Irish Agriculture - A Price History: from the Mid-eighteenth Century to the End of the First World War

This history of prices offers insight into the way Irish people once lived and behaved. Covering a period when agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, it illuminates issues as diverse as production patterns, prosperity and the Great Famine, political agitation during the French wars and agrarian unrest, and sheds light on intimate details such as the timing of marriage. The underlying data in this work are some 20,000 bi-monthly price observations from the period 1755-1914 that have been processed into annual price series. The prices and price indices presented furnish building blocks for historians and historically-minded social scientists engaged in writing Ireland's history. This work also opens the way to more systematic comparisons of the Irish and European economic experience, be it in terms of price inflation, living costs, market integration or market disintegration. Part of a series of Royal Irish Academy monographs which includes Garret FitzGerald's Irish Primary Education in the Early Nineteenth Century, it is a scholarly work of archival unearthing.