Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530-1750

Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530-1750. By WILLIAM J SMYTH Cork: Cork University Press, 2006, 608 pp. £49.00 ISBN 10 1859183972

This is the first engagement by an historical geographer in one book of this most formative and revolutionary period in Ireland's history. Using the twin concepts of 'colonialism' and 'early modernity', the book comprises a geographical analysis of the conquest and settlement of Ireland by the New English (and Scottish) and the consequences of this often violent and deep-seated intrusion upon the cultures and landscapes of pre-existing Irish societies.

Professor Smyth organizes his work in four sections - all with aptly named sub-sections - beginning with 'Making the Documents of Conquest Speak', which seeks to reveal the hidden lrelands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the territorial and social structures of Gaelic Ireland; the wooded lands that...