Frank Barry outlines in the preface how this book came to pass. About twenty years ago, he became interested in the proportion of foreign-owned manufacturing firms in Ireland since independence. Data existed for the period from 1972, but not before that. He assumed that piecing together the missing data might take six months. Instead, it took many years of painstakingly combing official reports, industry studies, books, magazines and newspaper articles. Once a firm had been identified, he, his students and research assistants had to do much more digging to establish fluctuations in the employment numbers across time.

The result is an unprecedented database of Irish manufacturing firms, which forms the foundation of the book. For economic historians, this gives us far more granular data than has been hitherto available, allowing us to test and revise many assumptions about the trajectory of the economy over the twentieth century. The database will also be of major interest to social and local historians, capturing a vital and neglected aspect of Irish life. A fascinating example is the Ford Motor Company in Cork, which was by far the largest manufacturing employer in the state in the 1920s, employing a peak of 7,000 people on the eve of the Great Depression. The factory eventually closed in 1984, unable to withstand the full force of free trade in the European Economic Community (E.E.C.).

Historians of all hues will enjoy the chapter ‘Pre-1922 southern business establishment and its legacy’. This examines the views and interests of the dominant Protestant and unionist business elites from the turn of the century. The sectarian divisions in Irish businesses lasted for decades after independence. A group of young Protestants reported being unphased about discrimination in the workplace in an Irish Times interview in 1965, since there were ‘plenty of Protestant employers’ (p. 34).

Barry observes that ‘existing writing on Irish economic and business history has been criticised as being overly focused on the role of the state’ (p. 5). This accusation is far from unfounded, and the book makes enormous compensatory strides. Somewhat ironically though, and perhaps it is down to this reader’s predispositions, the book is at its most compelling when it deals with economic policy. Barry brings vast expertise here, having published more on the subject than anyone else. Several important questions unanswered in the rest of the literature are dealt with expertly.

If the book’s greatest strength is the vast body of original work that underpins it, its second greatest is its readability: it is authoritative, succinct and pithy. Cramming a detailed overview of fifty years of Irish manufacturing alongside extensive policy analysis into just over 200 pages is an enormous achievement. A longer book written less skilfully, no matter how important its contribution, would have risked turning into an endless list of names.

The most tantalising part of the book returns to a subject that Barry has covered before: the influence of Puerto Rico’s inward-investment strategy on the Industrial Development Authority (I.D.A.) in the 1950s. The first mention of Puerto Rico in an Irish context came in the ‘Stacy May’ report by a U.S. consultancy group in 1952, and it was heavily cited by the I.D.A. in its 1956 report. Barry has even hypothesised that the example may have been inserted into the Stacy May report at the behest of the I.D.A., looking to influence other Irish policymakers. This goes to the core of the Irish development strategy ever since, our understanding of which has been severely hampered by limited file access.

The book is significantly strengthened by sitting Ireland in an international context and comparing it to other countries that struggled with the politics of exiting protectionism. It is rare for an author to combine a broad expertise with forensic and clear-eyed historical research for obvious reasons: achieving either is enormously time-consuming. This is the culmination of well over a decade of research, by someone who was already an expert. In a tribute to an outgoing colleague, Barry once described a top academic as someone whose work would still be read in a hundred years. Assuming people are still researching Irish economic history in the twenty-second century — which they certainly should — then this book will remain a compelling read.