ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a transnational perspective on the now established New British and Irish histories. It assesses not only the relatively small number of armchair' accounts written by British and Irish people about the region in question, but also, more crucially, relations between and amongst the four national groups of the archipelago within this specific expatriate setting, emphasising the involvement in this, after 1634, of a co-operative circle and patronage network centred to a large extent around a branch of the Scottish Leslie family. One of the major tasks of the book is to assess how peaceable' or otherwise this interaction was amongst those of archipelagic background whose pathways converged in central Europe. In these comparative aspects, the book aims to make a secondary contribution to a wider European historiography.
