David Dickson. Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630-1830. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2005. xvii + 726 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-21180-6.
Reviewed by James Patterson (Department of History, Centenary College)
Published on H-Atlantic (July, 2006)
David Dickson’s Old World Colony is a masterful account of the socio-economic and political evolution of the
south Munster region, defined by the author as Counties
Cork, Kerry and the western half of Waterford, over a
two-hundred-year period. The era in question is a very
long eighteenth century beginning with the first Elizabethan efforts to plant “New English” Protestants in the
region in the 1580s and continuing to the eve of the Great
Famine.
vantageous social and legal status to “peacefully” occupy
as much as one third of the land by 1641. The highly
complex events of the Wars of Three Kingdoms (1641-52)
resulted in the notorious Cromwellian land settlement
that transferred ownership of as much as 50 percent of
the land in the region from Catholic Old English and Old
Irish to Protestant hands. The final act was the defeat
of the Irish Jacobites in 1692. With the passing of the
sectarian-based Penal Laws by the Irish Parliament between 1695 and 1709, Catholics in south Munster were
effectively barred from meaningful civic, corporate and
socio-cultural participation on both the regional and national levels. By 1703, only about a score of surviving
Catholic landowners remained in the entire region, and
the ensuing 130 years belonged to the Anglo-Protestant
landowning and mercantile elites.
This sizable study is divided into three primary sections. Part 1 describes the political evolution of the south
Munster region during the formative period of active colonization dating from the Desmond land confiscations
of the 1580s up to the establishment of the so-called
Protestant Ascendancy (1695-1709). Importantly, Dickson identifies the radical transfer of land that occurred
between the 1580s and 1690s as a colonial process, which
in turn brought about a dramatic economic transformation. After allowing that his work is a regional study
whose conclusions do not necessarily apply to the rest
of the island, Dickson firmly concludes that “by any definition the victors in the struggle for control of south
Munster were a colonial group” and “economic power in
the region (in terms of ownership of land and control of
wholesale trade) passed largely into the hands of these
migrant families…. This group unquestionably constituted a self-defined community with demonstrably colonial characteristics” (p. xii). The second phase of confiscations followed the Nine Years’ War, ending in 1601.
Yet contrary to the interpretations of many historians of
the period, Dickson finds that the long-term impact of
the confiscations on regional Catholics was a “visceral
antipathy to the New English and a legacy of dispossession” (p. 12). He also describes the little-known process
by which the New English planters manipulated their ad-
The commercialization of the regional economy is
a further key theme presented in this section. Here
again, the decisive event was the arrival of New English
colonists. In effect, by 1641 a highly commercialized market economy, featuring the export of wool and live cattle to the west of England, was firmly in place. Other
aspects of this transformation include the first efforts to
enclose land, the monetization of the regional economy,
and the rapid expansion of local market fairs. Contemporaneously, the 1620s and 1630s witnessed the departure
of the first elements of the eventually vast Irish diaspora,
and by the 1650s the Irish were a real presence in places
like Montserrat and Barbados. It is, perhaps, important to
note that the majority of these first emigrants to the New
World were New English planters. Alternatively, dislocated Catholics were already departing to France and
Spain, where they rapidly became a fixture as soldiers,
clergy, and merchants.
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Perhaps of greatest interest for this particular review, Dickson clearly delineates the impact of the economic integration of the south Munster region into the
broader Atlantic world. The initial phase of regional involvement in trans-Atlantic trade consisted of the movement of New World commodities, principally tobacco
and sugar, to Munster. In fact, by 1640 the port of Kinsale
in County Cork was the largest importer of tobacco in
Ireland. However, by 1664 Cork had largely supplanted
other regional ports, and, as Dickson notes, by 1700 the
city of Cork was “one of the great port cities in the Atlantic World” (p. 144). The key to Cork’s rise to prominence was its role in processing and then distributing the
produce of the south Munster region to the wider Atlantic world. In turn, the form taken by this trade was
dictated by English Parliamentary legislation. The Navigation Acts of 1663 and 1671 insured that Ireland could
not trade directly with English colonies or effectively engage in the re-export of colonial goods, while the Cattle
Acts of 1665 and 1667 blocked the previously lucrative
sale of live cattle to England. Ultimately, in 1699 the export of woolen cloth was banned. Thus “shaped” by English economic interest, south Munster increasingly focused on the production of three primary goods–salted
beef, butter and woolen yarn. The first two of these became great trans-Atlantic commodities, in turn, dramatically affecting the socio-economic evolution of the entire
region. Simply put, more and more land was dedicated to
pasturage for the cows on which the trade depended, and
less was available for tillage. Hence, those able to capitalize on the new market opportunities via the medium
of cattle rearing thrived, while others less fortunate were
increasingly marginalized.
throughout the region. With noteworthy clarity, then,
Dickson confirms the centrality of trans-Atlantic trade to
the economic development of south Munster. Yet, while
the opportunities created by participation in this transoceanic trade brought tremendous wealth to planters and
merchants on both sides of the Atlantic, it also helped
shape the fate of tens of thousands of Irish peasants. As
Dickson observes, land values in south Munster rose between five and six times between 1690 and 1810, largely
as a result of “real changes in the agrarian economy and
in the market for the region’s goods in the world outside”
(p. 83).
The brief second section of Old World Colony addresses the latent tensions which underlay the period of
the Protestant Ascendancy. Dickson successfully, albeit
indirectly, challenges the still prevalent historiographical
interpretation that views the period as one of equipoise
in which the bulk of the regional population accepted an
ancien regime. The third and concluding part of this work
is, in terms of political history, the most groundbreaking. Here, the author argues persuasively that the south
Munster region, or at least the City and County of Cork,
was heavily influenced by the phenomenon of Atlantic
revolutions. Dickson utilizes a broad range of primary
source material to establish the presence of the United
Irishmen in south Munster from 1793, when the society’s
first club was founded in Cork City. Moreover, a number of pivotal figures in the national movement were natives of the region. Efforts to politicize the population
of south Munster dated from the early as 1790s with the
publication of the radical Cork Gazette. Indeed, by 1796,
Dickson shows that the Republicans in Cork, unlike their
Dublin counterparts, turned their efforts to politicizing
the rural poor by distributing propaganda that fed on preexisting socio-economic and sectarian grievances. The
United Irishmen successfully merged traditional agrarian
concerns, over issues like tithes, with new radical concepts such as universal manhood suffrage (p. 468). In
reality, by the end of 1797, the region had a sizeable, wellorganized, and highly motivated cellular United Irish military structure in place: “in the first quarter of 1798, when
there was both leadership and optimism among Cork
United Irishmen, the movement did indeed represent a
formidable challenge” (p. 468). In summing up the political status of south Munster during these key years, Dickson affirms that “a robust revolutionary movement had
developed a military capability in the course of 1797; the
pivot was the Cork City organization…. It is irrefutable
that across at least half of Munster there was a high level
of popular disaffection evident by the early months of
The primacy of the Atlantic provisions trade to the regional economy is strikingly confirmed by statistical evidence. Already by 1680, south Munster shipped some 80
percent of its pastoral goods to the Caribbean, primarily
in the form of salted beef and butter, with the remainder going to northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.
In the second decade of the eighteenth century, French
sugar islands swelled the pre-existing trade to the English
colonies. A resultant, remarkable story is told: 50,00080,000 of the cattle raised each year in rural Munster was
moved to Cork City, where they were butchered, barreled
and placed on board ship. Transported, sometimes after
switching hands in France, across the Atlantic, the beef
was unloaded in places such as Martinique and Jamaica,
where it fed planter and slave alike. Completing this cycle, slave-produced sugar and tobacco made their way
back to Cork City and were distributed via market fairs
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1798…. We have seen that the circulation of printed propaganda from Cork and Dublin was most impressive and
not by any means confined to the urban Anglophone
world” (p. 472). Pointedly, then, the region failed to
rise in May 1798, not because of an absence of popular
enthusiasm, but because of the success of the government’s preemptive disarmament campaign that spring,
a heavy regional military presence, and the loss of vital
leaders on the eve of the rebellion. In fact, “five years
later when news of Robert Emmet’s Rebellion broke a
number of leading United Irishmen in the city were detained … there were grounds for suspicions” (p. 472).
real decline in wages. By 1830 most lived on an acre or
less and had no livestock except a pig, which was their
only tie to the market. Finally, the failure of earlier industrial efforts, coupled with the absence of coal deposits
in the region, insured that no substantial industrialization would occur in the region after the 1820s. Thus, the
overwhelmingly Catholic, rural underclass, described by
Dickson as the true proletariat of pre-famine Cork, was
by 1830 dangerously underemployed, devoid of alternative economic opportunity, living outside of the market
economy on less than 5 percent of the region’s land, and
utterly reliant on a single root crop for their existence.
Moreover, they constituted the absolute majority (over
Furthermore, Dickson offers an in-depth analysis of
60,000 of some 100,000 households in County Cork) of
the dramatic socio-economic transformations that oc- south Munster’s population. We know only to well the
curred in the region between 1770 and 1830. Underlying looming implications of all this. Dickson concludes the
these alterations was a demographic explosion on a scale book with an analysis of the means by which the Protesunparalleled in early modern western European history. tant Ascendancy was undermined by 1830. Along with
From mid-century, south Munster’s population rose from
the familiar story of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Emanroughly a third of a million people to 1.1 million in 1831.
cipation movement, which ultimately succeeded in 1829,
Dickson attributes this rise primarily to “a food supply Dickson identifies the increasing wealth and status of
that was reliable,” the potato. Increasing social stratifi- Catholic merchants, professionals, and big farmers as
cation corresponded to population growth between the successfully challenging the socio-political and cultural
1770s and the 1820s. This process rapidly accelerated domination of the Protestant landowning gentry.
from the 1790s, and by 1800, coinciding with an “increasingly complex class structure,” was an “exceptionally unNew World Colony is so finely nuanced and meticuequal distribution of income” (p. 496). The winners were lously researched that it effectively raises the historiolarge farmers producing for the market; alternatively, the graphical bar for Irish regional history. Indeed, the study
landless laborers and small farmers were trapped in a is mandatory reading for historians of early modern and
classic example of the economist’s “price scissors,” featur- modern Ireland. Those working on the Atlantic World
ing rising rents and stagnant or declining wages as well will also find the book to be of tremendous utility, for
as chronic underemployment. The uniquely Irish phe- David Dickson has firmly placed south Munster in an Atnomenon of multi-layered tenancies further exacerbated lantic context.
the situation. In 1780, laborers were already suffering
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Citation: James Patterson. Review of Dickson, David, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630-1830. HAtlantic, H-Net Reviews. July, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11992
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