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very good dust-jacket with chip at top front edge, very good green cloth but boards slightly warped, light foxing on top foredge, some sections of paper are darker than others, different paper stocks evidently. previous owner's name. DONNELLY JR., JAMES S. The land and the people of nineteenth-century Cork: the rural economy and the land question. London ; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, xiv, 440pp., . Studies in Irish history, 2d series, volume 9. - CONTENTS: The rural economy, 1815-45 -- The Great Famine, 1845-51 -- Agriculture, 1851-91 -- The land question and estate management, 1850-80 -- Living standards, 1851-91 -- The land war: first phase, 1879-84 -- The land war: second phase, 1884-92 -- Conclusion. - Historians of nineteenth-century Ireland have tended to be preoccupied with politics and government. This book, however, is based on the belief that the springs of political activity cannot be properly understood until the underlying economic and social realities have been more thoroughly investigated. Using estate records, local newspapers, and parliamentary papers, Dr Donnelly focuses upon two central and interrelated subjects the rural economy and the land question from the perspective of Cork, Ireland s southernmost county. Cork was the largest and most populous of the thirty-two counties and has some claim to be regarded as a microcosm of the entire country during the period. This study examines the chief responses of Cork landlords, tenant farmers, and labourers to the enormous difficulties besetting them after 1815. It shows how the great famine of the late 1840s was in many ways an economic and social watershed because it rapidly accelerated certain previous trends and reversed the direction of others. Dr Donnelly s optimistic analysis of the rural economy and the land question from the early 1850s to 1876 confirms and extends recent challenges to the long accepted, pessimistic interpretation. He rejects the conventional view of the land war of the 1880s as the product of an intolerable, rapacious land system that finally cracked under the weight of agricultural crisis. Instead, he argues, the land war in Cork was essentially a revolution of rising expectations , in which tenant farmers struggled to preserve their substantial material gains since 1850 by using the weapons of agrarian trade unionism , civil disobedience, and unprecedented violence. THE AUTHOR: James S. Donnelly, Jr., graduated from Fordham College, New York, in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in 1971 from Harvard University, where he studied under Professor H. J. Hanham and Professor David S. Landes. He is now Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 9780710079862 ISBN 0710079869. Seller Inventory # 94125
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