In the 1890s, most of the inhabitants of the west of Ireland experienced great poverty and hardship, living - as they did - on farms that were too small to provide them with a reasonable standard of living. By 1921, however, the living conditions of many of them had been transformed by a series of Land Acts that revolutionized the system of land holding in Ireland. This book examines agrarian conflict in Ireland during the neglected period between the death of Parnell (1891) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), and demonstrates that land reform was often introduced in response to...

In the 1890s, most of the inhabitants of the west of Ireland experienced great poverty and hardship, living--as they did--on farms that were too small to provide them with a reasonable standard of living. By 1921, however, the living conditions of many of them had been transformed by a series of Land Acts that revolutionized the system of land holding in Ireland. This book examines agrarian conflict in Ireland during the neglected period between the death of Parnell (1891) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), and demonstrates that land reform was often introduced in response to...

The Irish Establishment examines who the most powerful men and women were in Ireland between the Land War and the beginning of the Great War, and considers how the composition of elite society changed during this period.
Although enormous shifts in economic and political power were taking place at the middle levels of Irish society, Fergus Campbell demonstrates that the Irish establishment remained remarkably static and unchanged. The Irish landlord class and the Irish Protestant middle class (especially businessmen and professionals) retained critical positions of power, and the rising...

This collection of essays explores the nature and dynamics of Ireland's land questions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also the ways in which the Irish land question has been written about by historians.

The book makes a vital contribution to the study of historiography by including for the first time the reflections of a group of prominent historians on their earlier work. These historians consider their influences and how their views have changed since the publication of their books, so that these essays provide an ethnographic study of historians' thoughts on the...

The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. This book presents the current state of our understanding of the issue as well as detailing innovative new research and reflecting on how historians have approached the topic in various ways since the 1930s. In eleven essays, a group of authors including some of the most influential historians of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explores Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book surveys the current state of the literature on the land question in...