ABSTRACT
The contours of the English economy at the end of the eighteenth century are reasonably well known. The agrarian sector was still the largest employer of labour but this highly commercialized society was also experiencing the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. The economy was on a war footing, prosecuting a hugely expensive war against France, but with the Peace of 1815 its manufactured products began to flood onto markets in continental Europe and the New World. Population was growing rapidly, with young workers migrating to the industrializing towns and thereby accelerating the process of urbanization. The agrarian social order was organized, with some regional variation, into three broad social categories comprising landlords, tenant farmers and agricultural labourers. Proto-industrial workers also peopled the countryside, but were being gradually superseded by the new, factory-based production. Industrialization and urbanization increased the demand for marketed foodstuffs. London emerged as the great metropolitan food market of the nineteenth century, drawing in supplies from overseas, including produce from Ireland. London is therefore a particularly good reference point when discussing prices, and changes in price volatility as they affected markets in the British and Irish economies in the modern period.
