Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016

Douglas Kanter is associate professor of modern British, Irish, and British imperial history at Florida Atlantic University, USA. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of The Making of British Unionism, 1740-1848: Politics, Government and the Anglo-Irish Constitutional Relationship (2009).Patrick Walsh is assistant professor of eighteenth-century Irish history at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His publications include The South Sea Bubble and Ireland: Money, Banking and Investment, 1690-1721 (Woodbridge, 2014) and with Aaron Graham The British and Irish Fiscal-Military States, 1660-1783 (London, 2016).

“This is an excellent and important book. Kanter and Walsh do an able job as both writers and editors, and ensure that several significant themes are capably developed across multiple essays. As a result, this volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of taxation in Ireland and invites further research.” (Karen Sonnelitter, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vol. 34, 2019)“The book is very well compiled, the panel of contributors well chosen and it reads coherently—aided by the chronological order of studies. … This provides us with a very clear and detailed illustration of the maxim in the introduction that ‘taxation is first and foremost a political issue’, and that the formulation and implementation of taxation initiatives are determined politically rather than forideological or philosophical reasons.” (Ciarán Mac an Bhaird, Studia Hibernica, Vol. 45, 2019)

• Chapter 1. Introduction; Douglas Kanter and Patrick Walsh.- Chapter 2. Ireland, Mercantilism, and the Navigation Acts, 1660–1686; James Guilfoyle.- Chapter 3. Politics, Parliament, Patriot Opinion, and the Irish National Debt in the Age of Jonathan Swift; Charles Ivar McGrath.- Chapter 4. Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland; Patrick Walsh.- Chapter 5. Finance and Politics in Ireland, 1801–17; Trevor McCavery.- Chapter 6. That ‘Absurd Phantom called Free Trade’: The Politics of Protection in Ireland, c. 1829–52; Andrew Shields.- Chapter 7. Resistance to the Collection of Rates under the Poor Law, 1842–44; Mel Cousins.- Chapter 8. Taxation and the Economics of Nationalism in 1840s Ireland; Charles Read.- Chapter 9. The Campaign against Over-Taxation, 1863–65: A Reappraisal; Douglas Kanter.- Chapter 10. Tides of Change and Changing Sides: The Collection of Rates in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21; Robin Adams.- Chapter 11. Taxation and the Revolutionary Inheritance: Tax Proposals, Legitimacy, and the Irish Free State, 1922–32; Jason Knirck.- Chapter 12. The Economic War and the Pamphlet War; Aidan Beatty.- Chapter 13. The Irish Tax State and Historical Legacies: Slowly Converging Capacity, Persistent Unwillingness to Pay; Michelle D’Arcy and Marina Nistotskaya.