From the founding father of Irish economic history.

Grada, Cormac O.

L. M. CULLEN

ECONOMY, TRADE AND IIRISH MERCHANTS AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1600-1988.

DUBLIN: FOUR COURTS PRESS. 55 [euro].

IRISH ECONOMIC HISTORIANS look up to Professor L. M. Cullen as the true founding father of their subject and its leading light for nearly half a century. His status among his peers is reflected in the breadth and quality of the essays in the festschrift presented to him in 2002, soon after his retirement from Trinity College Dublin. As laborers in a field that is somewhat out of fashion these days, economic historians are proud to have in their ranks one of Ireland's most formidable and truly great scholars. Those of a certain age among them find it hard to think of L. M. Cullen other than as "Louis." In the economic historians' guild of my generation--and I declare an interest as a fan and friend of long standing--the questions were: What would Louis think? Have you seen Louis' latest? Have you heard that Louis is learning Japanese?

Louis Cullen's published output is enormous and continues to grow. Beginning with some articles and a master's thesis on eighteenth-century foreign trade--all in Irish--by one "L. O'Coileain" as long ago as the mid-1950s, it has embraced not just multiple aspects of Ireland's past but also the economic histories of France, Scotland, and Japan. No Irish economic historian can match Cullen in terms of the quantity, quality, and range of nublications. The eighteenth century may be arguably "Cullen's century," but the subject matter of his books ranges from the early history of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce (1983) to economic development in Tokugawa Japan (2003); from a business history of Eason & Son (1989) to a study of smuggling in Ayrshire (1994); and from an elegant pamphlet on Ireland's towns and villages (1979) to a door-stopper on the brandy trade of ancien regime France (1998). His monographs on Irish social and economic history, including the enormously popular Life in Ireland (1968), the seminal An Economic History of Ireland (1970), and the unduly neglected Emergence of Modern Ireland (1983) are classics. Even more path-breaking and influential, perhaps, was The Formation of the Irish Economy (1969), based on a collection of Thomas Davis radio lectures masterminded by Cullen. Chapter 1 of Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants is Cullen's pithy, brilliant introduction to Formation.

Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants offers a mrlange of Louis Cullen's work over four decades that focuses on just some dimensions of his brilliant research career. The collection omits well-known papers published in top-rank professional journals, but includes nineteen others, nearly all gems, most of which previously appeared in collected volumes or in more obscure places. It might be said of some that they were "born to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air," and their republication in this form is particularly welcome. Three essays (Chapters 2, 3 and 12) testify to Cullen's leading role in building bridges and forging friendships between Irish, Scottish, and French economic historians. These essays, explicitly comparative, were Cullen's own contributions to the enormously productive series of conferences organized by him and others in the 1970s and 1980s. Some essays cover "big" issues that will be of broad interest, while others focus on very specialist topics indeed. The last two chapters (Chapters 18 and 19) are in the latter category. Testifying to Cullen's mastery of eighteenth-century banking practices, they are the most challenging in the volume. One, a critical reflection on Herbert Luthy's classic but (certainly to Irish readers) obscure La Banque Protestante (1959), contains some Irish resonances; the other, an arcane study of the Scottish exchange on London, contains hardly any. Three essays are new, and span a broad range: one is about the significance of eighteenth--and nineteenth-century wills for the economic historian (Chapter 5), a second is about Malthus and Ireland (Chapter 4), and a third employs the early history of the Royal Dublin Society for insight into the broader history of Dublin business and politics (Chapter 14). There are back-to-back contributions on the fate of the Dominican order in eighteenth-century Ireland (Chapter 15) and on Ireland's joining the European Monetary System (Chapter 16). Most readers will be unfamiliar with a fine piece on the role of exotic and colonial products in Irish consumption in the early modem era (Chapter 7).

The far-reaching impact of Louis Cullen's research on Irish economic history is evident in much of the work republished in this volume. The Ireland that emerges here is more complex, more commercialized, more sophisticated than that described in the hastily produced works of George O'Brien almost a century ago. For pre-Cullenite economic historians, Ireland before the famine was largely a place of lazy-beds and one-room cottages where legislative restrictions had impeded economic growth for centuries. For Cullen, however, even though his earliest work was about the west, the economy's tree epicenter lay in Munster and Leinster. Farmers and traders occupy central stage; in a classic paper not reproduced here, Cullen wrote of an "Irish history without the potato." And indeed, Cullen's Galway is more about its merchants (Chapter 11) than its illiterate laborers, more about Monivea than Muighinis. He includes an article on Father Hugh Fenning's valuable study of the Dominican order in eighteenth-century Ireland "to draw attention...to what was in Connaught in many ways in religion and business an integrated and successful society" (8). For Cullen, places such as counties Kilkenny and Kildare, south county Wexford, and north county Dublin--largely by-passed by colonization, socially differentiated, and mainly Catholic--were the most "traditional" in the pre-famine era. Already densely settled relative to the rest of the country in the seventeenth century, they retained much of their late medieval character well into the nineteenth. Cullen refers more than once to the resilience of the Irish language in south Kilkenny and east Tipperary (32-33, 94-96) and the survival or archaic technologies such as the quern for grinding corn (33,100). His "hidden Ireland" is peopled by the likes of the prosperous Callan shopkeeper and schoolmaster Amhlaoimh O Suilleabhain (Humphrey O'Sullivan) and his circle (Chapter 6), Jack "the Bachelor" Connor of Rush and his fellow-smugglers (130-31 ), and Arthur French of Rahasane, who in 1758 married one of the Cork Nagle family (and thus a cousin of Edmund Burke) with a reputed dowry worth a million or two in today's money (204). Where, one wonders, did all that Nagle money come from? Nor did the persistence of archaic features exclude economic growth: for Cullen the eighteenth century is a period of rapid economic progress, although that progress is never explicitly measured here.

Merchants and their activities have been central to Louis Cullen's interests from the start, and they feature prominently in these essays. More than any other economic historian, Cullen is at home in their archives, be they bankers, smugglers, wholesalers, or distillers. The "poor unwashed," an increasing share of the population in the pre-famine era, feature less, but they are central to a fine chapter, written in 1987 but previously unpublished, on "Malthus, Ireland, and famine" (Chapter 4). There Cullen argues that the pre-famine economy was more bleakly"Malthusian" than Joel Mokyr in Why Ireland Starved (1983) or, indeed, one Cormac () Grfida in a 1983 essay on Malthus, had conceded. Cullen maintains that life was more precarious in the pre-famine era than implied by the "gap in famines" described by the late Ken Connell, that technology in the form of the plough tilted the balance against labour, and that the Great Famine was no random event. One can still debate this. For my own tuppence-worth, today 1 would be somewhat more guarded about pre-famine progress than I was three decades ago. That is largely on the basis of what I have learned since from scholars like Louis Cullen and Peter Solar. Yet one can agree that given the dependence on the potato and the indebtedness of Irish landlords, an unprecedented shock such as Phytophthora infestans was bound to wreak havoc, while at the same time placing more emphasis than perhaps Cullen would on the sheer scale of its improbability a priori, and also allowing more room for the role of a culpably inadequate response from the authorities and elites of the day.

The Anglo-Irish ascendancy does not feature much in Cullen's world. As Anthony Malcolmson has wittily put it, "Louis Cullen does not love a lord." but that does not exclude an evident empathy for the resilient rearguard of the Gaelic landed gentry that survived against the odds. Nor does government feature much either. The lack of attention paid to public policy reflects Cullen's long-standing conviction that it mattered less for Ireland's economic destiny in the past than geography and factor endowments. Cullen's critiques of economic policy are reserved for his analysis of post--independence Ireland (Chapter 17).

In recent years, an economic history more bent on statistical estimation and economic modeling has rather marginalized the kind of scholarship practiced by Louis Cullen throughout his career. The leading lights of the subject today spend far more time seated in front of their PC or MacPro than they do in the archives, and indeed for the most part dread the prospect of working with primary sources. For them, a price series generated by a grant-funded research assistant is worth more than a dozen visits to an archive departementale or a county record office. In the introduction Louis refers to "the charm, uncertainties and surprises of a now vanished archival ancien regime" (8), but the papers too resonate of an academic culture that is under severe pressure.

Economic history is arguably the poorer for this turn, but today's practitioners cannot argue with the market. The pressure to publish and the preferences of journal editors nowadays dictate a different strategy. It is a commentary on the evolution of the field--and by no means on the quality of the material reproduced here--that few of the papers published in Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants would find a home today in the leading economic history journals.

Four Courts Press has done Louis Cullen proud. Should this book sell well, as it surely deserves to, perhaps the publishers will follow through by introducing yet more of Cullen's papers to a new audience. The well has by no means run dry.

--University College Dublin