This book offers a fundamental critique of conventional views of sixteenth-century Irish history that have stressed the centrality of colonization and military confrontation. It argues that reform rather than conquest was the aim of Tudor policy-makers, but shows that the immense difficulties faced by the reformers in pursuing their objectives forced them to make administrative innovations that ultimately contradicted and undermined their original policy.

This book offers a fundamental critique of conventional views of sixteenth-century Irish history that have stressed the centrality of colonization and military confrontation. It argues that reform rather than conquest was the aim of Tudor policy-makers, but shows that the immense difficulties faced by the reformers in pursuing their objectives forced them to make administrative innovations that ultimately contradicted and undermined their original policy.

In this book leading historians challenge traditional views about the British conquest and colonization of Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They reveal the contradictions, disappointments and failures, which attended the efforts of English and Scottish colonists. Notably, the British became increasingly aware of the need not to destroy the resources they originally sought to exploit.

Three times Viceroy, Sir Henry Sidney was a key figure in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. Sidney's account of his public career in Ireland, written in the winter of 1582-3, is one of the earliest political memoirs in English literature. It is unique among early memoirs in its size, richness of detail, and apparent fidelity to the factual record.



Composed in plain prose and consciously shorn of decoration and classical allusion, his narrative presents an individual with attitudes and preoccupations at odds with the zealous advocates of military conquest and religious...

In this book leading historians challenge traditional views about the British conquest and colonization of Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They reveal the contradictions, disappointments and failures, which attended the efforts of English and Scottish colonists. Notably, the British became increasingly aware of the need not to destroy the resources they originally sought to exploit.

James Anthony Froude remains one of the most commonly referenced and frequently cited of Victorian public intellectuals. Known to intellectual historians as the author of a monumental History of England in the sixteenth century and as a key exponent of Victorian religious doubt, he is also frequently referenced as the author of a series of scandalously provocative novels and of a hugely controversial biography of Thomas Carlyle. Historians of the British Empire and of Ireland have frequently been compelled to address his sometimes outrageous (but often representative) historical writings....