Originally published in 1960, this book presents a discussion of the relationship between economic theory and economic policy in relation to nineteenth-century Irish history. The text focuses on the period 1816-70 and covers a variety of areas, including the land system, absentee landlords, the poor law, private enterprise, free trade, public works, and emigration. A bibliography is included and detailed notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Irish history, British foreign policy and economic theory.

For a country that can boast a distinguished tradition of political economy from Sir William Petty through Swift, Berkeley, Hutcheson, Burke and Cantillon through to that of Longfield, Cairnes, Bastable, Edgeworth, Geary and Gorman, it is surprising that no systematic study of Irish political economy has been undertaken. In this book the contributors redress this glaring omission in the history of political economy, for the first time providing an overview of developments in Irish political economy from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Logistically this is achieved through the provision of individual contributions from a group of recognized experts, both Irish and international, who address the contribution of major historical figures in Irish political economy along the analysis of major thematic issues, schools of thought and major policy debates within the Irish context over this extended period.

Following an introduction to the key ideas of Coats, this work focuses on two themes: the difference between British and American economics, both in content and in the practice of the profession; and the interrelationships between economic ideas, events (or conditions) and policy issues.

This compact and accessible reference work provides all the essential facts and figures about major aspects of modern British history from the death of Queen Anne to the end of the 1990s. The Longman Handbook of Modern British History has been extended to include a fully-revised bibliography (reflecting the wealth of newly published material in recent years), the new statistics on social and economic history and an expanded glossary of terms. The political chronologies have been revised to include the electoral defeat of John Major and the record of New Labour in office. Designed for the student and general reader, this highly-successful handbook provides a wealth of varied data within the confines of a single volume.

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 book explores the life and career of Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902). Dufferin was a landowner in Ulster, an urbane diplomat, literary sensation, courtier, politician, colonial governor, collector, son, husband and father. The book draws on episodes from Dufferin’s career to link the landowning and aristocratic culture he was born into with his experience of governing across the British Empire, in Canada, Egypt, Syria and India. This book argues that there was a defined conception of aristocratic governance and purpose that infused the political and imperial world, and was based on two elements: the inheritance and management of a landed estate, and a well-defined sense of ‘rule by the best’. It identifies a particular kind of atmosphere of empire and aristocracy, one that was riven with tensions and angst, as those who saw themselves as the hereditary leaders of Britain and Ireland were challenged by a rising democracy and, in Ireland, by a powerful new definition of what Irishness was. It offers a new perspective on both empire and aristocracy in the nineteenth century, and will appeal to a broad scholarly audience and the wider public.

Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought.

Hunger is as old as history itself. Indeed, it appears to be a timeless and inescapable biological condition. And yet perceptions of hunger and of the hungry have changed over time and differed from place to place. Hunger has a history, which can now be told. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hunger was viewed as an unavoidable natural phenomenon or as the fault of its lazy and morally flawed victims. By the middle of the twentieth century, a new understanding of hunger had taken root. Across the British Empire and beyond, humanitarian groups, political activists, social reformers, and nutritional scientists established that the hungry were innocent victims of political and economic forces outside their control. Hunger was now seen as a global social problem requiring government intervention in the form of welfare to aid the hungry at home and abroad. James Vernon captures this momentous shift as it occurred in imperial Britain over the past two centuries. Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history in a novel way, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions, such as the United Nations, committed to the conquest of world hunger. All those moved by the plight of the hungry will want to read this compelling book.

The Anglo-Irish Union of 1800 which established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland made British ministers in London more directly responsible for Irish affairs than had previously been the case. The Act did not, however, provide for full integration, and left in existence a separate administration in Dublin under a Viceroy and a Chief Secretary. This created tensions that were never resolved. The relationship that ensued has generally been interpreted in terms of 'colonialism' or 'post-colonialism', concepts not without their problems in relation to a country so geographically close to Britain and, indeed, so closely connected constitutionally. Governing Hibernia seeks to examine the Union relationship from a new and different perspective. In particular it argues that London's policies towards Ireland in the period between the Union and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 oscillated sharply. At times, the policies were based on a view of an Ireland so distant, different, and violent that (regardless of promises made in 1800) its government demanded peculiarly Hibernian policies of a coercive kind (c. 1800-1830); at others, they were based on the premise that stability was best achieved by a broadly assimilationist approach — in effect attempting to make Ireland more like Britain (c. 1830-1868); and finally they made a return to policies of differentiation though in less coercive ways than had been the case in the decades immediately after the Union (c. 1868-1921). The outcome of this last policy of differentiation was a disposition, ultimately common to both of the main British political parties, to grant greater measures of devolution and ultimately independence, a development finally rendered viable by the implementation of Irish partition in 1921/2.