Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 147

In the last decade or so there has been a mass of books about Irish history and Irish agriculture. In many, perhaps in most, there has been a concentration on the famine of the 1840s, and the lead up to that famine, but particularly the immediate causes and then the far-reaching consequences for the wider economic and social well being of Ireland. Other studies have looked less at the famine crisis per se and more at the underlying economic structures, for example as illustrated through the study of prices. Those that take the longer view look at externalities such as the international consequences through the migration of not only displaced famine victims and their families, but also those with a spirit of adventure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who willingly, optimistically, emigrated. Yet other studies have looked at the internal long term recovery of the Irish rural economy and some of the difficulties it faced, not least the land wars that culminated in greater Irish land independence as tenants replaced their former Anglo-Irish landowners, and the extremes of poverty through the Congested Districts legislation which identified many of the western counties as the most deeply impoverished sections of the rural community.

Yet there is something missing from these studies, or at least it is missing in terms of technical detail. While touching upon farming as the context of the underlying bigger picture, they do not tell us very much about the business of farming – the day-to-day grind of waking up, going to the fields, tending the animals, marketing the produce. It is true that there have been studies of some elements of Irish farming society, such as the creamery industry, and of spade cultivation, but the broad business of farming is largely absent. This study nicely fills that space. Not many other studies have chapter headings that are so simple yet so descriptive of the art of farming. We have ‘Hay-making’ (chapter nine). ‘Ridges and drains’ (chapter three), and ‘Harrows, rollers and techniques of sowing seed’ (chapter seven). The book and its chapters uncover and explain the history of Irish farming between 1750 and 1950. It derives from the authors’ collection, interpretation, and synthesizing of work they conducted over three decades at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. They have a special knowledge and insight of that particular collection having been respectively head curator and curator at the museum. The authors openly admit that the weight of evidence derives from the nine counties of the historic province of Ulster. Nevertheless, all 32 counties, and many individual places within those counties, are represented in the index, to a greater or lesser degree. In addition, many of the illustrations and items of evidence come from collections in the Irish Republic.

The book is sponsored by the Irish Food Board which again says something about filling a need in the literature, but this is also a book that raises academic or scholarly issues. Besides, the changing structure of the plough and of the spade and the virtues of labour-intensive relative to capital-intensive means of production are all factors in the more technical measurement of agricultural output and productivity. Elements of this book will allow agricultural and economic historians to marry some of these relatively mundane developments to the more technical objectives and assessments of economic and agrarian history research. Finally, the book is lavishly illustrated with nearly 150 photographs and illustrations, though the squeamish might beware of the slaughter of the pig in county Antrim in c.1900 which is portrayed on p.274!