Susan Flavin’s strikingly original and hugely important volume on Irish economic history provides the first major study of trade and consumption patterns in Tudor Ireland since A. K. Longfield’s pioneering Anglo–Irish trade in the sixteenth century (London, 1929). It successfully challenges traditional accounts depicting a chronically underdeveloped economy which contracted still further in the final Tudor decades: it reveals, instead, a buoyant economy with a dynamic link between increasing domestic production and the export of manufactured goods, particularly an increasing output of cloth and clothing to the 1540s, and increasing consumption with the importation of new consumer goods. The evidential base of the study is the Bristol customs accounts which are far fuller and more detailed than surviving customs accounts for Irish, continental or other English ports and provide a quantitative framework for changing consumption patterns. Technological advances have permitted the author to make a detailed analysis of full import and export accounts for eleven individual fiscal years over the course of the sixteenth century: these employ the ‘particular’ accounts to 1565 and the more detailed ‘port books’ thereafter which, crucially, add the domicile of merchants and the precise port of arrival or departure of shipped goods. Throughout the volume, too, the author’s findings are supported by an impressive number of explanatory tables, figures, and plates.

The author’s analysis of the customs accounts allows her to piece together a fairly detailed account of Ireland’s trade, with a focus on the more urbanised, anglicised, and economically developed south-eastern part of Ireland. It is generally agreed, too, that trade between Bristol and Ireland had long been the most important branch of Ireland’s overseas trade and that England remained Ireland’s principal trading partner in Tudor times. The composition of Ireland’s import trade was restricted c.1500 to a range of around sixty items; but by the 1590s almost 400 different commodities were imported from Bristol. This increase reflected both a diversification of product types (in dressing, eating, and drinking), reflecting evolving cultural trends, and a great increase of new items, including luxury clothes and foodstuffs. Flavin identifies two distinct periods of commercial expansion, between 1526 and 1541, and between 1563 and 1575, the latter being especially marked, exhibiting an increase of 140 per cent in the range of imports. In the later sixteenth century, the value of Anglo–Irish trade fell off, but this, apparently, was because Irish merchants traded increasingly with continental Europe. Most of the Irish imports were also carried in Irish ships by merchants domiciled in Ireland, so that it was Irish merchants mainly who reaped the profits of the increasing luxury consumption in Ireland.

While the first part of the volume considers the pace and extent of changes in Irish consumption, parts two and three explore the importance of these changes at a microeconomic level, particularly in regard to the two major activities of daily living, dress and diet. For this, the quantitative data on imports is integrated with qualitative sources, including wills, archaeological and pictorial evidence, plus contemporary state papers, other literature, and legislation. A particular difficulty which the author faces here, and of which she is very mindful, is to interpret how far the evidence of change in the towns fed through into Gaelic Ireland. She shows, for instance, that the Irish were very hesitant about adopting English dress and fashion, but they did so in particular circumstances. English-style clothing was more expensive, and traditional Irish trews were more suited than knitted stockings to Irish conditions. In many ways, however, the evidence is not there to answer such questions: Flavin wisely leaves them open, as she often also does questions about the impact of the Munster plantation on consumption and fashion. Throughout, however, the author demonstrates an impressive knowledge of the secondary literature of consumption trends across England and Europe, enabling her to situate Irish developments within the wider European context. As is clear from this volume, while Ireland may not have been in the forefront of fashion – Irish consumers were not slavish imitators of customs elsewhere, and Irish fashion sometimes remained distinctive – nonetheless Irish consumption generally mirrored the sorts of change occurring across Europe.

Overall, it is no exaggeration to say that this volume offers one of the most innovative accounts of Tudor Ireland to appear in the last forty years, raising many new questions as well as radically revising our understanding of long-established assumptions about the Irish economy.