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  • Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750
  • Sean Farrell
Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530–1750. By William J. Smyth (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) 584 pp. $ 80.00

Historical geographers have made contributions to Irish historiography disproportionate to their numbers. After all, no serious student of Irish history can ignore Evans’ foundational work on Ulster archaeology and folkways, Houston and Seamus Smyth’s pioneering work on the transnational nature of Orangeism, Whelan’s wide-ranging insights on Irish nationalism and 1798 or Prunty and Murphy’s respective work on the urban geographies of Dublin.1 Rooted in a mastery of a remarkable array of sources, Smyth’s Map-making, Landscapes and Memory is a worthy addition to this lively scho1arly tradition. Taken together with David Dick-son’s magisterial Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Madison, 2005), this new book significantly improves our understanding of early modern Ireland.

Smyth’s central contention in this ambitious book is that Ireland’s uniqueness in Western Europe lies in the fact that it is both a colonial and early modern society. As a geographer, Smyth is particularly concerned with how space is organized, articulated, and transformed by the violent processes of change that dominated this era of Irish history. From such a perspective, William Petty’s maps were nearly as essential to the conquest of Ireland as Oliver Cromwell’s army was; Petty and other mapmakers made sense of the Irish landscape for English policymakers, [End Page 274] creating colonial knowledge essential to the English project of remaking Ireland in its own image.

Smyth’s scope is wide; his narrative sprawls across 200 of the most eventful years in Irish history. His masterful and creative use of a wide array of evidence—from a variety of maps to the 1659 Census that he employs to reconstruct the destructive/creative process that led to the making of modem Ireland—is exemplary. Moreover, unlike many scholars in Irish Studies, he applies theoretical and methodological frameworks to help glean insights from his often sparse (if wide) source base. In a particularly deft chapter about the trauma and violence of the 1640s, he adapts the anthropological insights of Taussig to interpret the complex and powerful legacies of the atrocities detailed in the 1641 Depositions.2 The use of multidisciplinary and/or comparative approaches is still far too rare in Irish history; Smyth’s work displays its potential admirably.

Smyth complements his broad overview of the period with three detailed case studies of Dublin, Tipperary, and Kilkenny. They display the intricacies of local shifting power relations and underline the importance of regional variation in this turbulent process. Given Ulster’s important and unique place within the reformation of Ireland, however, Smyth might have thought to include a northern case study as well.

A more substantial problem centers on the ways in which Smyth’s narrative emphasizes binary colonial structures over the more complex relationships forged within early modern Ireland’s turbulent society. Although the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Irish experience has all the hallmarks of a violent colonial encounter, much to the advantage of English-speaking Protestant settlers, this binary model of English conquest and Irish defeat was complicated by a middle ground characterized by a certain social continuity. Smyth is at his best when his narrative transcends his binary model, but as the book progresses, the middle ground disappears, as illustrated by Smyth’s reductionist and dismissive treatment of Ulster Presbyterians and the United Irishmen.

But it would be unfair to end on such a negative note. This is a strong and learned book, full of insights for scholars interested in Irish history.

Sean Farrell
Northern Illinois University

Footnotes

1. E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London, 1957); Cecil Houston and James Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore (Toronto, 1980); Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty (Notre Dame, 1996); Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (Dublin, 1998); Yvonne Murphy, Reinventing Modern Dublin (Dublin, 2003).

2. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York, 1991).

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