher Robert Neale
testi ed that ‘about Christmas [] a er Sir Charles Coote cominge into
the County of wickloe and haveinge there killed som of the Irish Rebells the
Irish gave out that they would be revenged of the English’. And in detailing
the circumstances of their brutal retaliation, Capt. Cahir of Wicklow added
that ‘upon Sir Charles Cootes rst marching into the County of wickloe, it
beinge reported in that Contry that an woman one of the Irish woman of
the Rebells partie was by his Comand hanged’, an Irish rebel leader arrested
two Englishmen, marched them to the site, ‘and nding for Certaine that the
saide woman had beene hanged’, ordered the two prisoners to be hanged on
the same spot.
In his biography of the Duke of Ormonde (–), omas
Carte described ‘the executions, which Sir Charles Coote had ordered in the
County of Wicklow, among which, when a soldier was carrying about a poor
babe on the end of his pike, he was charged with saying, that he liked such
frolicks’. Carte went on to assert that this violence had political implications,
as it created the impression that the authorities had ‘determined to proceed
against all suspected persons in the same undistinguishing way of cruelty’.
at then ‘served either for an occasion, or pretence’, for those Catholic
lords of the Pale already mentioned to ‘put themselves with their followers
in a posture of defence’, by joining forces with the Gaelic Irish rebels in the
Confederacy.
Of course, Coote was not the only perpetrator of anti-Irish violence. In
the s, additional examinants also told the Cromwellian High Court of
Justice of the ‘generall Murder’ of Catholics at Island Magee and Carrickfergus
in early . One examinant reported that ‘they and the rest of the Irish
were forced to shelter themselves in houses and that they were taken out and
murthered but how or by whom he cannot declare’. Several other possible
witnesses were also questioned about ‘the murther Comitted upon the Irish
in Iland Magee in the beginninge of the Rebellion’. In the s, the High
Court of Justice even executed a number of Scots for these massacres of
Catholic Irish.
In , John Nalson charged certain ‘half-faced Historians’ with having
‘concealed some things and palliated others’. He asserted that ‘the Cruelty of
the Rebels’ in Ireland during the s had been ‘strange and barbarous’, but
he also lamented that ‘on the other side there is not the least mention of any
Cruelty exercised upon the Irish’. Nalson also pointed out that ‘so to deny
or smother matters of fact, so easily to be proved, even by many Protestants
still alive’, only undermines the truthful accounts of the ‘inhumane Cruelties’
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of Catholic violence against Protestants. Conversely, over years Ireland
has discovered that suppressing or ignoring thousands of depositions that
detail crimes against Protestants was no answer either to bias in the viewpoints
that archive contains.
By a brutal stroke of luck, the documentation of Khmer Rouge violence
escaped the perpetrators’ attempt to consign it to oblivion. It is now evidence
in genocide prosecutions under international criminal law. But the work of
its historical interpretation has barely begun. Like the depositions, it
must be analyzed alongside other sources of evidence.
rGyal-dbang lnga-pa, Rgya-Bod-Hor-Sog-gi . . . (Xining, ), , quoted in Elliot
Sperling, ‘ “Orientalism” and aspects of violence in the Tibetan tradition’, in
ierry Dodin and Heinz Räther (eds), Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections,
and Fantasies (Boston, ), pp. –.
For de nitions of genocide and genocidal massacres, see Ben Kiernan, Blood
and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
(New Haven, ), pp. –.
See, for instance, Gabriel de San Antonio, Breve y verdadera relacion de los
successos del reyno de Camboxa (Valladolid, ); Mak Phoeun, Histoire du
Cambodge de la n du XVIe siècle au début du XVIIIe (École française d’Extrême-
Orient (EFEO), Paris, ), pp. –.
An analysis of these three cases may be found in Kiernan, Blood and Soil,
pp. –.
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 ( vols, New
Haven, –).
For an early comparable exercise, see R. B. Smith, ‘England and Vietnam in the
eenth and sixteenth centuries: an essay in historical comparison’, in C. D. Cowan
and O. W. Wolters (eds), Southeast Asian History and Historiography (Ithaca, ),
pp. –.
William J. Koenig, e Burmese Polity, 1752–1819 (Ann Arbor, ), pp. xiii, –;
Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830,
vol. I, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge, ), p. .
Victor Lieberman, personal comment; and his ‘Ethnic politics in eighteenth-
century Burma’, Modern Asian Studies, (), –, at .
Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. I, pp. –, –.
Lieberman, ‘Ethnic politics’, , , and Strange Parallels, vol. I, pp. , , .
Koenig, Burmese Polity, pp. –; Victor Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles
(Princeton, ), p. .
Jonathan Smart (Syriam) to Fort St George (Madras), March /, in Records
of Fort St. George. Letters to Fort St. George 1681/82–1744/45 ( vols, Madras,
–), vol. xxvi, pp. –, at . Victor Lieberman kindly provided a copy of
this letter.
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Smart to Fort St George, December , and ‘Translation of the letter from
King Sementho [Smin Dhaw] to Mr. Smart’, delivered December , in
Records of Fort St. George: Letters to Fort St. George 1681/82–1744/45, vol. xxvi,
pp. –. Lieberman kindly provided copies; see his ‘Ethnic politics’, pp. –.
British Library, London, India O ce Records, Correspondence with India
(Examiner’s O ce), E//, Abstract of Letters Received from ‘Coast’ and ‘Bay’
–, ‘Fort St George General dated th Janry ’, p. .
‘Translate of the Letter from King Sementho to Mr. Smart’, delivered to Syrian,
December , p. .
Smart to Fort St. George, March /, Letters to Fort St. George 1681/82–
1744/45, vol. xxvi, pp. –.
Arthur Phayre, History of Burma (London, ; repr. Bangkok, ), p. .
Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles, pp. –.
Lieberman, ‘Ethnic politics’, pp. note , , ; Burmese Administrative
Cycles, pp. –, , ; Koenig, Burmese Polity, p. , cites Alaung-hpaya’s
‘open appeals to Burman ethnic chauvinism’.
Phongsawadan mòn phama (‘Annal of the Mon of Burma’), in Prachum phong-
sawadan phak thi 1, History Series, part (Bangkok, ), vol. ii, p. , translation
from the ai kindly supplied by Kennon Breazeale. Lieberman, Burmese Admin-
istrative Cycles, p. .
Lieberman, ‘Ethnic politics’, pp. , –; Strange Parallels, vol. i, pp. ,
–; Phayre, History of Burma, .
British Library (BL), London, MS Oriental , pp. –. is is a Burmese
translation of a Mon history of Pegu by the Monk of Athwa, probably composed
in the late s, according to Victor Lieberman, who kindly supplied a copy.
Translation from the Burmese by U. Khin Maung Gyi.
Mak Phoeun, Histoire, pp. –, dates the rst ve Vietnamese military inter-
ventions at –.
Choi Byung Wook, Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang (1820–1841):
Central Policies and Local Response (Ithaca, ), p. .
Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, p. , says there were thirteen Vietnamese
interventions by , which would include eight in the eighteenth century
(see note , above). However for the period –, Sok mentions Vietnamese
involvement only in , in assisting Ang Im to regain the throne Khin Sok,
Le Cambodge entre le Siam et le Viêtnam (de 1175 à 1860) (EFEO, Paris, ),
p. .
Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) [], vol. , Pierre du Puy du Fayet,
Jean de Antoine de la Court and Charles Gouge, to the Directors, July ,
pp. –. Translation by Nola Cooke, who very kindly supplied her detailed
notes from the MEP archives. See also Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. i, p. .
Sok, Le Cambodge entre le Siam et le Vietnam, p. .
Mak Phoeun, ‘La frontière entre le Cambodge et le Viêtnam du XVIIe siècle à
l’instauration du protectorat français présentée à travers les chroniques royales
khmères’, in Pierre-Bernard La ont (ed.), Les Frontières du Vietnam (Paris, ),
pp. –.
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M. Piguel to Mgr. Lefebvre, April , in Adrien Launay, Histoire de la Mission
de Cochinchine 1658–1823, Documents Historiques, vol. II, 1728–1771 (Paris, ),
p. .
M. d’Azema to M. de Noëlène, undated, quoted in M. J. B. Maigrot to Mgr.
de Martiliat, September , and d’Azema to Directeurs du Séminaire des
M.-E., Cambodge, June , in Launay, Histoire de la Mission de Cochinchine
1658–1823, vol. ii, pp. –, at , ; Sok, Le Cambodge entre le Siam et le
Vietnam, p. .
D’Azema to De Noëlène, undated, and Piguel to Lefebvre, April , in Launay,
Histoire, pp. –, .
D’Azema to Directeurs du Séminaire des M.-E., Cambodge, June , Launay,
Histoire, –.
Chapter X.
Lords Justices and Council to His Majesty’s Commissioners for the A airs of
Ireland, June , in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde,
new series (Historical Manuscripts Commission, volumes, London, –),
vol. ii, pp. –.
Nicholas Canny, ‘What Really Happened in Ireland in ?’, in Jane Ohlmeyer
(ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge, ),
p. .
Samuel Gorton to Winthrop, September , quoted in Francis Jennings, e
Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York,
), p. .
Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. –.
Aidan Clarke, ‘ e Depositions’, in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library,
Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, ), pp. –, at , , . For the num bers
of depositions I draw on Clarke’s chapter in this volume. See also Trinity College
Dublin (TCD) MS , ‘Deposition of Henry Jones’, March , fos r–v:
TCD, Depositions Project, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo
r?> (accessed June ).
Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Woodbridge, Boydell Press,
), p. .
Noting ‘a few exceptions’, Kenneth Nicholls cites several Protestant depositions
that document atrocities committed ‘against the Irish’ see Nicholls, ‘ e other
massacre: English killings of Irish, –’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan
and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Con ict in Early
Modern Ireland (Dublin, ), pp. –, at .
Canny, ‘What Really Happened in Ireland in ?’, p. .
Robert Armstrong, ‘Coote, Sir Charles’, in James McGuire and James Quinn
(eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography ( vols, Cambridge, ), vol. ii, pp. –;
Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion, p. note . On Coote’s atrocities,
see also ‘R. S.’, A Collection of Some of the Murthers and Massacres committed on
the Irish in Ireland Since the 23d of October 1641 (London, ), p. ; omas
Carte, An History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde ( vols, London, –),
vol. i, pp. , –; Clodagh Tait, ‘ “ e just vengeance of God”; reporting
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the violent deaths of persecutors in early modern Ireland’, and Kevin Forkan,
‘Inventing a Protestant icon: the strange death of Sir Charles Coote, ’, in
Edwards, Age of Atrocity, pp. –, –; Aidan Clarke, e Old English in
Ireland, 1625–42 (Dublin, ), pp. –, , –, , , ; Micheál Ó
Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political analysis
(Dublin, ), p. ; Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the
Conquest of Ireland (London, ), pp. , ; Robert Armstrong, Protestant
War: e ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the ree Kingdoms (Manchester,
), pp. , –; M. Perceval-Maxwell, e Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of
1641 (Montreal, ), p. .
TCD MS , ‘R. S.’, An Aphorismicall Discovery of Treasonable Faction, chapter ,
paragraph , p. . See also the printed version in John T. Gilbert (ed.), A
Contemporary History of A airs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 ( vols, Dublin, ),
vol. i, p. .
Fingal and six other Pale lords to the Lords Justices from the Hill of Taragh,
December ; and, Confederate Peers to Nobility and Gentry of Galway,
December ; in Richard Bellings, ‘ e Irish Confederation and War, –
’ [c.], in John T. Gilbert, (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the
War in Ireland ( vols, Dublin, –), vol. i, pp. –, –. Consistent with
this, Coote is reported to have ordered his troops to kill Irish Catholic men,
women and even children ‘more than a span long’, and in the face of his o cers’
objections, he is alleged to have retorted: ‘Kill the nits and you will have no lice.’
Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: e Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dingle,
), p. . See also Peter Beresford Ellis, Hell or Connaught: e Cromwellian
Colonisation of Ireland 1652–1660 (Belfast, ), pp. –; omas Fitzpatrick,
e Bloody Bridge, and Other Papers Relating to the Insurrection of 1641 (Dublin,
), pp. –.
TCD MS , Pale lords at Tara to the lords justices and council, December
, fos r–v, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?>
(accessed June ).
General Preston to the earl of Clanricarde, January , in Carte, History of
the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde, vol. iii, p. .
Lords justice and council to his majesty’s commissioners for the a airs of Ireland,
June , in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, vol. ii,
pp. –.
John Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great A airs of State ( vols,
London, –), vol. ii, p. vii. In his memoir of the s wars in Ireland, the
earl of Castlehaven asserted that ‘there have been great cruelties committed
upon the English . . . But the truth is, they were very bloody on both sides, and
tho’ some will throw all upon the Irish, yet ‘tis well known who they were
that used to give orders to their parties, sent into enemies’ quarters, to spare
neither man, woman, nor child’, James Touchet, earl of Castlehaven, e Earl of
Castlehaven’s Memoirs: or, his Review of the Late Wars of Ireland, with his own
Engagement and Conduct therein, ed. Charles O’Conor (Waterford, ), p.
(italics original).
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National Library of Ireland, MSS – [Nicholas Plunkett], ‘A Light to the Blind;
whereby they may see the dethronement of James the Second, King of England,
with a brief Narrative . . . Anno ’, vol. i, pp. – (chapter , paragraph ).
TCD MS , ‘Examination of John Boyes’, taken before Charles Coote, February
, fos r–v, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?>,
MS , ‘Deposition of Isacke Sands’, fos r–r, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.
php?depID<?php echo r?>, and the depositions of Coote’s tenant Ge erey
Corbett, MS , fos r–v, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo
r?>, and Coote’s agent John Bourke, MS , fos r–v, http://.
tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?> (all accessed July );
MS , ‘Deposition of Chidley Coote’, fos r–v, http://.tcd.ie/deposition.
php?depID<?php echo r?> (accessed June ).
Fitzpatrick, e Bloody Bridge, xxviii–xxix.
Anthony Barnett, Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, ‘Bureacracy of death: docu-
ments from inside Pol Pot’s torture machine’, New Statesman ( May ), cover
and pp. –.
David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
(Berkeley, ), p. .
Chandler, Voices from S-21, pp. (citing S. Heder), .
For a secret, unpublished ‘Abbreviated lesson on the history of the Kampuchean
revolutionary movement’, see Pol Pot Plans the Future: Con dential Leader-
ship Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (New Haven, ),
pp. –.
‘planning the past: the forced confessions of Hu Nim’, translation in Pol Pot
Plans the Future, pp. , –, , –, , ; Chandler, Voices from S-21,
pp. –.
Elizabeth Becker, ‘Cambodia Blames Ousted Leader, Not Party’, Washington Post
( March ), p. A.
Ben Kiernan, e Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under
the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, ), pp. , ., , .
Kiernan, e Pol Pot Regime, p. .
‘You are stupid’, Nuon Chea raged at Duch. Jean-Claude Pomonti, ‘Le “repentir”
d’un tortionnaire khmer rouge’, Le Monde ( September ); see also Nic Dunlop
and Nate ayer, ‘ e confession’, Far Eastern Economic Review ( May ).
Canny, ‘What Really Happened in Ireland in ?’, p. .
‘It is a fault perhaps common to all . . . to treat of the depositions as of equal
merit or demerit throughout. e fact is that – as I would appraise them – they
are of every degree of merit from worthlessness upwards’, Fitzpatrick, e Bloody
Bridge, .
Canny, ‘What really happened in Ireland in ?’, p. .
TCD MS , ‘Examination of Robert Neale’, September , fos r–v,
http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?>, and ‘Examination
of Cahir alias Charles Birne’, October , fos r–v, http://.tcd.ie/
deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?>, (both accessed July ).
Carte, History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde, vol. i, pp. , –.
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TCD MS , ‘Examination of Owen Magee’, May , fos r–v, http://
.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?> (accessed June ).
For independent evidence of this massacre, see Nicholls, ‘ e other massacre:
English killings of Irish, –’, in Edwards, Age of Atrocity, pp. –; Michael
McCartan, ‘ e Cromwellian High Courts of Justice in Ulster, ’, Seanchas
Ard Mhacha, (), –, esp. –.
TCD MS , ‘Examination of William Elsinor’, fos r–v [http://.tcd.ie/
deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?>; TCD MS , ‘Examination of
Robert Boyd’, fos r–v http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo
r?>; TCD MS , ‘Examination of Margrett Lowrye’, fos r–v
http://.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID<?php echo r?> (all accessed
June ).
McCartan, ‘ e Cromwellian High Courts of Justice in Ulster, ’.
Nalson, Impartial Collection, vol. ii, p. vii.
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