It is a popular belief that while slavery was at its height in eighteenth-century England, Ireland remained untarnished and uninvolved. Although it is true that ports like Belfast and Dublin, unlike Bristol and Liverpool, did not become prosperous on the back of slavery, it is still difficult to believe that Ireland could have remained untouched … Read more
Is it possible to write famine out of Irish history? Note, the question refers to ‘famine’, not the ‘Great Famine’. The catastrophe of 1845-49 was unlike any previous famine. In the words of Peter Solar it ‘was no ordinary subsistence crisis’. Its singularity notwithstanding, Ireland’s story is often told with famine as a fugue running … Read more
In 1853 Aristide Bouciclaut—no apparent relation of the Irish playwright—hit upon a novel way of publicising his modest drapery shop, trading as Bon Marché, in the Rue de Sèvres in Paris. He produced an attractive card, printed by the relatively new process of chromolithography, depicting an elegantly aristocratic figure paying his respects to a blushing … Read more
R.F. Foster (Allen Lane, £20) ISBN 0713994975Roy Foster has already made an enormous contribution to the writing of Irish history. He has inspired, encouraged, and provoked many of us to engage in/with the reassessment of Irish historical writing and thinking that has marked the last two decades as among the most fruitful in Irish historical … Read more
Christine Kinealy (Palgrave, £15.50 pb, £47.50 hb) ISBN 0333677722 The Great Irish Potato Famine James S. Donnelly, Jr (Sutton Publishing, £20) ISBN 0750926325 These are two books which, at first sight, bear certain similarities. Both are surveys of the Great Famine by established scholars in the field, which combine elements of the author’s previous work … Read more