Historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Irish popular politics are hampered by the elusive nature of the surviving evidence. In 1922. during the Irish Civil War, Free State forces shelled the Four Courts, which housed the Irish Public Record Office, and destroyed large swathes of official English-language records (for information on attempts to recreate this archive digitally see Beyond 2022: Ireland's Virtual Record Treasury, https://beyond2022.ie/). Thus, Irish historians are deprived of the type of sources that have been richly mined by historians of popular politics in other regions. To further complicate matters, the vast majority of contemporaries spoke Irish. Their political views mainly survive in Irish-language poetry that was composed for performative purposes. Such Irish-language expressions of popular outlooks were separate to, but not independent of, broader Anglo-Britannic cultures, meaning that historians face considerable cultural and linguistic barriers when dealing with the historical record. It is within this evidential context that Timothy D. Watt's book Popular Protest and Policing in Ascendancy Ireland, 1691–1761 must be placed.

The first section deals with policing. Watt stresses the limits of power that hampered the nascent Protestant Ascendancy's authority. Attempts made in 1715 to empower judges to execute those guilty of rioting in groups of twelve or more people were rejected by the Irish parliament. They believed that, as in England, juries would be reluctant to use such harsh measures. Similarly, Protestant authorities in Connaught required the cooperation of their Catholic tenants and neighbors and were largely unwilling to upset this delicate social balance. Watt's discussion of local militias and irregular forces highlights the lack of funding and strategic thinking that hampered the attempts of the Protestant Ascendancy to protect its Protestant subjects. Despite this difficulty, as noted by Watt, there was a sustained campaign to build army barracks across Ireland, which helped to maintain order and to ensure that functionaries of the state, most notably tax collectors, could operate. In regions beyond their control, others served these functions, such as John Johnson of the Fews, a bounty hunter who captured local tories in south Armagh and allegedly acted with impunity.

The second section shifts focus to the “crowd.” In an urban context, Watt details how journeymen societies used the threat of what Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” to negotiate better pay and conditions (161). But it is Watt's work on protest in rural Ireland that is the most fascinating. The colonial authorities lacked sufficient revenue and were heavily reliant upon tax collectors. Their attempts to exercise authority sparked episodes of rural violence of which relatively little is known; this historiographical gap has been filled by Watt's detailed analysis of the minute books of the Irish revenue commission, now housed at The National Archives (Kew). Grievances with the regime's burgeoning revenue stream stretched across the religious, political, and socioeconomic divides; almost all groups engaged in smuggling, while Seán Ó Gadhra excoriated the range of taxes imposed, claiming it included a “nose tax [and] an arse tax” (113).

Historiographically, Watt attempts to find middle ground between those who argue that Irish politics is best understood either as a colonial framework and those who see it as part of the broader ancien régime. This is achieved through a greater consideration of the perspective of ordinary Irish people. This is a complex topic, however, that requires more detailed engagement with Irish-language sources. Ó Gadhra's poem, for example, evoked generations of poetic complaints about English taxes, law, and colonization. The most well-known example of this is Seán Ó Conaill's “Tuireamh na hÉireann” (ca. 1650s–1670s), a key poem that shaped contemporary Irish mentalités throughout the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the perspective of exiled Irish families provides a useful vantage point. Those left behind had to delicately negotiate their participation within the new state, while those who fled to France, Spain, and beyond were under less restraint. T. O. McLoughlin's work on surviving petitions from expatriate Irish people in Bordeaux sheds further light on this (“A Crisis for the Irish in Bordeaux: 1756,” in Nations and Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Context, ed. Michael O'Dea and Kevin Whelan [1995], 129–45. They claimed that they fled to France to avoid being coerced into British service or the oppressive code of penal laws in place against Catholics. Similarly, Irish merchants were quite circumspect in their letters home for fear of drawing trouble from the colonial authorities on their families, as captured in surviving correspondence from 1757 edited by Louis Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas Truxes (The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad [2013]. Such anecdotal evidence is not intended to offer an exhaustive study but indicates the potential of further exploration. It is a pity that Watt did not extend his analysis to include more Irish-language sources (even those available in translation) and the perspectives of expatriates. Nonetheless, this is a vibrant study that sheds new light on the nature of popular protest, provides groundbreaking work on rural violence, and offers new perspectives on the relations between dominant and subordinate groups in eighteenth-century Ireland.