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

by  Liam KennedyPeter M. Solar
€ 15.00

Book Details

Published by Royal Irish Academy

December 2007

Hardback

Number of pages: 216

ISBN: 9781904890416

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.

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About the authors

Liam Kennedy

Liam Kennedy is professor of economic and social history at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Colonialism, Religion & Nationalism in Ireland (1996) and the principal author of Mapping the Great Irish Famine (1999).

Peter M. Solar

Peter M. Solar is professor of economics at Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and at the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis. He has written extensively on Irish and Belgian economic history and on the history of the linen industry in Europe.