Dublin

How Dublin grew from a Viking settlement to the capital city of Ireland: a one-of-a-kind comprehensive history of one of the most popular cities in the world.

Dublin has many histories: for a thousand years, it was a modest urban settlement on the quiet waters of the Irish Sea. For the last four hundred years, it has experienced great - and often astonishing - change. Once a fulcrum of English power in Ireland, it was also the location for the 1916 insurrection that began the rapid imperial retreat. That moment provided Joyce with the setting for the greatest modernist novel of the age, Ulysses, capping a cultural heritage that became an economic resource for the brash 'Tiger Town' of the 1990s. David Dickson's magisterial survey of the city's history brings Dublin to life from its medieval incarnation through the glamorous eighteenth century, when it reigned as the 'Naples of the North', through to the millennium. He reassesses 120 years of Anglo-Irish Union, during which Dublin - while the economic capital of Ireland - remained, as it does today, a place where rival creeds and politics struggled for supremacy. Dublin reveals the rich and intriguing story behind the making of a capital city.

David Dickson is a professor in modern history at Trinity College, Dublin, and has published extensively on the social, economic, and cultural history of Ireland. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2006.