Over the last decade many historians have been attempting to rectify the hegemonic Anglocentric interpretations of the Irish diaspora. Logically, most of this effort has concentrated on Irish emigration to early-modern Europe, especially on the Irish communities in France and Spain. In line with recent trends in the historiography of this diaspora, Thomas O’Connor’s Irish voices from the Spanish Inquisition: migrants, converts and brokers in early modern Iberia represents a movement away from the political and economic causes of Irish migration to the socio-cultural and religious aspects of the Irish expatriate communities. In the process he has thrown light on almost totally unknown sources relating to the lives of Irish immigrants in the early-modern Spanish empire, belonging to an institution not traditionally associated with Irish emigration. The author portrays the Spanish Inquisition not as a repressive and bloody Catholic Counter-Reformation institution, but instead as a pragmatic religious policing institution, fully integrated to the will of the Spanish monarch, that acted as a social integrator of foreigners.

Effectively, Irish voices from the Spanish Inquisition represents a series of collective insights into the socio-cultural and religious lives of Irish immigrants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The author shows that although the Inquisition had a strictly religious remit, its trial records also contain considerable socio-economic data. For similar reasons, certain Irish groups such as Old English merchants, and soldiers as converts, on the one hand, and Irish ecclesiastics as intermediaries, on the other, appear more often in the records.

The book is divided into three parts covering the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Part one is partly an introduction to the subject, and partly an account of the growing levels of contact between Irish immigrants and the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century. For the most part these were Old English merchants, such as Thomas Burke, who were under suspicion for having taken the oath of supremacy in England or Ireland while professing themselves as true Catholics in Spain. Many of these merchants argued that their apostacy was external and made under duress (p. 43). However, this would have made the inquisitors suspect ‘false conversions’ in much the same way as they would have viewed the conversions of the Moriscos. According to the teachings of Mohammed, they were permitted to conform to Catholicism in public while remaining Islamic in private.

Part two, which covers the seventeenth century, deals primarily with the Irish presence in Spanish America, and the role of the Irish as intermediaries in the Iberian Peninsula. The author outlines the strategies used by Irish intermediaries to achieve social integration, though not always successful as the case of James Mochory shows (pp 78–81). Overall, the well-integrated Irish were the exception rather the norm in Spain and Portugal during this century. The strong point of this section of the book is the material from Irish cases in the Inquisition in Spanish America. This demonstrates that Irish emigration to Spain’s colonies was earlier and more substantial than previously thought. The outcome of many of these Irish cases was conditioned by the usefulness of these individuals to the Spanish Crown. The culmination of this section is the author’s analysis of the figure of William Lamport, whom he manages to de-romanticise by showing how developments in courtesan, institutional and colonial politics effectively shaped and decided his fate.

The last section of the book, dealing with the eighteenth century, is the most interesting, fascinating and novel. O’Connor shows, that despite the Irish military presence being on the wane as the century progressed, Irish clerics did a ‘roaring trade in reconciliations and conversions’ among lapsed Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants who wished to serve in the armies of the Bourbon monarchy (p. 156). His work also points to the very fluid nature of religious identity at the time: immigrants moved from one Christian denomination to another with relative ease. The Inquisition played a fundamental role in ensuring the supremacy of Irish Catholic merchants as go-betweens in Spanish ports. The most interesting material is that relating to the almost totally unknown Irish artisan communities in and around Madrid during the first half of this century. Finally, the last chapter of the book gives interesting insights into the lives of Irish female immigrants, especially regarding confessional solicitation.

Irish voices from the Spanish Inquisition makes a very welcome addition to our knowledge of the Irish diaspora to Habsburg Spain and its empire. Covering a period of three centuries, it is weakest on the Iberian Peninsula in the seventeenth century and strongest on the eighteenth century, a situation presumably related to the nature of the surviving sources. My only criticism with the book is the author’s use of the term ‘naturalisation’ as it is not often clear when it is referring to the process of social integration, or when the legal process of naturalisation is meant. This gives the impression that substantially more Irish were granted naturalisation papers than was actually the case.