This collection of essays comes out of the whirlwind of commemorative conferences and seminars held to mark the 400th anniversary of the Ulster Plantation. Most of those events approached the Plantation from an English-Irish comparative perspective and were largely concerned with matters of late Tudor and early Stuart colonialism. By contrast, the conferences that produced these papers placed the settlement in the context of Irish-Scottish relations spanning more than two centuries. As such, the papers produced here—representing a small selection of papers originally given at conferences in Glasgow and Belfast—offer an excellent broadening of perspective beyond the usual historiographic tale of English monarchical centralization and Gaelic collapse.
The essays appear alphabetically by author. A chronological arrangement may have been preferable as it would have allowed the reader to chart more easily change and continuity in Scottish-Irish interactions in Ulster over the period covered here. Alison Cathcart’s essay demonstrates that the Plantation was not simply the triumph of a civilizing London over its Celtic other. It was also in part the institutionalization of Scottish-Irish demographic patterns and power plays stretching back to at least the fifteenth century. Ciaran Brady focuses on the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign and argues that we must understand the local conditions obtaining in east Ulster before we can properly assess the region’s macropolitics. Hugh O’Neill’s rise to power is revealed as a product of the sorts of dynamics discussed by Cathcart, namely, of realpolitik jostlings between Ulster ruling families and resident Scots. O’Neill’s fears of a sociological world turned upside down—he was desperate to protect elite privilege—is an essential addition to typical depictions of him as Catholic warrior or Machiavelli.
Two essays address the war years of the 1640s. Robert Armstrong demonstrates the extent to which Presbyterianism took on strong, local variation in Ulster and was not merely beholden to Scottish versions. Scottishness, here, speaks with a strong regional dialect. Padraig Lenihan criticizes Ormond’s view of the Covenanters. He states that Ormond mistakenly sought to attack the Crown’s Presbyterian problem in Ulster rather than striking at the heart and Scotland proper. This was a mistake, as the Presbyterian presence was not as strong in Ulster as imagined and thus did not warrant the attention it received. Though a miscalculation, it was one that revealed much about the anxieties and obsessions of those in power.
David Menary and Michael Perceval-Maxwell tackle the Commonwealth and Restoration, respectively. According to Menary, Commonwealth officials were as nervous of Ulster Presbyterians as Ormond had been the previous decade. Thus, they floated a plan of transporting them out of Ulster-Menary looking specifically at resettlement plans for Kilkenny, Waterford, and Tipperary. But this is a tale of softening views: the government eventually came around to thinking these northern dissenters were more a pacifying than destabilizing force in the north and so the transplantation schemes were left to wither quietly away. Perceval-Maxwell contends that Charles II’s administration treated Scots in Ulster more harshly than those north of the Tyne. But here Ormond is shown to have learned his lesson that the Scots were not worth too great attention. Interestingly, the author argues, this angered the Scots government, which feared that leniency in Ulster made suppression of their own populist noncomformists more difficult. Here is the opposite of Cathcart’s tale, one in which an Ulster tail wags a Scottish dog.
Ray Gillespie’s sweeping essay on identity carries the story from the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth. This is an argument for contingency in the formation of a Presbyterian identity, for these settlers were not simply Scots in a new place. Rather it was the local effects of the covenant and the synod of Ulster, with its fantasies of universality, that gave it its flavor. Ulster Presbyterian identity, therefore, was something forged only in the early forties but that would maintain its unique character moving forward. Scottishness is less the concern here than “Ulsterness,” and Scotticization shown to be something of a red herring.
These are very technical articles and may not read well for the nonspecialist. This in itself is no criticism. If we are to understand the Ulster Plantation outside the limiting binaries of contests between (imagined) English civility and Gaelic barbarity, then this is precisely the sort of specialist research needed. Nevertheless, the tendency across the essays of not defining or explaining important terms, names, and events will make this hard going for the uninitiated. Moreover, Irish-language material is left untranslated. I am all for seeing scholars learn the vernaculars of their subjects, but given the lamentable state of Irish/Scots literacy among those practicing in the field, it seems unhelpful, even polemical, not to offer at least a basic rendering. Curious too is the casual use of the term “nation” in some of the essays. In a collection that is so promiscuously border-crossing and that provocatively asks the reader to rethink assumptions about what defines “Irish,” Scottish,” or “English,” it seems unfortunate that the authors at times resort to the shorthand of “nation” and all the ethnopolitical simplifying it carries.
A bit of work on the reader’s part to learn unfamiliar terms, however, will be well worth the effort. For this is a powerful group of essays and worth wrestling through if one wishes to understand something of the complexity of the origins, lived reality, and consequences of that largest and most (in)famous of “British” forced settlements in Ireland: the Ulster Plantation. What would be truly exciting—and a tribute to the scholarly rigor and conceptual independence on display here—is if some of the lessons of this collection could work their way into textbooks and the common consciousness more generally.
