DIVIDED KINGDOM:IRELAND 1630-1800 OHEME:NCS PAPER: Ireland 1630-1800 (Oxford History/Early Mod Irel)

Oxford History of Early Modern Europe

by S.J. Connolly

For Ireland the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era marked by war, economic transformation, and the making and remaking of identities. By the 1630s the era of wars of conquest seemed firmly in the past. But the British civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century fractured both Protestant and Catholic Ireland along lines defined by different combinations of religious and political allegiance. Later, after 1688, Ireland became the battlefield for what was otherwise Britain's bloodless (and so Glorious) Revolution. The eighteenth century, by contrast, was a period of peace, permitting Ireland to emerge, first as a dynamic actor in the growing Atlantic economy, then as the breadbasket for industrialising Britain. But at the end of the century, against a background of international revolution, new forms of religious and political conflict came together to produce another period of multi-sided conflict. The Act of Union, hastily introduced in the aftermath of civil war, ensured that Ireland entered the nineteenth century still divided, but no longer a kingdom.

Genres: History, Ireland, European History, Political Science, British Literature

536 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2008

About the author

Sean Connolly has taught at Queen’s University Belfast since 1996. Prior to his appointment, Connolly taught at the University of Ulster, and worked as an archivist in the Public Record Office of Ireland, now the National Archives of Ireland. He has been the editor of Irish Economic and Social History, and a member of the Council of the Royal Historical Society, and became a Vice President of the RHS in 2013. He has served on the AHRC Medieval and Modern History Postgraduate Awards panel.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Equally excellent and insightful follow up to Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630. S J Connolly again demonstrates the complexities of Irish history. The political, religious and social distinctions of today cannot be imposed retrospectively on earlier generations. Often, allegiances depended on what suited individuals at any point in time and, therefore, could be fluid.

[Meghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Are we allergic to good sentence structure?? This is brutal

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

While very in-depth, I couldn't help but feel that once again, Mr. Connolly focused on Ulster and the British side of history. This didn't feel like a history of Ireland so much as it did a history of British and Protestant occupation.