| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ronald Hoffman. Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782. Assisted by Sally D. Mason. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2000. Pp. xxvi, 429. $39.95.

The very richness of this magisterial saga of the Carroll family from sixteenth-century Ireland to revolutionary Maryland makes it difficult to review. Building on the extraordinarily detailed Carroll papers, of which the authors are also editors, Ronald Hoffman and Sally D. Mason address several themes of importance to early Americanists. From this rich array, the reviewer must select, but selection carries the danger of underestimating this book's contribution to the field. Most readers will perhaps classify the book as a contribution to the large literature on the Chesapeake gentry, a literature that it enriches in several ways. For one thing, the literature on the gentry usually tells their story from an insider's perspective. Despite their possession of one of America's first fortunes, the Carrolls' Catholic faith made them outsiders in a largely Protestant world. The detail available in the Carroll papers also allows Hoffman and Mason to tell the story of how a great fortune was built and maintained with more precision than is usually the case. This same detail, combined with the Carrolls' wide range of activity, permits numerous contributions to early American economic history. . . .

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