EMPIRE
Cromwellian Ireland and the Transformation of the English Atlantic World
Funded by a Research Ireland senior laureate award, The EMPIRE project will explore Ireland’s crucial role in England’s (and later Britain’s) global expansion.
The archive
Explore the sources
Discover archival collections, locate original records and work directly with datasets produced by the project.
Featured dataset
Barbados Assembly minutes, 1654–1658
Explore the minutes of the Barbados Assembly and Governor’s Council: a detailed record of colonial government, trade, justice and everyday administration during the Commonwealth and Protectorate.
PRIMARY SOURCES · DIGITISED RECORDS
Research pathways
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01
Find archival records
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02
Download datasets
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03
Read the research
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From the project
Research updates
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November 2026
New Sweden: from manuscript to dataset
Gerard Farrell explores handwritten text recognition and language models in processing early modern sources.
Published sources
Across the Atlantic archives
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From the project
News and research in progress
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About EMPIRE
Rethinking Ireland’s place in the Atlantic world
EMPIRE — Cromwellian Ireland and the Transformation of the English Atlantic World — explores Ireland’s role in the reconfiguration of English imperial power, economic networks and colonial expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The site brings together historical interpretation with accessible, traceable sources, offering researchers direct paths into the evidence.