Pre-Famine Ireland Research Articles

Geographies of Pawnbroking in pre-Famine Ireland

While pawnbroking had a long history in Ireland it was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that pawnshop numbers increased dramatically and the geography of pawnbroking shifted radically. This paper provides a detailed account of this changing geography. It outlines where the money that funded the expansion of pawnbroking originated. Unlike other businesses, pawnbrokers paid significant bonds to enter the trade and were legally required to provide three substantial independent sureties. To quickly recoup these initial costs and become profitable, pawnshops opened only in settlements where a significant demand for short-term credit existed. The ongoing decline of Ireland’s textile industries, the post-Napoleonic price collapses for agricultural commodities after 1815, the collapse of private banks in 1820 and a significant potato famine in the summer of 1822 combined as catalysts that caused a rapid expansion of pawnbroking between 1817 and 1824. As living standards deteriorated, pawnbrokers migrated into new settlements exploiting new poverties and the growing need for credit. This paper tracks the diffusion of pawnshops between 1787 and 1824 to provide new understandings of the geographies of deteriorating living standards, impoverishment and increased levels of economic precarity in the immediate post-Napoleonic period.

Mapping the Miasma; the geographies of a forgotten Irish epidemic

In the spring of 1832, the great cholera pandemic finally reached Ireland. This was the most virulent pestilence to reach European shores since the Black Death. Cholera was to kill at least 30,000 in Britain, 100,000 in France and Hungary, and a similar number in Russia. Eclipsed by the tragedy of the Great Famine and now almost forgotten, the cholera’s final death toll in Ireland has been variously estimated to have been between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Primarily an urban disease, it struck hard, but also erratically, attacking some towns, while leaving others close by unaffected. The impact and legacy of the cholera on Irish towns and society remains under-studied, despite the significant amount of contemporary data available. In this article, daily and weekly numerical data collected during 1832 by the Central Board of Health and preserved in the National Archives, is analysed using a modern GIS system. For the first time, the details of the incidence of the epidemic in individual towns is mapped. By mapping this data and setting it within the context of the complex political and social events of the period, the significant impact which the disease had on the urban sphere in pre-famine Ireland is revealed.

Population and Poverty in Ireland on the Eve of the Great Famine

We revisit the link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland and harness highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 census in our analysis. The results indicate that on the eve of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, population pressure was positively associated with two measures of poverty-illiteracy and the prevalence of poor-quality housing. Malthus mattered in the sense that our results indicate that a "no population growth" scenario between 1800 and 1841 would have led to a 6% improvement in poor-quality housing and a 4% reduction in illiteracy. However, the strength of this relationship is reduced when additional explanatory factors are considered, and factors relating to location and economic geography offer greater explanatory power. Incorporation of data from the 1821 census reveals that in the two decades before 1841, population growth was fastest in areas under less population pressure, supporting the notion that preventive check forces were at play. These findings are consistent with some elements of Malthusian theory, although ultimately they refute the notion that overpopulation was the principal cause of pre-Famine Irish poverty.

On the Structure of Wealth-Holding in Pre-Famine Ireland

Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth-holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional spread, and compare them with their British counterparts. We also discuss the share of Catholics and Quakers among top wealth-holders.

Lazarists/Vincentians: Tridentine Reform and Parish Missions in Grand Siècle France and Cardinal Cullen's Ireland

Lazarists/Vincentians:Tridentine Reform and Parish Missions in Grand Siècle France and Cardinal Cullen's Ireland James H. Murphy (bio) What does a special feature in a journal to mark the fiftieth anniversary of an important scholarly milestone betoken? Is the debate over Emmet Larkin's devotional revolution thesis dead or alive? Are we admiring a concluded discussion or seeking for new life in it? In this article I hope to use the comparative cases of the roles of the priests of the mission, called Lazarists in France and Vincentians in Ireland, in the Catholic revivals of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in their respective countries and times to ask what further lines of enquiry might be pursued concerning the devotional revolution.1 First though, let us look at the devotional revolution thesis itself and at how the debate around it has grown and developed. Larkin's original article, "The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75," was published in 1972 in the American Historical Review. For nearly a quarter of a century thereafter, however, Larkin put his efforts into writing a multivolume series focused essentially on the political and constitutional roles of the Catholic Church in Ireland between 1780 and 1918. He completed seven volumes, covering the years 1850 to 1891. Thereafter, he returned to issues close to the devotional revolution, publishing The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (2006) and projecting a further volume on the era of the devotional revolution itself, 1850–75, before his death in 2012. The most obvious thing to note in a discussion of future directions for the devotional revolution debate, therefore, is that the 1850–75 period itself has not been the subject of a sustained narrative. Over the years a standard version of the devotional revolution thesis has [End Page 62] developed that was well articulated in 2017 by Colin Barr and Daithí Ó Corráin.2 The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century when the issue was an excess of priests. The solution to this problem was twofold: regulations severely limiting the number of diocesan priests bishops could ordain, and efforts to curtail what was considered to be the excessive numbers of mendicant friars by requiring them to be educated in part on the Continent. The number of friars went into steep decline, but so too, alarmingly, did the numbers of diocesan priests when the Irish seminaries based on the Continent that produced so many of them closed due to the French Revolution. The ratio of priests to people took a further downward dip as the population of Ireland increased exponentially in the lead-up to the Famine. The practice of station masses, whereby priests periodically offered Mass and heard confessions at various points in their parishes, was introduced as a measure to meet the pastoral gap caused by the scarcity of priests and the limited capacity of existing chapels to accommodate significant numbers at Mass. After the Famine, with a reduced Catholic population, with growing numbers of clergy, and, under the leadership of the determined Paul Cardinal Cullen (1803–78), a dramatic flowering of religious practice and adherence to the norms of Church life as laid down by the Council of Trent (1545–62), a "devotional revolution," as Larkin dubbed it, took place. There have been three distinctive features of the devotional revolution debate over the years: a focus on statistics, a debate over whether the devotional revolution might have begun earlier than Larkin claimed, and a speculation as to the reasons, other than religious ones, as to why it took place. Concerning the third of these Larkin speculated in his original article that the embrace of Tridentine Catholicism as a form of national identity served as a substitute for the loss of the Irish language.3 When the article was later republished with two other articles in book form some years later, Larkin engaged with alternative theories that had been proffered in response to his, though all of them saw the trauma of the Great Famine as causative. They included the collapse in folk religion and the desire of small farmers to increase landholdings by adopting the stem-family system, thus...

Book Review: Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland

Book Review: Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland

‘Wholesome regulation and unlimited freedom’: governing market space in southern Ireland before the Famine

ABSTRACT:This article addresses efforts to reform market activity in pre-Famine Ireland, exploring Karl Polanyi's assertion that the ‘free market’ required ‘the intervention of the state in order to establish it’. It begins by rooting Ireland's alleged ‘social ills’ – over-population and subsistence agriculture – in terms of integration into international markets from the mid-eighteenth century. From the crisis of the 1820s, state actors came to see the extension of the cash economy as central to remedying these ‘ills’. Altering the physical fabric of exchange to encourage ‘rational’ market behaviour, I argue reformers aimed to ‘enclose’ commercial spaces economically and physically from non-market forces. Utilizing novel technologies of vision and precision, market space could thus operate according to a logic and ethics of its own, inculcating voluntary compliance through new standards of ‘trust’ and ‘fairness’. I conclude by asking, if indeed the state had come to operate as much through ‘freedom’ as force by 1845, how we might begin to reassess the course and context of the Irish Famine.

Ourselves Alone? Religion, Society and Politics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Essays Presented to S.J. Connolly, ed. D.W. Hayton and Andrew R. Holmes

Professor Sean Connolly has made a distinguished contribution to the history of Ireland. His first two monographs, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (1982) and Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (1992), were notable for their willingness to question established, even orthodox, interpretations. This was most apparent in his treatment of the penal laws in the latter volume, which demonstrated just how unexceptional in European terms the Irish version of the eighteenth-century ancien régime was. This concern in Connolly’s work, to challenge received wisdoms and to locate the Irish experience in a wider context, whether that was British, Atlantic or European, is given expression in the playful title—with its echo of an early twentieth-century insular Sinn Fein slogan—of this fine collection of essays published to mark Connolly’s retirement from Queen’s University Belfast. Thematically, this volume, edited by D.W. Hayton and Andrew R. Holmes, brings together a distinguished collection of former colleagues, academic peers and former students to explore the political, economic and social history of Ireland in the long eighteenth century. Somewhat neglected, therefore, is the influence of Connolly’s work on Ireland’s intellectual history. None of the contributors adopt an explicitly comparative approach, although Thomas Bartlett offers some suggestive thoughts about the Scottish dimension to the 1793 Catholic Relief Act, along the lines of Connolly’s significant contributions to the New British History. Such lacunae can however be excused when the sheer range of Connolly’s work is considered.

The regional dimension of national education in pre-Famine Ireland

The establishment of the National Education System in 1831 provided Ireland with a non-denominational education system aimed at reducing sectarian distrust and uniting the population. The national system was one element in the wider emergence of an institutional landscape in nineteenth century Ireland. The system involved a central-local management structure with the Commissioners of National Education having tight central control of an overall system but relied on local impetus to apply for, establish, and operate individual schools. As a result of this interaction, the emergence of national education was dependent on activities of various individuals and groups in Irish society, most notably the hierarchies of the various Churches. This paper examines the geographic aspects of the emergence of national education in the landscape of pre-Famine Ireland. The emergence of the system occurred in four distinct phases, with the activities of different groups affecting the uptake of national education. The distribution of national schools across the country is examined through thematic mapping, which identifies the development of distinct areas of high national-school densities and other areas of relative non-adoption. The pattern of national education in pre-Famine Ireland can be highly generalised by a line running from Sheephaven Bay in Donegal to Waterford Harbour, with the areas east of this line exhibiting high rates of national-school establishment, and areas to the west experiencing low national-school establishment. Spatial analysis is used to detect clusters of densities and provides further evidence of the spatial nature of national education. The spatial analysis is combined with the thematic mapping and discussion to produce a general regional map of the emergence of national education in pre-Famine Ireland. The regional map illustrates the role that social interactions played in the spatial emergence of institutions of the British state in nineteenth century Ireland.

The Irish rent … and mended: transitional textual communities in nineteenth-century America

In this paper, traditional folkloric forms that were ritualised and practised in pre-Famine Ireland are examined. So, too, are the strategies that storytellers employed in disseminating the imaginative aspects of the oral tradition to their audiences. Following the disruption of the storytelling tradition precipitated by the Great Famine and emigration, the fabric of Irish storytelling lay threadbare, both in Ireland and abroad. Of interest is the fact that in America the less “heroic” and more subtle strands of Irish folklore resurfaced in the theatrical venues that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, namely, minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. By the turn of twentieth century, the Irish were responding to other “heroic” depictions of themselves, not only with protestation but also with “tongue-in-cheek” laughter. Their grounding in a variety of folkloric texts in Ireland enabled them to transition to multiple kinds of accommodation and expressive resistance.

Food and culinary cultures in pre-Famine Ireland

Food and culinary cultures in pre-Famine Ireland

Food and culinary cultures in pre-Famine Ireland

Food and culinary cultures in pre-Famine Ireland

Assessing the distribution of social–ecological resilience and risk: Ireland as a case study of the uneven impact of famine

Explanations for the causes of famine and food insecurity often reside at a high level of aggregation or abstraction. Popular models within famine studies have often emphasised the role of prime movers such as population stress, or the political-economic structure of access channels, as key determinants of food security. Explanation typically resides at the macro level, obscuring the presence of substantial within-country differences in the manner in which such stressors operate. This study offers an alternative approach to analyse the uneven nature of food security, drawing on the Great Irish famine of 1845–1852. Ireland is often viewed as a classical case of Malthusian stress, whereby population outstripped food supply under a pre-famine demographic regime of expanded fertility. Many have also pointed to Ireland's integration with capitalist markets through its colonial relationship with the British state, and country-wide system of landlordism, as key determinants of local agricultural activity. Such models are misguided, ignoring both substantial complexities in regional demography, and the continuity of non-capitalistic, communal modes of land management long into the nineteenth century. Drawing on resilience ecology and complexity theory, this paper subjects a set of aggregate data on pre-famine Ireland to an optimisation clustering procedure, in order to discern the potential presence of distinctive social–ecological regimes. Based on measures of demography, social structure, geography, and land tenure, this typology reveals substantial internal variation in regional social–ecological structure, and vastly differing levels of distress during the peak famine months. This exercise calls into question the validity of accounts which emphasise uniformity of structure, by revealing a variety of regional regimes, which profoundly mediated local conditions of food security. Future research should therefore consider the potential presence of internal variations in resilience and risk exposure, rather than seeking to characterise cases based on singular macro-dynamics and stressors alone.

The regional dimension of national education in pre-Famine Ireland

The establishment of the National Education System in 1831 provided Ireland with a non-denominational education system aimed at reducing sectarian distrust and uniting the population. The national system was one element in the wider emergence of an institutional landscape in nineteenth century Ireland. The system involved a central-local management structure with the Commissioners of National Education having tight central control of an overall system but relied on local impetus to apply for, establish, and operate individual schools. As a result of this interaction, the emergence of national education was dependent on activities of various individuals and groups in Irish society, most notably the hierarchies of the various Churches. This paper examines the geographic aspects of the emergence of national education in the landscape of pre-Famine Ireland. The emergence of the system occurred in four distinct phases, with the activities of different groups affecting the uptake of national education. The distribution of national schools across the country is examined through thematic mapping, which identifies the development of distinct areas of high national-school densities and other areas of relative non-adoption. The pattern of national education in pre-Famine Ireland can be highly generalised by a line running from Sheephaven Bay in Donegal to Waterford Harbour, with the areas east of this line exhibiting high rates of national-school establishment, and areas to the west experiencing low national-school establishment. Spatial analysis is used to detect clusters of densities and provides further evidence of the spatial nature of national education. The spatial analysis is combined with the thematic mapping and discussion to produce a general regional map of the emergence of national education in pre-Famine Ireland. The regional map illustrates the role that social interactions played in the spatial emergence of institutions of the British state in nineteenth century Ireland.

Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland

Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland

‘Irish property should pay for Irish poverty’: accounting for the poor in pre-famine Ireland

According to Walker [2004. Expense, social and moral control. Accounting and the administration of the old poor law in England and Wales. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 23, no. 2: 85–127; 2008. Accounting, paper shadows and the stigmatised poor. Accounting, Organizations and Society 33, no. 4/5: 453–87] accounting contributed to the stigmatisation of the pauper and served to construct the social worlds of the old and new poor laws in England and Wales. Walker's encouragement of further research motivated the current examination of accounting for the poor in Ireland. The focus is on the early, pre-famine years of the Irish Poor Law, 1838–1845 – a law whose context and content differed in several critical respects from that which prevailed in England and Wales. The study draws on data contained in the minute books of regular meetings of the Castlebar Union's Board of Governors, as well as from the Poor Law Commission's annual summary reports. Analysis of these materials suggests a context in which accounting neither constructed a social world nor stigmatised recipients of poor relief. It is argued that accounting is better viewed as contingent, reflecting the dynamics of a complex, divisive, and highly controversial undertaking – governmental redistribution of wealth – during a laissez-faire era when utilitarian and individualistic principles dominated discussions of political economy. From a broad perspective, accounting can be viewed as providing rationality and transparency to a social experiment that was encumbered with moral ambiguity and embedded conflicts of interest. More specifically, accounting texts contain the documentation required by an absentee administrative cadre to monitor expenditures, justify rates on Irish property, and ensure that procedures in the statute were carried out as specified.

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (review)

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (review)

School Attendance and Literacy Before the Famine: A Simple Baronial Analysis

The paper analyses school attendance and literacy data in pre-famine Ireland and their correlates.

:The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850

:The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850