Professor Micheal Ó Siochru

Summary

The EMPIRE project will explore Ireland"s crucial role in England"s (and later Britain"s) global expansion. The mid-eighteenth century witnessed Britain"s emergence as the foremost power in the Western World, enjoying unparalleled wealth, influence, and geographical reach. But how did it obtain such an exalted position and more specifically, what were the processes that facilitated such a dramatic rise to prominence? This question lies at the heart of the EMPIRE project. Challenging the dominant, Anglo-centric narrative, this project takes a radically different approach, investigating how from the mid-seventeenth century, Ireland provided England with a decisive advantage over its continental rivals on the world stage. Irish historiography focuses primarily on the Irish diaspora in the emerging English Atlantic Empire, but EMPIRE will instead turn the spotlight on the country, rather than its people, as the significant source of finance and resources driving England"s expansion overseas and its global dominance thereafter. To test this hypothesis, the EMPIRE project will integrate traditional historical scholarship with an innovative Digital Humanities strategy to enable a detailed study of the intricate workings of the English government in Ireland. The project will provide access to large volumes of newly recovered records, available for the first time in over a century, since a devastating fire destroyed the original collections in Public Records Office of Ireland in 1922. Collectively, these sources represent by far the most complete record still extant of early modern English colonial administration and finance in the Atlantic World. The project will develop a novel historical methodology, using artificial intelligence to create a digital knowledge base from these newly identified records, exploiting new technologies to extract information from large amounts of raw text and data. This frontier research, therefore, will transform our understanding of the emergence and consolidation of England"s Atlantic Empire from the mid-seventeenth century.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

Advanced Laureate

Summary

This is an exciting collaborative project, working with the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the National Archives to produce a unique and comprehensive research platform for the study of seventeenth-century Irish History. The key outputs will be: . a fully functional online research platform, integrating the Books and Survey and Distribution with the existing Down Survey material; . preparation of the transcribed text with indexes of the Quit Rent Office set of the Books of Survey and Distribution in the National Archives for subsequent publication in print by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in five volumes in 2025.

Funding Agency

Irish Manuscripts Commission

Project Type

Digitisation and transcription of primary sources

Summary

The collection of '1641 depositions' in Trinity College Dublin comprises some 3,100 personal statements, in which mainly protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences at the outbreak of the rebellion by the catholic Irish in 1641. This material, collected by government-appointed commissioners over the course of a decade, runs to approximately 19,000 pages. It was systematically used in the subsequent trials of rebel leaders, and to inform decisions relating to the treatment of catholic landholders under Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate regime. During the early decades of the seventeenth-century Scottish and English planters (who increasingly identified themselves as 'British') colonised the province, often dispossessing the native catholic population. The depositions vividly document these colonial and 'civilizing' processes, which included the spread of Protestantism in one of the remotest regions of the Stuart kingdoms and the introduction of lowland agricultural and commercial practices, together with the native response to these developments. The depositions also constituted the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the 1641 rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers, and as a result they have been central to the most protracted and bitter of Irish historical controversies, which has never been satisfactorily resolved. In fact, the 1641 'massacres', like King William's victory at the Boyne (1690), and the battle of the Somme (1916), have played a key role in creating and sustaining a collective Protestant/British identity in Ulster. This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information on the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland. However, it is difficult to read and largely inaccessible to scholars, never mind the general reader. The aim of this project is to transcribe and digitise the '1641 Depositions', creating a unique research tool of interest to both the academic community and the general public. Web site publication would give users full access to all images and transcripts, with free text search, while the construction of a database will facilitate more detailed research projects in a variety of disciplines, and provide an ideal tool for use in the teaching environment. The project will provide material for postgraduate research, enhance the research and publication outputs of the principal applicants, and give valuable training and work experience to four research staff. It will also deliver a working methodology for the transcription and digitisation of manuscript collections, which can be applied to other unique historical collections. There will be a number of other specific outcomes, including an article for a popular journal describing the project, a refereed article for a scholarly journal, a major international conference on 1641, the papers of which will be published in an edited volume, and an exhibition (including a published catalogue) in the TCD Library. By exploiting existing international research networks the project will also address key historiographical debates, as well as cross-border issues of identity in Ireland. Preliminary discussions have also revealed a wide level of interdisciplinary interest from literature, linguistics, gender studies, anthropology and historical geography. This project is part of a joint initiative, involving the University of Aberdeen, Trinity College, Dublin and Cambridge University, which will develop existing institutional links between all three. I successfully applied for £426,000 from the AHRC Resource Enhancement Scheme, while Professor Jane Ohlmeyer obtained €250,000 from the IRCHSS. TCD has also committed funds to this project, bringing the total funding to over €1,000,000.

Funding Agency

AHRC; IRCHSS; TCD €1 million in total

Project Type

Digitisation and transcription of primary sources

Summary

Oxford University Press has invited a handful of leading early modern scholars to produce a new three-volume edition of Oliver Cromwell's letters and papers, the first since W.C Abbott's four volume work published in the 1930s. Abbott's edition is very problematic, as is the three-volume edition produced by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s. Significant numbers of letters and papers are omitted from both editions, neither of which is fully annotated. Moreover, significant advances in historical scholarship over the past 70 years need to be incorporated as commentary into a new critical edition. I am the only Irish scholar invited to partake in this prestigious project. As a first step in this process, we have employed three post-doctoral researchers for two years to locate, digitise and transcribe all the printed and manuscript material in the Irish and English archives. OUP intend to produce the edition online and in hard copy in 2014..

Funding Agency

IRCHSS; AHRC; British Academy; Leverhulme; TCD Start-Up Fund

Project Type

Critical edition of letters and papers

Summary

This project will create a consolidated digital atlas of the 1650s Down Survey of Ireland by overlaying all extant Down Survey maps and related cartographic material onto an Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 base. A catalogue of the surviving manuscripts will accompany the atlas. The project will create a geo-referenced Townland Index and an historical Geographic Information System (GIS). When combined, these can be used to consolidate a wide range of 17th-century source material. By applying spatial analysis tools to digitised historical text-based documents, such as the 1641 Depositions, this project will also support location-based analysis of people and events using contemporary geographic models. In September 2011 the project received €117,000 funding from the IRCHSS, which in addition to my work as PI will fund the employment of a Research Assistant for 15 months and a Computer Science Post-doctoral fellow for 6 months.

Funding Agency

IRCHSS

Programme

Government of Ireland Research and Senior Research Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Project Type

Digital Humanities and GIS