Just published by Profile Books is Dublin: The making of a capital city by David Dickson, Professor in Modern History, Trinity College Dublin. The book provides the first comprehensive survey of the city’s history to appear in more than 30 years and brings together in a single volume the work of many dozens of historians, geographers and archaeologists.
It traces some 1,400 years of the city, from Viking settlement to capital and reveals how much Dublin was always a hybrid place, a melting pot and sometimes a collision point for Viking, Gaelic and Anglo-Norman settlers, for New English and Ulster Scots, Huguenot and Jewish immigrants. It argues that much of the city’s cultural singularity, both within Ireland and globally, was the result of this hybridity.
The principal focus of the book is on the post-medieval emergence of Dublin as an internationally significant city, evolving from 17th-century court town to a parliamentary metropolis in the 18th century, and from a politically and religiously polarized town of the 19th century to the embattled centre of a new nation in the 20th. It concludes with a magisterial analysis of the vast city-region that had taken shape by 2000.
In essence, Dublin reveals the rich and intriguing story behind the development of the capital city and provides a comprehensive backdrop to the lives of our Dublin ancestors.
The book is also being published by the Lilliput Press in a special limited (76-book) edition, clothbound and cased, and signed by the author.
A North American edition will be published by Harvard University Press in the autumn.
