Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

by David Dickson

Overview

This all-embracing biography of Dublin, the first undertaken for more than thirty years, traces the social, economic, cultural and political development of the ‘second city of empire’ and its emergence as one of Europe’s great capitals. It explores Dublin’s first thousand years as a modest urban settlement, then focusses on the last four hundred, from the seventeenth-century court city via the parliamentary metropolis of the eighteenth, the politically and religiously polarized town of the nineteenth to the embattled centre of a new nation in the twentieth. It concludes with a magisterial analysis of the vast city-region that had taken shape by 2000. Dublin was always a hybrid place, a melting pot for Viking and Gaelic, Anglo-Norman, New English, Ulster Scot, Huguenot and Jewish, whence came much of its cultural singularity. Irish independence was a mixed blessing for the new capital: Dublin’s rulers were for the most part not interested in urban regeneration or architectural flamboyance, and its cultural institutions atrophied for half a century or more. But industrial policy from the 1930s accelerated migration to what became greater Dublin, the poorly planned low-density megalopolis that had fully taken shape a generation before the Celtic Tiger growled. Building on modern research, David Dickson’s Dublin provides an entirely fresh account, much of it unfamiliar. Ambitious, detailed, inclusive and richly illustrated, it captures this tantalizingly complex story in a single volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674744448
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	11/24/2014
Pages:	736
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

David Dickson is a Professor in Modern History in Trinity College Dublin and has published extensively on the social, economic, and cultural history of Ireland, including his award-winning Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630-1830. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2006.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

List of Abbreviations xvii

Prologue: Dublin Town and the First Thousand Years 1

1 The Fashioning of a Capital: 1600-1647 42

2 Court City: 1647-1690 67

3 Injured Lady: 1690-1750 105

4 'This Now Great Metropolis': 1750-1780 152

5 Patriot Town: 1780-1798 201

6 Apocalypse Deferred: 1798-1830 258

7 A Tale of Four Cities: 1830-1580 306

8 Whose Dublin? 1880-1913 379

9 Eruption: 1913-1919 425

10 A Capital Once Again: 1920-1940 461

11 The Modern Turn: 1940-1972 502

12 Millennium City: 1972-1000 536

Notes 564

List of Illustrations 651

Bibliographical Note 655

Index 670

Editorial Reviews

I thought I knew the history of my hometown, Dublin, and then I read David Dickson’s wise and stylish book…[An] eloquent book…Dickson’s book was teaching me things about my hometown until almost the very last page.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Robert Cremins

[Dickson] distils a mountain of scholarship to illuminate the whole of Dublin’s history. He is strongest on political and social change, informative too on the city’s marvellous architecture… This is the fullest overview of the many transformations of one of the world’s most enchanting cities.

The Times - Eamon Duffy

In Dublin, Dickson has woven together the city’s social, economic, cultural, demographic and architectural histories; the story he tells will intrigue natives, enlighten newcomers and stand as a monument to this great city’s place in an ever-changing Ireland.

The Telegraph - John Gallagher

This history of Dublin is an insightful, deeply researched, witty volume, which anyone interested in Ireland, England, Georgian architecture, or the misadventures of nation-building will find fascinating.

Weekly Standard - Edward Short

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