Modern Ireland: 1600-1972

by R. F. Foster

Overview

Masterfully blending narrative and interpretation, and R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 looks at how key events in Irish history contributed to the creation of the 'Irish Nation'. 'The most brilliant and courageous Irish historian of his generation'
  Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books 'Remarkable ... Foster gives a wise and balanced account of both forces of unity and forces of diversity ... a master work of scholarship'
  Bernard Crick, New Statesman 'A tour de force ... Anyone who really wants to make sense of Ireland and the Irish must read Roy Foster's magnificent and accessible Modern Ireland'
  Anthony Clare 'A magnificent book. It supersedes all other accounts of modern Irish history'
  Conor Cruise O'Brien, Sunday Times 'Dazzling ... a masterly survey not so much of the events of Irish history over the past four centuries as of the way in which those events acted upon the peoples living in Ireland to produce in our own time an "Irish Nation" ... a gigantic and distinguished undertaking'
  Robert Kee, Observer 'A work of gigantic importance. It is everything that a history book should be. It is beautifully and clearly written; it seeps wisdom through its every pore; it is full of the most elegant and scholarly insights; it is magnificently authoritative and confident ... Modern Ireland is quite simply the single most important book on Irish history written in this generation ... A masterpiece'
  Kevin Myers, Irish Times R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, Luck and the Irish and W. B. Yeats: A Life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140132502
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/1990
Series:	Penguin History Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	704
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.19(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include The Irish Story and W. B. Yeats: A Life.

Table of Contents

List of Maps
List of Tables
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One
Prologue: Varieties of Irishness
Chapter One: 'Wild Shamrock Manners': Ireland in 1600
Chapter Two: 'Nationalism' and Recusancy
Chapter Three: Plantation: Theory and Practice
Chapter Four: Confederate Ireland
Chapter Five: Cromwellian Ireland
Chapter Six: Restoration Ireland
Chapter Seven: Shipwreck and Deliverance: The Foundations of Ascendancy

Part Two
Chapter Eight: The Ascendancy Mind
Chapter Nine: Economy, Society, and the 'Hidden' Ireland
Chapter Ten: The Structure of Politics
Chapter Eleven: Americans, Volunteers and the Politics of 'Patriotism'
Chapter Twelve: 'Enthusiasm Defying Punishment': Revolution, Republicanism and Reaction

Part Three
Chapter Thirteen: The Mobilization of Popular Politics
Chapter Fourteen: The Famine: Before and After
Chapter Fifteen: Ireland Abroad
Chapter Sixteen: Land, Politics and Nationalism
Chapter Seventeen: The Politics of Panellism

Part Four
Chapter Eighteen: The 'New' Nationalism
Chapter Nineteen: War and Revolution
Chapter Twenty: The Takeover
Chapter Twenty-one: In a Free State
Chapter Twenty-two: The de Valera Dispensation
Chapter Twenty-three: 'Modern' Ireland?

Appendix:
Proclamation of the Republic
Chronology
References
Bibliographical Essay
Index of Subjects
Index of Names

Editorial 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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal