La terra i els homes. El País Valencià a l’època dels Àustria

2005. Pròleg de Manuel Ardit, 340 pp.

Why would a man born in Belfast, graduate by the Queen’s University of his natal city, who was preparing his PhD in Cambridge University, be interested in our country? For several reasons. For many reasons: for John Elliots’s master’s, but also for his Irish origin. As he said a few years ago in an interview, Valencia already attracted him as a research subject when he was a student at Queen’s University in Belfast. He said: ‘moving away from your own country – Ireland – and studying other places and cultures is always a way to better understand your own discontentment and reflect’. A lived experience as determinant factor that we don’t find in many other Hispanists. James Casey ha proved to be a true master in the use of the language to describe, analyse and explain historical phenomena; in the subtle determination of its components, in the analysis of its interrelations. And that is what he did in The Kingdom of Valencia, where he highlights the contradictions of the peripheral society that was Valencia in a time of slow consolidation of the modern state. The book is a sample of his work on Valencia throughout his career as a historian: a collection of articles difficult to find an publish in specialised magazines and collective books that keep all its validity.