HIST 380C Modern Ireland: The British Centuries, 1600-1973
As Britain's oldest colonial appendage, Ireland's status was altogether particular, and this course will investigate the particularities, and indeed peculiarities, of this unique relationship over a period of four centuries, from the ambitious land plantations of the seventeenth century to the problematic and bloody settlements of the twentieth. The course will examine just how Britain shaped Irish politics, economics, society, religion, culture and, indeed, its patterns of global migration. However much nationalists might have insisted that Ireland was altogether 'Irish', this course will show that Ireland was also - to a greater or lesser extent - British. But it will also show how, as the centuries progressed, Ireland increasingly undertook to reshaping itself in response, and sometimes in violent reaction to this massive assertion of imperial dominion.