packing industry as young, female, immigrant workers form the backbone of the meatpacking labour force. Today's meat packing ®rms are vertically integrated producers ofpackaged meat marketed to urban consumers. Underneath the neat styrofoam and clearwrap lie the environmental problems associated with concentrated livestock feedingoperations, the harsh conditions that workers labour under within the meat packingplants, and the health and safety concerns of consumers. Ian MacLachlan does anexcellent job of covering this topic in an integrated and even-handedmanner. His book ishighly recommended.

University of Minnesota, St Paul JEFF R. CRUMP

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0515

CHARLES DILLON and HENRY A. JEFFERIES (Eds) Tyrone: History & Society (Dublin:Geography Publications, 2000. Pp. lxxi� 852. d60.00 hardback); A. J. HUGHES andWILLIAM NOLAN (Eds) Armagh: History & Society (Dublin: Geography Publications,2001. Pp. lxxi� 1080. d60.00 hardback)

REVIEWS 139

The two Ulster counties of Tyrone and Armagh are the subjects respectively of thefourteenth and ®fteenth volumes in the Irish County History and Society Series. Liketheir predecessors, these substantial books are comprised of a set of essays by academicsand local historians, which deal with the history, literature, language, religion andsettlement of the two counties. Both books are arranged chronologically rather thanthematically, essentially ranging from the earliest evidence of prehistoric settlement tothe mid-twentieth century. They are not, however, entirely formulaic, although thevariations in the subject matter of content probably do no more than re¯ect theavailability of contributors. While the generic sub-title to the series makes the claim forinterdisciplinarity, the content of both volumes is ®rmly multi-disciplinary and largelyeschews any attempt to explore the interconnections between its constituent academicelements. Nevertheless, it goes almost without saying that these handsome volumesprovide a rich and varied repository of local history. They are set ®rmly within the highlyempirical tradition of so much Irish historiographyÐdensely footnoted history andarchaeology in which description is regarded as explanation, while the broader cultural,political and economic contexts of society are downplayed. So too is an intellectualframework for the studies, which largely lack any evaluation of their a priori assump-tions, or of the rami®cations of the conclusions of the individual chapters to the`societies', purportedly at the core of these books. Given that this is almost a diagnosticcharacteristic of many manifestations of Irish historiography (and certainly of too muchof the historical geography of the island), it is perhaps unfair to castigate unduly theeditors and contributors in these two particular volumes. Inevitably the work is patchy inquality and style but, at its best, is illuminating and well researched, while the books inthis series as a whole provide an important conduit for the (relatively) populardissemination of academic research that might otherwise be condemned for its localism.

In both Tyrone and Armagh, the editors have assembled an impressive range ofcontributors but there remains a certain lack of discrimination in the content, whichclearly is being driven by the often somewhat myopic research focus of the individualsinvolved. More important, perhaps, are reservations concerning the justi®cation forthese books. The Irish county is a complex concept, the shiring of the island occurringover a long period from the twelfth to the late-twentieth centuries. The counties maypreserve earlier territorial boundaries but essentially their delineation re¯ects the variousextensions of English power across the island of Ireland. InUlster, therefore, the counties

140 REVIEWS

are of seventeenth-century origin, although they may have Gaelic territorial predeces-sors. In this case, however, the Gaelic lordship of Tyrone, the ®efdom of the O'Neills, wasnot coincident with the later county, extending as it did to encompass much of what isnow counties Armagh and Londonderry. Both these books point to the importance ofthe local but not how that might be de®ned. Neither justi®es the county as a means ofdelineating local identities and meanings, a de®ciency that poses particular dif®culties inNorthern Ireland, where this territorial division is a much less obvious device of socialorganization than is true of the Republic of Ireland. There, counties remain the principalstructure for local government but in Northern Ireland the six county councils wereabolished in 1972 to be replaced by no less than 26 district councils which, to be brutal,were demarcated to re¯ect the much more ®nely detailed sectarian geography of theprovince. Overlying these are the boundaries of single-function governance entities suchas health and education boards, and also parliamentary constituencies for Stormont andWestminster. Consequently the role played by the county in the de®nition of place andidentity in Northern Ireland is less than immediately apparent. One obvious exception isin Gaelic sports, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) being organized on a countybasis; indeed the GAA may have been primarily responsible for de®ning county identityin the nineteenth century. Another is provided by the paramilitary groups who tend toorganise their `battalions' on a county basis. Neither volume, however, addresses thevalidity of the county as a basis for the study of local history in Northern Ireland, nordoes either pair of editors consider the point that their subject matter is de®ned less by themeaning of place in society than by an English administrative division, the boundary ofwhich was ®nally codi®ed in the First Edition Ordnance Survey maps of the 1840s. Thisfailure to examine the meaning of the local is disappointing. In deconstructing the notionthat society in Northern Ireland constitutes two monolithic and opposed traditions, it isincreasingly apparent that people are engaging with local history at a scale far smallerthan that of the county, which, moreover, is increasingly a concept that arguably has littlemeaning for Protestants. It is dif®cult to avoid a sectarian reading of the GAA, whichcontributes to the invisibility of the county in any of the current manifestations of Ulsterloyalist and unionist identity. Thus if these books present local history, whose history is itand why might people identify with it? There is a clear sense in Northern Ireland thatlocal history is about empowerment of ordinary people, loyalist and nationalist, who seethemselves as being excluded from hegemonic, elite-driven representations of the past.There has long been a search for a `common ground' often vestedÐas in the work ofEstyn EvansÐin a material culture that was somehow less contentious than the sectarianrivalries of rural and urban society. But local history now often re¯ects a rejection ofcommonality and certainly of the state. It is increasingly concerned with intenselylocalised and internalised communities de®ning themselves, often in directly sectarianterms, at the micro-scale of the rural townland or urban village. In his somewhat ¯oridintroduction to Tyrone, the poet John Montague refers (p. xxii) to the `̀ miasma of loyalloyalties'' that is the county of Tyrone and indeed all of Northern Ireland. What do the`̀ sturdy prosperous, mainly protestant towns'' of the Clogher Valley have in commonwith the intensely introverted community described in Daniel Donnelly's discussion ofthe ®shing community of east Tyrone's Lough Neagh shore? Such communities mayindeed locate themselves more broadly by reference to political organisations thatencompass all of Northern Ireland (or even Ireland in the case of Sinn F�ein), or to largerhistorical events like plantation, the Great Famine or emigration. But what is singularlymissing in the delineation of these identities is the county. Occasionally, the contents ofboth Tyrone and Armagh do interconnect with bigger issues but neither succeeds inaddressing the ways in which the local is in part de®ned through its intersection withother histories and places to create complex and minute geographies of belonging.

Nor, in either volume, is there any sense of the urgency or importance of the past.There are three dimensions to this problem. First, there is a clear reluctance to dealwith controversy (unless it is safely distant in the past). Both volumes strive for

REVIEWS 141

even-handedness. Chapters on Catholicism and the United Irishmen are matched byothers on Protestantism and the Orange Order. Gaelic language and literature is givendue prominence. But recent history is completely elided. Tyrone begins with prehistoricsettlement and ends with a history of nationalism in the county that, quite bizarrely, stopsin 1972. Armagh also gives due prominence to the prehistoric settlement but ends evenearlier with the work of the Boundary Commission in the 1920s. Excepting only Oram'schapter on the architectural heritage of County Armagh, neither book has anything tosay about the meaning of the past in the present, nor does either consider the bitter andon-going sectarian con¯ict that dis®gures the communities of both Counties Armagh andTyrone. Second, this reluctance to engage with the importance of the past to the present iscompounded by the content and its organization. The editors of Tyrone, Charles Dillonand Henry Jefferies, eschew any attempt to isolate the contextual themes of the book.Presumably the existence of the county is in itself seen as a suf®cient structure. This is justas well, perhaps, given the eclectic range of no less than eleven themes which WilliamNolan identi®es in his introduction to Armagh. These range from the predictable topicsof urbanisation, St Patrick and the post-Patrician church, and plantations and landlords,to the curious combination of archaeology, agriculture and architecture, and the baf¯ing`̀ Tories, raparees and folk poets''. Are these the key themes for the history and society ofa county, which no matter how offensive the term might be to its inhabitants, is knownmost widely for its `bandit country'? It is a curious perspective on history and society thatonly past pain and con¯ict is considered relevant. Finally, what do these two books (andthe others in the series) tell us about place and identity? In their joint foreword toArmagh, the Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic Archbishops of Armagh claim thatthe book ``allows us to read and understand the contemporary landscape'' (p. xxiv). Thisde®nes precisely the limitations of both Armagh and Tyrone and, in fairness to theirindividual editors and contributors, the template of the Irish County History and SocietySeries. That latter simply does not permit engagement with the meaning of place and theongoing and dynamic nature of a present-centred past. At the end of these quiteenormous volumes (30 chapters onArmagh, 26 on Tyrone), the reader is overwhelmed byhistorically-attested and footnoted accounts of territories demarcated by lines drawn inthe seventeenth century and abandoned administratively in the twentieth. But one has noidea as to what these territories mean, or if they provide any framework for identity andthe resolution of con¯ict. In a society in which local history is being portrayed as a formof activism, as a de®nite element in resistance and as part of the many (loyalist andnationalist) struggles for survival and justice, Armagh and Tyrone remain highlyproblematic contributions.

University of Ulster BRIAN GRAHAM

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0516

PIERRE PINON, Atlas du Paris haussmannien: La ville en h�eritage du Second Empire aÁ nosjours (Paris: Parigramme, 2002. Pp. 212. d49.00 hardback); SIMONE DELATTRE, Lesdouze heures noires: La nuit aÁ Paris au XIXe si�ecle (Paris: AlbinMichel, 2000. Pp. 690. FF160.00 paperback); KAREN BOWIE (Ed.), La modernit�e avant Haussmann: Formes del'espace urbain aÁ Paris 1801±1853 (Paris: Editions Recherche, 2001. Pp. 408. d26.00paperback); VINCENT BERDOULAY and PAUL CLAVAL (Eds), Aux d�ebuts de l'urbanismefrancË ais (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001. Pp. 256. d23.00 paperback); CHRISTOPHE

BERNHARDT and GENEVIEVE MASSARD-GUILBAUD (Eds), Le d�emon moderne: Lapollution dans les soci�et�es urbaines et industrielles d'Europe (Clermont-Ferrand: PressesUniversitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002. Pp. 466. d29.00 paperback)