"Named for its mythical leader "Captain Rock," avenger of agrarian wrongs, the Rockite movement of 1821-24 in Ireland was notorious for its extraordinary violence. In Captain Rock, James S. Donnelly, Jr., offers both a fine-grained analysis of the conflict and a broad exploration of Irish rural society after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars." "Drawing on a wealth of sources - the reports of policemen, military officers, magistrates, and landowners, buttressed by newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary inquiries, depositions, rebel proclamations, and threatening missives sent by Rockites to their enemies - Captain Rock offers a detailed anatomy of a dangerous, widespread insurgency whose distinctive political and cultural contours will force historians to expand their notions of how agrarian militancy operated and of how it influenced Irish nationalism in the years before the Great Famine of 1845-54"--Jacket.

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