Recent years have seen dramatic growth in the number of studies of the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War. Driven by the centennial of Ireland's revolutionary decade, Irish historians have used newly discovered sources and broader comparative frameworks to sharpen our understanding of the events of this transformative period. Gemma Clark's new monograph exemplifies the best of these trends.

Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War is based on Clark's close reading of hitherto underutilized sources: compensation claims filed in special courts set up by both the British and Irish governments after the Civil War. Focusing on cases from three Irish counties in the province of Munster (Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford—the first two active and the last less so), Clark uses the records to chart both the lived experience of violence and the ways that violence was linked to complex and shifting notions of religious and national difference.

Clark's book nicely underlines the often brutal intimacy of civil conflict in Munster. The vast majority of compensation claims were filed by Irish Protestants, and one of Clark's real strengths is her sophisticated treatment of the roles that sectarian sentiments played in what she terms “everyday” episodes of republican violence. Too often scholars portray sectarianism as a simplistic, all-or-nothing phenomenon. Clark clearly shows not only that many Protestants, rich and poor, were targeted simply because they were Protestant, but also that sectarian motivations coexisted and endlessly intermingled with a number of other local and national factors. For instance, following up on Fergus Campbell's work on the revolution in Galway, Clark emphasizes the continuing links between violence and land. In a particularly effective chapter on arson, she shows how republican activists used fire to effect land redistribution, settle local scores, and symbolically exorcise the British presence from the Irish countryside.

Another of the book's strengths is Clark's use of the broader, international literature on civil war violence to place Irish events in comparative context. Historians have long understood that conflicts in European states like Finland dwarfed the Irish case in scale and sheer brutality. Using the work of Stathis Kalyvas as her primary theoretical framework and a wide range of secondary scholarship on collective violence in continental Europe, Clark does this comparative work in much more systematic fashion than is typically seen in Irish scholarship. The result is a powerful and largely persuasive depiction of the Irish experience during the Civil War—one that nicely balances micro-level cruelty with a clear sense of the comparative limits and restraint of Irish violence. In a few instances, however, Clark's insights seem rushed, tantalizing but frustratingly brief and undeveloped. The most obvious case here is her potentially path-breaking work on sexual violence, an important subject introduced in six pages near the end of the monograph. That said, Clark's treatment of Irish events in their broader European context is sophisticated and generally productive—a model for future scholarship on the revolutionary decade.

While Clark's writing is clear enough, it fails to measure up to the book's high standards of archival research. There is simply no need for the explicit and self-referential signposting that plagues Clark's prose (e.g., “section 2a demonstrated”; “this book makes use of”). At the very least, one wishes that a stronger editorial hand had been used in a monograph of this quality. Still, I do not want to end this review on a negative note. This is an important and well-researched book that is a must-read for students of the Irish Revolution and of civil conflict more generally. Clark's innovative work on postwar compensation claims points to the central role that the toxic and intimate violence of the Irish Civil War played in the articulation of increasingly divergent British and Irish identities in the 1920s. The next decade doubtless will see continued growth in work on the history of violence in Ireland's revolutionary era. The scholars who pursue this research will be in debt to Gemma Clark for this thoughtful and provocative monograph.