This is an impressive collection of thirty-two scholarly papers delivered at a five-day conference held in 1998 to commemorate the bicentennial of the 1798 Irish rebellion. The collection, as a whole, reviews the historiography of the events and the larger Irish “problem” leading up to complicated 1790s, and provides new details and perspectives on the events and how they were perceived by contemporaries. Most significantly, it revises more than it affirms the textbook version of Theobold Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen's hope to transform Ireland to a nonsectarian democratic republic with the assistance of the French. The basic information is everywhere: after successfully eluding the British blockade off the island, the French appeared to assist an Irish revolt. The United Irishmen, armed with thousands of volunteer soldiers, promised to restore ancient Irish traditions. The Dublin government responds to this threat with militia and volunteer yeoman armies who seize on this opportunity to attack the United Irishmen and dismantle any trace of civilian opposition to British rule. The leaders of the United Irishmen are arrested and transported, but Irish supporters respond with localized rebellions. The first is in Wexford in the south east, where Catholics sought to destroy Protestant control. The “Wexford Boys” are not aided by the French and are crushed. The Dublin-based government handily puts down the mainstay of rebellion in the city, and Wolfe Tone commits suicide in prison following his conviction. Thus, this early attempt at nonpartisan cooperation—a fragile union of reform-minded Irish Catholics and Protestants—ends, and sectarian suspicion and hatred—and the “Irish Problem”—enter a new and disturbing phase.

This volume, nearly eight hundred pages in length, reveals these universal assumptions as either incorrect, overly simplistic, or part of a larger, more complex history. The volume presents the ideas, themes, and commentaries that both inform and alter the way in which popular protest, the United Irishmen specifically, and religious sectarianism generally, can be understood in new ways. The volume is extraordinary in its complexity and completeness. The essays range from ideological reexamination of the state of Irish political consciousness to painstakingly detailed reexaminations of local events that have been studied and restudied with every new generation of scholars.

The introductory set of essays lays the foundation for reevaluation of the events of 1798. The reader is presented with a new model of Irish radicalism, the roots of which sprang from the ancient constitutions that established the very concepts of republicanism and democracy and that grew direct ideological links to Jacobitism, the American Revolution, Jacobinism, and finally, the Irish response to its colonial standing. The Irish Catholic poor, it is argued, had their own national and political consciousness at the time of the risings of 1798 and that consciousness easily translated, as events deemed necessary, into a political consciousness. Based on religion, race, land, and culture, a singular identity of Irishness rose, easily merging with political radical ideologies so that Gaelic tradition and Rousseau's concept of the noble savage became linked. Likewise, the Jacobite argument that freedom and liberty were based on legitimacy could easily move from the Scottish crown to the propaganda verses of colonial liberation coined by the United Irishmen. Both the French and the British, it is argued, underestimated the sophistication of this consciousness and its application into armed action.

The next several essays reexamine the actual rebellions and military responses in the localities: Munster, Kilkenny, and Ulster and Dublin, some of which draw some surprising conclusions that add much to the revision of 1798. For example, economic downturn and an increase in Catholic freeholders on the 1797 voting rolls was responsible for raising sectarian tensions in the generally placid south Munster areas. United Irishmen leaders, men from Munster originally, though no longer residents, exploited these political fears in an attempt to organize support. The disaffection represented in the disturbances, however, does not seem to demonstrate any clear ideological link with the general campaign against Britain. Additionally, weaknesses in the outlying counties undermined early rebel successes. While the initial hope that the July uprising in Wexford would support strategic assistance in the midlands, failed communications with Dublin-based rebels caused them to fizzle. The United Irishmen in Dublin played a surprisingly small role in any of these uprisings, as early information given by informants concerning the rebellions allowed for the Dublin administration to occupy strategic points in the city and suppress activity.

There are several articles that address the wide range of experiences, perspectives, and memories associated with the risings. Not surprisingly, many of these deal with the sectarianism in Ireland and the political motivations leading up to 1798. What becomes obvious is how much of this was interpretation and falsification done on the part of contemporaries and early historians of the risings in order to give some sort of historical legitimacy to the sectarian divisions. The conflict shaped events and attitudes that followed. For example, Sir Richard Musgrave, MP for Linsmore, penned his eyewitness account of the rising, branding the Catholics as butchers in an attempt to draw all attention away from the virulent activity of Protestant ministers attacking Catholic rebels in Dublin. Emerging links between Irish yeomanry, the Volunteers, and secret Masonic societies, particularly in the Armagh region, prompted socioeconomic responses in the form of Irish Catholic organization. Violence in County Kildare during and after the rising failed to alienate moderate Protestant Mary Shackleton Leadbetter, who suffered personal attacks and great losses during the rising, as reflected in a careful reading of the letters she sent her daughter describing the tragic events. R. R. Madden, born in 1798, produced an eleven-volume history of the 1790s and the United Irishmen, emphasizing a higher moral account of events, and a general rehabilitation of the rebels using personal memoirs to rearticulate the just cause in rebelling against bad government and bigotry at the hands of the British. Popular memory offered competing traditions in the form of “Paddy Roarke” among Catholic nationals versus the failed risings as part of the longer nineteenth-century political platform of the “liberal Protestant” success in securing peace and prosperity within the British empire. New ways of viewing old sources and traditional ways of looking at untapped reserves of information piece together a diverse and rich picture of events associated with the risings.

The remainder of the volume provides an introduction to some other ways in which the risings had a direct or an indirect impact on how historians understand the larger picture of Irish history and Ireland's place in a more global history of politics in the nineteenth century. There is some very interesting work suggesting that the legal work that followed the rising did more to polarize the Irish than the rebellion itself. The Kilmainham Treaty provided little long-term closure to open wounds, as its ad hoc nature allowed both sides to use its advantage in appeasing supporters. Whether prisoners were “transported” or “emigrated” of their own will, was controversial for some time to come. The new laws imposed upon Ireland also helped to further divide rather than unite former combatants. The Suppression of Rebellion Act of 1799 and others soon enacted expanded both the powers of the courts and the broad interpretation of law enforcement. What Irish judges did and how they enforced the law played no small part in driving a wedge between Catholics and the authority they faced with the 1801 Act of Union. A strong case can be made that renewed vigor among Catholic nationalists grew from a sense of powerlessness that could only be alleviated by a Catholic and a lawyer, namely, Daniel O’Connell.

The impact of the risings was felt abroad and several concluding essays demonstrate that the risings took place in a larger framework of republican activities that spread from Botany Bay to the United States. The “Green Atlantic” brought the story and just causes of 1798 forward to 1804 revolt in Castle Hill, New South Wales, as well as the wave of United Irish émigrés who fought the British on new terms: as part of the United States military in the War of 1812.

Detailed and comprehensive, 1798 is a tour de force of historical scholarship and adds much to the historiographical debates on the causes of the rebellions and their place in contributing to the nineteenth-century “Irish Problem” and its widening gaps between religious, national, and socioeconomic groups on both islands. Seventeen ninety-eight has had a long-term impact on the political and religious consciousness of Irish émigrés and their adopted homelands, and the attention the year's events have received is well justified.