Peter M. Solar

The Irish Linen Trade, 1820–1852

Irelands 19th century linen industry was one of the few successful industries in that country at the time, but the deregulation of the industry in the 1820s has made it difficult for historians to determine the amount of linen cloth exported by Ireland to England. Export receipts taken from Belfast and import receiving receipts taken from London and Liverpool can help to approximate the quantity of linen cloth exported during the 19th-century Irish famine. Much of the data concerning the Irish linen trade was taken from the Railway Commissioners Report. The linen trade slackened in the 1830s following a fall in cotton prices; it was revived in the 1850s when the demand for cotton returned and flax-spinning mills were expanded.

New series for agricultural prices in London, 1770–1914

New annual series for the prices of major agricultural commodities sold in London markets between 1770 and 1914 are presented. These series are based on bimonthly observations drawn from newspaper market reports. The products covered are wheat, barley (grinding and malting), oats, potatoes, hay, butter, beef, mutton, and pork. Annual prices are calculated for both calendar and production years. The new series are compared to existing series.

Why were Dutch East Indiamen so slow

The speed of ships is a crucial variable in shipping productivity. Despite the dominance of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Eurasian trade in the early modern era, its ships were generally slower than those of other companies. This article investigates the causes of this gap in shipping speeds. We dismiss reasons that highlight more numerous stops, longer routes, inferior navigation and restrictive instructions, and emphasize differences in ship design resulting from constraints imposed by the Dutch shallow inland waterways, and the slow adoption of copper sheathing in the late eighteenth century, as plausible explanations.

The Benelux countries

The Benelux countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg — are surrounded by the great powers of northern Europe, and their population, taken together, has never amounted to more than half that of France, Britain or Germany. Over the centuries the central location and small size of the Benelux countries have created both dangers and opportunities. These countries have been traversed by the armies and buffeted by the economic policies of their large neighbours. But being at the crossroads of Europe, the Belgians, Dutch and Luxemburgers have often been able to profit by acting as commercial and financial intermediaries. These countries have been among the ranks of the most developed economies since the Middle Ages, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, along with Britain, were at the top of the European league table of income per capita.

Why Ireland Starved and the Big Issues in Pre-Famine Irish Economic History

This reflection on Joel Mokyrs Why Ireland Starved discusses the way in which Mokyr addressed three big issues in pre-famine Irish economic history: Why population grew so rapidly, why the Irish were so dependent on the potato and what role British control played in Irish economic development. It suggests that differences among Irish counties were small relative to the differences between Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, hence cross-section analysis within Ireland, Mokyrs preferred method, may not be able to capture the causes of rapid population growth and potato dependence. As for the influence of British control, the way in which seventeenth-century changes in landownership shaped subsequent economic development is neither fully elaborated nor tested empirically.

Sail on, Albion: the usefulness of Lloyd’s Registers for maritime history, 1760–1840

Lloyd’s Registers are an underexploited source for maritime history, particularly during the industrial revolution era. We provide a critical description of this source, then assess its completeness as a record of British and Irish shipping by an analysis of entries for ships named Albion between 1776 and 1840. We pursue the Albions by comparing the information in the Registers with that in Lloyd’s List, a contemporary maritime newspaper. These exercises show that the Registers are much less than a complete census of British shipping, and that systematic analysis of this source must contend with some discontinuities in its quality.

Late eighteenth-century merchant ships in war and peace

This article assesses Lloyd’s Register as a source for late eighteenth-century maritime history by analysing the ships listed in the 1779 and 1790 volumes. The Registers turn out to a reasonably complete enumeration of the ships involved in the foreign trade of Britain and Ireland, but contain only a small share of ships in the coasting trade. The article analyses the names given to ships, their size and rigging, where they were constructed and how they were used. It also investigates the ships used as privateers and transports during the American Revolutionary War and the technical practices of sheathing and doubling. The distribution of ships by owner is discussed, as is the way in which the Registers classified ships.

European industry, 1700-1870

Abstract This paper offers an overview of the development of European industry between 1700 and 1870, drawing in particular on the recent literature that has emerged following the formation of the European Historical Economics Society in 1991. The approach thus makes use of economic analysis and quantitative methods where appropriate. There are a number of important revisions, compared with previous accounts of Europe’s Industrial Revolution, particularly as embodied in the major existing textbooks on European economic history. First, the Industrial Revolution now emerges as a more gradual process than was once implied by the use of the take-off metaphor. Nevertheless, the scale of the structural transformation that occurred during the process of industrialisation continues to justify the use of the term Industrial Revolution. Second, although the emphasis on the central role of technological change is not new, we use economic analysis to shed new light on the process. Drawing on a model of technological choice first introduced by Paul David, we emphasise the importance of factor prices for the initial switch to modern capital intensive production methods in Britain, the rate of diffusion of these methods to other countries and path dependent technological change. In the cotton industry, particular emphasis is placed on the role of high wages, while in the iron industry, the price of coal is seen to play an important part. We also draw on the idea of a General Purpose Technology to evaluate the role of steam power.

Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported in Lloyds Registers are shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolbens Act in 1788.