History: Fine wines lie long in casks before delighting discerning palates. The same is true of David Dickson's study of south Munster in a time of evolution and revolutions.
A vintage from the 1970s, when the harvesting began, it has gained in depth and savour through being allowed to mature over two and a half decades. Owing to the unforgiving regimes under which most academics now labour, with the imperative to publish swiftly or be sacked, such a leisurely pace as Dickson's is increasingly rare and soon will be outlawed by the university commissars. Instead of a classic vintage like Dickson's, professional historians will concoct only supermarket plonk - at best, to be quaffed in a single gulp; at worst, so sour that it should be reserved for cooking (preferably the books of near-bankrupt universities).
This account of Cork and its hinterlands between 1630 and 1830 follows a model set by historians of France, who aspired to write total history. Accordingly, they built massive foundations with the demographic and economic statistics of their districts. On these were then piled copious details of people, their deeds and ideas. Continuity was balanced delicately against change.
This French model has been copied more often by chroniclers of pre- revolutionary America than by those of Britain or Ireland. One pioneer, Professor Louis Cullen, keen for Ireland to receive similar treatment, sketched how it might be done, most notably in his stimulating but impressionistic The Emergence of Modern Ireland (1981).
David Dickson has now responded triumphantly to Cullen's exhortations and example. Adroitly he blends the social and economic fundamentals with the surface glitter of politics, ideologies, public and private lives. The Cork region is fitted expertly into wider worlds - a precociously commercialized economy, increasingly integrated markets within Ireland, the expanding imperial system of Britain, the busy North Atlantic and, with the vessels of the East India Company and British navy putting in regularly at Kinsale and Cork, the entire globe. Geography guaranteed that the area retained and strengthened its ancient links with west Wales and Britain and the westerly seaboards of Catholic Europe.
In the later 17th century, a vindictive English parliament stunted the valuable traffic in textiles, tobacco and sugar. Once abundant trees had been felled and shipped away; shoals of pilchards abandoned the coastal waters; locally made iron proved of low grade and expensive. The entrepreneurs of Munster, desperate and ingenious, adapted. Wool, cattle and salted butter became the staples. Indeed, every bit of the cow was put to profitable use - from tallow for soap and candles to hooves for glue. Offal may have varied the diet of locals, but its export as a further money-making venture was sufficiently common to provoke riots. At least, the tripe and drisheen on sale today at O'Reilly's stall in the English Market show the tenacity of one dietary tradition.
Meanwhile, from the 1680s, the city of Cork pulled decisively ahead of its rivals such as Dungarvan, Kinsale and Youghal. Dr Dickson suggests reasons for Cork's regional ascendancy: a central location for producers as far afield as Tipperary, east Limerick and Clare; a secure harbour; well-developed overseas contacts; assertive and adventurous traders, including a well-connected group of Quakers. The commercial successes and cultural effervescence of south Munster, as outlined here, invite comparison with other ports and their hinterlands, such as Limerick, Sligo, Derry, Belfast, Newry, Drogheda and Waterford.
Dickson's story moves from newcomers arriving and taking over in the 17th century, through the resultant clashes, to the reviving fortunes of the longer established and mainly Catholic majority. In turn, he considers the owners and tillers of the soil, and townspeople. The tensions and turmoil, with episodic agrarian and urban violence, are fully described, but so too are the unobtrusive accommodations.
He has fresh and sometimes unexpected views on the sociable encounters across the confessional gulfs, mainly of well-heeled and sporty men. He suggests how, notwithstanding discriminatory laws, the Irish language and familiar music survived.
There were economic benefits for many, especially during Britain's foreign wars, as well as shocking losses through famine - most grimly in 1740-1 - and brutal humiliations. None of these experiences is belittled. Nevertheless, the lasting impression is of vitality, ingenuity and endurance. After the 1780s and especially in the 1820s, the picture darkens. He details the astonishing rates of increase in the population, suggests reasons, and shows how, as wages fell, divisions throughout the area were accentuated.
Dickson is invariably calm and cogent, whether he is handling abstruse data on soils, crop yields, diet and demography or the contested questions of Jacobitism, bardic verse, rebellion and repression.
Published in Cork's year as European Capital of Culture, this outstanding study explains why the city and its region deserve the resonant title. Unlike the fireworks and sea serpents in the Lee, it will endure, and so ensure that the origins of Cork's economic and cultural distinctiveness are understood.
Toby Barnard teaches history in Oxford. His latest book, A Guide to Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland, will be published this summer