This ambitious effort analyzes how forces of economic reciprocity and dynamics of class formation operated and mutated in and around the area of Thomastown, a historically important commercial exchange route on the Nore River in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Its author, Marilyn Silverman, is recognized as a contributor to understanding Ireland’s social past and to the field of historical anthropology. This book is the second in an expected trilogy, the first being Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town, written with P. H. Gulliver in 1995.

In the bulk of the work, Silverman endeavors to solve the problem of how class characteristics like "landlord paternalism" and "labourer deference" functioned over time to comprise an eventual "common sense"—or hegemonic—worldview. Silverman hopes to extend Gramsci’s notion of hegemony by arguing that ideology formation is processual rather than static (a point emphasized in other contexts by Sally Falk Moore in the 1990s). Moreover, Silverman maintains that shifts in ideology construction can be located in discursive forms such as oral narratives, letters, and print media. Silverman believes that she can determine when and how structurations of hegemonic thought gained sway in Ireland by coupling the microsocial with the macrohistorical, and by providing extensive data on how laws relating to trade, fishing, housing, and education were interpreted and negotiated at the local level. She further claims that her model can extend the methodological playing field of historical anthropology.

Unfortunately, these perspectives are not stated outright; rather, the reader encounters the aforesaid in the book’s conclusion, which serves as a kind of apologia for the preceding 475 plus pages. This lack of guidance through formidable amounts of newspaper reports, court proceedings, and personal interviews renders large parts of the book unapproachable. To make matters worse, Silverman’s inattention to recent scholarly work on famine, labor, colonialism, and state formation, both in Ireland and elsewhere, substantially saps the strength of reader altruism.

Undoubtedly, Silverman combed over a century and a half’s worth of regional archives to glean data on the networks of class relationships in Thomastown. Strong chapters occur toward the book’s end, revealing lives embroiled in civil war, affected by powerful clergymen, and compromised by British Army recruitment. Also, at times Silverman’s studies yield startling and compelling diatribes, such as a poet’s comment on life under the constitution, printed in the Kilkenny Journal in 1937. Part of it reads, “Was it for this that Patrick Pearse faced the British firing squad, and James Connolly, broken . . . but still defiant, was dragged to his equally splendid death?” (p. 385, ellipsis in original).

Despite rich passages like this, Silverman’s overall project is perturbing, partly because her study appears to spurn both centuries-long Anglo-Irish relations and salient shifts in Irish history. For instance, considering that the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) fell within the first 50 years of the author’s time frame, Silverman’s omission of recent historiographic works published to commemorate the event seems blatantly irresponsible. Through death or emigration, the Famine claimed over three million of the working class, the very same people who form the backbone of Silverman’s analysis. Likewise, by confining her chronicle of colonization and state formation to the years between 1800 and 1950, Silverman seriously understates the importance of the Insurrection of 1798, on the one end, and the international policy shift of Seán Lemass in the late 1950s, on the other. The former precipitated an enduring redefinition of political arrangements through the Act of Union; the latter reversed isolationism and prepared Ireland for the present state of Celtic Tigerism.

Silverman’s holistic paradigm begs to be enriched by the politics of representation (which in Ireland often served the goals of the colonizer) and Irish resistance (which was frequently utilized for ideological purposes to bolster the psyche of the laboring poor). Coupled with the author’s use of oversimplified categories like "paternalism" and "deference," these deficiencies preclude attention to the full range of discursive patterns and nuances of the Irish colonial predicament. The career of Daniel O’Connell serves as but one example.

An even more trenchant critique concerns Silverman’s handling of specific cases, which she exhibits in boxed format throughout the text. These are not only subjected to the heavy hand of ellipsis, but they are also weighted with authorial comment. Both methods curtail the ability of researchers to apply other types of analysis to the data. Silverman also seems to ascribe verisimilitude to large amounts of printed news sources; as media constructs, these reports were neither disinterested nor value free.

Silverman is correct in her assessment that a historiography of Irish working-class life should be written from a holistic perspective, and her description of Thomastown extends beyond the spatial dimensions of the typical community study. These decisions deserve commendation. However, by failing to chronologize her data within important historical purviews, by neglecting the rich body of theory that speaks to the process of class formation within the modern context, and by disregarding the preservation of even the essence of primary sources, Silverman undermines her own project. Scholars of Ireland and of historical anthropology are impoverished historically, ethnographically, theoretically, and methodologically as a result. One can only hope that Silverman will address these issues and offer correctives in the final work of the Thomastown trilogy.