AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2015 so-called honor cultures. In these discussions and in his analysis of pre-Famine and Famine violence, Mc Mahon reveals his exceptional skill for the logical dissection and evaluation of claims other scholars have made; typically, he presents a contrast between two or more theses and counter-theses, for example different explanations for long-term trends in violence in Early Modern Europe. This raises the book to a higher level of importance than it would otherwise have had. Mc Mahon offers a theoretical as well as empirical contribution to understanding violence in Ireland. Mc Mahon’s principal argument is clear. He identifies and critiques claims that pre-Famine Ireland was a “remarkably violent country,” that many homicides stemmed from an honor culture among men, that its purpose was to enforce communal norms, and that violence was declining as a result of a civilizing process or the evolution of a more disciplinary society. In doing so, he challenges the fundamental assumptions of some major perspectives on social change, especially social change in Western society over the past several centuries. Mc Mahon warns against the widespread temptation to posit long-term patterns of growth and decline in social structures and practices. Most helpful, in my view, is his critique of typologizing. Rather than contrasting different types of societies and violence he suggests that we should examine degrees of variation: degrees of differences in societal features (such as nationalism and sectarianism), degrees of differences in types of violence, and degrees of differences in “marginality,” by which he means the extent to which violence or a particular kind of violence is “closer to or further away from the centre of everyday life”(p. 174). Mc Mahon insists that there is much constancy in homicide over space and time. With a few exceptions, considerable similarity can be found among Irish counties in their rates of homicide during the period he is studying. There has also been significant continuity in homicide rates in Ireland over the past several centuries. And Irish rates of homicide are not greatly different from rates of homicide in other countries. The majority of homicides in all these places and times involve young men losing their tempers, usually under the inffuence of alcohol. True, he does recognize some distinctive features of Irish violence, but they constitute relatively small percentages of the total violence that occurred. Although he is not willing to embrace evolutionary psychology as the explanation for this universality, he does believe that the “roots of male predominance in violence... have their origins deep in human history”(p. 88).

The book is not without weaknesses. First, Mc Mahon can be very repetitive, though I should acknowledge that what gets repeated are important points that he wants to make. And second, he makes one important argument for which he does not provide sufficient evidence, namely, that Irish communities utilized “a variety of tools of conffict negotiation” and “for the most part... skillfully managed” violence (p. 173). It may be