Sixteenth-century Ireland has been seen as something of an economic backwater beset by political troubles. In Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland, based on her research into the exchequer customs accounts for the port of Bristol, Susan Flavin challenges that view. Changing patterns of consumption across Europe have received attention from historians, but hitherto Ireland has been bypassed, largely for lack of documentary evidence. Flavin has already helped to remedy the situation through the publication of data from the Bristol accounts, and here she offers a synthesis of that evidence with other surviving documents and archaeological findings. Flavin explains that the Bristol accounts provide the most detailed and chronologically extensive source for examining trade between England and Ireland in the sixteenth century, although as she herself points out, the trade was mainly with towns of southeast Ireland and the accounts therefore have most to say about life in those communities.

Flavin organized her book into three sections. The first deals with the overall trajectory of trade between Bristol and Ireland. The sixteenth century saw a great expansion in the range of commodities imported to Ireland from Bristol, rising from around sixty in the late fifteenth century to more than four hundred by the end of the sixteenth century. The accounts show diversification—subcategories of products, indicating particular qualities—and Flavin successfully argues that this does not merely reflect a change in recording practices but instead represents the widening range of goods. Paradoxically at the same time there was a decline in the overall value of the trade, which seems to have been crucially affected by a reduction in the export of English woolen cloth to Ireland.

Ireland is shown not to have been the mere passive recipient of English goods and fashions. Goods traded by Irish merchants with other nations were exported from Ireland to England through Bristol. By careful use of sources Flavin builds a picture of Irish trading networks with Europe, which had their own influence on Irish culture. The more detailed accounts after 1565 likewise allow Flavin to build a picture of the internal trading networks within Ireland and show that the market for many imported commodities existed throughout the country and was not limited to the southeast.

In the second section Flavin looks in detail at clothing—a key part of identity, according to Flavin. English sumptuary legislation sought to regulate Irish clothing and hairstyles, to bring it in line with English models. In this it was unsuccessful. The sixteenth century saw the growth of a native Irish clothing industry with exports of cloth and clothing to England through Bristol. The exchequer accounts show how the Irish imported large quantities of haberdashery, developing their own distinctive style and favoring bright colors—particularly yellow, traditionally obtained through the use of saffron—as a mark of distinction from the more sober shades adopted by the Protestant English. Flavin also shows through records of imported soap that the Irish were far from the dirty people described in derogatory contemporary English accounts, although a lack of mirrors referenced in the accounts and surviving wills and inventories suggests to Flavin differences in grooming.

In her final section, dealing with food and drink, Flavin chooses to leave out a discussion of staple dietary fare, which was homegrown rather than imported. This is a shame as her discussion of clothing is fuller and one feels that her excellent use of other source material and archaeological evidence could have provided more complete coverage here. Nevertheless, there is much of interest: the suggestion of market-gardening around Cork in the sixteenth century, the comparatively late infiltration of hopped beer and its association with the import of stoneware drinking vessels from the Continent. As with clothing, the Irish made their own choices; for example, favoring continental cutlery over the products of the expanding English trade and showing markedly less interest than the English in sugar and spices, except aniseed and licorice, both associated with distilling. There was also an Irish glassmaking industry, revealed through the export of products to Bristol.

The Bristol exchequer customs accounts show the importance of England as a source of imported goods to Ireland, but it is clear that the Irish themselves were active agents in this trade, and this forms Flavin's main argument. The influence of English immigration as part of the late-sixteenth-century plantations appears to have been minimal: an increase in the import of woolen stockings and wooden drinking vessels. Irish traders participated in wider European trading networks and Irish consumers had an awareness of European styles and fashions independent of any English filter.

Flavin includes a useful set of appendices summarizing the data in the exchequer accounts and providing much valuable material to those wishing to further their own research on sixteenth-century trade.

Overall this is an engaging and well-written work that opens up and encourages the exploration of many avenues for the further study of early modern Ireland as well as providing food for thought for those working on other countries.