This book is the first major academic study of the Ulster Plantation in over twenty-five years, newly available in paperback. The pivotal importance of the plantation to the shared histories of Ireland and Britain would be difficult to overstate. It helped secure the English conquest of Ireland, and dramatically transformed Ireland's physical, political, religious and cultural landscapes. The legacies of the plantation are still contested to this day, but as the peace process evolves and the violence of the previous forty years begins to recede into memory, vital space has been created for a timely reappraisal of the plantation process and its role in identity formation within Ulster, Ireland and beyond. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field offers an important redress in terms of the previous coverage of the plantations, moving away from an exclusive colonial perspective, to include the native Catholic experience, and in so doing will hopefully stimulate further research into this crucial episode in Irish and British history.

Reviews

"this book has much to commend for its breadth of coverage, for its solid performance and for its interdisciplinary approaches."
Allan I. Macinnes, University of Strathclyde, Northern Scotland, 2019

1. Introduction: The plantation of Ulster: ideas and ideologies - Micheál Ó Siochrú and Éamonn Ó Ciardha
2. The 'British' Crown, the Earls and the plantation of Ulster - Jenny Wormald
3. 'Civilising' Gaelic Scotland: the Scottish Isles and the Stuart Empire - Martin MacGregor
4. Plantation and civil society - Philip Withington
5. The City of London and the Ulster plantation - Ian Archer
6. Success and failure in the Ulster plantation - Raymond Gillespie
7. The Catholic Church in Ulster under the plantation, 1609-42 - Brian MacCuarta
8. Randal MacDonnell and early seventeenth-century settlement in northeast Ulster, 1603-30 - Colin Breen
9. Educating the colonial mind: Spenser and the plantation - Andrew Hadfield
10. Responses to transformation: Gaelic poets and the plantation of Ulster - Marc Caball
11. The plantation of Ulster: aspects of Gaelic letters - Diarmuid Ó Doibhlin
12. Angling for Ulster: Ireland and plantation in Jacobean literature - Willy Maley
13. The Scottish inhabitants of that province are actually revolted: John Milton on the failure of the Ulster plantation - Nicholas McDowell
Index

Editors

Micheál Ó Siochrú is Associate Professor of History at Trinity College, Dublin

Éamonn Ó Ciardha is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Ulster