Cormac Ó Gráda
(Clarendon Press, £47)
Since Louis Cullen’s path-breaking Economic History of Ireland since 1660 appeared twenty-two years ago, there have only been two rather less ambitious text-books to challenge its monopoly—Mary Daly’s Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800 (1981), and Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw’s Economic History of Ulster 1820 -1939 (1985). Now the arrival of Cormac Ó Gráda’s New Economic History, with an appearance both physically and intellectually formidable, offers a new standard text-book on Irish economic history.
However, even in the Introduction, Ó Gráda warns the reader that despite its size this is no narrative survey—much of the material presented ‘is too fresh for the usual text-book treatment’ [p. v]—but rather a general account, heavily informed by recent advances in the quantitative investigation of the Irish past. Ó Gráda’s commitment to reporting on quantitative research, its methods, its revelations and the often frustrating limitations of data, take the reader through a remarkable diversity of issues—tillage yields in the 1770s, Napoleonic bankruptcy trends, the height of prisoners and of East India Company recruits before the Famine, the calorific content of potato varieties, inventories of post-Famine shops, farmers’ inheritance behaviour, employment trends in the sea fisheries, banknote circulation and cattle smuggling in the Economic War.
The book makes demands, but not unreasonable demands, on the historian who lacks an easy familiarity with modern economic theory and the techniques of economic analysis. But the author’s relaxed style of writing, his sympathy for the forensic methods of the non-quantitative historian, and his eye for the telling quotation enhance the accessibility of his arguments.
More than half of the text is concerned with the first seventy years of the survey. There are separate chapters on pre- and post-Famine demography, agriculture and living standards; banking and infrastructure before and after 1850 are also treated in chronologically distinct sections. A series of reflections on the Great Famine reside at the centre of the volume. Industry however is treated synoptically, with both long-term industrial evolution and the diagnoses for poor industrial performance between 1780 and 1914 being examined without the Famine splicing up the discussion. These are probably the easiest chapters for the general reader, for it is one of the few weaknesses of the book that its sheer intellectual fecundity makes it difficult to read sequentially. Some of the strongest conclusions are not at the end of chapters, and Ó Gráda’s ‘big picture’ is often very softly delineated—and only after the reader has been brought to the quarry-face of research, shown the problems, and warned of the provisionality of many findings. A short conclusion, or epilogue, drawing together the strategic arguments would serve the hurried reader at least.
Many of Ó Gráda’s themes and arguments will be familiar to students of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Despite his generously expressed debts to the pioneering work of Joel Mokyr and Peter Solar, the strong arguments which provide the book’s intellectual architecture are very much Ó Gráda’s own: the relatively respectable performance of eighteenth-century Irish agriculture, Irish society’s ‘botched adjustment’ to the new international economic order of the early nineteenth century, the marginal role of landlords in agricultural development, and the non-inevitability of the great cataclysm of the 1840s. On post-Famine agriculture, Ó Gráda maintains an Olympian distance from the historiography of the land question, dismissing the significance of tenant right and suggesting that ‘what is striking nearly a century [after the Land Acts]…is how easily the system imposed by the sword in the seventeenth century was eliminated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how few traces it left’ [p. 257].
The contrast between divergence in British/Irish economic performance in the early nineteenth century, and convergence after 1850 is examined from a multiplicity of angles, but most tellingly in the section on ‘Population and Emigration 1850-1939’ (Chapter 9), which should be obligatory reading for all students of modern Irish history. Similarly Chapter 13, a penetrating and ingenious exploration of the causes of Irish industrial disappointment, is a tour-de-force, reinstating natural resources, and discarding Mokyr’s residual of entrepreneurial failure as long-term explanations. On the old question as to why Ulster’s industrial history was so different, Ó Gráda seems surprisingly agnostic.
The final three chapters, on North and South between the wars, is centred on policy analysis and on the financial history of partitioned Ireland. The ideas here are highly original—especially in the area of banking history—and in a notable piece of ‘revisionism’, Louden Ryan’s longstanding estimates of Irish tariff levels are finally challenged. But these probing essays which complete the volume stand somewhat apart from the rest of the book. A chapter on World War I and its immediate aftermath is an obvious lacuna; for while Ó Gráda is obviously right to play down 1815 as a turning point in Irish economic history—’the post-war crisis…was in large part a fiction born of special pleading’ [p. 161]—there is a far stronger case for seeing the Great War as an economic watershed. Yet it does not even merit an entry in the index.
The First World War transformed labour costs, and while there is much here on the long-term evolution of the labour market, its composition and the trends in wage differentials and Anglo-Irish comparisons, there is a notable silence on the role of organised labour in helping to explain the distinctive trajectories of (in the nineteenth century) skilled and unskilled real wages, and (after 1914) the narrowing urban wage differentials. If skilled labour was precociously powerful in nineteenth-century Irish cities (as seems to be the case), this may be more central to the industrial story than is implied here. Similarly fear of its potential strength was a major factor in shaping the political economy of the new southern state.
Ó Gráda’s concern with monitoring long-term shifts in living standards, across region and across class, throws up fascinating if incomplete evidence on material culture, diet, and attitudes to savings and inheritance. But gender relations, and the relative contributions of women and children to trends in family living standards, will have to be teased out far more. Ó Gráda makes admirable demographic use of the Rotunda Hospital archives, but this is only a beginning to the quantitative study of family living standards. The remarkable central fact, highlighted many years ago by Joseph Lee, that Irish women were unique in early twentieth-century Europe in having shorter life expectancy than Irish men, has still not been satisfactorily explained.
The initial reaction of many to the sight of this book—exasperation at Clarendon’s pricing policy—will quickly dissolve when its enormous value as a resource for the shelf of every working historian is realised. Its intellectual range, its rigorous standard in the weighing of evidence, its methodological pyrotechnics and its palpable humanity, will ensure that Irish economic history will never be quite the same again. Ó Gráda has explicitly identified numerous agendas for future research, and has set agreeable tasks for us all to contemplate.
David Dickson