This book is composed of six microhistories relating to social encounters in County Kerry on the southwest coast of Ireland, during the interlude 1600–1730. Its value far exceeds the sum of its parts, because Marc Caball makes the case that the society that emerged in Kerry during what was a period of dramatic change throughout Ireland was a unique hybrid society, which he considers to have been partly the product of accommodations negotiated between the majority native population of high, or moderately high, status, and the dominant newcomers who recognized the need to reach such understandings because they remained numerically weak even as they were becoming owners of most of the land in the county. Caball explains also that society in Kerry remained socially conservative, and that the authors of texts in the Irish language, of which he makes extensive use, displayed more respect for the incoming English proprietors who received their lands through government-sponsored confiscations than for people from the lower ranks of Irish society who attempted to improve their circumstances by aping the mores of English functionaries or by adopting their religion.

The author explains his choice of the adjective hybrid to describe society in Kerry because, as he puts it, society there, by the outset of the eighteenth century, “exhibited traits characteristic of both colonial and ancien régime societies and as such was effectively hybrid” (50). When Caball invokes the term ancien régime he is recalling the work of S. J. Connolly, which has contended that there was nothing exceptional about Irish society compared with other European societies of the eighteenth century and has rejected the notion that Ireland underwent a process of colonization over the course of the previous two centuries. For Connolly, Kerry was a county where banditry persisted because the local elites could not act effectively to maintain order because of their remoteness from the government in Dublin. Caball cannot deny the factor of distance from Dublin but he rejects the notion that the county was remote from external influences, first by alluding to the maritime location of Kerry, which put it into contact with other parts of the world that had come under British and trading dominance over this same interlude, and second, by making reference to Henry, Lord Shelbourne (1675–1751), the largest landowner in the county at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and to his father Sir William Petty; both were people of consequence in Britain as well as in Ireland.

The more interesting part of this argument and the justification for Caball's subtitle derives from the details he provides on the county's Atlantic and global associations. These include the taking by piracy in Kerry in 1650 of a Dutch ship bound for Cape Verde; the prevalence of tobacco smoking even among the poor of the county in the first half of the seventeenth century, of which witness was provided by the author of the well-known Irish-language text Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis (The parliament of clan Thomas); the existence in the seventeenth century of Kerry natives who had become tobacco producers on the West Indian islands of Nevis, St. Christopher, and Montesserat; the presence as planters in Barbados of the Trant family of London, who had also come into possession of property in Kerry; and the involvement of Kerry with the Atlantic provisioning trade, including with French activities in the Atlantic Basin. Such contacts and associations, according to Caball, meant that Kerry with its “zones of contact between newcomers and natives” developed into a society akin to “diverse territories and regions bordering the Atlantic” (17).

There seems little ground on which to dispute Caball's argument given the evidence he can cite to support it. Challenges are likely to focus rather on what he has to say on the uniqueness of the Kerry experience, as other historians of other counties and communities in Ireland will point to the occurrence within the areas with which they are familiar of “countless daily acts of conversation and neighborly interchange that constituted a middle ground where people from different backgrounds interacted fluidly and no doubt often on the basis of mutual benefit and not infrequently mutual sympathy” (29).