Description

The configuration of modern Irish fields, roads, and village boundaries is the direct physical footprint of 19th-century property ownership. In Landholding Society and Settlement in Nineteenth Century Ireland, legendary scholar T. Jones Hughes delivers his definitive essays analyzing how land tenure, the ruling landlord class, and regional farming systems structurally organized the countryside.

Hughes carefully maps out the immense regional variations across the four provinces, demonstrating how the size of estates, the layout of tenant smallholdings, and the positioning of big country houses dictated everyday economic life. By merging cartography with extensive land records, this text goes past standard political histories to reveal the raw, structural anatomy of rural society prior to and following the Great Famine.

Why this volume is crucial for historical geographers:

• Pioneering Academic Analysis: Gathers the foundational spatial research and regional essays of acclaimed geographer T. Jones Hughes.

• Deep Settlement Mapping: Explores the physical layout of townlands, estate boundaries, and regional farming systems across Ireland.

• Invaluable Data Integration: Masterfully connects historical maps with mid-19th-century land valuation records and census data sheets.