Beginning in a turf fort in west Cork, this paper is about the fragmented processes of colonial state formation in 18th-century Ireland. The story is told from the fragmented edges of the state rather than from the centre - from isolated peninsulas on Ireland’s Atlantic edge, from boggy mountainsides, rural villages and coastal communities often bypassed in accounts of modernisation and centralisation. It deliberately decentres the state to explore the impact of the institutions of the fiscal-military state at Ireland’s outer limits. While cognisant of the development of the fiscal and especially military apparatuses of the Irish colonial state, this paper takes its inspiration from cultural-history approaches to the history of the Atlantic coast in thinking about how we might write about state formation and its contested 18th-century story from the outside in, and how that might reshape our understanding of how the state operated.

Dr Patrick Walsh is associate professor of eighteenth-century Irish history at Trinity College Dublin, where he is also co-PI of the Trinity’s Colonial Legacies project. A former general editor of Eighteenth-Century Ireland, his previous books include The Making of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy: The Life of William Conolly (2010) and The South Sea Bubble and Ireland, Money, Banking and Investment, 1691-1721 (2014).

This seminar will be available in hybrid form, in-person and online via Teams. Please indicate your preference when registering.

This is a joint event with the Centre for 18^th-Century Studies. All welcome!