Dr. Patrick Walsh

am an economic, social and political historian of eighteenth-century Ireland. My current research investigates the processes of state formation in eighteenth-century Ireland within a comparative imperial perspective. I am especially interested in the ways in which the agents of the emerging Irish state negotiated and collaborated with the different interests and groups within Irish society and have written extensively on the history of Irish taxation and the Irish version of the fiscal military state. To this end I have also collaborated with colleagues in the National University of Ireland, Galway on a database of Ireland's international trade, 1683-1829 while I am also co-investigator on the Irish Residential Army Barracks project at UCD. Most recently I have become increasingly interested in the history of Irish property in the long eighteenth-century and its financial and other connections to empire. Prior to coming to Trinity I taught at University College London (UCL) and previous to that I held an IRC-Marie Curie-Sklodowska postdoctoral mobility fellowship jointly at UCL and UCD. I am currently Co- PI (with Dr Andrew MacKillop, University of Glasgow) on a project funded by the AHRC and the IRC digital humanities networking scheme entitled Comparing and Combining Early Modern Irish and Scottish Land Records: New Transkribus and Natural Language Processing Approaches I am also Co-PI (with Dr Ciaran O'Neill) on the Trinity Colonial Legacies project

  18h century Irish history   Ireland and Empire   Irish economic history   Irish History   Trinity Colonial Legacies

I am an economic, political and social historian of eighteenth-century Ireland. My doctoral work and first monograph focused on the politics of the eighteenth-century Irish ascendancy elite through the first major study of the key political, administrative and landed figure, William Conolly (1662-1729). Since 2010 my research has focused on two major themes. The first of these is the impact of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century financial revolution on Ireland and Scotland as exemplified by my second monograph and associated articles on the South Sea Bubble and current ongoing research on the eighteenth-century Irish property and financial markets arising out of my collaborative IRC/AHRC network grant which developed new digital humanities-led methodologies to unlock one of Ireland's most significant and untapped archives - the Registry of Deeds, a resource of unparalleled archival wealth in European terms. My second major research focus developed in a series of articles and edited books is on the Irish version of the fiscal-military state. This is the subject of my current book project which seeks to explore the processes of state formation in eighteenth-century Ireland through a comparative and colonial lens making an important contribution not just to the literature on Ireland, but also to European, British and Atlantic history debates on the wider phenomenon of the fiscal-military state as it developed across Europe and the Atlantic colonies. Drawing on detailed archival research on taxation and its discontents, the geography of military deployment and the coalitions of competing interest groups that made up Irish society it reinterprets Ireland's dual position as a partner in the British-Irish imperial project and as a site of empire and colonial state-making. Finally, this dual experience of empire informs my contributions to the major public history research project I am co-leading on Trinity's colonial legacies.