The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 2, 1550–1730

"If you want to get good insights into the latest scholarship on colonial Ireland, this is the place to start. This is really where you would go if you want to understand the political, social, and economic history of early modern Ireland. There’s also a very good chapter on the environment. The volume presents cutting-edge research in a very accessible way and makes the history of colonial Ireland very accessible, particularly to undergraduates but also to general readers. We did that on purpose because we were trying to disrupt traditional narratives. Whether we succeeded or not is another matter. That Irish story should have begun, some reviewers would say, in the 1530s with the onset of the Protestant Reformation, and it should have gone right through to, say, 1800, or it should have stopped in 1690. We want people to rethink some of these key dates and say, ‘How can we look at this story slightly differently?’"