References in the consultas on Ireland in the Simancas archives continually remind the student of the larger background against which the invasion of 1601–2 took place. It was a background in which the emphasis insofar as Spanish foreign relations were concerned was on disengagement. But while Spain had concluded peace with France, sent out overtures to England, was seeking to extricate herself from the costly Dutch war and conducted negotiations even with Constantinople, she yet maintained a jealous care for her greatness. Thus war with France threatened to erupt over Savoy; Spain continued support to Archduke Albert, sovereign of the Netherlands, in his struggle against the United Provinces; she sought to support the emperor's eastern war against the Turk by attacking the Berbers in the Mediterranean; and she tried to extract better peace terms from England by creating a diversion in Ireland.

The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary interest to Charles, the negotiations absorbed much of the time and energy of the confederation and undoubtedly contributed to its eventual downfall.

The final Henrician policy towards Ireland, involving ‘surrender and regrant’ and overtones of conciliation and redress is a familiar part of Irish history. What actually happened to that policy in its early phase is not so familiar. In a paper setting forth the importance of Henry’s Irish policy Robert Dunlop felt obliged to say something concerning its fate and the reasons for its failure. Having rejected a religious explanation, or any ‘conflict between tribal and feudal ideas’, he placed the blame on the Irish chiefs themselves. While admitting that a weak central government was ‘unable to enforce its decrees without constantly appealing to the sword’, he stressed most that ‘the easy indifference with which the Irish accepted Henry’s plan was fatal to its success’. Had their chiefs been more willing to surrender some of their authority the policy, so well devised, would have succeeded. ‘Their inability or unwillingness to do so compelled the use of more drastic measures, and was the cause of all their subsequent misfortunes.’ Dunlop’s conclusions have an air of vagueness, and there were actually very concrete reasons, besides the general character of the Irish, why the policy did not achieve more immediate success. Those reasons are to be sought in Edward VI’s reign as it manifested itself in Ireland.

The study of the history of science has only within the last few decades attained the rank of an important field of enquiry for both scientist and historian. It was thus almost inevitable that, at first, attention should have been focused on the great and original thinkers like Boyle, Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. But this type of approach frequently results in the presentation of a distorted picture, for few men are geniuses, and these are not truly representative of their age. The Irish scientists of the late seventeenth Century, who ranged from the very able to the pedantically dull, are far more typical examples of contemporary natural philosophers than are Newton or Boyle.

In 1680, science in Ireland was still a rare and infrequent study, and it must be admitted that the country had fallen behind the rest of Europe not only in the natural sciences but also in almost all other intellectual disciplines.

The great Anglo-Irish historian, W.E.H. Lecky, was born in Dublin in 1838. He is best remembered for his volumes on Ireland and England in the eighteenth century (begun in the 1870s and completed in the 1890s). His European reputation had already been made with his History of the rise and inpuence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe (1865), and his History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).

A critical year for Dublin was 1685. It was the year that Charles II died and James II came to the throne. The twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign had brought stability, prosperity and expansion within a predominantly protestant framework. The death of Charles, the accession of his catholic brother James, and the recall of the great duke of Ormond appeared to mark the end of an era. It was a year of anxiety for protestants and of fluctuating hopes for catholics. It was a time of transition that was to be followed by the uninhibitedly partisan policy of Tyrconnell, by the Jacobite war, and by the protestant liberation after william’s victory at the Boyne.

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.

There is a sense in which the home rule debates of 1886 were less the climax of than a deviation from the logical and predictable development of Irish politics in the Parnellite period. Had home rule been achieved, no doubt all would have been changed, and an autonomous Irish parliament would have addressed itself enthusiastically to solving the country's social and economic problems. But in the absence of home rule these problems immediately resumed the centre of the stage and the chief of them, the settlement of the land question, became again the crucial issue in Anglo-Irish relations. For some people, indeed, it had remained the crucial issue even during the ‘home rule’ winter of 1885–6, when the position on the Clanricarde estates in Galway, already notoriously bad, perceptibly worsened and when pressure was brought to bear both upon the Irish National League and upon the parliamentary party itself to adopt a more warlike posture towards rack-renting and evicting landlords.

Contemporary printed sources for economic history begin to become numerous from the early eighteenth century. The wealth of this printed material as well as the survival of the rarer specimens of the literature only in scattered and in some instances unexpected locations make the task of the research worker or historian an arduous and time-consuming one. Moreover, except where there are separate chronological catalogues of collections it is difficult, especially in the larger libraries such as the British Museum and the National Library, Dublin, not to overlook many relevant items. A bibliography of this material was first projected by Henry Higgs as one of a series of companion volumes to his Bibliography of economics, 1751-1775, published in 1935. The volume recently edited by Mr Hansonl is a revision and expansion of the galley proof of Higgs’s unpublished volume for the period 1701-1750. Meeting a real need, it will be welcomed. Its aim is to ‘include every new English work on economic affairs’ in the first half of the eighteenth century. Its use will save researchers much laborious consultation of indexes, and will greatly facilitate the location of the rarer items, which are frequently available only in a single collection.

The first reliable statutory census of the population of Ireland was taken in 1821 and started the decennial series. An earlier census authorised by statute had been taken between 1813 and 1815. The results, however, were defective and neither printed nor presented to parliament. The causes or this failure air discussed below.

The first decennial census of Great Britain (taken in 1801) was a success, and a bill to take a single census of Ireland was introduced on 31 January 1806 ‘to assimilate the laws and regulations of Ireland to those of this country as far as it is just and expedient’. It was thrown out at the first readiilg. During the commons’ debate on the second census of Great Britain (taken in 1811), several members deprecated that Ireland had again been excluded and attributed this to ‘a species of timidity on the part of certain persons who were afraid even of letting themselves know the real amount of the inhabitants of the sister kingdom’. More probably, however, Ireland was omitted because of the formidable practical difficulties her inclusion would have presented. A second bill for a census of Ireland, which became law on 18 July 1812, made light of these difficulties or suggested how they might be overcome.

By no means the least of the obstacles which hinder a quantitative analysis of Irish agriculture prior to 1847 is the chaotic state of weights and measures. Successive statutes had been introduced in an effort to secure uniformity, but had little effect even in official quarters. Thus, although 5 Geo. IV c. 74 set up, as from 5 January 1826, the ‘imperial standard’ as the only standard measure of distance, area, volume and capacity, the Irish Post Office continued to use the Irish mile in its cancellations at least up to 1856, and used the same unit in its published list of distances. Variations in the stone, hundredweight and ton, together with non-standard grain measures, were declared illegal in Ireland as from I July 1835, but practice again lagged far behind the law.

In the absence of any comprehensive survey of the actual state of weights and measures in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians dealing with the period have tended to bypass the problem at the expense of ambiguity and inaccuracy.