Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 290

By the standards of some recent books on Irish history – including Barnard’s own – this is slight volume but one which is nonetheless replete with interest. The theme of the book – improvement – is approached from a number of angles. Barnard offers no precise definition of improvement, and what contemporaries thought it might be changed over time. It was a part of the otherness of Ireland – the very fact that it was not England – that meant that English observers and Irish landlords familiar with England could always see room for additional improvements and engaged in a sort of progressive catch up. In every generation there were some who reflected on how little had been achieved and how much more remained to be done.

Improving Ireland? falls into seven chapters of which four are, in essence, biographical studies. So we have Sir William Petty, surveyor, landowner, political arithmetician, a man so clever he was kept at arm’s length by government. Then Richard Lawrence, who also arrived with the Cromwellian army, did well out of the turmoil of the 1650s and emerged as both participant in and commentator upon Irish affairs. A third chapter looks at the development of the landscape of Lohort Castle in County Cork, improved and manipulated to prove the antiquity of both the castle itself and the lineage of the its owners, the Percevals, later Earls of Egmont. Finally we come to Robert French of Monivea in County Galway, improving landlord and farmer. The conclusion introduces further improving figures. A central chapter introduces the world of Irish history writing and publishing and shows how this too was tied to ideas of improvement. Here again, Barnard writes of aspirations unfulfilled, projects commenced but left unfinished.

In the sense of improving an estate, improvement was not rocket science. Contemporaries had a pretty clear view of what it involved: the foundation of markets and small towns, the development of industry, glass and iron in the seventeenth century, linen in the eighteenth, the draining of bogs and the improvement of land. Improvement normally implied the drafting in of Protestant tenants with superior farming skills. It was also the commercial exploitation of whatever was available although Sir James Caldwell’s venture of selling barrelled eels in Dublin failed. By the mid-eighteenth century it included the provision of adequate roads: but whilst Barnard tells us of the discussion about the need for better communications, he says nothing of any action which followed. (An observer of 1729 thought it easier to import grain to Dublin from Egypt than from Roscommon or Longford.) The discovery was made in every generation that to secure even a modicum of success required resident landlords to drive matters forwards. In the seventeenth century there were those who were pessimistic about the prospects. By the mid-eighteenth century everything seemed possible. And yet improvers wrestled with intractable problems. There was the character of the Irish. Petty recommended sending the Irish to England and recruiting a new population from amongst the English. Robert French let rip in 1741 about his less satisfactory tenants:

You know I never like such idle, vain persons … In short, we have the fate of meeting treacherous and ungrateful people. The girls are idle, slutty, gadding abroads [sic] and never spin a thread of yarn. [p.146]

Hence his weaving project depended on recruiting weavers from elsewhere in Ireland. The second was the disabilities under which Catholics lived which some, but not all, recognized was retarding economic development. The preference for English, and if not English, at least Protestant, tenants was always strong. Even in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, there was a conviction that ‘Ireland would prosper only when it had become a predominantly Protestant country’. The third was the way in which the English government never bought into the idea of Irish improvement but actively worked against the economic development of Ireland when it came into conflict with English interests. Of course, the hostility of the English allowed responsibility for slow and patchy progress to be blamed on others. Nonetheless, whilst much was achieved, contemporaries also worried about the shallowness of improvement’s roots and the patchiness of its benefits. Robert French grew disillusioned with his commitment to linen when boom turned to slump in 1770. Another proprietor, Charles O’Conor, noted in 1786 a modest increase in his rent roll as a result of his exertions, but wondered whether his tenants had received any benefit. Others wondered aloud whether the increased prosperity had brought the landlords any moral benefit as a class: Barnard, always acute on consumption and sensitive to material culture, shows how siren voices feared too much luxury would lead to decay.

Barnard describes a handful of committed landlords who thought hard and struggled long to make a success of their estates. They are the antidote to any view which regards the Irish landlords as merely parasitic absentees. It is, though, a strangely inward looking book which makes no attempt to establish a British and Irish culture of improvement. Perhaps in England there was so much less to do, but examples of what Barnard describes can be found there, even if often earlier in time. Scotland surely offers a multitude of examples to parallel the Irish experience, although here, as in England, historians have perhaps been too ready to equate enclosure and the consolidation of holdings with improvement. But Barnard’s book will be a central plank in any study of improvement as a common element within eighteenth-century British and Irish society, and for that reason alone deserves a wide readership.