A

Industrialization

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrial activity in Ireland was substantial and geographically widespread. The 1821 census of Ireland indicates that more than 40 percent of men and women who stated their occupation were "chiefly employed in trades, manufactures, or handicraft." Of the provinces, Ulster, predictably, had the highest percentage (55%), followed by Connacht (43%), Leinster (33%), and Munster (24%). Six counties outside Ulster had a greater proportion of their population in trade, manufacture, or handicrafts than in agriculture. Within all the provinces there were further great disparities and in some east Ulster baronies the percentage of workers engaged mainly in trade, manufacture, or handicraft might exceed 70 percent, but even in the west of the province, some baronies had about a half of their populations so concentrated.

From the 1820s to the end of the nineteenth century, however, the process of industrialization in east Ulster accelerated, and this led by the 1850s to a much clearer industrial demarcation of this area from the rest of Ireland. Indeed, until the 1830s Dublin and Cork led Belfast in a range of industries, most notably in brewing, distilling, flour milling, and shipbuilding, but also in others such as engineering and foundries, tanning, woolen manufacture, glass-making, and paper-making.

Cork was and remained much more a commercial than an industrial city, as reflected in the significant presence of merchants on the city council. Nevertheless, the optimistic view expressed in the 1790s that the commercial significance of the city would soon rival that of Liverpool could not have been more ill founded. In fact, the nineteenth century was one of widespread stagnation, and the 1901 population figure of 76,000 was some 5 percent less than that of 1821. Even if nineteenth-century Cork lost its dynamism, it remains the case that at least 20 percent of its male and female population was engaged in manufacturing. Census data show that on the eve of the famine 8,000 men worked in manufacturing; this had fallen by a quarter in 1851, and the figure declined still further to 4,000 in 1901. The number of women in manufacturing remained much more stable in the long term: 3,500 in 1841 and around 3,000 in 1901. There was a sharp, if short-lived, increase (to over 5,000) recorded in the 1851 census, which reflected a postfamine revival movement in cottage-based manufacturing in, for example, lace-making, net-making, and knitting.

Before the development of large-scale brewing and distilling in the later eighteenth century, sugar refining was Dublin's most significant capital-intensive industry, in which the firms catered to a countrywide market. In general terms the industrial development of eighteenth-century Dublin evolved from commercial activity, where goods were manufactured for the home market from raw materials drawn either from within Ireland itself (e.g., woolens) or were imported (as with silk or iron). During the eighteenth century, Dublin was the predominant economic and social center for the whole of Ireland, and to a considerable extent this derived from the dependence of Ulster's rapidly growing linen industry on Dublin as a financial center, marketplace, and port. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, this dominance began to look less secure.

In Dublin, traditional industries like cabinetmaking and carriage manufacture declined, as did clothing, the last apparently a victim of a determination to retain outdated techniques. Few manufacturing industries developed to provide substantial employment to the "deposed capital" in the nineteenth century. There was some growth in engineering, especially relating to the railways, as well as in food and drink. A small number of large firms stand out. Among these are the Quaker biscuit manufacturer W. and R. Jacob, formerly of Waterford, which opened a factory in Dublin in 1851. The firm demonstrated an early commitment to mass-production methods and became a public company in 1883; by the beginning of the twentieth century it employed more than 2,000 workers. Dominating the manufacturing sector in Dublin was Guinness, established in 1759, but its output still lagged behind Beamish and Crawford of Cork in the early nineteenth century. The trend in Irish brewing was to install much larger units in a smaller number of urban centers. Guinness rose to prominence not only because of its distinctive product but also through its high-quality management, technical innovation, and successful marketing. The firm exploited the British market, and as the transport system improved the market within Ireland increased. In both markets consumers increasingly favored high-quality stout. Decades of expansion led to the conversion of Guinness into a public company in 1886. Between that date and 1914, dividends on ordinary shares rose from 15.4 to 35.7 percent. Some members of the Guinness family entered the peerage. Firms like Jacob and Guinness, however, were very much the exception to the rule; indeed, apart from food and drink, much of the south and west of Ireland had very little industry by the early twentieth century.

LINEN IN THE PROCESS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION

Leading the industrialization process in the north of Ireland was the linen industry. Within Ireland, linen production developed from a thoroughly rural and widespread activity into a much more localized but strikingly successful example of factory-based industry centered on the Belfast area. However, factory techniques did not become widespread in spinning until the 1830s and in weaving until the late 1850s and 1860s.

The influence of Huguenot immigrants who arrived in 1698 has been shown to have been exaggerated. In fact, the industry had been growing for several decades before that. In the 1640s and 1650s substantial surpluses of linen yarn were sent from Ulster to England to be woven. A combination of cheap land, the chance to take refuge from religious persecution, and the opportunity to take advantage of the evident yarn surpluses all combined to attract migrants from the north of England and Scotland in the later seventeenth century. The earliest known reference to a significant linen industry in Ulster comes from the 1680s; from this period through the eighteenth century access to the English market was the main stimulus to Irish linen industry, especially following the abolition in 1696 of duties on flax, yarn, and cloth imported into England from Ireland. Further encouragement for Irish linen came with the formation in 1711 of the Trustees of the Hempen and Flaxen Manufactures of Ireland known as the Linen Board. The main tasks of the board were to oversee and operate the regulations governing linen duties, to promote quality control in production, and to make determined efforts through financial incentives to spread the industry more widely outside Ulster. The board continued to function until 1828, but it lacked the expertise to ensure that its grants were used in the most cost-effective way. Even so, the most balanced assessments of the board's activities have judged it to be mildly positive, and linen dominated the manufacturing sector in both Ireland and Scotland by the later eighteenth century. During the course of that century a number of significant and related developments can be identified, each of which contributed to the subsequent transition to factory production. These included the following: (1) changes in bleaching and finishing technology and the emergence of the large-scale bleachers and drapers; (2) the move away from Dublin as the main entrepôt in the Anglo-Irish trade, and the associated switch to direct exports from Ulster; and (3) the impact of the short-lived factory-based cotton industry, whose appearance coincided with the final phase of domestic spinning in the linen industry.

Taken together, these developments were crucial in the acquisition of skill, the accumulation of capital, the refinement of credit and banking networks, and the introduction of factory techniques. Ultimately, they contributed enormously to the emergence of northeast Ulster as the premier linen-producing area in the world and also to the rise of Belfast as an example of spectacular urban growth and very much a symbol of successful industrialization. Most of the flax produced for the Irish linen industry before the 1860s was grown on farms in the north of Ireland. Having been prepared, the flax was spun and wound onto bobbins by women and children, then woven into cloth by the farmer-weavers and perhaps their older children, who would then take it to market. Although the farmer-weaver predominated, by the late eighteenth century the journeyman weaver working for a variety of middlemen was increasingly in evidence and was typically provided with board and lodging and paid a wage, or, if married, he was more likely to work in his own home. One important consequence of the growth of the linen industry, often under landlord patronage, was that it stimulated competition for land, drove up rent levels, encouraged subdivision of holdings, and increased population pressure. In 1841, for example, County Armagh was the most densely settled county in Ireland.

The techniques for flax spinning and weaving remained fundamentally unaltered before the 1820s, and the same is true for the marketing arrangements for selling the webs. The brown (unbleached) linen webs were sold through a large network of brown linen markets. At the markets, some held weekly, others monthly, jobbers could supply weavers with yarn, and drapers and bleachers purchased weavers' webs. If the drapers played a key role in organizing and marketing the cloth, the bleachers were responsible for initiating profound long-term changes in the industry. Sometime during the eighteenth century, mechanical power was applied to bleaching, thus making it the first process in the industry to experience mechanization. From the late 1780s, following Bertollet's discovery of the bleaching properties of chlorine gas, it became possible for bleaching to be carried on throughout the year. Bleachers and their agents made more frequent appearances at brown linen markets in order to buy webs for their bleach-greens (on which linen was laid on the grass to be bleached). At the same time it is clear that bleachers might supply yarn to weavers and also play an important role in the export of linen across the Irish Sea and beyond. These changes in the scale and function of bleachers had fundamental long-term significance because bleachers turned into drapers and linen merchants provided some of the earliest machine spinning and weaving.

The linen trade contributed much to the development of an embryonic credit structure based on bills of exchange. In the absence of formal banking facilities credit networks evolved directly between northern bleachers and Dublin, and between English merchants and bankers. As direct shipments from Ulster to Britain increased, the intermediate role of Dublin declined: in 1710, 88 percent of Irish linen exports to Britain had been shipped through Dublin, but by 1780 that proportion had fallen by half. A reflection of the growing importance of the industry and the reorientation of trading links was the construction in 1785 of the White Linen Hall in Belfast. This in turn led to a further decline in the proportion of linen sent to Dublin, even from such major markets as County Armagh, which traditionally had strong links with the capital. Research in the 1980s into the late eighteenth-century business community has shown that although the construction of the Linen Hall was originally advocated by drapers, other merchants quickly came forward and used the hall's management committee in order to organize shipping arrangements and the discounting of bills of exchange. This same group of merchants has also been identified as the driving force behind the formation of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce in 1783 and of the Belfast Harbour Board two years later. These developments contributed considerably to the emergence of Belfast as a leading commercial center.

COTTON AND THE TRANSITION TO FACTORY-BASED PRODUCTION

The role of Belfast as a center of textile production was transformed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the cotton industry, and its origins as a factory town may be said to date from this period. The need to import raw cotton, coal, and machinery meant that the Ulster cotton industry tended to be concentrated in coastal towns such as Belfast, Bangor, Larne, and Carrickfergus, although it also spread inland. In origin the region's cotton manufacturers were from a range of backgrounds, including haberdashery and, significantly, linen bleaching and drapery. The industry was stimulated by the wars with France and by the Linen Board, which provided, inter alia, some thirteen grants for cotton-spinning machinery in 1782. In 1797 the board was authorized to grant up to £350 to firms wishing to purchase steam engines. The principal type of cotton produced in Belfast was muslin, a finer and lighter product than calico, though the latter was also made. The area's experience with the manufacture of fine linens ensured a ready supply of skilled labor that could easily move into muslin production.

Another factor that contributed to the switch to manufacturing muslin rather than linen was the ease with which muslin could be bleached, making it an attractive business for the small enterprise. The rise of the large bleaching businesses forced many smaller concerns out of business, but some of them were able to turn to muslin bleaching. The Ulster cotton industry was heavily reliant on imported technology, which often proved extremely troublesome to install and maintain. Belfast did not really begin to acquire a textile machine–making industry until the 1830s and 1840s, and this was in response to the growth of flax spinning. Although the cotton industry failed to lead to the development of textile machine making, it certainly helped to stimulate credit networks and banking facilities.

Banks began to develop partly in response to demands of the cotton industry, but it was the linen industry that was of much greater significance for the region and its banks in the long run. The main reason for this lies in the contraction of the cotton industry in the late 1820s and 1830s and the introduction of factory-based wet spinning of flax at the same time. However, the ascendancy of Belfast within the Irish linen trade has been shown to predate the coming of joint-stock banking and the inauguration of regular steamship services (both in the mid-1820s). For the triennium of 1820 to 1822, six ports accounted for 98 percent of Irish linen exports, and the share of Belfast (43%) was double that of Dublin. Particularly striking were the links between Belfast and Liverpool: the latter had taken a mere 8 percent of Irish linen exports, but fifty years later the proportion was 61 percent.

The advent of the wet-spinning process provided cotton spinners with an attractive alternative in the years after 1825, when trade was depressed. Those with a great deal of fixed capital already committed in Ireland thus had an opportunity and a strong incentive to move into power spinning. For these reasons, then, it is no surprise that two of the first entrants into power flax spinning were a bleacher and a cotton manufacturer, and this in turn helps us to appreciate the technological and organizational developments in Ulster textile industries that had taken place since the late eighteenth century. Bleachers like the Murlands of Castlewellan in County Down integrated backwards into spinning, building their first mill in 1828 and their second in 1836. This set a pattern for several other bleachers such as the Richardsons at Bessbrook in County Armagh and the Adairs at Cookstown in County Tyrone. The Murlands' enterprise was an early example of factory flax spinning in the countryside using a mixture of water and steam power. The Mulhollands, by contrast, were the first to open an entirely steam-driven mill in Belfast, and their move was the first of several made by former cotton spinners who now converted to flax. By 1834 twelve mills had been built or converted and a further nine were in the process of construction. Such a rate of expansion had never been achieved by the Ulster cotton industry. Provincial production of linen was responsible for the growth of industrial villages in many parts of Ulster, especially in the period 1830 through 1870. Although most of these were in the east, some—like Sion Mills in County Tyrone, developed by the Herdman family from 1835—were in the west.

The major factor underpinning the expansion of factory spinning (and, later, factory weaving) was the growth of export markets, especially the United States. Over 40 percent of Ulster's linen exports went to the United States by the late 1850s. Textile machine making emerged soon after the advent of power spinning and by the mid-1830s was beginning to make a noticeable impact on the local economy, lessening dependence on imported technology. Mill construction continued apace, with only brief interruptions in commercial crises such as that of between 1847 and 1848, so that by 1850 there were sixty-nine spinning mills in Ireland, the vast majority of them in Ulster. One consequence was a massive increase, perhaps a doubling, in the demand for flax during the 1840s.

The advent of mill-spun yarn had an adverse effect on those households involved in hand spinning. Here both demand and wages declined drastically, and this had an adverse effect on the viability of households, especially in peripheral areas of northwest and southwest Ulster. Before the Great Famine the decline of the linen industry in these areas led to deindustrialization and emigration. To a limited extent the impact of decline was offset by the growth of embroidery and sewing trades, which, though present from the late eighteenth century, grew rapidly from about 1830 to the 1850s. Organized largely by Scottish firms, working through agents resident in Ulster, this work perhaps served as a brake on depopulation as well as a more genteel alternative to mill work for young girls of "decent" family.

Commentators on the eve of the Great Famine were well aware of the pace of growth of Belfast, and that such growth was unprecedented. Within the Chamber of Commerce by the 1820s, although textile interests (cotton, linen, and wool) were dominant, there were also representatives from shipbuilding and engineering, tanning, distilling, printing, and, among many from the service sector, members drawn from accountancy, banking, and insurance. No group lobbied more energetically on behalf of Ulster business from the later eighteenth century and the chamber continued to grow in membership, and in the range of businesses in which members were involved, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Acutely aware of the significance of Britain as a source of raw materials and intermediate goods, especially the coal and iron that under-pinned industrialization, and as a market for manufactured goods, the chamber lobbied hard for more regular and cheaper cross-channel transport and postal services and for lower port dues.

From the 1820s the chamber lent its support to the promotion of railways in Britain and Ireland as well as to improvements in mail services between Belfast and the west of Ireland. It attached great importance to free trade across the Irish Sea and declared in 1834 that "it is now generally admitted that had a free intercourse existed between this country and England since the Union such as now exists that our manufactures would be at present further advanced than they are." This comment points to an increasingly important characteristic of the industrialization process in Ulster: it was perceived to be underpinned by the Act of Union of 1800. Many businessmen, especially in the larger export-oriented firms, were Protestant and the view that industry and trade were dependent on the British connection resulted in a strong and militant unionism in the business community. Indeed, Ulster unionism could scarcely have become the force it did from the 1880s to partition without the financial support and leadership from industrialists and merchants. The chamber also intervened in many other areas of public policy. Thus in December 1846, in the face of the "great national calamity" of the famine, it called for the "suspension of the use of grain in Breweries and Distilleries whereby the food of more than five millions of people is daily consumed in the United Kingdom."

The mechanization of flax spinning was of fundamental importance in extending the industrialization process in northeast Ulster. The low wages of handloom weavers, together with the technical deficiencies in the power weaving of the fine linens in which Ulster specialized meant a considerable delay in the widespread adoption of power looms. However, the labor supply was dramatically curtailed through death and emigration in the late 1840s, and as a consequence wages rose by some 20 percent to 30 percent between 1848 and 1852. This particular problem was compounded as late as the early 1850s because weavers' were to some extent locked into seasonal agricultural work. Under these circumstances the pressure to refine power loom technology intensified during the 1850s, and necessary improvements were made just in time for Ulster to reap huge benefits from the unprecedented demand for linen occasioned by the "cotton famine" during the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

In many ways the American Civil War period was a crucial one for the Ulster linen industry, with much new investment. A number of spinning and bleaching firms integrated weaving into their operations, but there were now more opportunities for specialist, single-process, weaving enterprises to develop. In fact, the number of looms in both types of enterprise was almost exactly equal by 1875, though there was a marked tendency for the specialist firms to increase their share of weaving capacity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time a relatively small number of large, fully integrated firms developed and became the giants of the industry between the 1860s and 1914. This process was accelerated by the decision, first taken by the York Street Flax Spinning Company in 1864, and soon by many others, to adopt a joint-stock form with limited liability. It was also aided by an immense expansion of bank credit, by the availability of flax increasingly imported from Europe, and by the development of a textile-engineering sector, which by mid-century also competed successfully in American and European markets.

The transition to factory production in the linen industry was the most significant feature of industrialization in nineteenth-century Ireland and led to a much greater role for Belfast in both manufacturing and services. Linen was also an industry subject to economic fluctuations, with frequent downturns in business leading to short-time working and unemployment in, for example, 1879, 1886, 1893, 1904, 1908 through 1909, and 1912. The majority of workers in the linen industry as a whole were women, but the diversification of the economic base in Belfast meant that men increasingly found work, and relatively high wages, in engineering and shipbuilding. The two shipyards Harland and Wolff, established in the late 1850s, and Workman Clark, set up in 1879, though subject to considerable short-term fluctuations in output, grew over the long term. From the 1880s to the First World War they came to epitomize the success and self-confidence of industrial Belfast. Good business connections, bank assistance, design flair, highly skilled labor, and a massive expansion in world seaborne trade and travel, all combined to underwrite growth. On the eve of the First World War employment at Harland and Wolff had reached 14,000. Other industries such as rope making and various branches of engineering developed as spin-offs and helped to sustain expansion when the rate of expansion of the linen industry slowed. By 1911 these sectors, together with textiles, accounted for some 40 percent of total employment in the city. While three-quarters of the working population of Belfast was described as industrial, much of it in factory production and employed by medium-sized and large firms, the proportion in Dublin was just over half, and much of this was in craft industries or in unskilled occupations. For example, less than 20 percent of the work force of Guinness, Dublin's largest employer, was skilled. The population of Belfast grew from 19,000 in 1801 to 387,000 in 1911, and increasingly the city depended on a labor force born outside its boundaries: Less than 40 percent of the population had been born inside the city in 1901. Belfast was also exceptional in Ulster terms. Derry, the province's second city, had no comparably dynamic industrial base; rather, it developed a specialization in shirt making, collar making, and embroidery, mostly using female labor.

The industrialization process in Ireland conformed to a pattern of regional growth and decline often observed in Europe since the eighteenth century. Dependence on overseas trade led to an increasing concentration of industry in the northeast in general and Belfast in particular. The economic problems following the 1914 through 1918 war inflicted permanent damage on the staple industries and helped to ensure that Northern Ireland after 1920 would never have the economic self-confidence of pre-1914 Ulster and would, moreover, always have a substantial unemployment problem.

SEE ALSO Banking and Finance to 1921; Brewing and Distilling; Factory-Based Textile Manufacture; Industry since 1920; Rural Industry; Shipbuilding; Transport—Road, Canal, Rail; Women and Children in the Industrial Workforce

Bibliography

Bielenburg, Andy. Cork's Industrial Revolution, 1780–1880: Development or Decline? 1991.

Bielenburg, Andy. "The Irish Brewing Industry and the Rise of Guinness, 1790–1914." In The Dynamics of the International Brewing Industry since 1800. 1998.

Cohen, Marilyn. Linen, Family, and Community in Tullylish, County Down, 1690–1914. 1997.

Cohen, Marilyn, ed. The Warp of Ulster's Past: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Irish Linen Industry, 1700–1920. 1997.

Collins, Brenda. "Protoindustrialization and Prefamine Emigration." Social History 7 (May 1982): 127–146.

Crawford, William H. "The Evolution of the Linen Trade in Ulster before Industrialization." Irish Economic and Social History 15 (1988): 32–53.

Daly, Mary E. Dublin: The Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860–1914. 1984.

Dickson, David. "The Place of Dublin in the Eighteenth Century Irish Economy." In Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850, edited by Thomas M. Devine and David Dickson. 1983.

Geary, Frank. "Deindustrialization in Ireland to 1851: Some Evidence from the Census." Economic History Review 51 (August 1998): 512–541.

Hepburn, Anthony C. A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast. 1996.

Macneice, Denis S. "Industrial Villages of Ulster, 1800-1900." In Plantation to Partition, edited by Peter Roebuck. 1981.

Murphy, Maura. "The Economic and Social Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cork." In The Town in Ireland, edited by David Harkness and Mary O'Dowd. 1981.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939. 1994.

Ollerenshaw, Philip. "Industry, 1820–1914." In An Economic History of Ulster: 1820–1939, edited by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw. 1985.

Ollerenshaw, Philip. "Businessmen and the Development of Ulster Unionism, 1886–1921." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28 (January 2000): 35–64.

Solar, Peter. "The Irish Linen Trade, 1820–52." Textile History 21 (spring 1990): 57–85.

Takei, Akiro. "The First Irish Linen Mills, 1800-1824." Irish Economic and Social History 21 (1994): 28–38.

Philip Ollerenshaw