CONVERGENCE AND CONFLICT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND

Abstract

Recent writing shows that eighteenth-century Irish society was both less and more divided than was supposed by Lecky, whose History of Ireland in the eighteenth century (now over a century old) dominated so much subsequent historiography. Because Lecky enjoyed access to records that were subsequently destroyed his work will never be entirely redundant, but this article looks at ways in which his views have been and continue to be modified. It surveys the various interpretative models now being used to open up the period, which invite comparisons not merely with England, Scotland, Wales, and colonial America but also with Europe. It also considers how that endlessly fascinating decade, the 1790s, has emerged from the spotlight turned on it by a plethora of bicentenary studies.