For the student of the Irish experience, agrarian movements, rural sectarianism, and popular political unrest in the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries are subjects that deserve particular attention at the present time. This volume, which undertakes to pull together divergent strands of current research on these topics and to initiate the process of fitting them into larger conceptual frameworks, will, we hope, prove to be more than merely a convenient compendium of individual works. To some extent, such a collection of essays yields a varied picture of seemingly unconnected developments. In a broader sense, however, the very act of assembling a diverse set of works like these serves to aid in the identification of general questions and issues that should be of paramount concern in Irish studies.
