Eighteenth-Century Irish History: Then and Now

This article surveys writings on the history of eighteenth-century Ireland over the first forty years of the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá Chultúr. Commissioned to mark the journal’s fortieth anniversary, it adopts a cautiously celebratory yet critical tone. Beginning with the journal’s first issue in 1986, it traces trends in the historiography of the period between the publication of the New History of Ireland Volume IV (1986), through the bicentennial histories produced in the 1990s and on to the Cambridge History of Ireland (2018). It reflects on what has been written and how the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society has contributed to and shaped our understanding of the period. Integrating scholarship on Ireland into wider international and transnational trends and themes, it also offers some suggestions for possible future trajectories for the field.