Belfast merchant families in the seventeenth century

Jean Agnew

‘... an exemplary study’, Toby Barnard, IHS.

‘... this book represents a significant scholarly achievement and will no doubt remain the standard textbook on early Belfast. Its relevance to the study of early modern trade and maritime enterprise is more general than this, for what makes this work more interesting are the insights it gives into how a new colonial town, with no previous trading links, was able to establish itself as an important commercial centre’, Evan Jones, International Journal of Maritime History.

‘... a mature, well-written piece of scholarship. Jean Agnew's study will certainly become a classic; it is a model of economic, social, religious and political analysis of an increasingly important community and their world’, James McAllister, Irish Economic and Social History.

‘Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century will be of considerable value to historians working toward a composite picture of the larger North Atlantic merchant community. In addition to a wholly worthwhile final product ... the author has given us an admirable model. Belfast was, after all, just one of dozens of places being shaped by the dynamics of regional and transatlantic trade. On a purely practical plane, Jean Agnew demonstrates what a sensitive and judicious historian who explores a merchant community as a collection of individuals and interconnecting families can accomplish’, Thomas M. Truxes, William and Mary Quarterly.