Politics and Political Culture in Ireland from Restoration to Union, 1660–1800 is an impressive volume and a terrific tribute to Jacqueline Hill. Hill is well known for her publications on Irish history in the long eighteenth century (from the Stuart Restoration and to the early Victorian period), particularly her work on the corporation of Dublin and her explorations into how politics played out at the local level and across social boundaries. A founding member of the Irish Federation of University Teachers Committee on Women to promote the rights of women within Irish academia, she has also edited Irish Historical Studies and the volume of the New History of Ireland for the years 1921–1984; managed the project for creating an online bibliography of Irish history (funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences); and trained generations of undergraduates and PhD students at Maynooth University (she continues to teach graduate students to this day, despite officially retiring in 2013). In recognition of her achievements, she was elected a member of the Irish Royal Academy of 2013. I first met Jackie (as she is known to friends and colleagues) at a conference in England in 1997: I was just venturing into Irish history myself at the time and was shortly to embark on my first research trip to Dublin. She urged me to attend a conference she was organizing at Maynooth, arranging for me to stay in university accommodation (where I was welcomed with traditional Irish hospitality), and then during my subsequent week in the archives she invited me to her Dublin home to discuss my research and to offer advice about sources. Our paths have not crossed too often over the years, but such acts of kindness and generosity are precious and never forgotten.
Inspired by Hill's own research, the various contributors to this collection explore new ways of thinking about politics and political culture in Ireland between 1660 and 1800, moving away from the traditional focus on national institutions (the viceregal court, parliament, or the law) and stressing instead the importance of regional political cultures and the need, as the publisher's blurb on the dust jacket announces, to adopt “an organic approach” to the way power was “made manifest and distributed across the social world.” Five of the essays focus on Dublin. Brendan Twomey explores the financial travails of Dublin Corporation after 1690 and the broader context for the challenge to oligarchy in the 1740s led by Charles Lucas, the self- proclaimed “last free citizen of Dublin”; in the process, Twomey highlights the increasing “political density” of early eighteenth-century Dublin, with political information transmitted through “a broad range of media such as the press, toasts, petitions, public celebrations, the production of memorabilia, shop and tavern names and signs, ballads and street protest” (36). Mary Ann Lyons examines the politics of pageantry between 1660 and 1770—the Dublin guilds’ public-facing ceremonies and rituals that took place in city streets, parks, and taverns across the city, and the way such ceremonies could embody the chasm that existed between the enfranchised citizenry and the disenfranchised broader public. Colm Lennon investigates how Protestants and Catholics in the parish of St. Audoen managed the problem of urban property from 1665 to 1700, and what this tells us about “community-building at parish level and the preservation of old bonds across the religious divide” during an era of increasing sectarian tensions (76). Raymond Gillespie's deeply contextualized case study of the suicide of the apothecary Mark Quinn in November 1674 yields fascinating insights into politics, culture, and identity in Restoration Dublin. James Kelly looks at public reactions to the demographic, physical, and economic expansion of Dublin over the eighteenth century, and the growing optimism about how the city could be transformed and improved with paved and lighted streets and beautiful buildings, a sentiment that reached a climax in the 1780s, though thereafter such optimism began to falter as the century drew to a close.
Moving outside the capital, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright discusses John Black III's schemes for improving eighteenth-century Belfast: Black, a Belfast-born merchant, lived most of his life in Bordeaux and was friends with Montesquieu, though for all his cosmopolitan influences what shaped Black's worldview most were his deeply held religious views. (Black was raised a Presbyterian but later in life gravitated toward the Church of Ireland.) David Hayton offers an insightful investigation of the interplay of local and national politics in his chapter on Presbyterians and Jacobites in Ballentoy, County Antrim, in 1716: even in this remote corner of rural Ireland, Hayton finds, popular attitudes “were heavily influence by the conflicts, and the rhetoric, of national politics” (190). In the final essay, Toby Barnard explores the world of rumor, rancor, and common opinion at the parliamentary by-election for Dungarvon, County Waterford in 1758 (Dungarvon being a constituency with an unusually wide franchise). The volume opens with a brief essay about Hill by Vincent Comerford and Bernadette Cunningham, followed by Gillespie, Kelly, and Lyons's introduction, and concludes with a list of Hill's publications up to 2021.
It is impossible to do justice to this marvelous collection in a short review. All of the essays are deeply researched, elegantly argued, and methodologically and conceptually innovative. Furthermore, they hold broader implications for how we should approach the study of political history (both high and low politics), integrate the local with the national, and stive to write not just a social and cultural history of politics but also social history with the politics put back in. Accordingly, Politics and Political Culture in Ireland deserves a wide readership, beyond those who specialize in this period of Irish history. And what a way to honor Jacqueline Hill!
