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Notes and Documents
The Scholarship and Legacy of David Beers
Quinn, 1909–2002
Nicholas Canny and Karen Ordahl Kupperman
David Beers Quinn, pursuing his intersecting interests in Tudor Ireland and the European exploration and settlement of North
America, transcended the old imperial history and created the field of Atlantic history. As David Dutton observed in a memorial tribute, Quinn was "a historian of immense industry and erudition." His immersion in the sources and his ability to see the large picture combined with an extraordinary interdisciplinary range to compose a body of work that will continue to shape our view of the origins of the European presence in America and its effects.1
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Those readers of the William and Mary Quarterly who only know of David Quinn from the printed page may consider him to have been an Englishman. This is not surprising, given his many publications on English exploration and settlement in America, his long service (1957–1976) as Andrew Geddes and John Rankin Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool, and his involvement with British politics of the Left, initially as a Trotskyite and Communist and later as an activist in the British Labour Party (including New Labour, which, for him, brought deliverance from a long Tory winter under Margaret Thatcher). All who met Quinn came quickly to appreciate, not least from his accent, that he was an Irishman. Those who look more closely at his accomplishments will see that he made a significant contribution to the history of early modern Ireland in addition to his major output on the history of European overseas expansion, that he did more than anybody else of his generation to merge those two scholarly fields, and that his Irish background and experience influenced his interests and his approach to history. |
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David Quinn was born in Dublin in 1909, but the only significance of that city as his birthplace is that his middle name of Beers was the surname of the midwife, a personal friend of his mother, who delivered him at Dublin's Rotunda Hospital, the oldest maternity hospital in Europe. His significant local attachment in his early years was to the town of Clara in King's County (now County Offaly), which, in 1911, had a population of 1,800. Clara owed its status as a manufacturing town to the paternalism of a Quaker entrepreneurial family, the Goodbodys. They had established flour, grain, and jute mills in this strategic location at the very center of Ireland. Catholics were numerically preponderant in Clara, but it was unusual among towns of the Irish midlands in that it contained a significant and varied Protestant presence. Most of the Protestants had been invited there by the Goodbodys to meet skill and managerial shortages in their various business enterprises or to render the family personal service in any of their five mansions situated in the vicinity of the town. |
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Quinn's father, also David, was one such employee, being head gardener at "Inchmore," the grandest of the Goodbody "big houses." He was of Church of Ireland background from Stewartstown, County Tyrone, a Scottish planter foundation. In Clara, he married Albertina Devine, another Goodbody employee, who had come from Bandon, County Cork, an English planter foundation of the seventeenth century that had persisted into the early twentieth century as a Protestant and Unionist outpost. David Beers Quinn was their only child. As employees of the Goodbodys and as members of the Protestant community, the Quinns enjoyed a privileged position in a town where unspoken class and denominational lines were understood and observed. In material terms, privilege for the Quinns meant a free house and fuel, vegetables and fruit from the garden, and a wage of sixty pounds per year. |
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