Synopsis
This survey of the history of modern Ireland begins in 1600, with the end of the Elizabethan wars and the establishment of the Ulster plantation, and ends in 1972, the year in which the Republic joined the EEC and the Stormont parliament in Northern Ireland was suspended. Social, cultural and economic factors are given as much prominence as politics, and there are thematic chapters on such topics as emigration, colonization and ascendency culture. The author incorporates the controversies and conclusions which have emerged over the last 25 years and also presents his own personal view of the emergence of modern Ireland during the last three centuries. R.F.Foster is author of "Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family" and "Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life".
Reviews
In 1600, the Tudor kingdom of Ireland was divided by Gaelic chieftains, had a subsistence economy and was home to a welter of peoples, each of whom defined their "Irishness" differently. By the 1970s, when this massive, scholarly history closes, Irelanddespite three centuries of conquest and fissurewas a country with a powerful sense of national identity. The record of England's treatment of Ireland, as told by Foster, is dismal: intensive colonization via the plantation system, Cromwell's campaign of massacre and expropriation, forced resettlement of native landholders, especially Catholics. In this engaging revisionist chronicle, the author, a University of London historian, shows that the Irish potato famine of 1845-49, far from being a watershed event, merely accentuated the trends of large-scale emigration, agricultural decline and Anglophobia already underway for three decades. Foster casts a skeptical eye on turn-of-the-century cultural revivalists and the gropings of Yeats, Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory; the quest for "Irishness," he argues, has sometimes fueled sectarian and even racialist emotions.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Foster's previous books, on Lord Randolph Churchill and Charles Parnell, established his reputation as a fine political biographer. He now turns his attention to a wider subject--the sweep of Irish history from the English intrusion of late Elizabethan times onward--with considerable success. Foster cuts through the Gordian knot of myriad complex issues to give his reader a solid feel for the key factors that have made modern Ireland. Anyone who wants to understand Ireland as it now is must know it as it has been, and that is what Foster does for his audience. For both academic and public collections.
- James A. Casada, Winthrop Coll., Rock Hill, S.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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