Howard Clarke
For Ireland and its people - or at least a large proportion of them - the 17th century was profoundly traumatic. The standard litany is familiar in outline: the Battle of Kinsale and its surrender to Mountjoy in the winter of 1601Ð2; the Flight of the Earls in September 1607; the completion of a detailed plan for the plantation of six counties in Ulster early in 1609; the issuing of grants for the plantation of parts of the midlands in January 1621; the outbreak of rebellion in Ulster in October 1641; the tense period of the Confederation of Kilkenny from 1642 to 1649, followed immediately by that of military campaigning by Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton in 1649Ð51; the confirmation by the newly-restored King Charles II of the Cromwellian land settlement in November 1660; the execution of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett in July 1681; the Siege of Derry in 1689 and the Battle of the Boyne in July of the following year; the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691 and the Treaty of Limerick signed in October; and the steady imposition of legal impediments on Catholics during the course of the 1690s. The upshot of these convulsions was that, in the succinct words of Aidan Clarke, 'the land of Ireland changed hands'. Gaelic poetry is replete with heart-felt incantations of dispossession - of land and of cultural identity.
William J Smyth's penetrating analysis dips far beneath the surface of these turbulent political waters. As his time frame he adopts the 'long' 17th century. In the 1530s the Catholic monolith in Ireland inherited from the Middle Ages, untainted by continental-style heresy yet grossly debased by socio-religious compromises, began to be threatened by stirrings of 'reformation'. By the middle of the 18th century Ireland was dominated by a self-confident aristocracy and gentry in the countryside, and by Protestant municipal corporations and business communities in the cities and towns. This transformation is illustrated to perfection by the last coloured plate in the book - William van der Hagen's depiction of a state ball held in Dublin Castle in 1731 as 'a highly structured, elitist and gendered social space [that] was mirrored in microcosm all over the island by the Big House and its world of elegance and exclusion'.

Smyth's twin pillars are colonialism and early modernity and, since he is a geographer by trade, his distinctive stock is cartographical. His book is satisfyingly full of maps. Some of these are contemporary maps beautifully reproduced in two blocks of coloured plates that in themselves make this publication worth buying. They range across the whole island, regions thereof, and individual towns in early stages of plantation. Maps in this period became 'instruments of conquest', essential tools of socio-political programmes. Other maps reproduced here are aids to scholarly analysis of complex historical processes. Many of these are the author's own; some represent the work of others, wholly or as adaptations. Among the former is a map summarising the relative percentage distribution of 'killings/murders' per barony as reported in the 1641 Depositions. This and other examples are indicative of a high degree of originality.

Four main sections make up the bulk of this substantial volume. The first relates in part to three great statistical resources dating from the years 1654Ð9: the Civil Survey, the Down Survey and the so-called '1659 Census', masterminded by William Petty. Together these can be exploited, with the aid of earlier and later evidence, to chart the land resettlement by adventurers, officers and soldiers coming over from the neighbouring island. Secondly there are three regional case-studies, of Counties Dublin, Kilkenny and Tipperary. Thirdly comes an overview of the great changes in territorial organisation across the whole period 1530Ð1750. This is accompanied by a chapter focused more specifically on personal naming patterns and on language patterns. Finally we are introduced to the global context of the North Atlantic, where what occurred in Ireland is presented as part of a much broader process of early modern colonisation. The background story may be relatively familiar, but this is a work that contains many new insights into subtly differentiated cultural geographies and for them it will long remain required reading.

Howard Clarke is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Socio-economic History, UCD and Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy