The nature and extent of urban and village foundation and improvement in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Ireland

Conventionally, Irish historians have assumed that the widespread urban and village foundation and improvement that occurred in Ireland between circa 1700 and 1845 came about largely as the result of the direct intervention of members of the landowning minority. These people are held to have engaged in the extension or reconstruction of settlement as a means of exerting control over exchange and marketing or of asserting their social status through patterns of conspicuous consumption. This paper argues that while this sort of direct involvement by landowners was important in some cases, their involvement in urban modernization in Ireland was much more likely to be indirect. Commonly, it was limited to the construction of new markets and other public utilities and to the provision of building leases. These encouraged a wide spectrum of other social groups to participate in the process of reconstruction. The identity of these other participants is explored and a typology of urban and village foundation and improvement established which places these later transformations within the context of the inherited pattern of earlier, medieval and plantation, urban space.