The clash between Britain and Ireland—and between Catholics and Protestants within Ireland—is among the oldest and most enduring nationalist, ethnic, and religious conflicts in the modern world, rooted in the colonization of Ireland by English and Scottish Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Through fifty-six original sources, many of which have never been reprinted, this volume traces the origins and development of the conflict during the years of the legislative union between Britain and Ireland—years shaped by the rise of, and British and Irish Unionist responses to, Irish nationalism.

Dworkin's Introduction provides both a history of the conflict and a discussion of its causes; headnotes and footnotes set each selection in historical, political, and cultural context, and identify those terms and names that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. A map, a glossary, a chronology of events, and a select bibliography are included, as are an index and several contemporary illustrations.