This is an impressive and satisfying book. It has ‘no pretence to being an exhaustive history of the Ulster plantation in all its aspects’ (p. ix) but it expertly examines the processes of conquest and colonisation in Ulster from the perspective of its indigenous population, and it seeks to ‘determine the temper of relations between native and newcomer in those decades of ostensible peace’ before 1641 (p. 7). In doing so it addresses a major subject in early modern Irish history that has been unduly neglected, and does so through meticulous research, sound judgement, originality, attention to its wider colonial context, and with real flair. It transforms our understanding of the colonisation of Ulster and, incidentally, raises important questions about the writing of Irish history in the shadows of the Troubles.

Dr Farrell observes that most of the existing literature concerning the plantation of Ulster, in common with studies of European colonial projects elsewhere in the world, evinces an unconscious tendency to adopt the perspective of the coloniser ‘rather than face the perspective of the indigenous peoples being invaded’ (p. 8). He notes that, all ‘European colonial powers constructed a legitimising narrative to justify their conquest of native peoples and the seizure of their lands’ (p. 10). Then he highlights examples of the use of language by modern historians, influenced by those colonial narratives that denigrate the culture and customs of the native peoples and represent the self-image of the colonisers as being somehow superior. The roll call of historians who have written about the colonisation of Ulster in that manner include T. W. Moody and Roy Foster, among others, though none is condemned more strongly than Debora Shuger for the uncritical acceptance of the ‘cant of conquest’ (p. 10).

In addition, this subject has been warped by academic historians engaged in ‘present-centred history’, driven by ‘the imperative to produce a history fit for the purpose of healing sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland’ (p. 287), what Nicholas Canny characterised as ‘a reconciliation-friendly version of Ireland's past’. Farrell notes that ‘revisionism’ in Irish historical studies focused overwhelmingly on ‘straw man arguments which few serious scholars actually hold’, while leaving other ideological positions, mostly Anglo-centric and/or unionist, ‘largely untouched’ (pp 290, 289). The result has been, ‘a revised view of colonial Ulster obscuring the violence inherent in colonisation’ (p. 290), which made the 1641 rebellion seem inexplicable (p. 287). Farrell, quite rightly, rejects history written with political agendas, whatever the intention underlying it.

Farrell's approach has been inspired by American scholars who have shown an interest in and sensitivity to the ‘Indian side’ of native-colonist encounters in North America. He deftly defends his thesis that Ulster was a colony, against those who would prefer not to acknowledge it as such, whether because of an assumption that colonisation only happened outside of Europe (p. 42), or because many northern Irish unionists are ‘uncomfortable’ with the term ‘colony’ (p. 286). He highlights many interesting parallels between the interactions between the English colonists and the native peoples of Virginia, New England and Ulster. He reminds us of the scale of the ethnic cleansing envisaged for Ulster by the British crown, illustrated with a stark map (p. 50). He explains why the result in Ulster did not match British intentions, pointing to the initial difficulties in attracting British settlers to Ulster but also the fact that the Ulster Irish did not suffer the demographic collapse such as occurred among native societies in North America exposed to diseases spread to them by the English.

In the past Canny and John McCavitt proposed that a combination of low population density and a high demand for tenants presented the Irish in Ulster with the opportunity to negotiate favourable conditions at the start of the plantation process. Farrell judges that any such ‘window of opportunity closed quickly’ (p. 184). He reveals how the Irish were progressively degraded economically through increases in rents which forced them onto marginal land on which they might try to scrape a living or made them landless. He reveals that many Irish tenants, desperate to remain on their land, were impoverished by being made to pay unaffordably high rents to the colonists (p. 182). One colonist observed in 1628 that half of the Irish had been reduced to stealing and begging (p. 278). Significantly, the Irish were systematically and deliberately excluded from skilled employment – they were tolerated only as sources of cheap labour and high rents (p. 196).

As well as being degraded economically, the Irish in Ulster were subject to the colonists’ arbitrary use of the English common law as a pretext to exploit them further, and keep them in subjection through arrests, fines and imprisonment. The Irish came to see ‘judicial process as little more than a kind of institutional violence’ (p. 189). At the same time the Irish were generally regarded with contempt by colonists who considered themselves superior to them. There was a lot less cultural exchange than revisionist historians have claimed. Farrell found that unequivocal ‘examples of colonists being able to speak Irish are in fact rare in the depositions from Ulster’ (p. 119), and it is ‘far more likely that the Irish were compelled to learn English than vice versa’ (p. 120). Farrell emphasises economic motivation for the stripping of the colonists in 1641, but the caption of the well-known woodcut showing naked Protestants who had been stripped by Irish rebels in strikingly modern attire suggests that it was motivated more by resentment at constant cultural disparagement: ‘savages upbraided them saying now are ye wilde Irish as well as wee’.

This book concludes that ‘colonial Ulster was a society riven by underlying tension and conflict’ and the Irish were very conscious of being dispossessed within living memory and of being progressively degraded ever since ‘by force and legal chicanery’ (pp 277–8). The outbreak of the 1641 rebellion was simply a ‘delayed reaction’ to an unfolding process of colonisation that promised only worse to come, and Farrell astutely compares it to similar responses among native peoples in North America who also underestimated the inherent ruthlessness of colonial régimes. The Irish, like the ‘Indians’, naively thought that they might find a reasonable accommodation with the colonists and the ‘concealment of enmity no doubt became a survival mechanism under these circumstances’ (p. 294). The year 1641 reflected a general despair among the Irish in Ulster of ever enjoying an equitable future in Ulster's colonial society.