Between 1710 and 1770, the inventive, ornate Rococo style should, in the natural course of events, have been Britain's prevailing decorative style. This is the first book to describe and explain its oddly frustrated course in England and, in vivid contrast, its brilliant flourishing in Ireland. The authors' controversial claim is that Ireland not only devised its own form of 'insular' Rococo, but exported this mode successfully in a gesture of cultural colonialism to the West of England. Their book shows that the Irish were, far more effectively than the English, participants in the European consensus of the Rococo period.