Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw,eds,Ulster Since 1600: Politics,Economy and Society

Reviewed by: John Morrill, Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK

Co-authored histories of Ulster are far from unknown, but this new one is probably the most intelligently planned and well executed and it is certainly pretty much up-to-date. It consists of 20 chapters, all by acknowledged experts, and is plagued neither by serious overlaps not gaping gaps. The structure is a little curious and does not make for an overall sense of the history. It works extremely well as a succession of chapters, less well as a single history. Thus nine chapters start at 1600, but one of those ends in 1780, two in 1800, one in 1900, three in 1914, one in 1945, and one in the present. Several but not all of the next 11 chapters take over where their corresponding chapter ends. Whether this was to optimize the expertise of the authors or for other reasons is not clear. But these asymmetries make for a book which is not for students whose main focus is the nineteenth century.

All the chapters are well pitched at the undergraduate or at the intelligent generalist with limited prior knowledge, although the paucity of maps is a let down. There is an appropriately dispassionate tone to most of the essays, although the consistently impatient use of ‘vested interests’ to describe confessional policy on schooling in the otherwise admirable chapter on education is telling. The problem of what to do about Derry/Londonderry is a pragmatic one: the county is Londonderry; the city is Derry throughout. Readers can be assured that every chapter demonstrates a mastery of its literature, recondite modern writing interspersed with citations of primary sources. And the story is brought right up to date with a final narrative chapter on ‘politics since 1960s’ which is a masterpiece of compression.

There are paired chapters on: (from 1600) economy; politics; gender and sexuality; people and population change/labour and society; and (from 1780) business and society. There are also singleton chapters on religion and society 1600–1914 (after which religion is subsumed into many chapters); crime, policing and the law (1600–1914); popular culture 1600–1914 (part matched by a chapter on sport in the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries); business and finance (1780–1945); education since the late eighteenth century, in- and out-migration 1600–1945; and social policy and social change since 1914. The one chapter to cover the whole period is an admirably concise history of Ulster towns since 1600 (a century each of plantation; trade; industry, diversification). Almost every chapter succeeds in establishing the distinctiveness of Ulster within Ireland, and some, but not all, also address the distinctiveness of Ulster within what became the United Kingdom. The Scottish dimension, other than in the regular discussions of Ulster Presbyterianism is perhaps undernourished. And some would have expected rather more on writing and cultural activity in Irish.

So this is a wholly admirable first book to give to anyone trying to get their head round the particularities of Ulster history. It is strongest of all as a work of economic and cultural history, but it is a reliable guide to all of the pretty comprehensive range of subjects that it deals with.

It is not the editors’ fault that this book went to press just as there was a wave of fundamental revisionary work on the early part of the period. The Flight of the Earls, the Ulster Plantation and its nemesis, the 1641 Rising, have all been the commemorated with new work of transformational importance – one or more major essay collection in each case, and in the case of 1641 new monographs arising from the online publication of the more than 8000 depositions taken from survivors of the ‘massacres’. Given what the depositions tell us about material culture and material conditions in the Province, as well as about ethnic and religious conflicts, some adjustment of trajectory is now necessary. A little more reprehensively, the authors of the earlier chapters are collectively to blame for relying too heavily on Philip Robinson's 1994 book on the Plantation and appearing to ignore the extraordinary work of the late Robert J. Hunter of the University of Ulster. It might be unreasonable to expect them to track down his thesis, the victim of the worst miscarriage of justice I have encountered in 50 years in the profession, and now published for the world to wonder at (The Ulster Plantation in the Counties of Armagh and Cavan, 1608–1641 [UHF, 2012]); but there are also his many essays, 19 of them now gathered together in Ulster Transformed: Essays on Plantation and Print Culture c.1590–1641 [UHF, 2012], including studies of seven of the nine counties of historic Ulster, which should be referenced for many aspects of the process of plantation, and for Hunter's extraordinary sense of landscape and townscape. But despite slightly unsound foundations, Ulster Since 1600 is an admirable account of the particularity of Ulster, of how it came to have its distinctive modern history, and why many of the legacies of its past, however attenuated, still have the power to haunt and to bite back.