Using Anglo-Irish attempts to define and defend their civil rights, Neil Longley York demonstrates how political ideology is played out in a social context. His study begins with seventeenth-century expressions of Anglo-Irish grievance and proceeds, via an examination of patriot writings, to the union of the British and Irish parliaments in 1800. The author traces the development of an Irish constitutional tradition, which he sees as nationalistic and revolutionary, from its origin in seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic sources and analyzes the impact of this tradition on Irish political institutions and on Ireland's place in the eighteenth-century British imperial system. He ... Read morealso shows how Irish Catholics helped to articulate a constitutional tradition that is normally thought of as originating with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Thus, for York, the 1643 Argument of Patrick Darcy, a Catholic, deserves as prominent a place in the emergence of Irish constitutionalism as William Molyneux's more famous 1698 Case of Ireland Stated.

The author's comparison of the Anglo-Irish to their American contemporaries allows him to put the Anglo-Irish problem into a larger context and to ask questions that Irish specialists have tended to pass over. That the Anglo-Irish talked the same constitutional language as their Revolutionary American cousins while pursuing different objectives is, according to York, a reminder that constitutional disquisition cannot be separated from social and political context. This is a notion rarely touched on by Irish historians but frequently explored at length by specialists in Revolutionary American history.

This engaging study will prove especially useful to Irish studies specialists--particularly those interested in eighteenth-century Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, to students of British political and intellectual history, and to anyone interested in constitutional history presented in a socio-political context.

Neil Longley York is an associate professor of history and past director of the American studies program at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Mechanical Metamorphosis: Technological Change in Revolutionary America (1985) and editor of Toward a More Perfect Union: Six Essays on the Constitution (1988).

One of the most rewarding books on eighteenth-century Ireland published in the last generation.--Gerard OÆBrien, Magee College, University of Ulster