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Reviews '77

proble~n confrolited a British government for the first time with the
question of compensation for expropriating private property on a significant
scale ' (p. 198); for there was a most appropriate precedent in the
compensation paid to British slaveowners under the emancipation act
of 1833. A topic that is wholly omitted, and ought surely to have been
given some place in even an economic interpretation, is the strategic
factor in Anglo-Irish relations; and there should have been a t least
some indication of the I-epercussions on Anglo-Irish relations of the Irish
in A~nericaafter the fanline exodus.
T h e book may be recon~n~ended to the critical attention of all students
of modern Irish history. I t is not easy reading, but there is not a flabby
sentence in it. Its challenges deserve to be met in the spirit in which
they have been offered.
T. W. MOODY

SAILING SHIPS OF IRELAND. Ry Ernest B. Anderson. Pp. 303.


Dublin : Morris & Co. 1951. 18s. 6d.
ONEhas only one f m l t to find with this f ~ ~ lmuch
l, needed and deeply
interesting book, and that is that the author-killed, most unfortunately,
before his n o r k was published-omitted documentation of his material.
T h e facts are there in abundance, and one is confident that nothing is
akserted as true that is open to doubt, but references to authorities and
bibliographv are absent. Now and then when one guesses that, for
example, A. Marmion's nforitirnc ports of Ireland is the source of
information, reference shows the guess to be correct, and the information
to have been fxithfullv abstracted. But a work on such a specialised
subject as this docs not permit of many such guesses. Future workers
on the history of Irish shipping would have reason to bless M r Anderson
if he had seen fit to indicate where he had got his abundant information.
Andel-son was a pioneer. Apart fro111 Marmion's work, Colonel
A. T. Lawlor's Irish nznritirtze sz~rvey and some works on Dublin and
Cork shipbuilding, there is no other book which treats of Irish maritime
history, and Antierson was the first to write at once as an historian and
the possessor of technical knoxvledge of Irish sailing ships. W h a t Basil
Lubbock, our author's namesake Anderson, and the pages of the unfor-
tunately defunct R l z ~ ePrter did for the last of the British wind ships,
this book has done for I~ish-built and Irish-owned shipping of the past
hundred and fifty years. I t is unlilcely to be superseded for a long time
to come as the text book on the subject.
T h e title is a misnomer, for the field covered by the book is in one
sense narrower and in another wider than it indicates, narrower because
it is restricted to the last century and a half, wider because the history
of Irish paddle steamers as well as sailers is followed. Anderson devotes
separate sections to shipowners in sail, paddle-steamer owners, and ship-
building companies. I n them he covers, with the emphasis always on

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1 7 ~ Reviews
the technicalities of his subject, the history of Irish shipping and ship-
building (exclusive of the screw steamship) from the end of the eighteenth
century. Students of the history of that period, and in particular those
interested in econon~ichistory, will find his work of much value. Detailed
studies of technical aspects of Irish history are all too few, and one could
wish for other Andersons to write of the history of our railways (on
which K. M u r r a y in T h e Grrat Northern Railway has ~ n a d ea beginning),
our roads (of what remains to be done here we had a foretaste in Colm
0 Lochlainn's paper in FEil-sgrihhinn E6in n l h i c Ngill), our bridge
building, canalisation and inland transport in general. T h e general
reader with an interest in maritime affairs may well find these glimpses
which Anderson gives of what must be for most a ' hidden Ireland '
absorbing. Such worthy forerunners of the ' Irish T r e e ' ships of to-day
as the early Canadian-built ships with which most ports commenced
their more modern fleets, the Belfast and Derry clippers and nitrate ships,
the Cork W e s t Indiamen, and the Dublin sailing tramps, not to speak
of the hundreds of lesser ships owned in the smaller ports, belie the
suggestion that the Irish are not a sea-minded people. &laterial for very
many school lessons to capture the interest of our youth in the ports
and coastal parishes could be drawn from Anderson's book.
O n e less skilled in the subject than the author can courlt few omissions.
Perhaps a more careful search in local newspaper files would have yielded
information on ships like the " Minerva," built in Galway for a maiden
voyage to America in 1791, which he misses (Connaught Journal,
28 November 1791, 7 June 1792). But the main picture is clear, and
remarkably full.
G. A. HAYES-McCoy

THEHOLYSEE AND THE IRISHMOVEMENT FOR THE REPEAL OF THE


UNION WITH ENGLAND,
1829-1847. By Rev. John F. Broderick, S.J.
Pp. xxvii, 237. Rome : Universitas Gregorianae, 195 I [ I ~ s . ] .
(Analecta Gregorianae, vol. 5 5 ; series facultatis historiae ecclesias-
ticae, sectio B, no. 9.)
CATHOI,IC-LIIIERAL movements, in the second decade after the final defeat
of Napoleon, presented a new and difficult problem to the I-Ioly See.
I n 1829, the protestant government of the United Kingdom, by conceding
' Catholic emancipation ' gave way to an Irish campaign organised so as
to command British liberal support. I n 1830, the independence of
Belgium was secured after a revolt against the rule of the protestant
King William I successfulIy organised by an alliance of the catholics and
liberal political parties in the southern Netherlands. I n the same year,
a si~nilaralliance in Poland attempted unsuccessfully to win independence
from Alexander I , the orthodox Greek czar of all the Russias. T h e
moral theory of popular sovereignty n i g h t justify the claims of Poland
o r of Belgium : to the Holy See the essential political unit mas the entire
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Waterloo, on 07 Jan 2020 at 22:03:10, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
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