Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783
Patrick Leech, Review of Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783, in Irish Studies Review (Bath), Vol. 13; No. 3 (2005), 405-07.
Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783. Thomas M. Truxes, 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 448, ISBN 0.521.52616.7, £30.00 (pb)
It is surely unusual for a publishing house to wait sixteen years before reissuing a monograph in paperback, but this is what Cambridge University Press has done with Thomas Truxes’s rich and comprehensive account of trade between Ireland and America in the period from the Restoration to the end of the American War of Independence. Volumes such as this which present a wealth of detailed research in economic history do not risk stepping over the boundary dividing specialist academic reading and the general educated public, and as such often remain in hardback for consultation in university libraries. This paperback reissuing, then, would seem to be exceptional, and the reason for this may be found, perhaps, in the exceptional nature of this book. For Truxes plowed a deep furrow in economic history which many ways anticipated a whole series of research interests that were emerging at the time, but which have since taken up a central place in the concerns of economic, social, and cultural historians. These include the interrelations of the economic and social actors in the world of the North Atlantic, the importance of consumption as a motor force of the leap into the modern, industrialized ‘world system’, and the phenomenon of migration as a crucial element in this development.
It is almost a commonplace to use expressions such as ‘rich’ and ‘wealth of detail’ to refer to monographs such as these. But the reader who can lay aside a desire for generalization or theory can bath in a truly exceptional wealth of information, and one which can be regarded as a mirror of wealth and complexity of its subject, eighteenth-century Atlantic commerce. Truxes’s account, like the trade system it describes, is made up of a host of interrelating strands linking the hinterland of Irish ports, the ports themselves, the major entrepôt pots of England (London, Liverpool, Bristol), the ports of the British West Indies and sugar plantations they served, and the growing cities of British North America, in particular Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. It demonstrates, at a moment when the work of Bernard Bailyn, Nicholas Canny and David Armatage was just beginning to chart the area of historical studies now known as ‘Atlantic history’, the validity of considering this geographical space as a single economic. social and cultural area of historical enquiry. Some examples of this will serve at this point.
Truxes’s story narrates how the slave economy of the British West Indies, based on large-scale sugar production in plantations (replacing the former dependence on tobacco, produced instead mainly on smallholdings) was possible only through abandoning self-sufficiency and relying on the import of provisions (mainly salt beef and butter) and clothing (low-quality linens), the former principally for consumption by the white workers and overseers, the latter by the slaves. Both these crucial imports to the West Indies were supplied overwhelmingly from Ireland, in particular from Cork (provisions), Ulster and Dublin (linen). Further the low-quality provisions used to maintain the increasing slave populations consisted of, to a considerable extent, Swedish herrings, repackaged and re-exported from Ireland (possible because of the quality of the ‘most advanced meat-packing industry in the eighteenth-century world’). The large profits from sugar production, then, which Robin Blackburn and others have reinstated as a crucial factor in the development of the British economy in the period of the Industrial [pp. 405/406] Revolution, was to some degree possible because of an Irish ‘input’ into the system. But the ramifications of the development of the eighteenth-century imperial world system continue. The Irish linen industry was heavily dependent on the import of flaxseed from America, and the American flaxseed merchant merchants, in turn, were dependent on filling westbound ships with Irish emigrants, mainly Irish indentured servants, to the American mainland, a flow of skilled and semi-skilled workers who contributed massively to the ‘transmission of cultural values in the formative years of the American nation’. The interrelated nature of the North Atlantic economy in this period emerges in Truxes’s book, then, with striking clarity and by means of a wide and detailed panorama.
Consumption, too, emerges as a central concern. Truxes’s focus on Irish-American commerce highlighted elements of the eighteenth-century mercantilist economy which had been considered marginal with respect to the large themes of the Industrial Revolution such as cotton and iron production, transport, and so on. The importance of consumption to the economic, social and cultural explosion of Britain in the late eighteenth century was only slowly being recognized in the 1980s, with the work of Neil McKendrick and John Brewer, and only acquired mainstream status in the 1990s. Although consumption is treated here only in so far as it impinges on his principal focus, commerce, Truxes’s work does highlight the importance of consumer goods in the Irish economy as early as the late seventeenth century. Sugar and rum were major imports for Ireland, although the former only indirectly, via England. Tobacco constituted Ireland’s leading import until the early eighteenth century, consumption being widespread even amongst the poor, according to William Petty. The tobacco trade, indeed, was foundational, as the first substantial commercial link between Ireland and America.
Migration, too, has become the focus of much attention since the publication of Truxes’s book. As far as Ireland is concerned, much of this has focused on the mass migrations of the nineteenth century, but the work of Thomas O’Connor, Louis Cullen, and others has striven to keep a focus on the early modern period as equally important in terms of migration both to both Europe and North America. Again, Truxes is interested in migration as an element in the trading system of the North Atlantic economy, but students of the social and cultural impact of migration will also find his account illuminating. He estimates the total number of emigrants to America before 1775 to be around a quarter of a million, small compared to the mass exoduses of the mid-nineteenth century but highly significant nonetheless. These emigrants can be divided into three main groups: paying passengers, convicts and indentured servants. But it was the last of these which was most important, both quantitatively (it accounted for over half the total) and qualitatively. His account of the mechanisms of indenture extends a little outside the confines of trade and describes how this orderly arrangement, by which a worker would guarantee his labour to an employer for a fixed period of time, usually between four and seven years, took place through guidelines set out in Acts of Parliament and by means of a contractual arrangement made before a magistrate. It thus constituted a means by which the poor of Ireland could ‘borrow against future earnings’ in order to pay for their passage. Many of these indentured servants, once the period of work established by their contract ended, could benefit from the expanding economic opportunities on offer in America. If the outcome of this rational economic strategy may have been positive for many of those who sold their labour in [pp. 406/407] this way (although this is an area into which Truxes does not delve too deeply), the similarities and contrasts with slavery, another system designed to respond to the labour requirements of the New World, inevitably come to mind.
Truxes’s focus on Irish-American trade emerged out of the ‘revisionist’ school of economic history led by Louis Cullen, intent on ‘revising’ Irish economic history by taking it beyond the narrow confines of national borders and considering it s a part in a series of larger wholes (the British Empire, European trade, the Atlantic world and so on). The back cover advertises this ‘revisionist’ status, indicating that the book ‘assaults well established myths depicting Irish involvement in transatlantic trade as subordinate to narrow British interests’. But if, on the one hand, Truxes does demonstrate the extent of independent Irish involvement in the trade of the North Atlantic, and the extent to which Irish firms throughout Ireland benefited from this involvement, it is nonetheless true, as he takes considerable pains to emphasise, that Ireland was working in a subordinate position overall within the British commercial empire. This was particularly evident in the period between the Navigation Acts of the 1660s, which specifically recognized Ireland as a trade rival, and 1731, which allowed ‘unenumerated’ goods to be imported directly into Ireland and not via England. But it was true also in a general sense throughout the period. Both American and Irish trade were ‘carefully structured to serve the interests of the mother country’, and in any case the overall financial and credit structure of thru entire trade remained in London, in particular with the sugar interest. That Dublin as a result was able to develop financial and banking services ‘which reached a higher stage of development than anywhere else in the empire outside London’ merely testifies to the extent of the benefits which were to be had even amongst minor partners within the empire.
Patrick Leech, University of Bologna
