Book Review: The Alliance of Pirates: Ireland and Atlantic Piracy in the Early Seventeenth Century by Connie Kelleher

was (not including the £10,000 he owed the queen for the right to settle Antrim). It seems that a powerful motive for colonisation was personal profit that remained unrealised. Why, despite such significant investment by Essex and others (including the government in London), the settlement scheme remained unrealised is an intriguing question and is clearly bound up with the complex character of the earl. It also reflected some of the structural problems of the Elizabethan state. Heffernan argues that the most significant problem that Essex had to deal with was the queen herself, and particularly her inability to make decisions, and the Privy Council’s love of issuing contradictory orders that left Essex compromised in his dealing with O’Neill. These are valid insights but perhaps even more important than these was the inability of early modern central administrations to control events as complex and multi-faceted as plantations without any significant administrative support. The result, revealed in every settlement from Leix-Offaly to the Longford plantation of the seventeenth century, was the way in which local circumstances neutralised the best-laid plans of Dublin or London and changed the design and execution of settlement. More studies like this one will allow us to nuance this insight. For such studies, this is a model to follow with its rigorous analysis of sources and its careful narrative.