‘Objects of raging detestation’ the charter schools

Charter schools were intended to solve the problem facing a victorious people taking over a defeated, impoverished country from the 1690s onwards. With almost a quarter of the Irish population […]

‘The Widow’s Mite’: private relief during the Great Famine

During earlier food shortages in Ireland, including in 1822 and 1831, charitable bodies had been set up to provide relief at a local level, and some of these were revived […]

Larcom the cartographer: political economy in pre-Famine Ireland

Thomas Aiskew Larcom was born on 22 April 1801 in Gosport, Hampshire, into a military family. From 1817 to 1821 he undertook a soldier’s education and was commissioned into the […]

‘Practical anarchists, we’: social revolutionaries in Dublin, 1885–7

When we think of revolutionaries in late nineteenth-century Ireland, we think of Fenians rather than the anarchist agitators who were then making their presence felt on the Continent. Irish revolutionary […]

The Irish and the Atlantic slave trade

It was the Stuarts who introduced the Irish to the slave trade. Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 at a time when it was becoming clear that sugar […]