In 1500, most of Ireland lay outside the ambit of English royal power. Only a small area around Dublin was directly administered by the crown. The rest of the island was run in more or less autonomous fashion by Anglo-Norman magnates or Gaelic chieftains.

Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history. Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of political movements ever since: the unification of the island's pluralistic community into a coherent political entity. The reason for the neglect lies partly in another remarkable feature of the revolution itself, the circumstances of its accomplishment. it was engineered by Anglo-Irish politicians, in collaboration with an English head of government in Ireland, and by constitutional means, in particular by parliamentary statute.

A detailed study of changing patterns of consumption, showing how these related to wider political, social and economic developments. This book, based on extensive original research, argues that everyday Irish consumption underwent major changes in the 16th century. The book considers the changing nature of imported goods in relation especially to two major activities of daily living: dress and diet. It integrates quantitative data on imports with qualitative sources, including wills, archaeological and pictorial evidence, and contemporary literature and legislation. It shows that changes in Irish consumption mirrored changes occurring in England and across Europe and that they were a function of broader developments in the Irish economy, including the increasing participation of Irish merchants in European markets. The book also discusses how consumption was related to wider political, economic and cultural developments in Ireland, showing how the acquisition and interpretation of material goods were key factors in the mediation of political and social boundaries in a semi-colonised and contested society. Susan Flavin completed her doctorate in early modern history at the University of Bristol.

Colm Lennon's Sixteenth-Century Ireland, the second instalment in the New Gill History of Ireland series, looks at how the Tudor conquest of Ireland by Henry VIII and the country's colonisation by Protestant settlers led to the incomplete conquest of Ireland, laying the foundations for the sectarian conflict that persists to this day. In 1500, most of Ireland lay outside the ambit of English royal power. Only a small area around Dublin, The Pale, was directly administered by the crown. The rest of the island was run in more or less autonomous fashion by Anglo-Norman magnates or Gaelic chieftains. By 1600, there had been a huge extension of English royal power. First, the influence of the semi-independent magnates was broken; second, in the 1590s crown forces successfully fought a war against the last of the old Gaelic strongholds in Ulster. The secular conquest of Ireland was, therefore, accomplished in the course of the century. But the Reformation made little headway. The Anglo-Norman community remained stubbornly Catholic, as did the Gaelic nation. Their loss of political influence did not result in the expropriation of their lands. Most property still remained in Catholic hands. England's failure to effect a revolution in church as well as in state meant that the conquest of Ireland was incomplete. The seventeenth century, with its wars of religion, was the consequence. Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents Introduction - Town and County in the English Part of Ireland, c.1500 - Society and Culture in Gaelic Ireland - The Kildares and their Critics - Kildare Power and Tudor Intervention, 1520–35 - Religion and Reformation, 1500–40 - Political and Religious Reform and Reaction, 1536–56 - The Pale and Greater Leinster, 1556–88 - Munster: Presidency and Plantation, 1565–95 - Connacht: Council and Composition, 1569–95 - Ulster and the General Crisis of the Nine Years' War, 1560–1603 - From Reformation to Counter-Reformation, 1560–1600

This quirky, yet important book, breaks new ground in the study of Gaelic Ireland by exploiting the rich source material contained in the sixteenth-century Annals of Ulster, Annals of Connacht, the Annals of Loch Cé and the Four Masters. While attention has previously been paid to poetry in Irish as a source for the history of the 16th century, the richness of the prose sources have not been exploited by historians. The annals contain a series of short accounts of events arranged by year. The storytelling of the annalists provides the openings into the past that are the key to this book, which uses seven of their longer stories to examine, at micro level, aspects of Gaelic society that created them. The significance of each story is illuminated by reference to other contemporary evidence, including the genealogies and the poetry. The text is provided in both the original Irish with an English language translation, with extensive writings placing the passages in their historical time.

The elusive search for stability is the subject of Professor D. George Boyce's Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the fifth in the New Gill History of Ireland series. Nineteenth-century Ireland began and ended in armed revolt. The bloody insurrections of 1798 were the proximate reasons for the passing of the Act of Union two years later. The 'long nineteenth century' lasted until 1922, by which the institutions of modern Ireland were in place against a background of the Great War, the Ulster rebellion and the armed uprising of the nationalist Ireland. The hope was that, in an imperial structure, the ethnic, religious and national differences of the inhabitants of Ireland could be reconciled and eliminated. Nationalist Ireland mobilised a mass democratic movement under Daniel O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Irish Potato Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. The mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912–22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents Introduction - The Union: Prelude and Aftermath, 1798–1808 - The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers, 1808–29 - Testing the Union, 1830–45 - The Land and its Nemesis, 1845–9 - Political Diversity, Religious Division, 1850–69 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (1): The Making of Irish Nationalism, 1870–91 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (2): The Making of Irish Unionism, 1870–93 - From Conciliation to Confrontation, 1891–1914 - Modernising Ireland, 1834–1914 - The Union Broken, 1914–23 - Stability and Strife in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

This book provides the first systematic analysis of the whole range of treatises written on the 'reform' of Ireland in Tudor times. By assessing approximately six-hundred extant treatises it demonstrates how the Tudors viewed Ireland and how they arrived at the policies which they chose to implement there during the sixteenth century.