ABSTRACT

The economic history of Ireland since independence attracted limited scholarly interest prior to the early 1970s. Some important specialized monographs were published, including Raymond Crotty’s Irish Agricultural Production1 and Kieran Kennedy’s Productivity and industrial growth: The Irish experience,2 which marked a more sophisticated turn in the historiography. Irish economic history gained a wider audience with the publication of two landmark surveys in 1972; Louis Cullen’s An economic history of Ireland since 1660,3 which traced the economic history of the island back to the seventeenth century, and James Meenan’s The Irish economy since 1922,4 which focused more specifically on the decades since independence. These works provided a synthesis at a time when economic history and material culture in general were becoming more fashionable academic topics both in Ireland and internationally, providing an alternative to the traditional focus on political history.