Nicholas Canny
Biographic Data
| ID | 383080 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Canny |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Canny |
| SIGNATURE | CANNY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 103 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 212 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 27 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Telling the Truth Is Dangerous: How Robert Dudley Edwards Changed Irish History Forever by Neasa MacErlean (review)
Edmund Spenser, A view of the present state of Ireland [1596]: A radical re-appraisal of a well-known text
Most scholars believe that Spenser's View was written in 1596. This study indicates that it is a 1596 amalgamation of two elements: one drafted about 1589 when an optimistic Spenser portrayed the controversial actions of Lord Grey de Wilton in Ireland as a humanist enterprise; the other composed in 1596 when a panic-stricken Spenser, believing England's control over Ireland to be in jeopardy, argued for the appointment of a new governor, backed b…
Edmund Spenser, A view of the present state of Ireland [1596]: A radical re-appraisal of a well-known text
Most scholars believe that Spenser’s View was written in 1596. This study indicates that it is a 1596 amalgamation of two elements: one drafted about 1589 when an optimistic Spenser portrayed the controversial actions of Lord Grey de Wilton in Ireland as a humanist enterprise; the other composed in 1596 when a panic-stricken Spenser, believing England’s control over Ireland to be in jeopardy, argued for the appointment of a new governor, backed b…
"Reflections on the Golden Jubilee of the Publication of "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America
Taking the opportunity of a seminal article's fiftieth anniversary, Audrey Horning, Peter Mancall, Hiram Morgan, and Rory Rapple discuss the impact of Nicholas P. Canny's 1973 William and Mary Quarterly article, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," on scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Alison Games provides an introductory essay for the Forum, and Canny provides a response
Hugh O'Neill in Irish historical discourse, c .1550–2021
An analysis of the multiple publications relating to the career of Hugh O'Neill that appeared during the middle decades of the twentieth century reveals the extent to which authors who were then writing about the past permitted their interpretations to be influenced by the politics and prejudices of their own time. It is then demonstrated that the various positions then adopted by competing authors had been influenced also by polemics from the pa…
Imagining Ireland's Pasts: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries
The book describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries, and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. The book details how each set of authors …
Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish
Kerry, 1600–1730: The Emergence of a British Atlantic County
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Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe
This decisive contribution to the long-running debate about the dynamics of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe examines the new monarchies that emerged during the course of the 'long seventeenth century'. It argues that the players surviving the power struggles of this period were not 'states' in any modern sense, but primarily princely dynasties pursuing not only dynastic ambitions and princely prestige but the conse…
Elizabeth I and Ireland
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The Haliday Collection: A printed source for the seventeenth century
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature - Volume 113C, 2013
The Portuguese Atlantic World, C. 1650–C. 1760
After sixty years of Spanish rule, Restoration in 1640 saw the accession to the Portuguese throne of the duke of Braganza as Dom João IV. This did not erase Portuguese guilt by association. Spain's enemies still harassed Portugal. The Dutch suspended trade with Portugal and sought spices, sugar, and slaves in their places of origin. In the Atlantic, the Dutch occupied the north-east of Brazil (1630–1654), major ports of Angola (1640–1648), and th…
Popular Movements in Colonial Brazil
To speak of popular movements in Brazil before 1822 raises problems, especially if European and Atlantic contexts are considered. Who are the people, and how would they manifest themselves in a social formation marked by three centuries of slavery that not only deeply influenced the lives of Brazil's inhabitants but also articulated all economic and social relations, and radically demeaned the value of manual labour? Bondage in Brazil involved mi…
The Ecological Atlantic
In the Atlantic world in the centuries from 1450 to 1850, tumultuous changes in ecology had outsized impacts on human affairs. Historians have already laid useful foundations for an environmental history of the Atlantic world. Atlantic West Africa from Senegambia to the Gulf of Guinea participated in the ecological Atlantic by providing a few cultigens to the Americas, its share of pathogens (notably malaria and yellow fever), and above all by su…
Atlantic Warfare, 1440–1763
This article explores how changes in methods and intentions affected conflicts in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. First, it defines war in this era — specifically, to distinguish between acts of war and other types of violence that occurred in the Atlantic world between 1440 and 1763. Although the peoples of the Atlantic world made war idiosyncratically in this era — shaping their uses of force to suit their par…
Africans, Early European Contacts, and the Emergent Diaspora
Although Atlantic Africa was the last of the continent's shores to establish regular overseas connections, many aspects of its interactions mirrored those of East and North Africa. Ghana's successors in the Western Sudan, the empires of Mali and Songhai, continued to assure safety, stability, and wealth to Arab and Berber traders from the north. Trans-Saharan trade supplied books and paper to the centres of Islamic learning at Timbuktu and elsewh…
Atlantic Law
In Atlantic history, law functioned as an element of regional formation. Legal practices and discourses circulated widely, and similar patterns of legal politics produced parallel regulatory shifts around the region. This article describes processes contributing to each trend in Atlantic law. It considers some similarities in strategies for extending sovereignty and notes the prominence of often indirect references to Roman law by European sojour…
Severed Connections
Scholars often portray indigenous peoples' interactions with the Atlantic world in linear terms: European expansion engulfed native communities and enslaves them to a global capitalist system. The mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, however, tells a more complicated tale. By the 1750s, many native peoples had learnt from decades of experience how to engage the Atlantic world on their own varied terms, often to their own advantage. Those…
Religion in the Atlantic World
Writing on the diffusion of artistic forms in a transoceanic context, the art historian George Kubler likened an important work of art to a lighthouse emitting ‘signals’, which might be transferred officially, but might also be carried by ‘unexpected bearers’ to be ‘relayed’ to diverse people, including unintended recipients. This article adapts Kubler's model of diffusion and transformation to the transatlantic afterlives of a broader set of Eur…
Africa in the Atlantic World, C.1760 – C. 1840
The transatlantic slave trade peaked in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when more than 80,000 slaves annually were being shipped from Africa for the Americas. This overshadowed the older-established trade in slaves northwards from West Africa across the Sahara Desert to the Muslim world, which was probably under 10,000 annually. Despite the long history of commerce, direct European involvement in Africa remained limited. In contrast …
People and places in the Americas
Writing in the wake of King George's War, Edmund Burke, together with his cousin, offered the first comparative analysis of European settlement patterns in the New World in his Account of the European Settlement of America (1757). Although Burke never crossed the Atlantic, he was still able to provide insights into the ‘comparatively weak’ state of Spanish settlement in New Mexico, the lack of ‘towns and villages’ in New France, and the defects i…
The Challenge of the New
Europe's incursion into the Atlantic — the ‘occidental break out’ — after the mid-fifteenth century created many challenges and generated many kinds of ‘newness’ for all of those caught up in it. For the peoples of the African littoral, of the Canary Islands, of the Caribbean, and of the American mainland, the contact with Europeans throughout this period was inevitably, if not always initially, violent. Both Africa and America had been the site …
Violence in the Atlantic
The shaping of an Atlantic world during the first two centuries of Europe's overseas expansion saw an increase in the use and intensity of violence. Conquest, beginning with the Atlantic archipelagos (Canary Islands, Hispaniola, Santo Domingo), led to massacres and the elimination of populations. The diseases that Europeans brought with them may have done the most to wipe out the Canary Islanders during the fifteenth century, and the Tainos durin…
The Spanish Atlantic, 1650–1780
During the years from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish empire exhibited increasing economic diversity and robustness and maintained its dominant position among European empires in the Americas without serious challenge, notwithstanding Spain's eclipse as a military power in Europe and maritime power on the seas. In size alone, Spain's possessions in the Americas dwarfed those of any other colonising nation and…
Household Formation, Lineage, and Gender Relations in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Households did not figure prominently in the early Atlantic migration to the Americas. The opportunity for innovation in household structure, given the ethnicities, economies, and colonial regimes involved, was great. Large portions of the Americas diverged from the prescribed patterns of marriage in the Western European empires that had laid claim to the territory. The potential for differing versions of the early modern American family can be g…
The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America
ALTHOUGH the lordship of Ireland had long been in English /4 hands, effective control over the country had been lost during j tthe late medieval period, with the result that independent and autonomous Irish jurisdictions covered much of the island until the end of the sixteenth century. Attempts to reassert English authority over Ireland produced under Elizabeth I a pattern of conquest, bolstered by attempts at colonization, which was contemporan…
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World
This book focuses on the history of the Atlantic World from 1450–1820 and contains thirty-seven articles that offer a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the movement of people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices around and within the Atlantic basin. As a result of these movements, new peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose in the lands and islands touched by the Atlantic Ocean, while others were destro…
Europeans on the Move: Studies on European migration, 1500-1800
This book considers the phenomenon of European migration during the three centuries following the first Columbus voyage to America. A survey of the medieval background shows that Europeans were adept at long-distance travel in search of employment and opportunity, well before the encounter with America, and that some of these medieval adventurers had long been pressing beyond the perimeter of Europe. The chapters reveal that established patterns …
Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity
Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, composed in 1596, has long been accepted as a fundamental contribution to the theory of colonization, but it has not been adequately appreciated as a political text because commentators have at once exaggerated and diminished its originality.1 The exaggeration has happened because scholars have contended that Spenser's opinions were altogether more advanced than those held by any of his contemporari…
Writing Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the Wider World
The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke f…
Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America
Journal Article Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America Get access Nicholas Canny Nicholas Canny professor of history National University of Ireland, Galway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 3, December 1999, Pages 1093–1114, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568607 Published: 01 December 1999
Atlantic history: What and why
One of the discernible trends in the historiography of recent decades – especially in that which concerns the early modern centuries – has been the emergence of a literature that describes itself as Atlantic History. This paper seeks to identify positive and negative reasons why the once-popular history of exploration and discovery has given way to this new subject, it identifies some fresh meanings that may be drawn from some well-known sources …
Protestants, planters and apartheid in early modern Ireland
Two recent books, one on protestantism, the other on plantation, have much in common. Both are by young authors who as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, identified aspects of the history of early modern Ireland that were in urgent need of investigation and who then proceeded with the necessary research in British universities; in one case under the supervision of Dr Brendan Bradshaw and in the other under the tutelage of Dr Toby Barnard.…
Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the Changing Face of Gaelic Ulster
Late Atlantic History
Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800
This book considers the phenomenon of European migration during the three centuries following the first Columbus voyage to America. A survey of the medieval background shows that Europeans were adept at long-distance travel in search of employment and opportunity, well before the encounter with America, and that some of these medieval adventurers had long been pressing beyond the perimeter of Europe. The essays reveal that established patterns of…
The British Atlantic World: Working Towards a Definition
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Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Journal Article Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Ed. by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. xi + 290 pp. $35.00.) Get access B. W. Higman B. W. Higman University of the West Indies, Jamaica Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 3, December 1988, Pages 911–912, https://doi.org/10.2307/1901578 Published: 0…
Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée
The question of why the Reformation failed to win any significant number of adherents from among the native population in Ireland has, since the nineteenth century, been posed frequently by historians and, until very recently, the question has been accepted as valid and the answers provided have generally been considered plausible. That the problem of the Reformation in Ireland should be approached in this way is at least a concession by scholars…
Greater Britain, 1516-1776: Essays in Atlantic History
Journal Article Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History Get access Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History. By DAVID ARMITAGE (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004; pp. 292. £57.50). Nicholas Canny Nicholas Canny National University of Ireland, Galway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXI, Issue 491, April 2006, Pages 538–539, https://doi.org/10.1093/e…
Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800
Migration and Opportunity: Britain, Ireland and the New World
The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565-1576
The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective
Of all the Atlantic revolutions, the fifteen-year struggle that transformed French Saint-Domingue into independent Haiti produced the greatest degree of social and economic change, and most fully embodied the contemporary pursuit of freedom, equality, and independence. Between 1789 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution unfolded as a succession of major precedents: the winning of colonial representation in a metropolitan assembly, the ending of racial …
The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The French were major actors in the creation of an Atlantic world. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Atlantic sphere provided employment for thousands of French sailors, sustained a large merchant community, and supplied much capital. In the following two centuries, cities and ports involved in Atlantic trade emerged and prospered. French imperial policy was a source of permanent tensions — between colonists and authorities in Versailles; p…
The Scholarship and Legacy of David Beers Quinn, 1909-2002
Ireland and the European exploration and settlement of North America, transcended the old imperial history and created the field of Atlantic history. As David Dutton observed in memorial tribute, Quinn was a historian of immense industry and erudition. His immersion in the sources and his ability to see the large picture combined with an extraordinary interdisciplinary range to compose body of work that will continue to shape our view of the orig…
Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s
SPENSER'S IRISH CRISIS: HUMANISM AND EXPERIENCE IN THE 1590s Get access Nicholas Canny Nicholas Canny University CollegeGalway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 120, Issue 1, August 1988, Pages 201–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/120.1.201 Published: 01 August 1988
Early Modern Ireland: An Appraisal Appraised
Hugh O'Neill in Irish historical discourse, c .1550–2021
An analysis of the multiple publications relating to the career of Hugh O'Neill that appeared during the middle decades of the twentieth century reveals the extent to which authors who were then writing about the past permitted their interpretations to be influenced by the politics and prejudices of their own time. It is then demonstrated that the various positions then adopted by competing authors had been influenced also by polemics from the pa…
Atlantic World 1760–1820
There would have been no Atlantic world without trade. Throughout this period, the consumption of American-produced sugar, tobacco, and coffee, as well as the use of American gold and silver for money, was common throughout Europe. At the same time, the settlement of colonial emigrants and transported slave populations continued to grow and to transform the agriculture and environment of the Americas and western Africa. By the mid-eighteenth cent…
Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the Changing Face of Gaelic Ulster
Historical revision: XVI The Flight of the Earls, 1607
On 4 September 1607 the two Ulster earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and the lord of Fermanagh, Cuconnaught Maguire, accompanied by their respective kinsmen, embarked from Lough Swilly for continental Europe. They never again returned to the lands they had striven so hard to hold. Their departure was a tragedy for Gaelic Ireland; their former dependants were left leaderless and unprotected, and what remained of the Gaelic way of life was soon undermi…
The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America
ALTHOUGH the lordship of Ireland had long been in English /4 hands, effective control over the country had been lost during j tthe late medieval period, with the result that independent and autonomous Irish jurisdictions covered much of the island until the end of the sixteenth century. Attempts to reassert English authority over Ireland produced under Elizabeth I a pattern of conquest, bolstered by attempts at colonization, which was contemporan…
Early Modern Ireland: An Appraisal Appraised
XXXIV Rowland White’s ‘Discors Touching Ireland’, c . 1569
This selected document was forwarded to Sir William Cecil in March 1571, but it was probably composed some years previously, and almost certainly before the Irish parliament of 1569–71 had assembled. It is transcribed from a copy, bearing the name of Secretary Thomas Wilson, which survives among the State Papers, Ireland in the Public Record Office, London (S.P 63, vol. 31, no. 32, ff 73–117). The piece is considered worthy of presentation becaus…
Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée
The question of why the Reformation failed to win any significant number of adherents from among the native population in Ireland has, since the nineteenth century, been posed frequently by historians and, until very recently, the question has been accepted as valid and the answers provided have generally been considered plausible. That the problem of the Reformation in Ireland should be approached in this way is at least a concession by scholars…
The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565-1576
The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480-1650
The Anglo-American Colonial Experience
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The Formation of the Irish Mind: Religion, Politics and Gaelic Irish Literature 1580-1750
Journal Article THE FORMATION OF THE IRISH MIND: RELIGION, POLITICS AND GAELIC IRISH LITERATURE 1580–1750 Get access Nicholas Canny Nicholas Canny University CollegeGalway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 95, Issue 1, May 1982, Pages 91–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/95.1.91 Published: 01 May 1982
Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity
Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, composed in 1596, has long been accepted as a fundamental contribution to the theory of colonization, but it has not been adequately appreciated as a political text because commentators have at once exaggerated and diminished its originality.1 The exaggeration has happened because scholars have contended that Spenser's opinions were altogether more advanced than those held by any of his contemporari…
Fusion and Faction in Modern Ireland. A Review Article
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The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566-1643
Migration and Opportunity: Britain, Ireland and the New World
Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780-1914 . Samuel Clark , James S. Donnelly, Jr
A Reply
Europeans Abroad: Problems, Perspectives and Possibilities
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Protestants, planters and apartheid in early modern Ireland
Two recent books, one on protestantism, the other on plantation, have much in common. Both are by young authors who as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, identified aspects of the history of early modern Ireland that were in urgent need of investigation and who then proceeded with the necessary research in British universities; in one case under the supervision of Dr Brendan Bradshaw and in the other under the tutelage of Dr Toby Barnard.…
Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606
Quinn's study brings together the results of his nearly fifty years of research on the voyages outfitted by Sir Walter Raleigh and the efforts to colonize Roanoke Island. It is a fascinating book, rich in details of the colonists' experiences in the New World. Quinn solves the mystery of the Lost Colony with the controversial conclusion that many of the colonists lived with the Powhatans until the first decade of the seventeenth century when they…
Afterword: From Identity to Independence
Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish
Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Shorter Notices
Shorter Notices Get access NICHOLAS CANNY NICHOLAS CANNY University CollegeGalway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CIII, Issue CCCCVII, April 1988, Pages 482–483, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CIII.CCCCVII.482 Published: 01 April 1988
Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Journal Article Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Ed. by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. xi + 290 pp. $35.00.) Get access B. W. Higman B. W. Higman University of the West Indies, Jamaica Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 3, December 1988, Pages 911–912, https://doi.org/10.2307/1901578 Published: 0…
History (88 works) · History (52 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (49 works) · Political science (49 works) · Ancient history (40 works) · Archaeology (34 works) · Geography (33 works) · Law (33 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Atlantic World (28 works)