W.H. Crawford
(Ulster Historical Foundation, £6.95)
For three decades Bill Crawford has been enlightening us about the evolution of the economy and society in his native Ulster. He has published a series of mould-breaking articles, without which our understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ulster would be seriously impoverished. His essential focus has been the linen trade of Ulster before industrialisation, but his explorations of this topic have also led him into path-breaking work on tenurial relationships, the evolution of roads and markets, the role of women in a proto-industrial society, technical innovation and industrial development, the role of towns, and the political implications of economic change. Because neither his pioneering thesis nor his impressive array of articles have been made available in book form, Crawford’s work is much less well known than it should be. Anybody interested in any part of any of the nine counties of Ulster would derive relevant insights from reading this book.
In 1972 Crawford published the short Domestic Industry in Ireland: the experience of the linen industry but this has long been out of print. The Ulster Historical Foundation is to be congratulated on making this text available once more, under a new more precise title, in a handsome new design, and with the addition of a fresh introduction and a valuable bibliographical essay. The book retains its array of striking visual material—almost one hundred carefully chosen and captured illustrations, which demonstrate the impressive collection of the Armagh Museum. There are weavers’ shears and harvest knots, Orange artefacts and cockfights, bleachgreens and damask factories, not to mention ‘the linen weaver’s slaying table’. There are also generous quotations from original documents, a technique which brings the past alive in a very immediate way. While illustrating the complexities of the linen of the linen industry, the text is also a useful guide to the relevant sources. This is hardly surprising as much of Crawford’s career, in the PRONI, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and currently as Development Officer for the thriving Federation for Ulster Local Studies, has been spent in generously and unselfishly making these available to students, local historians, scholars and colleagues.
This book looks at the origins of the linen industry in north Armagh in the early eighteenth century, and its consequent spread over the northern third of island. A map on page five depicts the industry at its maximum extent, just prior to it becoming factory-based. A weaving core in inner Ulster (centred around
Lough Neagh, but reaching south into north Monaghan and Cavan) was surrounded by a spinning periphery (running from Meath, Westmeath and Longford through Roscommon, Leitrim, Fermanagh and part of the Lagan). Outside this, there were only two other significant regions—the Clew Bay area of Mayo and a narrow coastal strip in west Cork centred on Dunmanway.
Crawford then explores various facets of the industry—marketing, bleaching, the life of the weaver, state support through the Linen Board and the putting-out system. The book concludes with twelve appendixes containing significant documents. As the bibliographical essay suggests, this account needs to be read alongside a magisterial article by the author in Irish Economic and Social History XV (1988), ‘The evolution of the linen trade of Ulster before industrialisation’. The importance of this article is that it demolishes the economic thesis of Peter Gibbon which underpins his influential account of the origins of the Orange Order. As Gibbon’s flawed thesis has been absorbed in an uncritical way by too many students of Ulster politics, Crawford’s work is critical in undermining one of the principal props of the Ulster ‘troubles’ industry. In looking at popular politicisation in Ulster in the 1790s, it is definitely a case of ‘back to basics’ and one must abandon all the inherited ‘explanations’. Indeed, if one was to offer a criticism of Crawford’s work, it is that it remains resolutely focused on the social and economic history of the industry and is far less concerned (and far less sure-footed) in dealing with the political ramifications.
This is an essential book for any serious student of Irish history in the period from the Boyne to the Famine. It is especially useful for teaching purposes, given its relaxed style, its wealth of illustrations and its generous citations from primary sources. Perhaps the Ulster Historical Foundation might now think of putting together a volume of Bill Crawford’s collected essays.
Kevin Whelan