Capitalists and co-operators: agricultural transformation, contested space, and identity politics in South Tipperary, Ireland, 1890–1914

Abstract

Technological change in the dairy industries of western Europe in the 1880s and 1890s significantly affected the human geography of dairying regions, as new butter factories or ‘creameries’ shifted the location of butter production off the farm. By way of an Irish regional case study, the paper examines the activities of two distinct groups involved in the establishment of creameries: private capitalists and agricultural reformers. The former group was represented mainly by former butter trade personnel and England-based butter retailers, the latter by organisers and supporters of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society who promoted dairy co-operatives. Other groups in Irish rural society, such as farmers, traders and the Catholic clergy, also affected the spatial outcome. Capitalists and co-operators used rural space in different ways, with dairy co-operatives becoming place-confined and susceptible to particularistic concerns, a contrast to the ‘free hand’ commerce of their rivals. Although operating within the economic realm of the dairying industry, the spaces occupied by these creameries and their competitive activities became bound into cultural and political discourses and representations of identity in late 19th and early 20th-century Ireland. Location and price wars between private and co-operative creameries presented a lens through which wider colonial relationships of economy and cultural identity were viewed and played out, and how understandings of ‘Irish’, and ‘foreign’ became naturalised locally. In these respects, the analysis offers an attempt to link the broad economic context of agrarian change with its political and cultural spheres.