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

Irish Agriculture: A Price History from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to the Eve of the First World War. By Liam Kennedy and Peter M. Solar. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2008. 206 pp., 30.00, hardback, ISBN 978-1-904890-41-6.

A history of agricultural prices is unlikely to excite. But, as the authors of this impressive work argue, knowledge of agricultural price movements is essential to an understanding of modern Irish history. The population explosion of late eighteenth-century Ireland, the catastrophic loss of human life in the Great Hunger, and the endemic agrarian unrest throughout this period, were all closely linked to the terms of exchange for Irish agricultural products. The challenges to producing a price history that captures both the pre- and postfamine experience were substantial, and the interpretative...