ABSTRACT

The swing towards arable required an increase in the labour force; the landlords now became interested in stimulating the growth of population. The Irish were driven to their extreme dependence upon the potato largely because it was the crop that would sustain them with the greatest economy of land. Arthur Young, after his tour of Ireland in the 1770's, believed marriage to be much more general in Ireland than in England; he hardly ever met an unmarried farmer or cottar and nearly all domestic servants were married. That in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century pastoral farming was the more thriving, the colonizing element in Irish agriculture was the result partly of natural conditions, but, much more, of Ireland's colonial status. Landlords quickly realized that their policy of drawing ever greater rents implied a policy of extending arable farming.