Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Guinness's Brewery in the Irish Economy, 1759-1876 by Patrick Lynch; John VaizeyReview by: F. S. L. LyonsIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 13, No. 52 (Sep. 1963), pp. 371-374Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30005019 .

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REVIEWS 371 about two-thirds of the county remained in catholic ownership, the merchants of Galway town being conspicuous among the owners. The Cromwellian transplantation is not recorded in these books, but its effects are to be traced in the names of catholic families from Leinster and Munster who frequently appear as restoration grantees. Lord Trimleston dispossessed the French family of Monivea. Bellews from county Louth became owners of several lands in the neighbourhood of what is now Mount Bellew. The intricate nature of the restoration settlement is indicated by the entry of rival claimants to the same piece of land.

Dr Simington has repeated his general introduction, which is a masterly and detailed exposition of the surveys and settlements of the seventeenth century and of the various documents in which they have been recorded. His special introduction for Galway draws attention to many features of the text and supplies a wealth of supplementary references which help to elucidate the record. Mr Mac Giolla Choille's preparation of the text is careful and scholarly. He is also responsible for the index of personal names, which is a valuable feature of the book and must have presented considerable difficulties. The original indexes of places are reproduced, which have the disadvantage that entries for each initial letter are divided into baronies and within each barony are listed in the order of their appearance and not alphabetically. As two of the original volumes have been combined the index to the second is to be found in the middle of the book. The reader should note that the place-names index refers to the original pages of the manuscript (shown in the margin); the index of personal names refers to the pages of the printed book. A folder at the back contains Petty's map of the county, which shows many of the names in the text. Other maps of particular areas are referred to in Dr Simington's introduction.

It is clear that much labour and care have been devoted to the production of the book. The printing is excellent and the price not unreasonable. Our gratitude is due to the Irish Manuscripts Commission, Mr Mac Giolla Choille and Dr Simington for a valuable addition to the published sources of Irish history.

J. G. SIMMS

GUINNESS'S BREWERY IN THE IRISH ECONOMY, 1759-1876. By Patrick Lynch and John Vaizey Pp. viii, 278. Cambridge University Press. i96o. 35s.

APART from a few histories of banks and other similar institutions - most of them so marmoreally pious that they might have been produced by monumental masons rather than by historians - little 'business history' has so far been written in Ireland. This is partly, no doubt, a consequence of the general neglect of the study of Irish economic history; but partly, of course, it is to be explained by the simple fact that we have few large businesses with sufficient spare cash to

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372 REVEWS

afford the luxury of a monograph or important enough to deserve one. In Dublin, however, there has for two hundred years been one conspicuous exception to this generalisation. The great firm of Guinness, with its enormous impact upon the capital and upon Irish society at large, and its scarcely less imposing international reputation, has long cried out for the kind of treatment which it would have got at least a generation ago in the United States, if not also in the United Kingdom. As the bicentenary approached in 1959 it became known that a large-scale history was in progress and now we have here the first instalment of it.

Such a book could not fail to be both interesting and informative, and it must be said at once that even though the authors have deliberately turned away their gaze from most things in the history of the Guinness family which might amuse or divert the reader, their account of the Guinness firm contains a vast amount of material which is entirely new and of very great importance in advancing our knowledge not merely of this one firm, but of the whole economy within which it functioned. We learn a great deal about the technical processes (thankfully discarding en route the hoary but gruesome Dublin tradition that the excellence of the stout is mysteriously connected with the quality of the Liffey water), about the organisation of the business, about the development of the export trade and the gradual dominance of Guinness's in the Irish market. All of this, together with valuable details about costs, prices and production levels at various periods, is a most considerable addition to the social and economic history of the age.

In their concluding chapter the authors confess that their story 'has been for the most part dry and technical' (a fact which will have dawned on most readers long before the concluding chapter), but their approach is entirely justified by its results. It is essentially the economist's approach and if this has the defect of over-exposing us to the dismal jargon of that trade, we are compensated by the sharp cutting edge which their discipline brings to the problems of growth and development. The detailed discussions of, for example, the war-time inflation between 1793 and 1815, the ill-effects of the controlled deflation after the war and, at a later stage, the rapid post-famine expansion, are all admirably done and indeed set a new standard of exact analysis too long absent from the historical study of Irish economic problems.

This is not, however, intended to be simply an economist's explanation of the Guinness phenomenon. The book, as its title implies, has a much more ambitious aim - to set the firm in the context of the economy. This involves, naturally, several excursions into Irish economic history. These are always interesting, often stimulating, and occasionally startling. The fundamental concept from which the authors work is that for most of the period which concerns them there were really two Irish economies - the maritime and the rural, the former linked closely with that of Britain (indeed, virtually an integral part of it), the latter economically as well as geographically beyond the pale.

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REVIEWS 373 This is, of course, a familiar enough concept (though one hears of it more often in relation to Belfast and its hinterland) and it serves the authors well. Perhaps it serves them too well. Perhaps they over-stress the isolation of the rural sector and under-estimate the extent to which land, its ownership and tenancy, its uses and abuses, affected even the maritime economy. On at least one very important occasion this tendency to assume a rigid demarcation between the two economies leads them into over-simplification and so into distortion. Thus, speaking of the Famine period, they say (p. 167) that the Famine had taken place 'as though it were a war in a neighbouring country while Dublin was a brightly lit, comparatively well-fed, slightly anxious neutral territory'. Surely this ignores both the extent to which hunger struck at the capital itself, and the fact that those who lived there were a great deal more than 'slightly anxious' about its effects.

It must be admitted, however, that at the end of the book, the authors recoil somewhat from this naive interpretation of the Famine and end by seeing it for what it undoubtedly was--a turning-point both for Guinness's and for the country. Their summing-up is best expressed in their own words (p. 247). At first it was a local brewery in the maritime sector of the Irish economy. Then it took advantage of the sea-routes to Bristol and Liverpool and the rise in artisans' incomes in England and Scotland that accompanied the building of the railways. After the Great Famine the use of money spread like a tide through a depopulated Ireland whose remaining inhabitants had higher incomes than ever before. Guinness's was the first business to conquer this market. Within twenty years after the Great Famine there was hardly a shop without a stock of porter. Then Dublin itself succumbed. It is this conquest of the opportunities given by the rising incomes of the people first in England then in Ireland that is the great achievement of the commercial policies of the firm.

It is difficult in the present state of our knowledge to challenge this statement, yet at the same time it is hard to accept it in its entirety without some misgiving. It will be seen from the quotation that the explanation for Guinness's remarkable expansion inside Ireland after the Famine is held to be a general rise in incomes (due, it is claimed, mainly to the reduction of the population), a rise which at long last brought the stagnant rural sector into profitable relations with the buoyant maritime sector. No doubt this is true up to a point--but only up to a point. This was after all that same rural economy which between 1877 and i88o was to experience dire distress and actual starvation and which, even for twenty years after that, was in some areas seldom very far from the brink of destitution. That there was an improvement in market conditions for Guinness is not in question-- the authors have demonstrated this beyond doubt - but the income which paid for the stout may have been less generally distributed than they imagine. Poverty was still widespread and those tenants who sought solace from drink may not necessarily all have turned to Guinness. Indeed, Dr Connell's researches have shown that while illicit

G

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374 REVIEWS

distilling may have been on the decline from about I87o onwards, poteen consumption was still considerable and there were evidently quite a few peasants who were not yet convinced that Guinness was good--or at least best--for them. Moreover, while one can readily see that the historians of the Guinness firm would naturally explain the expansion of business in terms of growing prosperity in the country, it would be dangerous for the social historian to argue that what was good for Guinness was good for the country as a whole. So far as more income was available for the public house, less income was available for improved agriculture. Or, to put it another way, more tenants may have been drowning their sorrows in more porter, but it is at least arguable that the lowering of the porter did not necessarily decrease the sorrows - quite the contrary, in fact.

These points are made here, less as detailed criticism of the authors' thesis, than to demonstrate the difficulty of fitting a study like this into an economic background which is still so imperfectly known. If, however, direct criticism is to be made, it must be on two other grounds. One is the technical complaint that a book like this, which breaks so much new ground and uses so many sources never before available, ought to have indicated much more clearly, both in footnotes and in bibliography, precisely what those sources are. We are, indeed, told something of the Guinness records, but not enough, and it is certainly insufficient to list some of the other material under such vague heads as British Museum Manuscripts --a title which, as it stands, is almost meaningless to an historian.

A more serious criticism concerns the presentation of the material. A broadly chronological framework is observed, but the frequent sub-headings and the tendency of the authors to jump from subject to subject give a curious effect of discontinuity to their work. The most unfortunate result of this jerky narrative is that the central characters - the family themselves - do not emerge as the rounded figures we might have expected. It is with some difficulty that we can piece together the whole picture - a picture not merely of business acumen and its rich rewards, but also of solid civic and parliamentary service and above all, of course, of incomparable philanthropy. Nevertheless, the effort is worth while, for when the picture does take shape it is undeniably impressive. When we take our leave of the Guinnesses in 1876 the tide of their prosperity is flowing strongly and they have already achieved that serene equipoise between God and Mammon which has ever since been the hall-mark of the family.

F. S. L. LYONS

THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Edited by F. L. Cross. Pp. xix, I492. London: Oxford University Press. 1957- 70s.

THE purpose of this work is stated in the editor's preface to be to bring together, in a concise and handy form, as large a body of

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