The controversy about Wood s Halfpence between 1722 and 1725 was an exceptional instance of Irish defiance of England s imperial authority. In a heated public dispute, more than 100 pamphlets and broadsides in prose and verse protested against the English Government s granting a patent for coining copper money for Ireland to an English manufacturer. Castigating the project in economic and constitutional terms, they revealed an indebtedness to traditional arguments for Ireland s status as a free kingdom, whose people enjoyed the same liberties as the people of England. The pamphlets thus...