The question of how well the Irish economy fared during the union with Great Britain (1800– 1921) has always been politically fraught. Irish nationalists at home and abroad blamed the British connection for Ireland’s relative underdevelopment: free trade with Britain had led Ireland, ‘with all its natural resources’, to ‘hurl from its bosom its mechanics, its laborers and its farmers to become toilers and wanderers in strange lands’.  The more data we have that can speak to such debates, the better.

In a series of path-breaking publications, Bielenberg has highlighted the wealth of industrial data available for Ireland under the Union, and he and Geary have used these to calculate long-run manufacturing growth rates during the first two quarters of the nineteenth century.

In this paper, authors Kevin O’Rourke, Sean Kenny, and Jason Lennard build on the pioneering work of Bielenberg, bringing together the series collected by him and other scholars, as well as series collected by ourselves, to create a compendium of industrial data that is, we think, as comprehensive as currently possible for Ireland under the Union.

Conclusions based on a new index such as the one presented in this paper need to be tempered with caution, given the problems of data availability highlighted above. This is particularly true of the pre-Famine period. That having been said, the data currently available to us suggest that, while Ireland did not experience aggregate deindustrialisation either before or after the Famine, its industrial performance was relatively disappointing when viewed in a comparative perspective.

Read the full article here: O’Rourke, Kevin, Lennard, Jason and Kenny, Seán (2022) An annual index of Irish industrial production, 1800-1913. Economic History Review. ISSN 0013-0117