SS117 Irish History: Conflict, Identity and the Shaping of Modern Ireland

This course offers a broad survey of Irish history with a principal focus on the modern centuries, beginning with the Tudor conquest of Ireland. By charting the history of Anglo-Irish relations through major political and military conflicts in the 17th and 18th centuries, special attention will be given to the British attempt to assimilate Ireland under the Act of Union from 1801. We will examine the mass social and political campaigns that emerged in the 17th century and the rise of the modern ideologies of Irish unionism and nationalism, including the influential Irish-American dimension of the latter, which took shape in the decades afterthe Great Famine (1845-50). The course will also examine the undoing of the Union between Britain and Ireland in 1921, the nature of the partition agreement which underpinned the constitutional settlement at that time, and how sustained violent conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s forced politicians and political leaders in these islands and beyond, to revisit the 'Irish Question'.