Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 314

(hbk); £19.95 (pbk). Make no mistake about it, this is one of the great books of rural history (and much more) of our generation. Dickson’s book tells the story of Cork and its hinterland (‘south Munster’) over a period of 200 years, from the maturity of the Munster plantation before the cataclysm of 1641–2 and the Cromwellian reconquest, to the collapse of the regional economy after 1820. Hence the book is divided into two broad sections: ‘Crescent, c.1630–c.1770’ and ‘Reckoning: c.1780–c.1830’ separated by a single chapter, ‘Intermezzo’. The ambition of writing a history of a city and its hinterland over such a long period is probably unparalleled in British and Irish history and the results are simply marvellous. There are few aspects of society which are left unconsidered. Dickson moves with ease between the rural and urban economies, between Protestant and Catholic society, between gentry demesnes and the rise of the malt and porter trade. The learning is enormous: Dickson is equally adept with Irish verse and customs accounts. The prose purrs along like a Rolls Royce, with some memorable turns of phrase coined along the way. The penalty of such a breathtaking vision of a whole society over 200 years is size and, one might add, portability. The text runs to 500 pages, supplemented by a further 141 pages of endnotes, plus appendices and index. I suspect that few other than reviewers will read it from cover to cover. Most will see it as three parallel books – about rural, u rban and commercial, and religious developments – and will read selectively just as this review concentrates on one of the three themes.

Munster was the earliest area in Ireland to be extensively colonized by the English in the late sixteenth century. The first Munster plantation was overthrown in 1598 and then re-established after the final English defeat of the Ulster Gaelic lords in 1603. It was a colony based on a paranoid fear of the native Irish: but by the 1630s the English, first and second generation, seem to have relaxed with a degree of tolerance of the Catholic Irish. This all fell apart in the months after the Ulster Rising in 1641 and there then followed a decade of war, and, at the end of that war, renewed confiscation and expulsion. Over the following thirty years, colonial society was re-established, only to collapse once more after the accession of James II and the war of reconquest fought by William III on his accession. Again, there were confiscations, and by the early eighteenth century laws were increasingly being introduced to place the Catholic population under a variety of disabilities. The story of the seventeenth century is thus one of confidence built – and lost; of capital created – and wasted; of uncertainties and instabilities in landowning. Land confiscated was not inevitably lost to the families of its previous owners, some of whom continued as lessees; but each successive period of disturbance allowed more English settlers to secure land. There were large-scale expulsions of Catholics after the Williamite wars of 1690–1 and a determination to make the new Protestant settlement ‘impregnable and irreversible’. Confiscation of land was matched by the exclusion of Catholics from the civic life of Cork. Uncertainty remained until the accession of George I: Dickson quotes a writer of 1714 as saying that ‘people begin to improve, plant etc. as expecting they are now doing it for themselves and their own prosperity, and not for those to whom the lands would certainly have come, if the grand design had taken place’ (p.67). The big trade of Cork remained largely in Protestant hands for much of the eighteenth century but the diaspora of Catholics onto the continent gave them the networks of relatives, friends and co-religionists on which international trade could be sustained.

The first half of the seventeenth century is marked by the emergence of the great Anglo-Irish settler families of whom the Boyles, earls of Cork, were the greatest (they acquired several additional titles for cadet branches). They remained an organizing principle in Munster society throughout the seventeenth century: in the early eighteenth, in a reversal of the expected processes, they tended to sell out (often because, like the senior line of the Boyles, by then earls of Burlington, their attention became focussed on England), and for that reason Munster society in the eighteenth century became a much more open gentry society. ‘The regime of the gentry’ is described at length in Chapter 3, where we learn not only who the new entrants to the gentry were, but of their tastes, houses, marriages and political interests. They had the advantage throughout the eighteenth century of sitting on an appreciating asset. Dickson estimates that the income of solvent proprietors rose five- to six-fold between the 1690s and 1810s. The background to this, in the first instance, was the development of an efficient cattle-processing industry based on Cork and a more dispersed butter export trade. Later, in an about turn, cattle were largely abandoned for corn, especially in those districts with access to the sea or inland waterways.

In Chapter 4 Dickson describes the development of the Cork victualling trade based on bullocks from north and west Cork, but also from further afield in north Kerry, east Limerick and much of Tipperary. Beeves sent to Cork were slaughtered and the meat barrelled, much of it for export to the Americas. Dickson suggests 50–80,000 head of animals were slaughtered annually (although some late seventeenth-century writers offered higher estimates) in a short slaughtering season. There were secondary industries based on the hides, tallow, glue-making and the like. The Munster economy also had extensive rural textile industries. Indeed, one of the many areas in which Dickson is marvellous is in his painstaking assembly of all the local – often estate-sponsored – attempts to develop artisan industries.

This prosperity was achieved despite the best efforts of the English. One of the paradoxes of English policy in Ireland is the paranoia with which they viewed Irish Catholics but their determination to exclude the Irish from English markets and economically hobble the Protestant colony. What one therefore sees are repeated moments of reinvention as the Irish, excluded from markets by English legislation, looked for new outlets or products. This is not simply the familiar banning of live cattle imports into England. In 1699 for instance, the export of Irish cloth (except to England) was banned although there is some evidence of a continued (but illegal) cloth trade to Portugal. Subsequently yarn spinning for Norwich and other English towns emerged as a profitable trade, the duty on which was finally lifted in 1739, a rare victory for Irish interests over the English. The development of sail cloth manufacture trade from the 1720s was assisted from 1745 with an Irish export bounty: the English retaliated in 1750 with their own export bounty which severely knocked back the Cork manufactory.

This reinvention also characterized the overall farming economy of the region. Having been forced into the butter and Atlantic victualling trades in the later seventeenth century when the export of live cattle was forbidden, from the second quarter of the eighteenth century there was a further re-orientation of the rural economy into arable and mixed agriculture to produce corn for the English market (Chapter 8). The result was that corn was grown in the most improbable of places – certainly where no one would attempt to break the ground today – and butter production confined to more remote areas. The trade in barrelled beef declined and in its place emerged a trade in preserved pork. By the end of the eighteenth century a new trade in live animals had emerged and in processed or semi-processed goods – bacon, candles, soap, shoes.

Naval victualling offered considerable opportunities during both the war against the thirteen colonies and the Napoleonic Wars. Dickson describes the development of such specialities as the supply of ships’ biscuits: but this trade largely crashed with the downsizing of the army and navy after 1815. The cost of wartime bonanzas was that Cork was unable to serve its normal markets to anything like the same degree and by the end of the Napoleonic wars, the options for export from Cork had become far more limited than they had been half a century before. Wartime prosperity fed back into – and was assisted by – the development of the regional infrastructure in terms of both roads but also coastal shipping. Practical steps were taken to improve the quality of butter coming to market: again, all aspects of enterprising self-help. The impression is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century – and perhaps for a decade or two thereafter – south Munster had achieved a degree of prosperity and commercial success, not only as an agricultural producer but also as a manufacturing centre with a nascent factory manufacturing trade. This is not to say that Munster society was wholly comfortable with itself. Catholics had achieved a high degree of integration into society by the end of the century and looked for emancipation, the possibility of which seemed close in the early 1790s and then receded for a generation (the young Daniel O’Connell makes his appearance in the final pages of the book). There remained a residual preference amongst landlords for Protestant tenants, but there is no real sign that Catholics were still discriminated against in the way they had been. Indeed, they were welcomed into some of the voluntary militias of the late 1770s. But there was an increasing level of agrarian disturbance in the 1790s which developed out of earlier agitations against enclosures and tithes and elided into the more revolutionary ambitions of the United Irish-men. The disturbances of 1798 in Munster were just that, disturbances rather than rebellion, but also a part of the development of a political consciousness which operated below the horizon of parliamentary politics. Attacks on tithes were perhaps inevitable as the re-orientation of the agrarian economy revitalised corn tithes: but the campaigns against tithes can also be seen as a means by which small producers under price pressure hoped to cut their costs.

The truth is that the reappearance of commercial ar able agricultural in Munster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was only possible because of the potato (discussed in Chapter 8). In Munster we have a society which grew a crop substantially for export and in which not only the labourers, but the farmers themselves, lived for the most part (if not exclusively) off another which had only a limited export potential. The high yields of the potato from indifferent ground with a modicum of manure and the willingness of labourers (or the entrapment of labourers) to take a cottage and potato ground in lieu of wages allowed the emergence of a low wage-cost economy with no incentive to achieve real gains in labour productivity. There was perhaps nothing wrong with this if we approach the matter without hindsight; but it is a further element in the costs carried by Munster as the distant supplier of a highly commercial and sometimes fickle market. This was the key problem for the south Munster economy. Local demand was not large – especially given the immiseration of a large part of the population and their reliance on self-produced potatoes – and the very commercialization of the economy made it vulnerable to falling prices and changes in taste in the English market. The end of war, the running down of military victualling, the post-war slump after 1815 and the default of the leading Cork banks in 1820 all made the 1820s a desperate decade in Munster. Its textile trades were overwhelmed by English factory manufactures. The later spread of the Dublin banks into the area suggests that the essential vigour of the Cork economy had been undermined. The response to under- and unemployment was migration, and Dickson argues that the 1820s were more of a turning point in Munster history than the Famine decade.

It would be an interesting exercise for Dickson or someone else to examine the parallels for the trajectory of the Cork economy elsewhere in Britain: in such an account the failure of provincial banks – expressions of local loyalties and regional commercial networks as well as repositories of local savings – will doubtless play a part. Where Cork certainly differs from England is in the arc curved by its landlords. It is clear enough from what Dickson says that the larger Plantation estates tended to dissolve in the first half of the eighteenth century and sold out to the sitting tenants. The remaining estates also tended to withdraw from active estate management through the use of leases for three lives and leases to middlemen – a form of subcontracting – until late in the century. Some landowners queried whether the letting out of large parcels to reliable Protestants who sub-let was the best way of proceeding as early as the 1740s, but it was only much later in the century when a general distaste for middlemen emerged and estates – of-ten in the teeth of opposition from their existing lessees – started to re-establish direct tenurial contact with the individual occupiers of their lands. This was perhaps the adoption of English estate management by Irish estates, sometimes overseen by English stewards. (Arthur Young spent a year as an absentee’s estate steward in 1777–8 and appears to have suffered for the precocity of his reform-ing ideas.) Other late eighteenth-century resident landowners also experimented with agrarian improvements and exhibited a willingness to invest in new buildings. Some circulated improving agricultural literature: but it is unclear how far they influenced their tenants.

What was unclear to this reader is whether late eighteenth-century Cork rural society should be characterized as one of small, independent freeholding farmers and small gentry (often sub-tenants) or of absentee estates. The correspondence between the local agents of the Anglo-Irish estates and their head agents or Englishdomiciled proprietors is the bedrock on which some of the later chapters of the book are built and this perhaps gives a rather misleading impression. And one would like to know to what degree freeholding farmers were bought out by their neighbours, surrounding gentry and Cork merchants in the more depressed years of the century. We need to resolve these questions to achieve an understanding of the rising agrarian violence of the district. To judge from their pre-occupations, these were movements of farmers, but were they movements of tenants or freeholders? Given the absence of any all-embracing late eighteenth-century source, even of the quality of the English land tax, there is perhaps no easy way of establishing this without assembling the data townland by townland, but this might usefully be done in the future. Local history in its purest form might also do something to clothe the farmers – whether tenants or otherwise – and even their labourers. Of necessity, this is a book of the broad sweep rather than the individual, but one hopes that more can be done to recover individuals, their experiences and attitudes, for one of the most interesting questions posed by the book – and again a comparative matter – is how it was possible for such strong solidarities against tithe owners and landlords to emerge in Ireland but not in Britain.

Dickson’s is not a theoretical work. The Cork region, or south Munster, is pragmatically defined as the reach of the Cork newspaper (pp.xii–xiii) and whilst Dickson often seems to exclude the peninsulas of west Cork from consideration, copper mining in Allihes and the urban development of Kenmare and Bantry do creep into his account. Nor is there any attempt to place the development of Munster in any intellectual frame drawn from development economics; indeed there is little reference to the modern literature of the industrial revolution. And so some will feel that the work is old fashioned, a piece of local history rather than contemporary economic history: and yet it is hard to see what more theory could have contributed. Nor does it have a political axe to grind although some will doubtless raise an eyebrow at the title. There are occasional difficulties following the text when the focus of the work remains Munster but the prime action is happening elsewhere – a problem notably in the account of 1798. There is also an element of mystery about the illustrations. At one level the book is well-illustrated with 110 figures: but these are never referred to in the text (nor are they indexed) and have a largely separate existence with long explanatory captions. Was the book envisaged as an unillustrated one, with the figures added in during production? Regrettably the quality of their production is not always high and what are plainly glorious oils and watercolours of Cork and its surrounding district do not always convey their full impact. To have had figures such as no. 74 (Grogan, ‘Boats on the Lee below Tivoli’) or no. 89 (Rienzi, attrib., ‘Panorama over Fermoy’) as colour plates would have allowed them to sing.

In this respect a little more expenditure would have been beneficial, but it would be wrong to end without offering a word of congratulation to the publishers. If Dickson says that ‘it is of course somewhat unfashionable in the present age to attempt a monograph on this scale’, then it is even more unusual these days for a publisher to accept the risk of such an enormous project and we must be grateful to Cork University Press.

Whether in hardback or paperback, the book is a bargain. The journey it traces is a fascinating one with repercussions and echoes for other pre-industrial economies in Ireland, Britain and further afield. It is a journey I urge you to undertake. In a word, wow!