Echoing the prioritization of the Anglo-Irish nexus in the revisionist as well as nationalist narratives of Irish history, there have been few studies of the history of ideas with an Irish focus and still fewer attempts to locate them in their European context. This is one of the many attractions of James Stafford’s pioneering investigation of political thought in and about Ireland spanning “the age of revolutions.” His engagements with a sequence of largely familiar Irish, British, and European political economists, philosophers, politicians, and commentators who directly engaged with or who employed “the case of Ireland” to address issues of empire, political economy, and political order are generally precise and insightful. More importantly, as well as thinking on the condition of Ireland, they provide a set of perspectives that, by placing Ireland in the context of the debates on Europe’s “British problem,” demonstrate that Ireland mattered in the larger debate on the merits of British and French models of state.

This was not the case in the early eighteenth century. Prompted by the conviction that they possessed the same commercial and constitutional rights as Englishmen, their urtext, and the work that provides Stafford with his title, was William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland. Published in 1698, this enduringly influential work was prompted by the intensification of the mercantilist restrictions that already bound Ireland’s right to trade. Since Irish Protestants felt entirely justified then in imposing a body of confining legislation (the Penal Laws) on the majority Catholic population, it was inevitable, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, that the emerging “Enlightenment critique of empire” (the subject of Chapter 1) highlighted the negative economic consequences of Britain’s multiplicity of mercantilist regulations as well as the Penal Laws. Stafford’s exploration properly commences with this emerging critique, ventured in Ireland by Charles O’Conor and Edmund Burke who highlighted the negative economic (as well as other) consequences of the Penal Laws; in Britain by David Hume, Josiah Tucker, and Adam Smith, whose point of departure was the negative commercial implication for the British Empire of the mercantilism; and in France by Montesquieu, who drew attention to what he identified as the harshness of Britain’s imperial control of its dependencies. It is a testament to the acuity of his analysis that Stafford’s engagement with each author is incisive as well as apposite. One can observe that the criticism of mercantilism he attributes to Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker would be deepened if he also addressed the mid-century economic writings of Malachy Postlethwayt and Mathew Decker, since, as well as favoring dilution of mercantilist regulation, they were earlier advocates of an Anglo-Irish union. This reservation notwithstanding, Stafford’s excavation of Smith’s thinking on Ireland is a model of its kind. It might have been still more impactful if the author had linked it to the existing literature on the origins of the Irish Act of Union and to the increasing political appeal of the integration of Britain and Ireland, but this is not a strong criticism of an account of political economic discourse in the third quarter of the eighteenth century that sparkles with originality and insight. It also anticipates what is another strong feature of this study—its reengagement with the impact of The Wealth of Nations on political thinking when the Anglo-Irish connection was dangerously loosened by the sequential concession to Ireland of free trade (1780) and legislative independence (1780) (Chapter 2). Stafford’s account of William Pitt’s attempt to mitigate their implications by linking Britain and Ireland in 1785 in a reciprocally binding “commercial arrangement” rehearses a familiar narrative, however. Its rejection by both Irish Patriots and traditionally minded British economic and political interests meant that the Anglo-Irish nexus was left vulnerable to disruption, which is what happened in the 1790s when, inspired by the example of revolutionary France, Irish radicals developed their own commercial programme.

Stafford’s analysis of political thinking in Ireland in the 1790s is illustrative of the value of his approach, since as well as bringing a new dimension to the thinking of leading United Irishmen (his analyses of Wolfe Tone and Arthur O’Connor are particularly impressive), he addresses “the position Ireland was coming to occupy in the European imagination” (103). This thinking was largely hostile to Britain, in keeping with the negative perspective that prevailed on the continent. Irish radicals took an opposite perspective. They perceived that France “represent[ed] a new kind of empire” (137), one to which they looked for inspiration and protection. This was not to be, of course, as Britain affirmed its control over Ireland when it resorted to a legislative union in 1800. Stafford’s arresting characterization of the Union as “the triumph of a counter-revolutionary iteration of Enlightenment: the translation of the sceptical ‘science of man’ developed by the Scottish philosophers into an imperial art of government” at a moment of “revolutionary pressure” (171) makes sense in this context. It also echoes the conservative European perspective articulated by the Prussian diplomat, Friedrich Gentz, who advocated state consolidation to counter the power of revolutionary France.

If this is a valuable additional perspective on a measure that British and Irish historians of the Act of Union can profitably embrace, Stafford’s invocation of the negative perspective of the English demographer, Thomas Malthus and the statistician, Edward Wakefield (contra the optimistic expectation of Thomas Newenham) anticipates the economic problems that were to take precedence from 1815. This exposed the acute differences between the thrusting industrial model pursued in Britain and the comparable agrarian realms of Ireland and France, and between the thinking in these matters in each jurisdiction. Since this was a subject expertly addressed by R.D. Collinson Black more than half a century ago, Stafford’s account of this is less novel than his analyses of European commentators—Gustave de Beaumont, Jean-Charles Sismondi, and Georg Hegel—and the influence they had on the emergence, against the background of the Great Famine, of a demand for major land reform in Ireland such as had already been initiated in France in the 1790s. This was only to happen in Ireland in the future. But Stafford’s examination of how “the State of Ireland” was differently conceived provides an illuminating additional perspective.

The fact that Ireland was less central to the debate on Britain’s commercial and industrial relevance in the second half of the eighteenth century than it was in the first half of the nineteenth century is indicative of its mutability and changing character. It also suggests that further excavation will, by augmenting our knowledge of the comparative discourse grounded on “commerce, empire and the European order,” provide for a better understanding of the respective histories of Britain, France, and Ireland, which is reason enough to recommend it. And, if it is the case that this is not sufficient cause, readers are encouraged to engage with it for Stafford’s deft summative accounts of the prominent authors upon which this important essay in the history of ideas is built.