The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880 ed. by James Kelly (review)

The publication of the four-volume Cambridge History of Ireland series is an important milestone in the historiography of Ireland. The last major university press series on Irish history, T. W. Moody's A New History of Ireland, was published by Oxford in nine volumes between 1976 and 2005. The lengthy production process (some chapters were reportedly written ten or more years before appearing in print) and the general revisionist sensibilities of the series meant that many of the essays did not reflect recent scholarship, new fields of inquiry, and indeed the new approaches to Irish history that began to take the field in the 1990s. In the words of the editor James Kelly, The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880 (alongside the others in the series) seeks "neither to replicate nor to replace A New History of Ireland, but to reflect the state of the historiography at present." To this end the volume aims to offer "a more complete and integrated reading" of the period covered in two principal ways (18). First, the work reflects both the newest scholarship on longestablished subjects and also explores other topics and themes that have only recently become subjects of interest to historians of Ireland. Secondly, the volume dispenses with the traditional periodization that has reflected the long dominance of political subjects in the writing of Irish history. The period under study, 1730–1880, was selected because it witnessed two "parallel processes" that fundamentally shaped Irish society, politics, and history: the peak and decline of Protestant ascendancy and the corresponding growth of Catholic social and political power (18). The struggle between these two groups "for political power and ideology provides the unifying narrative spine to the history of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (20). While this narrative spine drives the chronological organization of the book (and reflects the continued influence of political history in Irish studies), about half of the essays in the volume explore the other major forces shaping Ireland in this period, including changes in the Irish economy, social system, family life, and language.

The publication of major series such as this typically attract some notice outside of the academy, especially in Ireland where public interest and debate over the meanings and lessons of national history are typically more robust than in America or Britain. Still, as is often the case, the publisher makes an exaggerated case for the volume's accessibility to the general reader, as the level of assumed knowledge is uneven across the twentysix essays. So, whatever the intended audience, the book will most benefit scholars and students, particularly those delving into a subject for the first time. While unavoidably different in tone, approach, and completeness, almost all of the chapters provide solid overviews of the topic at hand, leaving readers with a clear sense of the contemporary historiographical consensus and fault lines as well as the key secondary sources.

The book is divided into six parts covering politics, economy and demography, religion, society, the Irish abroad, and the Great Famine and its aftermath. Each of these contains three to seven chronologically ordered essays. Readers of this journal will likely be most interested in the fifteen chapters that wholly or largely cover the Victorian period. In part 1, Patrick M. Geoghegan explores Daniel O'Connell's transformative impact on Irish politics and the difficulties of contemporaries as well as later scholars in objectively assessing him. Maura Cronin's essay helpfully demonstrates that popular politics in the pre-Famine period were not just a Catholic affair, as Irish Protestants also mobilized to counter the reforms demanded by O'Connell and his followers. In part 2, Andy Bielenberg charts the evolution of the Irish economy over the nineteenth century, concluding that while the most far-reaching changes in this period involved the service sector, this sector and the economy as a whole continued to center on agriculture, leaving Ireland...