First published in 1975. Using estate records, local newspapers and parliamentary papers, this book focuses upon two central and interrelated subjects - the rural economy and the land question - from the perspective of Cork, Ireland's southernmost country. The author examines the chief responses of Cork landlords, tenant farmers and labourers to the enormous difficulties besetting them after 1815. He shows how the great famine of the late 1840s was in many ways an economic and social watershed because it rapidly accelerated certain previous trends and reversed the direction of others. He also rejects the conventional view of the land war of the 1880s, arguing that in Cork it was essentially a 'revolution of rising expectations', in which tenant farmers struggled to preserve their substantial material gains since 1850 by using the weapons of 'agrarian trade unionism', civil disobedience and unprecedented violence. This title will be of interest to students of rural history and historical geography.

First published in 1975. Using estate records, local newspapers and parliamentary papers, this book focuses upon two central and interrelated subjects - the rural economy and the land question - from the perspective of Cork, Ireland's southernmost country. The author examines the chief responses of Cork landlords, tenant farmers and labourers to the enormous difficulties besetting them after 1815. He shows how the great famine of the late 1840s was in many ways an economic and social watershed because it rapidly accelerated certain previous trends and reversed the direction of others. He also rejects the conventional view of the land war of the 1880s, arguing that in Cork it was essentially a 'revolution of rising expectations', in which tenant farmers struggled to preserve their substantial material gains since 1850 by using the weapons of 'agrarian trade unionism', civil disobedience and unprecedented violence. This title will be of interest to students of rural history and historical geography.

This is the most wide-ranging series of essays ever published on the Great Irish Famine, and will prove of lasting interest to the general reader. Leading historians, economists and geographers – from Ireland, Britain and the United States – have assembled the most up-to-date research from a wide spectrum of disciplines including medicine, folklore and literature, to give the fullest account yet of the background and consequences of the Famine. Contributors include Dr Kevin Whelan, Professor Mary Daly, Professor James Donnelly and Professor Cormac Ó Gráda. The Great Irish Famine was the first major series of essays on the Famine published in Ireland for almost fifty years.

Named for its mythical leader "Captain Rock," avenger of agrarian wrongs, the Rockite movement of 1821-24 in Ireland was notorious for its extraordinary violence. In "Captain Rock," James S. Donnelly, Jr., offers both a fine-grained analysis of the conflict and a broad exploration of Irish rural society after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Originating in west Limerick, the Rockite movement spread quickly under the impact of a prolonged economic depression. Before long the insurgency embraced many of the better-off farmers. The intensity of the Rockites' grievances, the frequency of their resort to sensational violence, and their appeal on such key issues as rents and tithes presented a nightmarish challenge to Dublin Castle--prompting in turn a major reorganization of the police, a purging of the local magistracy, the introduction of large military reinforcements, and a determined campaign of judicial repression. A great upsurge in sectarianism and millenarianism, Donnelly shows, added fuel to the conflagration. Inspired by prophecies of doom for the Anglo-Irish Protestants who ruled the country, the overwhelmingly Catholic Rockites strove to hasten the demise of the landed elite they viewed as oppressors.
Drawing on a wealth of sources--including reports from policemen, military officers, magistrates, and landowners as well as from newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary inquiries, depositions, rebel proclamations, and threatening missives sent by Rockites to their enemies--"Captain Rock" offers a detailed anatomy of a dangerous, widespread insurgency whose distinctive political contours will force historians to expand their notions of how agrarian militancy influenced Irish nationalism in the years before the Great Famine of 1845-51.

Remembering the Year of the French is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly between the study of historical events - the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798 - and folkloric representations of those events. Delving into the folk history found in Ireland's archives and rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories, folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that had gone largely unnoticed by historians. Though his focus is 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk history and of grassroots social memory.