"Although Irish Protestants argued continually through the 18th century that Ireland was not a colony, to all intents and purposes that was the way England saw it. Yet behind the barrage of criticism out of Ireland there was little consensus as to who precisely constituted the Irish. This book looks at a range of writers from Molyneux through to the mid-century Catholic historian Charles O'Conor and on to Maria Edgeworth to see how they each resisted English images of the Irish."--Jacket.