History: Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630 By SJ Connolly Oxford University Press, 426pp. £35Historian SJ Connolly's present work is the first of two volumes; a second volume is promised for the period 1630 to the 1790s. The author notes that this volume is "well removed, in terms of chronology, from the period that has been the focus of my own detailed research".
He draws on his own "reading of at least the major primary sources available in print" and the work of most of the specialist historians of the period. Using the organising framework of "the Irish", vis-à-vis "the English in Ireland", he seeks to summarise the character of late medieval Ireland. He then details the fall of the Kildare Fitzgeralds, the beginnings of the Reformation and the redefining of England's relationships with Ireland under Henry VIII. The middle chapters deal with the uneven and complicated expansion of the centralising English state, the inevitable accommodations and resistances that followed, culminating in the wars of conquest and subsequent plantations in Munster and Ulster. The book's final chapters address the economic and legal/administrative reconstruction of early 17th-century Ireland and the complex interweaving of religions and nationalities in shaping identities. The epilogue concludes by anticipating the horrors of the early 1640s and "how little the Protestants of that Ireland were prepared for the catastrophe that was shortly to engulf them".
Connolly provides arresting vignettes of late medieval Ireland. He is perceptive in noting how New English writers are in difficulties groping to describe a culture very different from their own, including the centrality of group over individual rights in the Irish tradition. He is sensitive to the hybrid nature of Ireland's elites and the subtle military and social alliances that stretched across the island. He is particularly sure-footed in dealing with religious issues in all their phases. Connolly provides good insights into the strategies of English viceroys such as the pragmatic gradualism of Anthony St Leger as he attempted to incorporate the Gaelic lords into the operations of central and local government. He presents useful images of the worlds of Shane and Hugh O'Neill. Connolly deals superbly with the delicate manoeuvrings in parliamentary, court and ecclesiastical circles as well as the machinations of Irish lords. Regularly itemising exquisite details of much political intrigue, Connolly provides lucid accounts of the growing corruption, duplicity and profiteering of New English officials. Nor is he squeamish about highlighting the brutalising levels of violence in this extraordinary period.
NEVERTHELESS, CONNOLLY'S Contested Island can be contested in relation to some empirical details and in terms of levels of interpretation and conceptualisation. Tullyhogue was not "presumably O'Neill's own residence" but rather that of the O'Hagans, legal advisers and inaugurators of the O'Neill kings. Edmund Spenser was resident at Kilcolman, not Ballycolman. Connolly states that Gaelic Ireland constituted two-thirds of the island with perhaps half the population. But Gaelic populations comprised at least half the population in the other one-third - in other words, at least three-quarters of the island's population were of Gaelic stock. And what of the statement: "Ireland with its rudimentary record-keeping, fluid and poorly defined land boundaries . . . ". In truth, Ireland was characterised by a profound genealogical-cum-territorial ethos, where both manuscripts and the seanchas carefully itemised the ownership of every well-bounded townland, ballybetagh and lordship.
Connolly uses a bipolar strategy in contrasting his characterisation of "Gaelic Ireland" with levels of development in "English Ireland". In 1500 Ireland, "English Ireland" then comprised the Pale and outlying port-cities and towns in the south of Ireland. It would have helped the reader if a third cultural-cum-political zone had been identified - that of a hybrid "middle-nation" that was emerging over most of Munster, the western half of Leinster and east and north Connacht. Connolly is justified in criticising an overemphasis on the effects of regaelicisation. What emerged in this crucial hybrid zone was a creative fusion of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lifestyles. Connolly seems to eschew the identification of such long-term trends. Yet the notion that New English policy was governed by pragmatic, short-term objectives is questionable. Key monarchs and administrators, from Henry VIII through William Cecil and John Davies - promoting a centralising state - always kept the longer strategic processes in view. His notion that the evidence is still conjectural about the influence of Spanish colonial models, likewise, cannot be sustained. From at least the time of Philip II, English translations of key Spanish texts dealing with their colonial endeavours were known to English policy-makers and military adventurers.
CONNOLLY IS SELF-CONSCIOUSLY clear that the book is "an exercise in a traditional genre, the general narrative survey", concentrating "where possible on incident and experience rather than generalisation". Yet, the division of late 15th/early 16th-century Ireland into only two major cultural zones is in fact a decisive generalisation. Concepts such as "early modernity" are not addressed, so relevant to understanding the emerging culture of the New English, coming from a radically transforming England to rule and settle in Ireland. Imbued with notions of territorial expansion, ethnic superiority, agrarian utopias and imperial dreams, it was such people who engaged in the conquest of a very different Ireland.
Successive sections of the book are written from the perspective of different social groups, Connolly argues. Yet it appears to me that the predominant views quoted are those of New English officials in Ireland and their equivalents in England. The regular use of the concept of "reform" is instructive here. The New English ideological notion that the Irish - of whatever tradition - were in need of "reformation" in all aspects of their culture is never sufficiently interrogated. And however fair-minded, Connolly's more decisive interpretations appear to lean more heavily on the work of so-called "reform-centred" historians than that of other specialist practitioners in this field. True insights from some Irish-language sources, including poetry, are given due commentary. Yet, it is striking that Annála Rioghtachta Éireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters (long since translated from Irish into English) is only addressed as a source from pages 394 to 396. A systematic analysis of its pages from 1460 to 1600 would illustrate the levels of cultural stability in Ireland in the late 15th and early 16th centuries - as against the turmoil that is recorded therein from the 1540s onwards, as a systematic and sustained cultural assault was made on most Irish institutions and professions.
Despite the absence of a bibliography, it is clear that little attention is paid to pertinent works outside the discipline of history. This is, therefore, a specialised work in history, which will be widely read by practitioners in the field. They and others will find much to admire, agree and disagree with in this well-written, closely argued but by no means comprehensive interpretation.
William J Smyth is Professor of Geography at University College Cork and the author of Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530-1750 (Cork University Press, 2006)