Book Review: The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation by David Dickson

Abstract

plying lodging and food to crown forces, pressure on their resources that escalated as the war proceeded, and that left the community exhausted at war’s end. Apart from those contributions regulated by custom and law, they suffered extortion and corruption in their localities from military figures; further, there was resentment that their traditional local control of the military enterprise was passing to English newcomers. The author offers an analysis of the Palesmen’s peaceful response to these impositions, and to their displacement as military defenders of the ancient colony; this response was articulated in a stream of local and individual petitions, and treatises, together with personal lobbying at court by those with means. This is a well-focused study of the range of pressures experienced by the older colonial community during the Nine Years’War. The author does justice to the major dimensions of that crucible: ideological challenges to their loyalist identity, posited by O’Neill’s appeal to participate in a Catholic crusade against a heretical regime, and the administration’s growing questioning of their loyalty; the variety of individual Old English responses to Confederate military pressures on their lands; the major, indeed decisive contribution of the Pale community to the manpower of crown armed forces; the crippling social costs of providing men, food and supplies for those forces; and the growing alienation and resentment at their treatment by the crown’s representatives, and their displacement in military and political service by New English of lesser social status than themselves. The author deploys a sophisticated analysis to explore the multifaceted wartime experience of the Old English community. War intensified the marginalization from the crown of this community, in spite of their deep and unwavering loyalism, in the face of the unprecedented demands which that lengthy conflict imposed, and the administration’s rejection of their claim to loyalty. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nine Years’ War as it impacted socially and militarily on the Pale community, and the challenge that war posed to their identity as the natural defenders of crown rule in Ireland.