Irish Agriculture - A Price History: from the Mid-eighteenth Century to the End of the First World War (Royal Irish Academy Monographs) Book

Prices affect the living conditions of millions of people, hence their importance for an understanding of the past. In "Irish Agriculture: A Price history", Liam Kennedy and Peter Solar consider what was until relatively recently the principal means of livelihood for the majority of the country's population, shedding light on some major controversies in Irish history: the impact of the French wars, the significance of the Great Famine and the origins of the Land War.Prices and price change offer insights into people's behaviour in the past, and not just their economic behaviour. They help illuminate issues as diverse as production patterns, prosperity and famine, political and agrarian agitation and even such intimate detail as the timing of marriage. As the historian David Fischer has asserted: 'The history of prices is a history of change. 'The underlying data in this work, the product of more than ten years of archival research, are some 20,000 bimonthly price observations from the period 1755-1914 that have been processed into annual price series. The prices and price indices presented here 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 Irish and European economic experience, be it in terms of price inflation, living costs, market integration or market disintegration.Read More