Irish Maritime Trade in the Eighteenth Century: a Study in Patterns of Trade, Market Structures, and Merchant Communities

<p>Ireland has a centuries-long history of maritime and economic interaction with Great Britain and other more distant communities on the Atlantic rim. In the last forty years of academic writing on the main themes of Ireland's economic history, very few historians have examined the late-eighteenth century maritime trade data. The original Customs logs or port books are lost but other sources of information remain. This thesis uses a new source of information, Richard Eaton's A Daily and Alphabetical Arrangement of all Imports and Exports at the Port of Dublin, in the Quarter ending the 25th March, 1785, as well as the shipping reports contained in the daily newspapers of the time to create a micro-history of the maritime and mercantile interaction between Ireland and her trading partners. Eaton's "List" not only gives us a complete tally of the goods exported from, and imported into Dublin in the first three months of 1785 but the customs official also recorded the names of each merchant or firm operating in Dublin at that time. This is the first time that such detailed information has been available to scholars and it is unavailable from any other source. The focus is on Dublin in 1785 and a comparison is made with another Irish port city -- Belfast. Change over time is measured by using data for the same focal cities in 1770. Ireland's key market is England and Liverpool is the increasingly popular destination for goods leaving Dublin and the port of lading for goods arriving in Dublin. Using the databases created for the purpose, this thesis analyses the relationship between Dublin/Belfast and Liverpool and discusses the patterns of trade and market structures. Although every export/import sector had a group of leading merchants, no single merchant or small group of merchants were able to wield sufficient market power to exclude competitors. All sectors of the merchant communities of Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool -- regardless of whether they dealt in primary produce, linen products or merchants' goods -- were general merchants, with little evidence of specialisation.</p>

Irish Maritime Trade in the Eighteenth Century: a Study in Patterns of Trade, Market Structures, and Merchant Communities

<p>Ireland has a centuries-long history of maritime and economic interaction with Great Britain and other more distant communities on the Atlantic rim. In the last forty years of academic writing on the main themes of Ireland's economic history, very few historians have examined the late-eighteenth century maritime trade data. The original Customs logs or port books are lost but other sources of information remain. This thesis uses a new source of information, Richard Eaton's A Daily and Alphabetical Arrangement of all Imports and Exports at the Port of Dublin, in the Quarter ending the 25th March, 1785, as well as the shipping reports contained in the daily newspapers of the time to create a micro-history of the maritime and mercantile interaction between Ireland and her trading partners. Eaton's "List" not only gives us a complete tally of the goods exported from, and imported into Dublin in the first three months of 1785 but the customs official also recorded the names of each merchant or firm operating in Dublin at that time. This is the first time that such detailed information has been available to scholars and it is unavailable from any other source. The focus is on Dublin in 1785 and a comparison is made with another Irish port city -- Belfast. Change over time is measured by using data for the same focal cities in 1770. Ireland's key market is England and Liverpool is the increasingly popular destination for goods leaving Dublin and the port of lading for goods arriving in Dublin. Using the databases created for the purpose, this thesis analyses the relationship between Dublin/Belfast and Liverpool and discusses the patterns of trade and market structures. Although every export/import sector had a group of leading merchants, no single merchant or small group of merchants were able to wield sufficient market power to exclude competitors. All sectors of the merchant communities of Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool -- regardless of whether they dealt in primary produce, linen products or merchants' goods -- were general merchants, with little evidence of specialisation.</p>

Women, Trade, and the Roots of Consumer Societies

This chapter explains the significant, if often overlooked, ways in which both free and enslaved women as well as men participated actively and eagerly in trade around the Atlantic rim from 1500 to 1800. Commerce in the early modern period was not performed by heroic individuals or anonymous empires but by individuals embedded in familial and social relationships. The meanings that contemporaries accorded to female traders changed over time. With the expansion of Atlantic trade and particularly the increased availability of consumer goods in the mid-eighteenth century, women’s economic practices took on new political and social significance. By the end of the century, however, several forms of women’s commercial activity were attended by danger and backlash. By the 1830s, commerce itself had come to be defined as a male activity, even as women continued to participate in trade.

The Sea of International Politics

Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.