Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660

An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the tumultuous events in Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s.

Between 1641 and 1649, for the first time before 1922, Ireland was recognised by the international community as an independent nation. Even though the Cromwellian conquest of 1649 made short work of Catholic Ireland's revolution, it nevertheless ranks as one of the most successful revolts of early modern history. This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how the tumultuous events of the 1640s and 1650s transformed the course of Ireland's history. The contributors consider throughout why Restoration Ireland after 1660 was such a different world from that of the Stuart era. Was the change due simply to the passage of 20 years; or to war in the 1640s followed by English occupation in the 1650s? During these decades did active forces of change outweigh those of continuity in shaping Irish society, identities, warfare, religious beliefs, and economic and tenurial practices? These essays seek to set Ireland in its wider European and British contexts.

Chronology; Introduction: a failed revolution? Jane Ohlmeyer; 1. What really happened in Ireland in 1641? Nicholas Canny; 2. Four armies in Ireland Scott Wheeler; 3. The military revolution in seventeenth-century Ireland Rolf Loeber and Geoffrey Parker; 4. Ireland independent: confederate foreign policy and international relations Jane Ohlmeyer; 5. 'Political' poems in the mid seventeenth-century crisis Michelle O. Riordan; 6. Strafford's ghost: the British context of Viscount Lisle's lieutenancy in Ireland John Adamson; 7. The Irish economy at war, 1641–52 Raymond Gillespie; 8. The seventeenth-century land settlement in Ireland: towards a statistical interpretation Kevin McKenny; 9. Radical religion in Ireland, 1641–60 Phil Kilroy; 10. The Protestant interest, 1641–60 T. C. Barnard; 11. 1659 and the road to restoration Aidan Clarke; Conclusion: settling and unsettling Ireland: the Cromwellian and Williamite revolutions T. C. Barnard.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how the tumultuous events of the 1640s and 1650s transformed the course of Ireland's intellectual, social, economic, military, tenurial and, of course, political history. The chapters also set Ireland in its wider European and British contexts.