Since the 1960s, Prof Nicholas Canny has been exploring England's (and Scotland's) engagement with Ireland. Focusing on the era of the first Elizabeth and the hapless Stuart kings, he has followed the thinking and fortunes of the many who upped sticks and removed themselves to Ireland. The exodus, parallel to and connected with the contemporary emigration to North America, briefly matched in numbers the westward flight from Iberia.
Since he began his quest, Prof Canny has been joined by other inquirers, guided or provoked by his theories as to why so many moved across perilous seas. As a result of this scholarly activity over the past 30 years, a great deal more is known about who came to Ireland and what they did once they arrived, even if their reasons for coming remain a matter of earnest speculation. Prof Canny deserves great gratitude for stimulating so much of this work, and also for his brave bid to summarise it. Daunting in volume and price, his analysis makes accessible an endeavour by turns heroic, mercenary and sanguinary, which profoundly affected how Ireland's societies developed.
He begins with the obscure Lodowick Bryskett, but soon moves to the better known Edmund Spenser. The poet - subject to almost as much exegesis and speculation as Yeats - leads naturally into the detail of the schemes to substitute civil Protestants for the unruly locals throughout Elizabethan Ireland. Spenser proposed and benefited from plantation. He is cast by Canny - not entirely convincingly - as the progenitor of the subsequent settlements.
Once embarked, the majestic vessel, the wind in its sails, progresses down the Awbeg towards its destination. With Prof Canny, an expert captain, at the helm, the journey, if long, is smooth, enjoyable, enlightening and crowded with memorable incidents. He treats us to the fullest and in many ways most convincing account of how the enforced and casual plantations altered Ireland. He points out the contrast between the apparently entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan newcomers in Munster and their less adventurous counterparts in Ulster, and suggests reasons - mostly in the economies of the locations where they had originated. He values industry and emphasises how important towns - or what at the time passed for towns - were to the enterprise.
Not unduly censorious, he allows the greed, fraud and cruelty of the predatory newcomers to be inferred. Moreover, he shows that the displaced or threatened among the locals often accommodated themselves to this new order, even while scheming for its overthrow.
The chance for the ousted came in 1641, owing to a concentration of events, some within but most outside Ireland. Thus, what had begun so hopefully in the bright morning of the 1580s ended in a welter of death and destruction.
Excellent as Prof Canny's account is, it contains oddities over which the interested will pause. He readily admits that the "British" element in the undertaking was small and intermittent.
The learned, but maladroit James VI of Scotland inherited the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603. Sorting out Ireland was to be the first joint venture of the new British state. Yet in the Ulster plantation, as Canny is at pains to show, the Scottish and English elements seldom fused.
Elsewhere in Ireland, Scottish interest was limited. Otherwise, the notion of "Britain" was strongest among Welsh antiquaries. Strangely, Canny never traces the considerable Welsh settlement of Ireland, especially in the south-east and Dublin, but also in Kerry, and even makes fun of the occasional Welsh person he has uncovered in Ireland. He convincingly insists on the importance of the towns to the English dream of a placid and prosperous Ireland, and has much of value to say of the strangers' takeover of high office and power in Dublin. However, Dublin, the site of the greatest English success in its ambition to remake Ireland in its own image - if not "British" - is given scant attention.
These reservations in no way detract from the admiration for Prof Canny in bringing his bulky vessel expertly into safe harbour. The surprise is that, where once his passengers would have expected to land on the westward shore of the Atlantic, he has steered expertly towards Britain and Europe, as the places with which early modern Ireland was naturally linked. The price of the ticket may be steep, but the cabins are comfortable, the entertainment splendid and the final vista remarkable. No one interested in being guided through the choppy waters of 17th-century Ireland can do without this craft.
Toby Barnard teaches history at the University of Oxford and is currently tercentenary visiting fellow at Marsh's Library in Dublin. His next two books - Ascents and Descents, and A New Anatomy of Ireland: Protestants in Ireland, 1649- 1770 - will be published soon