Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean is a complex and ground-breaking collection of essays. Grounded in history, it integrates perspectives from art historians, architectural and landscape historians, and literary scholars to produce a genuinely interdisciplinary collection that spans from 1620-1830: the high point of European colonialism. By exploring imperial, national and familial relationships from their building blocks of plantation, migration, property and trade, it finds new ways to re-create and question how slavery made the Atlantic world.

Reviews

Natalie A Zacek provides a sharply contemporary perspective on public debate and identity, deconstructing, inter alia, the 'Irish Slave' meme in 'How the Irish became black'. This invaluable publication disentangles the polarities of subjects and agents, insularity and global dynamics.
Sylvie Kleinman, History Island, September 2023.

Foreword - Sir Hilary Beckles
Introduction - Finola O'Kane and Ciaran O'Neill

Part I: Setting Out the Terrain
1. Setting out the terrain: Ireland and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century - David Dickson
2. From Perfidious Papists to Prosperous Planters: Making Irish elites in the early modern English Caribbean - Jenny Shaw
3. Free, and unfree - Ireland and Barbados, 1620-60- David Brown
4. Trade, plunder and Irishmen in early English Jamaica - Nuala Zahedieh
5. Doing business in the wartime Caribbean: John Byrn, Irish merchant of Kingston, Jamaica (September - October 1756) - Thomas M. Truxes

Part II: Consolidating Territories
6. Ireland and British Colonial Slave-ownership 1763-1833 - Nick Draper
7. Soldiers, settlers, slavers: Irish lives on the Spanish borderlands of North America and the Caribbean in the revolutionary 1790s- José Shane Brownrigg-Gleeson
8. Searching for sovereignties: the formation of the penal laws and slave codes in Ireland and the British Caribbean, c. 1680 to c. 1720 - Aaron Graham
9. Comparing Imperial design strategies; The Franco-Irish plantations of Saint-Domingue - Finola O'Kane
10. Eyre Coote, the House of Assembly and the Defence of Jamaica, 1806-8 - David Fleming
11. In search of excess: Lambert Blair and his appetites - Ciaran O'Neill

Part III: Comparative Perspectives
12. Two islands, many forts: Ireland and Bermuda in 1624 - Emily Mann
13. Imperial barrack-building in 18C Ireland and Jamaica- Charles Ivar McGrath
14. The architectures of empire in Jamaica: the Irish legacy Louis P. Nelson
15. Designed in parallel or in translation?: The connected landscapes of Kelly's Pen, Jamaica and Westport, Co. Mayo - Finola O'Kane
16. Formations and Deformations of Empire: Maria Edgeworth and the West Indies - Claire Connolly
17. How the Irish became black- Natalie Zacek
18. 'Where are you actually from?': Racial issues in the Irish context - Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro

Index

Editors

Finola O'Kane is Professor in Architecture at University College Dublin.

Ciaran O'Neill is Ussher Associate Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin.