Provides for a historical perspective of Scotland's interaction with the world beyond its borders. As one of the most prolific historians of his generation, Allan I. Macinnes, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde, has been foremost in promoting an international rather than insular approach to the study of Scotland. In a distinguished career he has written extensively on the Scottish Highlands, the British revolutions, the formation of the United Kingdom, the Jacobite movement, and Scottish involvement in the British Empire. The chapters collected here reflect the extent of these interests and a commitment to understanding Scotland - or indeed, other territorial units - in an international or global context. Covering a period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, essays examine the complex interaction of the peoples of the British and Irish isles; they consider Scottish participation in Britannic and European conflict; and they explore Scottish involvement in business networks, political unions, and maritime empires. From intellectual and cultural exchange to political and military upheaval, Scotland and the Wider World will be key reading for anyone interested in the antecedents to Scotland's current international standing.

Shane O'Neill played a key role in Ireland's story in the sixteenth century, yet he has suffered a peculiar fate. Memorialised in drama, poetry and fiction as 'Shane the Proud', he has been remarkably neglected by historians who have been content - or resigned - to accept the largely personalised accounts of his character and actions, broadcast by his enemies, as a fair estimation of his historical significance. In this extended and critical study of Shane's life and times, Ciaran Brady, leading historian in Early Modern History, returns this neglected and misunderstood historical figure to his rightful place - at the centre of this turbulent period in Irish history. Based on a detailed examination of all the available primary sources, and also on a critical examination of the stories and myths that came to surround Shane, Brady offers an original interpretation that sets Shane against the multi-layered backgrounds of Ulster, Irish and English Court politics of his time - moving away from the conventional cultural stereotypes through which Shane and his contemporaries have been customarily interpreted.In doing so Brady reveals not only the highly complex nature of the problems confronting Shane and his English adversaries, and the genuine nature of the attempts of both sides to find a permanent solution on mutually acceptable terms, but also the combination of surface contingencies and deeper ideological forces that doomed their efforts to failure.

This book offers a perspective on Irish History from the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Many of the chapters address, from national, regional and individual perspectives, the key events, institutions and processes that transformed the history of early modern Ireland. Others probe the nature of Anglo-Irish relations, Ireland's ambiguous constitutional position during these years and the problems inherent in running a multiple monarchy. Where appropriate, the volume adopts a wider comparative approach and casts fresh light on a range of historiographical debates, including the 'New British Histories', the nature of the 'General Crisis' and the question of Irish exceptionalism. Collectively, these essays challenge and complicate traditional paradigms of conquest and colonization. By examining the inconclusive and contradictory manner in which English and Scottish colonists established themselves in the island, it casts further light on all of its inhabitants during the early modern period.

This book offers a new perspective on Irish History from the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Many of the chapters address, from national, regional and individual perspectives, the key events, institutions and processes that transformed the history of early modern Ireland. Others probe the nature of Anglo-Irish relations, Ireland's ambiguous constitutional position during these years and the problems inherent in running a multiple monarchy. Where appropriate, the volume adopts a wider comparative approach and casts fresh light on a range of historiographical debates, including the 'New British Histories', the nature of the 'General Crisis' and the question of Irish exceptionalism. Collectively, these essays challenge and complicate traditional paradigms of conquest and colonization. By examining the inconclusive and contradictory manner in which English and Scottish colonists established themselves in the island, it casts further light on all of its inhabitants during the early modern period.

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 an extended reinterpretation of English policy in Ireland over the sixteenth century. It seeks to show that the major conflicts between Tudor governors and native lords which characterised the period were not the result of a deliberate Tudor strategy of confrontation as conventional interpretations have assumed, but argues that they arose from a failed experiment in legal reform and cultural assimilation which had been applied with remarkable success elsewhere in the Tudor dominions. The book seeks to explain the course of this exceptional failure, and it identifies a distinct administrative style which evolved in Irish government during the middle of the century under a complex set of pressures acting on the would-be reformers both in Ireland and at the Tudor court. It argues that it was this distinctive, highly centralised and intensely activist mode of government that inadvertently undermined the aims of reform policy and provoked the alienation and hostility that was precisely the opposite result to that which was originally intended.

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 oppression so often portrayed by historians. By exploring its emphases, omissions and deviations from the recorded sequence of events, the editor's introduction reveals a surprisingly complex set of Elizabethan perceptions and prejudices about Ireland. This memoir, last edited for publication in the mid-nineteenth century, is an essential source for the study of the English in Ireland.