took some notes on this if anyone's looking aonchiallach.github.io/posts/ireland_notes/

this is a welcome example of someone taking the NLR approach to historiography in an Irish context, building up a repository of theoretical sources on European economic history coming from a Marxish perspective and plugging them into the most donnish outputs of the Trinity, UCD and Maynooth history departments. The results are a bit uneven; there's a lot hanging on the Anderson brothers here and I think the age of their models is really showing.

Coakley's aim seems to be to de-emphasise the colonial in favour of an attention to 'internal factors' and he makes a big show of rejecting Denis O'Hearn writings which locate Ireland within an orthodox colonial underdevelopment framework as a means of explaining why 'Ireland' (meaning the twenty-six county state) never industrialised but when Coakley has to show his cards on this subject all he has is: quasi-feudal kinship networks were stronger in Ireland than in England, Scotland or Wales.

Brenner is obviously a huge presence here as well so there is a consistent emphasis on the non-emergence of the petty-bourgeois yeoman strata in what became the Free State in comparison to the north, which is of course in large part due to the class compromise underpinning the plantation project. This means Coakley has to treat Ulster Custom as something independent from British imperialism; Bew being cited without caveats makes me wonder if he reckons that partition reflected a 'neutral' economic reality. Nothing too objectionable from the nineteenth century onwards, but a bit perfunctory.