Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783
Jacob M. Price, Review of Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783, in The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 1990), 318-19.
Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xiv + 448. 26 tables. £39.
The older economic histories and trade studies had relatively little to say about the commercial inter-connectedness of Ireland and the British-American colonies in the period 1660-1775. However, more recent work by L. M. Cullen, F. G. James, and R. C. Nash has suggested that, despite the Navigation Acts, such trade may have been quite significant in both directions. Truxes has pursued these suggestions and, after the most extensive research in Ireland, England, and North America, gives us a full and authoritative account of the various branches of this commerce.
Irish-American trade is a good example of the adaptability of the market to the most discouraging political interventions. The prohibitions in the 1660s of the importation of Irish cattle into England stimulated the growth of beef and pork packing and of the victualling trades in south-eastern Irish ports, particularly Cork, with exports going first to the French Atlantic ports for their Antilles trade and then increasingly to England’s own West Indian colonies—along with Irish butter, herrings, and other provisions. The navigation laws required Irish-bound return cargoes of American produce to be landed first in England until a British liberalizing act of 1731 permitted non-enumerated goods to be shipped directly from the colonies to Ireland. The new rules allowed significant direct Irish imports of West Indian rum and North American flax seed and—in years of bad harvests—wheat and flour. Even earlier, an English act of 1705 had permitted direct Irish exports of linen to the colonies, though shipments via Britain were encouraged by a subsidy adopted in 1743. Direct shipping ventures from Ireland to North America were still discouraged by the lack of bulky export commodities, but this deficiency was counterbalanced in part by the development of a substantial trade carrying indentured servants and other Irish emigrants to North America in the decades preceding the Revolution. These trades stimulated the development of an Irish merchant community in many of the principal American ports.
Truxes has pursued the most exhaustive quantitative investigations into English, Irish, and American trade statistics, (Only in the case of Scotland have his researches been less than complete, for he seems to have missed the not insignificant quantities of Irish linens that went to America via the Clyde as early as the 1740s.) His data allow one to place Irish-American trade in a fuller context, neither neglecting nor exaggerating its importance. If the colonial markets never took more than 25 per cent of Irish linen exports, Ireland was the ultimate source of some 54 per cent of North American imports of plain British/Irish linens and the colonies were the [pp. 318/319] source of 80-98 per cent of essential Irish flax seed imports. Similarly, if the colonies took only 16 per cent of Ireland’s butter exports, they took up to 47 per cent of its beef exports and provided 63-75 per cent of the barrel staves so necessary for those beef shipments. Such precision adds greatly to the value of Truxes’s book and will enable future writers on both Irish and colonial trade to give the proper weight to the Irish-American component.
Jacob M. Price, University of Michigan
