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Book Review: The age of transition: trajectory of the world-system, 1945-2025

have effectively sought to demonstrate that notwithstanding its smallness of scale Ireland contains a rich and sometimes confusingly contradictory array of complexity. Historical forces of colonization and settlement have interacted with a physical environment to produce enduring patterns of cultural regionalism while the imagining of place itself has been filtered and altered by writers and participants alike over a long time. There is nothing simple about Ireland in the finding in this literature. The cliche is pronounced dead. The emphasis throughout the 11 essays is clearly upon the complexity of social fissures, regional mosaics and fractured alignments. If the unifying linkage was an intent to demonstrate the futility, and indeed anti-intellectualism, of simple one-nation, or two-nation theories then this volume is successful. However, it is surprising that the integrative force of modern regional economics is virtually ignored. An emphasis on divisions ignores the reality of capital investment patterns which transcend political borders, and avoids analysis of integrated economies such as the disadvantaged border counties or, contrastingly, the identified vibrancy of the Belfast-Dublin corridor. A sequel to the present volume could, with profit, explore the dynamics of these factors which are powerfully reshaping the social and cultural geography of modern Ireland. In an inclusive Conclusion, Brian Graham argues that 'Hegemonic ideas are being renegotiated and refashioned in the multifaceted context of secularisation, Europeanness and the seemingly eternal conflict in the North'. It is indeed out of this process of change that a new Ireland is being born but one cannot but wonder if the full impact of the change has been assimilated by those who purport to offer political leadership in a society where events of the seventeenth century continue to provide the iconography for urban sectarian rioting. It is to be hoped that the assurance and optimism of the editor are more firmly founded than that of the United Irishmen who, precisely two centuries ago, declared that in the light of the contemporary European revolution in secular and societal thinking the old animosities of Irish sectarian difference and class differences were at an end. Readers of this volume will find it a useful locating device and directional aid in a search which still continues for an Ireland capable of being explained to those who live within it as well as to those who observe it externally.