This was a time of vibrant writing about the Irish past, in which the colonial question and the nature of Irish society before the twelfth-century English conquest remained key contexts. The dispute over the ancient origins of the Irish, always viewed through that colonial prism, continued to engross antiquaries. This chapter examines eighteenth-century iterations of this theme, looking at the two main theories of Irish origins: the Milesian, derived from rich medieval Gaelic sources (employing the biblical template of the Israelites), which posited Scythian, Egyptian and Spanish ancestry, mirroring the various sojourns of the Irish on their epic journey to the “promised land” of Ireland; and the Scandinavian, propounded by the upholders of the benefits of English colonization, and aiming to place that colonization in a framework of pre-existing contact with, and invasion by, the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. The debate was also inflected by the modern imperial project, thus linking England’s oldest colony, Ireland, with its newest, India. Nevertheless, the core question remained the same – the nature of Irish national character – and was primed for the onset of overtly racial constructions towards the end of this period.

There is general agreement among historians that 1690 marked a watershed in Irish history in general, but no such decisive break can be seen in historical writing. Many of the same themes and debates continued, notably over the nature of pre-colonial Gaelic society. These were sharpened by the incorporation of the wars and rebellions of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the available narrative, as evidence in support of the English colonial diagnosis of Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies that the conquest had been imperfectly carried out and that consequently the native Irish remained fundamentally untouched by the civilising process. Oliver MacDonagh’s argument that early nineteenth-century historical writing lacked a ‘developmental or sequential view of past events’, and thus treated the past ahistorically as ‘an arsenal of weapons’ with which to fight contemporary political battles, can equally be applied to previous centuries. This also produced a habit of interpreting historical events and actions as if they were contemporary: ‘In such a view, no statute of limitations softens the judgement to be made upon past events, however distant [and] no prescriptive rights can be established by the passage of time, however lengthy.’ This concept of history as, in some ways, contemporaneous is to be found in almost all the texts discussed below.

Seventeenth-century legacies

The most prominent histories published in the immediate aftermath of the Williamite success came from the victors’ camp. They were characterised by a noticeable sense of history as an unfinished, still-unfolding process which incorporated the present in all its uncertainties. The pattern was established, when the out come of the Williamite wars was still unclear, in Hibernia Anglicana (1689–90) by Richard Cox (1650–1733).