After the Famine: Irish Agriculture, 1850-1914.
Miller, David W.
By Michael Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv plus 313pp. $54.95).
To place this book in its historigraphical context one needs to be aware of two developments over the past generation. One of those developments - the cliometric revolution in economic history - is no doubt familiar to readers of this journal. The other - the controversy between "revisionists" and "post-revisionists" in Irish history - may be less so. The founding fathers of the Irish historical profession in the 1930s sought to replace the old catholic/nationalist and protestant/unionist history with a new objective, scientific history. Since most of the Irish public took nationalist history far more seriously than whatever unionist history they might be aware of, by the 1970s the profession was dominated by historians who took aim mostly at nationalist verities. The result, by the 1980s, was serious alienation between that public and "revisionist" historians. That rift might be compared to the recent controversy in the U.S. over the Enola Gay exhibit - a comparison which would interestingly highlight the conservative construction of American nationalism and the leftish construction of Irish nationalism. During the past decade a section of the Irish historical profession, the so-called "postrevisionists," have decided that perhaps all that objectivity was too much of a good thing.
The revisionist line on post-famine agriculture - satirized by one wag as "down-trodden landlords and predatory tenants" - was influenced (long before its 1994 publication in book form) by the pioneering research of W.E. Vaughan in estate records. Vaughan's interpretation was that in the generation after the famine the lot of the surviving rural population improved considerably. J.S. Donnelly elaborated the point by arguing that the celebrated Land War of 1878-81 was a "revolution of rising expectations" occasioned by a sharp but temporary downturn in the mid-1870s in a generally improving agricultural economy. Needless to say, generalizations like these were like raw meat to the hypothesis-hungry econometric analysts who began in the late 1970s to drive old-fashioned Irish economic historians into other types of inquiry. The work under review is a very important and sophisticated effort to resolve the issue by modern analytic methods. Inevitably it will also be seen as a contribution to the revisionist/postrevisionist controversy.
Turner sees the post-famine Irish economy as dominated by commercial agriculture. It was fundamentally different from the pre-famine economy in which an underclass living at subsistence levels loomed so large, even if there were bad years in post-famine Ireland when many people were pushed toward the margin of subsistence. Since Ireland was an agricultural sector of a very advanced industrial economy, he tries to find ways to assess its agriculture on its own merits and to avoid erroneous conclusions from comparisons with more diverse national economies. He presents a thorough treatment of agricultural change and of patterns of land tenure between the Famine and World War I. These chapters are illustrated with abundant descriptive statistics, including very useful thematic maps, from a database of annual national-level and decennial county-level agricultural returns. (He also includes a handy appendix which tabulates much of the national-level data.)
The analytic core of Turner's study, however, is contained in his chapters on agricultural output, performance and labor and on the "distribution of the spoils." His conclusions raise serious questions about the meliorist view of the first three decades after the famine as originally put forward by the revisionists. The tenants, Turner argues, experienced not sustained improvement but "a long period of relatively fixed incomes," though he does detect enough improvement in the years immediately preceding 1876 to provide very cautious support to Donnelly's "revolution of rising expectations" hypothesis. Sustained progress was not achieved, however, until the generation after the depression of 1879-82.
Turner's challenge to the revisionist orthodoxy on the period from the Famine to the Land War will give comfort to the postrevisionists. However, his equally interesting, but less fully developed, view of the period from the Land War to the Great War should give them pause. He rejects with derision any suggestion that the benefits of Irish agricultural restructuring were drained back to the "colonial master." Rather, he stresses the British role in subsidising the creation of a peasant proprietorship as a component in the economic origins of the movement for Irish independence. Surprisingly, he does not analyze in any detail the process of judicial determination of rents under the 1881 Land Act, which so constrained landlord income as to put them in the mood to cut the crucial 1903 deal which made peasant proprietorship a reality. Though it is surely not the last word on the controversies it addresses, this solid monograph is a very important contribution to the continuing debate on the post-famine agricultural economy and its role in shaping modern Irish politics and society.
David W. Miller Carnegie Mellon University
