Ireland is an island, situated on the western fringes of Atlantic Europe. Any settlers to this island had to first cross the sea and it is this sea connection that brought new ideas, technologies and different cultures to this land. Nine chapters in this volume, written by twenty-two British and Irish scholars, explore the impact of maritime links on Irish settlement from pre-historic times to the eighteenth century. This collection of up-to-date, multidisciplinary research provides new international perspectives on Irish settlement. The oceans surrounding Ireland meant that it was never isolated from international developments, be that the spread of coastal trading outposts in the Bronze Age to piracy in the north Atlantic during the plantation period, or the notorious triangular trade in the eighteenth-century.