ABSTRACT
Nearly all the prospective recipients of that remarkable postbag intercepted in its journey between Bordeaux and Dublin in 1757 were urban folk; more precisely, they were city folk living in or very close to Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, or Galway. Compared to the vast historiography on colonial American urbanization and on that of eighteenth-century England and Scotland, the study of pre-industrial Irish towns has been limited, patchy, and remarkably introverted. We have to turn back to Jan de Vries's classic study European Urbanization 1500–1800 (1984) to determine whether eighteenth-century city development in Ireland shared common features, or was in any way distinctive. By contemporary American standards, these Irish cities were big indeed. Such estimates and rankings are of course very soft, and de Vries's Irish figures should be revised in the light of more recent research – Dublin significantly upwards and Cork downwards.
