A History Of Ulster

Jonathan Bardon teaches in the School of Modern History at Queen's University, Belfast.

The Plantation of Ulster followed the Flight of the Earls when the lands of the departed Gaelic Lords were forfeited to the Crown. Bardon's history is the first major, accessible survey of this key event in British and Irish history in a lifetime.

Few European communities are more soaked in their bloody history than the Catholics of Ulster, but the Catholic and Protestant communities' faulty understanding of their past has had ruinous effects on the lives of its inhabitants. Marianne Elliott has written a coherent, credible, and absorbing history of the Ulster Catholics. The whole sorry sweep of the province's history is covered-from its early medieval origins to the tenuous but holding Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and formation of an all-Ulster legislature.

This up-to-date edition spans 9000 years of social, political and economic life in the province of Ulster, Northern Ireland.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

This book examines the native Irish experience of conquest and colonisation in Ulster in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Central to this argument is that the Ulster plantation bears more comparisons to European expansion throughout the Atlantic than (as some historians have argued) the early-modern state’s consolidation of control over its peripheral territories. Farrell also demonstrates that plantation Ulster did not see any significant attempt to transform the Irish culturally or economically in these years, notwithstanding the rhetoric of a ‘civilising mission’. Challenging recent scholarship on the integrative aspects of plantation society, he argues that this emphasis obscures the antagonism which characterised relations between native and newcomer until the eve of the 1641 rising. This book is of interest not only to students of early-modern Ireland but is also a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic history and indeed colonial studies in general.

This book is the first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over 25 years. The pivotal importance of the Plantation to the shared histories of Ireland and Britain would be difficult to overstate. It helped secure the English conquest of Ireland, and dramatically transformed Ireland’s physical, political, religious and cultural landscapes. The legacies of the Plantation are still contested to this day, but as the Peace Process evolves and the violence of the previous forty years begins to recede into memory, vital space has been created for a timely reappraisal of the plantation process and its role in identity formation within Ulster, Ireland and beyond. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field offers an important redress in terms of the previous coverage of the plantations, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience, and in so doing will hopefully stimulate further research into this crucial episode in Irish and British history.