The Exchange Business of the Irish Banks in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Throughout the eighteenth century, Ireland was a peasant economy producing for export beef and dairy produce together with an increasing amount of linen cloth. With the passing of the English protectionist Cattle Acts of the 1660's, France and the foreign and English islands of the West Indies became the main outlet for Irish agricultural produce until about the middle of the eighteenth century, although exports of wool, woollen yarn and tallow to England remained at all times substantial. Despite this protectionism, however, England re-established itself after 1689 as Ireland's major foreign market, largely because of the Irish tariff system which favoured Anglo-Irish commerce above all others, and the growth of the linen trade. After 1758, the hegemony of the English market was further strengthened by the re-admittance of Irish pastoral products. The vicissitudes which characterised Irish exports to England were not, on the other hand, paralleled in the Irish imports from across the Irish Sea. Dublin and Cork were the main centres through which this trade was transacted, and though Belfast was a growing centre, it was dependent on Dublin as a point of shipment in the first half of the century and then, as later, for much of its foreign exchange business. The movements of commodity trade in this period were on the whole favourable to Ireland. Even the initial impulse of the Industrial Revolution was felt more as a demand for food for the growing industrial masses of England than as a herald of doom for Ireland's nascent and modest industry. Despite the sharp rise in population, and the country's grievous social and agrarian sores, it seems certain that there was some increase of prosperity in Ireland in the last four decades of the eighteenth century. There was, however, apart from the larger seaport towns, little urban development, the middle class remained small and the gentry largely absentee. In these circumstances, it is highly probable that the bulk of inland transactions was effected by cash of one kind or another; and in the early part of the period the inland remission of funds presented grave difficulties. This arose from the relatively underdeveloped nature of the economy which provided scant opportunity for a widespread growth of specialised financial institutions. In the seventeenth century there were no banks in Dublin apart from a few which specialised in mortgages on land. In the provinces there was only a bank of sorts, conducted by the Cork merchants Edward and Joseph Hoare, whose overseas trade at the end of the century enabled them to draw bills