ABSTRACT
After Columbus, the struggle by European powers to control the Atlantic and the New World brought Ireland’s geopolitical location into sharp focus. Ireland, after about 1530, is progressively redefined as a crucial and strategic springboard for colonisation and provisioning of, migration to and trade with the New World.1 The island also becomes one of the epic battlegrounds in the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe and is transformed from a ‘kingdom’ to a fully-fledged colony by Britain through these processes.2
A social revolution also takes place in Ireland which seeks to replace the variety of social, economic and political structures of late medieval sixteenth-century Ireland with a single territorial and social system modelled on early modern England.3 Thus, Ireland, in the period under review, deepens its European engagement, becomes an integral part of the European controlled Atlantic world yet – uniquely amongst Western European countries – becomes a colonised rather than a colonising country.
