Eighteenth-century Irish intellectual history has enjoyed a revival in recent years. New scholarly resources, such as the Hoppen edition of the papers of the Dublin Philosophical Society and the recently published Berkeley correspondence, have been fundamental to that revival. Since 1986 the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr has sponsored a complex conversation on the meaning and legacy of the eighteenth century in Irish history. Work in the journal and beyond deploying “New British” and Atlantic histories, as well as continuing attention to Europe, has helped to enrich scholarly understanding of the environments in which Irish people thought and acted. The challenge facing historians of Ireland has been to find categories of analysis that could comprehend religious division and acknowledge the centrality of the confessional state without reducing all Irish experience to sectarian conflict. Clearly the thought of the Irish Catholic community could not be approached without an understanding of the life of the Continental Catholic Church. Archivium Hibernicum has been collecting and publishing the traces of that history for a hundred years and new digital resources such as the Irish in Europe database have extended that work in new directions. The Atlantic and “New British” contexts have been more proximately important for the Protestant intellectual tradition.

William Pitt's 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at coordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neomercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organize trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organize its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense, while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.