David Brown's study of the Adventurers for Irish Land, Empire and Enterprise, represents a significant intervention in mid-seventeenth-century British developments and will be essential reading for those concerned with a range of fields including Irish history, of course, but just as significantly the War of the Three Kingdoms, early imperialism, economic history, and Britain's expanding role in global trade including slavery. In this meticulously researched work, Brown argues confidently for an even greater appreciation of the deeply linked relationship between these areas, a relationship driven by the Adventurers. Their relentless pursuit of profit and land in Ireland, Brown demonstrates, ultimately led them to much greater roles in a period of multiple revolutions as they came to monopolize and control English and international trade, local government and militias, parliamentary politics and finances, military finance and supply, and even the War of the Three Kingdoms.

Formed in early 1642 and centered at Grocer's Hall, the Adventurers were a distinctly Puritan group with ties to Calvinist circles in London and a particularly close association with Robert Rich, earl of Warwick. Though the group ultimately acquired more than 1,000 members, who invested in amounts ranging from £3 to £1,300 (listed in the appendix), they were dominated by a core group of twenty. Many of the investors were merchants, but the more powerful members, notably Maurice Thomson, also obtained significant offices that allowed them to hold an astounding degree of influence over governmental policy. Thomson was instrumental in formulating the Navigation Act of 1651, for example, described by Brown as a “complete victory” for the Adventurers (179). Brown concludes that such domination of international trade, no less than parliamentary and military finance, ushered in a fiscal revolution that also laid the foundation for the nature of British imperial policy thereafter. The Adventurers likewise became an imposing force in the theater of war, providing and controlling much of the financing behind the War of the Three Kingdoms. To cite but one pertinent example, Adventurers contributed significantly to the raising of £80,000 for parliamentary forces for the battle of Naseby, a turning point in their fortunes as leaders of the New Model Army now promoted Adventurer interests while the Adventurers in return continued to provide the Army with finances and supplies in a “new alignment of commercial interest” with the military (144).

Ireland's fate was also controlled by the Adventurers, Brown argues, who were responsible for a critical development in the relationship between Britain and Ireland: the end of plantation Ireland and the beginning of Ireland's place within the larger British imperial system (229). The scheme for the Adventurers’ project was first proposed by the earl of Cork to the earl of Warwick in the months following the 1641 Rising in which he “recommended total conquest” and “the complete removal of Irish Catholics from Ireland” (64). Subsequently formulated as the Adventurers Act of 1642, policy for Ireland now departed from previous plantation models into a colonial model “that relied on private enterprise to conquer and exploit each new colony,” borrowing from models of colonial conquest and governance elsewhere rather than building on earlier models and policy for control of Ireland (64–65). Grasping the opportunity afforded by the 1641 Rising as “a once-in-a-generation financial windfall in the form of Irish land” (89), the Adventurers would go on to fund, supply and steer the war in Ireland as well. Their aggressive pursuit of private profit over state objectives led them to prolong the war in Ireland, resulting in a war there characterized by “annihilation and plunder” (99). The Adventurers, for instance, lobbied against parliamentary peace negotiations with the Irish Confederates for fear of losing out on land in Ireland and would later come into conflict with Oliver Crowell over distribution of Irish land in spite of their earlier lucrative association with the New Model Army, in the end “gaming the lottery” to acquire their desired land (203).

Brown's study is organized chronologically in a groundbreaking and compelling narrative that contributes significantly to this period's developments and fundamentally to the later course of British colonial policy and practice. Attention to the role of such individuals as the earl of Warwick, John Pym, Denzil Holles, and Sir John Temple within the context of their relationships to Irish affairs and the Adventurers’ control over policy and finance also certainly sheds new light on these well-known figures. Lesser-known figures, such as Maurice Thomson, emerge into the limelight at the forefront of this period's events. Much of the Adventurers’ long-term success was driven by Thomson, whose acquisition of “enormous riches” was underpinned by an “instinct for political opportunism” (230) that steered the group through this tumultuous period of shifting alliances as Thomson negotiated with Charles I, Parliament, and Oliver Cromwell and ultimately for the return of Charles II. Charles's gratitude was evident not only in a personal pardon for Thomson, a pardon that “places him at the heart of the efforts to bring about the restoration,” but also, Brown asserts, in the Act of Oblivion, which “could not have been more tailor-made to the Adventurers’ demands, and might as well have been drafted by Thomson himself” (219–20). Thomson's financial and political acumen would lead him, via the Adventurers and their quest for profit, to rise to a supremely outsized and unprecedented role in British, Irish, and indeed global history.