The Writing of Irish Economic and Social History Since 1968

Abstract

T SHE year i 968 was an important one for economic history in Ireland. In that year the Irish Economic History Group held its first annual conference. The group had been established in i967 during the Belfast meeting of the British Economic History Society; and in I970 was formally constituted as the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland. Also in i968 appeared two important books on Irish economic and social history: Cullen's Anglo-Irish Trade (32) ,1 containing much ofthe evidential basis ofhis reinterpretations ofeighteenthcentury Irish economic history; and Connell's Irish Peasant Society (23), a collection of highly original inquiries into aspects of nineteenth-century society. Since i968 a large volume of material, having some claim to be economic or social history, has been published. The annual bibliographies compiled by the Economic History Review list nearly 450 items on Ireland to the end of I977, but this is a considerable understatement, notwithstanding the energies of an Irish compiler between I970 and I975.2 Judging by the more comprehensive bibliographies published in Irish Economic and Social History since I974, a more realistic figure might well be over i,000. In the face of such apparent abundance, Prof. Lee's remark that scholars regularly and rightly lament the neglect of Irish economic history,3 seems to have a ring of Irish perversity about it, but it is sound enough. If economic history is defined as that which is written by professional economic historians, there is little of it: the combined profession in Irish universities, north and south, would be hard pressed to raise a rugby team.4 Much recent economic history is the work ofgeneral historians, economists, archivists, folklorists, antiquarians, and enthusiastic amateurs. A large part of their writing qualifies as economic or social history only on the most elastic definitions; a good deal is ephemeral and some is trivial. Still, all is welcome. Economic history in Ireland suffered premature generalization sixty years ago in the publications of George O'Brien;5 and the empirical epoch experienced by the subject in Britain during the interwar years passed Ireland by. Irish economic history, ifit was thought about at all, was presented as