The rapid growth in the Irish economy since 1995 has given rise to the sobriquet “Celtic Tiger.” Two consequences of this financial success have been the expansion in higher education and the noteworthy growth in academic publishing. Irish history has been a beneficiary of both developments, and there is now a substantial corpus of work on areas that were previously underresearched, such as women's history, the 1798 Uprising, and the Great Famine. However, Desmond Norton's study of landlords, tenants, and famine in the 1840s demonstrates that there is still much research to be carried out on this pivotal decade in the development of modern Ireland.

Land is central to understanding much about the Irish economy, society, and politics in the nineteenth century, and Irish landlords have generally been regarded in a negative light, especially in popular memory. Norton challenges some existing beliefs on landlord-tenant relations, emigration, land improvements before 1845, and estate management in Ireland. He thus opens up the debate on topics that have, to date, been little considered, including the poverty of landlords and improvements made by landlords. The work also offers many interesting insights into the Famine period as experienced by landlords rather than seen through the eyes of government officials, the media, or nationalist commentators.

The main sources used in this book are the papers of Messrs. Stewart and Kincaid, a firm of land agents based in Dublin. They acted on behalf of landowners and agents in counties Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Dublin, Kildare, Kilkenny, King's (now Offaly), Limerick, Longford, Mayo, Meath, Queen's (now Laois), Roscommon, Sligo, Tyrone, Westmeath, and Wicklow. Their clients included the Pakenham family, who held estates in Longford and Westmeath, and Lord Palmerston, who was the British foreign secretary and twice the British prime minister (in 1855–58 and in 1859–65). He owned estates in Sligo and Dublin and is remembered in many historical accounts as an uncaring landlord who forced a thousand tenants to emigrate during the Famine simply because he wanted to clear his estates. The poverty and misery of these emigrants when they arrived in Canada led to Palmerston being criticized in the Legislative Council of Canada. Norton, however, is less critical, suggesting that Palmerston's attitude to evictions hardened over the years as he came to regard land clearance as being necessary for the social improvement of Ireland. In general, Norton offers a more nuanced view of Irish landownership, suggesting that most of Stewart and Kincaid's clients were progressive, improving landlords. Interestingly, although Daniel O’Connell was not one of their clients, Norton proposes that the Liberator allegedly charged unusually high rents yet made no improvements to the estates for which he was responsible.

The Stewart and Kincaid papers, which are uncataloged, have been previously little used. They are in private ownership: in fact, many are now in Norton's personal possession. The utilization of this unusual source is both the main strength and the main weakness of Norton's study. The strength is that Norton's close reading of this correspondence provides a fresh insight into the complex and underresearched areas of landlord-tenant relations during the fraught years of the Famine. It is particularly to be welcomed for the fresh insights that it offers on the role of middlemen and on landlord involvement in emigration and evictions. Norton also adds a further layer of complexity to the debate on Famine evictions (or “ejectments”) by introducing the concept of “quasi-evictions,” whereby a tenant voluntarily surrendered his land in order, possibly for a small financial payment, to avoid formal eviction. By doing so, Norton highlights the complex relationship between eviction and emigration and the danger of judging landlords who assisted their tenants to leave Ireland. He also suggests that many historians (myself included) have previously overrelied on eviction statistics provided by the Irish Constabulary and so have grossly underestimated the numbers involved.

A weakness of this publication is that the high reliance on one source means that at times the focus of the study is narrow; more contextualization would have been useful in some places, especially for readers who are less familiar with this period of Irish history. Also, the structure of the book, looking at different estates in different chapters, while good in terms of clarity, can make the text appear repetitive. However, the maps are useful for the reader, and they are exemplary in their clarity. Notwithstanding the reservations outlined above, this book is a valuable addition to the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. It is especially valuable for the fresh perspectives that it offers on the role played by landlords during Ireland's Great Famine, particularly in regard to evictions. This book suggests that despite the growth in Famine studies since 1995, there is still much that remains unknown or misunderstood.