The practice of improvement in the Irish context — The Castle Caldwell estate in county Fermanagh in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

This paper discusses the eighteenth-century concept of improvement as applied on the estate of Sir James and Sir John Caldwell during the forty years from the early 1750s to the early 1790s. It sets the idea of improvement against the background of the Anglo-Irish situation in Ireland and. using material from Caldwell family archives, shows how in Ireland the concept, though largely derived from English and European ideas, took on significant additional overtones.