The Pamphlet Controversy About Wood's Halfpence (1722-25) and the Tradition of Irish Constitutional Nationalism (Munster Monographs on English Literature)

The controversy about Wood’s Halfpence between 1722 and 1725 was an exceptional instance of Irish defiance of England’s imperial authority. In a heated public dispute, more than 100 pamphlets and broadsides in prose and verse protested against the English Government’s granting a patent for coining copper money for Ireland to an English manufacturer. Castigating the project in economic and constitutional terms, they revealed an indebtedness to traditional arguments for Ireland’s status as a free kingdom, whose people enjoyed the same liberties as the people of England. The pamphlets thus render a representative picture of Irish political thought and of the country’s relationship with its closest neighbour, and most powerful rival, England, in the early eighteenth century.