Like scientists, drawing data on climate change going back thousands of years from Greenland ice cores, economic historians can tell much about the more recent past from changes in prices through time. From the Industrial Revolution, for example, the growing demand for meat in neighboring Britain raised Irish meat prices in the longer term; in contrast, imports from the new world depressed prices for cereals in the second half of the nineteenth century. These price effects have left a trace in the historical record. Ireland, however, has lacked the kind of market price data available in many European countries such as the Scottish “fiars” or the French “mercuriales,” so economic historians working on Ireland have had a relatively meager range of price data to work off for a small range of commodities over limited time frames. This work of scholarship by two of the major players in Irish economic history has dramatically changed all that.

Over many years, the authors have painstakingly constructed a range of price series pertaining to Irish agriculture, predominantly from hundreds of volumes of Irish newspapers; for this herculean task alone the authors deserve much credit. The book initially sets out the very limited historiography on the subject, which was clearly the least taxing aspect of the undertaking. An outstanding achievement of the book is that they have produced a new vista of the long view in Irish price history from the mid-eighteenth century to the eve of the First World War. For the first time, we can examine the price effects of epic events such as the French Wars, the upheavals of 1798 and famine of 1800/01, the Great Famine of 1845–1849, and the Land War of 1879–1881. This at last provides a template with which to test the late Raymond Crotty's controversial thesis that a key turning point in Irish economic history (the shift from tillage to pasture) took place from the termination of the Napoleonic War rather than the Great Famine (Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure, Cork, 1966). Liam Kennedy and Peter M. Solar's new price series provides firm evidence that Crotty's revision was misplaced and the Great Famine of 1845–1849 was indeed a watershed in Irish economic history, when prices rose by 25 to 40 percent, until international economic prices reasserted their influence in its aftermath.

The thorny issue of weights and measures is taken up in chapter two and we are made aware of the lack of consistency of measures across space and time throughout the period in question, but it is not made clear if or how this might affect the veracity of the price series presented in the core chapters, three to five. Another problem with reportage of prices more generally in newspapers, particularly in Ireland according to Richard Perrin, was the publication of fictitious prices, when the maximum price gained currency as the published price (The Meat Trade in Britain, 1840–1914, London, 1978, pp. 28–29). Much ingenuity has gone into constructing the various series through an unpromising historical landscape where price data were highly sporadic in terms of geographical coverage, and for Dublin (the most important commercial center and principal entry point for imports for the first half of the period) very poor. To deal with this, the authors have drawn their data for commodities (other than beef and cattle) to a very large degree from two ports, Waterford and Belfast, where price data were reported more consistently in the newspapers than elsewhere in the country. Bimonthly observations were made for each commodity for each year. The northern and southern series could then be cross-checked, and since they were strongly correlated, the authors argue this provides support, firstly, for the veracity of their approach and secondly, they conclude that “market integration was highly developed across the island” (p. 103). The first contention becomes increasingly clear-cut through time, but the second becomes less so as one recedes back into the eighteenth century, when because of the shortfall in Belfast and Waterford data the authors resort to other markets, notably Kilkenny and Cork in the south and Londonderry in the north. This splicing of data from different regions is undertaken in a period when price divergence was strongest, and the landscape of semi-subsistence farming presumably dulled price signals, particularly in the west. This supposition is borne out in the authors findings that Londonderry and Belfast prices did not move well together in the 1780s and 1790s (p. 45) and in their own lack of confidence in the northern projection back into the eighteenth century.

The book places major question marks over the work of Thomas Barrington (“A Review of Irish Agricultural Prices.” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society 15 [1927]: 249–80), which has informed much of the thinking on prices in Irish economic history for the period between the 1840s and the 1920s. The authors find grave fault with Barrington's price projections back into the nineteenth century, and Land Commission evidence in the 1880s and 1890s where they note a host of inconsistent methods and outcomes. While accepting these limitations, the book has not identified major problems with official data for the early twentieth century. Could the official data in the decade or more before the First World War (provided by the Land Commission and the Department of Agriculture) not be salvaged to provide comparisons between all four Irish provinces, providing a useful benchmark to provide greater regional contextualization of the series presented here, in its final phase at least? As the poorest part of the country, one would expect a different price story in Connacht for much of the period in question. At the other end of the spectrum, were there structural factors in the economy which made Dublin prices different, which might explain some of the discrepancies found between Solar and Kennedy's series and those of the Land Commission (which showed a greater rise between 1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century? Table 3.11 (p. 68) records rises in three commodities for this period between the Land Commission prices and a few Dublin commodities for which a comparison is possible, and for two of these, the Dublin prices were indeed closer to the Land Commission than the average for Kennedy/Solar. Dublin was the main departure point for Irish agricultural exports to Britain, in addition to being the major transport hub for the Irish market. The price of premium malting barley, for example, was largely determined by Guinness Brewery (in Dublin), simply because it consumed such a large share of the native barley crop.

The beef series set out in chapter 4 utilizes Dublin data for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but prior to this Cork and Belfast prices are spliced on to extend the series back into the eighteenth century, again making the series less consistent. In the final analysis, Kennedy and Solar conclude that history favored the hoof, but this “shift in the relative price structure originated farther back in time than most would have imagined… .the secular trend in prices privileged pastoral products from the final decade of the eighteenth century onwards. This makes it one of the longest-running historical forces shaping rural economy and society in Ireland” (p. 99). This being as it may, there is little evidence that these price effects brought a shift away from the acreage under cereals from the final decades of the eighteenth century to the 1840s. All the indications are that the demand for flour and oatmeal rose in Ireland in these years, as did the demand for beer and whiskey (which used malt derived from barley), and since all this was largely met by native cereal cultivation, the logical probability is that arable output and acreages increased in these years, in tandem with the growth of livestock numbers with a significant increase in labor and capital inputs and a far greater utilization marginal land. This reminds us that price was not the only factor determining the scale of output or the balance between pasture and arable farming. If a rapidly expanding population of smallholders, domestic textile producers, and farm laborers were price responsive in many respects, examples of factors which created a resistance to “the drumbeat of modernization” include the extensive nature of on farm consumption and semi-subsistence agriculture across much of the country, which accounted for a large part of the food supply until the 1840s. Moreover, the logistics of transporting significant amounts of livestock to the larger British urban markets only became feasible with the railway age and steam navigation.

This book has demolished large swathes of Irish price history. The prices and price indices presented will provide building blocks for economic and social historians engaged in Irish history, while also providing the basis for more systematic comparisons with Great Britain and continental Europe. While it is certainly the most important book to be published in Irish economic history in the last ten years, it has raised as many questions as it has answered, some of which will take decades to answer. The respective positions of Dublin and the west of Ireland in Irish price history (at the opposite ends of the price spectrum) seem to be the most pressing ones to be addressed. Every book has its price, and at 45 dollars this is good value for a hardback, and the production team (including the authors) should be commended for the quality of the illustrations, graphs, and figures. As the first of the Royal Irish Academy's new monograph series, it has set an extremely high standard in every respect.