Ever since the pioneering work of D. B. Quinn on Ireland’s role as a testing ground for English colonisation of the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comparative studies of the two regions have abounded. Audrey Horning’s new book, Ireland in the Virginian Sea offers one of the more substantial recent contributions to the field. In scope it comprises a comparative analysis of English – and subsequently British – colonial activity in Ireland and Virginia roughly between 1550 and 1650. The first two chapters of this four-chapter book examine the development of colonisation in Tudor Ireland (pp 17–100) and England’s initial encounters with the Powhatan natives of Virginia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (pp 101–75). The great majority of Horning’s readers will either be more familiar with early modern Ireland or colonial Virginia and consequently this contextualisation is understandable, though it is perhaps excessively drawn out in places. However, the core of Ireland in the Virginian Sea is offered in chapters three and four. These respectively offer a comparative study of the history and archaeology of the Ulster Plantation (pp 177–270) and the Jamestown Colony (pp 271–352) in the early seventeenth century. Particularly welcome is Horning’s in-depth analysis of the plantation of Londonderry from Thomas Phillips’s settlement of Coleraine in the immediate aftermath of the Nine Years’ War through to the settlements erected by the London Companies as part of the formal Ulster Plantation. By examining both the historical contexts in which these evolved and the material remains of them from an archaeological perspective Horning provides one of the more substantial studies of the Londonderry Plantation conducted to date (pp 194–239). Equally, the particularly ample coverage of the Jamestown colony in the less studied years after the Powhatan uprising of 1622 is welcome (pp 313–52).

Horning’s adoption of the comparative model is somewhat paradoxical as her argument throughout is that it is inaccurate to suggest that Ireland provided a testing ground for English colonisation of the New World. For instance, she argues that cultural understandings between natives and settlers in the two regions were vastly different, the English and Irish having co-habited in Ireland since the twelfth century, while the natives of Virginia and the English would have found each other much more profoundly alien. Horning is largely correct to identify in this manner how the similarities between the two regions as arenas of early modern colonisation have perhaps been overstated. English settlers were indeed more familiar with Ireland than Virginia in the early seventeenth century, while the Irish were certainly much more familiar with the English than the natives of Virginia were. But there is a danger in thinking that this familiarity or lack thereof was monolithic, and doing so elides some of the complexities of these interactions. For instance, English army captains with years of experience of Ireland could recommend destruction of crops as a weapon of war in Ireland. But those less familiar with the country could express genuine surprise that arable farming was practised in parts of Ulster. Thus while some English visitors to Ireland were far more knowledgeable of the country than they would have been of Virginia, for others both regions were strikingly alien. Nevertheless by highlighting the many broad divergences between the two regions Horning provides a useful corrective to studies which place too great an emphasis on the parallels between English and British activity in regions such as Ulster and Virginia in the early seventeenth century.

Elsewhere Horning’s book has come in for criticism for minimising the degree to which English interactions with Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked by conflict and the overthrow of a native class by aggressive newcomers. This, it has been argued, is in order to have Ireland in the Virginian Sea conform to a reconciliation-friendly version of Irish history in Northern Ireland. This is certainly an aspect of Horning’s study, featuring in both the lengthy introduction and conclusion (pp 1–16, 353–67). The aggression which characterised Irish and English interactions in early modern Ireland is, therefore, rather muted. For instance Horning points out that, unlike in Virginia where native land rights were given little consideration, ‘the Ulster Plantation was … approved and implemented by the Irish Parliament, not by the English Parliament as an invading colonial power’ (p. 12). Yet to suggest that this legitimised the plantation ignores the packing of the Irish parliament from the late sixteenth century onwards with New English arrivistes whose agenda was inherently colonial. Thus, the ratification of the Ulster Plantation by the Irish parliament really stood for little when assessing the legitimacy of the initiative or the impact it had on the displaced. However, to suggest that these oversights pervade Horning’s book or detract from the central comparative study is perhaps to do it a disservice.

Many will find these aspects of Horning’s interpretation somewhat disagreeable. But ultimately the substance of Ireland in the Virginian Sea lies in the comparative study of plantation-era Ulster and colonial Virginia. Horning’s work adds significantly to our understanding of the history of the two regions, the material culture of both and how the two overlapped and diverged at the time. It will be required reading for scholars of plantation-era Ulster and colonial Virginia.