Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783
Liam Kennedy, Review of Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783, in The International History Review, Vol. 13, No. 4 (November 1991), 810-12.
Thomas M. Truxes. Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1989. Pp. xiv, 448. $42.50 (us).
In the early modern period, English colonists viewed Ireland and British North America as frontier regions which, despite the obvious geographical differences, held certain characteristics in common. It is these colonial similarities, and the underdeveloped state of the two regions, which makes a comparison of Irish-American trade in the century after the Restoration so inviting. In a work which is clearly influenced by L.M. Cullen’s path-breaking study of Anglo-Irish trade, Truxes charts these transatlantic links with style and analytical rigour.
In terms of Truxes’s chronology, the formative period of Irish-American commerce was between 1660 and 1731, the years when English policy attempted to ‘reconcile the mercantilist ambitions of the mother country with Irish demands for participation in North Atlantic trade’ (p. 7). With the weakening of the Navigation Acts and their restrictive powers [pp. 810/811] in relation to Irish overseas trade in 1731, the way was opened for direct two-way trade between Ireland and the American colonies. From the mainland colonies in the New World came tobacco, flaxseed, lumber, iron, and, in years of dearth in Ireland, wheat and flour. The offshore islands of the British West Indies, which had been reduced to a state of virtual monoculture serviced by slave labour, helped satisfy the growing taste for sugar in the British Isles. In return, Ireland exported large quantities of salted beef, pork, butter, herrings, and cheap linen fabrics. The last, which emerged as an important source of export earnings after 1705, is especially significant. It shows that manufacturing activity was not confined to the mother country, with Ireland reduced to the role of a mere supplier of agricultural surpluses, as some mercantilist thinking would have dictated. Moreover, the basis of mutually beneficial trading relationships lay in differences in resource endowments and factor costs, not in colonial policy per se.
Another traffic from Ireland, which complemented these commodity flows, was that in labour power. Tens of thousands of Irish people, many of them indentured servants and prominently from the north of Ireland, made their way to the New World. This was replete not only with economic but also with political significance, as was evidenced by the enthusiastic participation of Ulster Presbyterians in the rebellion of the 1770s. It is in this traffic also that we can locate the origins of the most important and most continuous of all economic ties between Ireland and North America over the last three centuries: the self-renewing stream of emigration out of the old country.
In terms of economic impact on the two societies, just how important was the Irish-American commodity trade? Truxes certainly retrieves this neglected strand of the history of the Atlantic economy from the obscurity it previously suffered. He notes, for example, that the American colonies were second only to Great Britain as markets for Irish exports during the eighteenth century. But it must be remembered that this was a very poor second. For the four years ending in 1760, for example, exports to North America represented on average only 17 per cent of total Irish exports. The proportion of Irish imports coming from North America was marginally lower at 16 per cent. It is of course true that for particular subregions in Ireland the impact was much more pronounced. The transatlantic provisions trade was crucial to the expansion of Cork in this period, while parts of Ulster benefited disproportionately from the trade in flaxseed and linen goods. But the macro-economic picture seems clear enough: while commodity flows between Ireland and North America provided a useful boost to economic activity, in the final analysis they were of subsidiary importance to the evolution of both economies. [pp. 811/812]
The merits of Truxes’s pioneering work lies not in any grand claims which might be made for the significance of the subject matter. Rather, it derives from the careful assembly of trade statistics (though much of the price data is of limited value, being based on ‘official’ estimates), and an imaginative exploration of the many ramifications of Irish-American trade which help illuminate wider issues of social and economic development in these two regions of the Atlantic economy. At the level of political economy, it raises important questions about the colonial status of Ireland in the eighteenth century. Was Ireland simply a colony or did it have junior partnership status in the exploitation of the territories and markets of the British empire. Were there major benefits as well as costs arising from Ireland’s incorporation into the empire economy? Truxes does not resolve these issues but he sets them firmly on the larger historical agenda.
Liam Kennedy, Queen’s University of Belfast
