From Boom to Bust: The Lordship of Ireland and the European ‘Commercial Revolution’

Economic developments within Ireland from the opening of the second millennium to the early fourteenth century are discussed within the context of the European commercial revolution, which, across the same period, promoted exchange at all levels before succumbing to a prolonged and deepening recession. The reversal of trends from expansion to contraction began earlier and was more pronounced in Ireland than in Europe's core commercial regions, partly because of the higher transaction costs consequent upon its peripheral geographical location but more particularly due to its susceptibility to surplus extraction by outsiders: the Papacy, English Crown, and overseas merchants, financiers and shippers. The systemic under-investment and indebtedness consequent upon these unequal relationships conspired to depress domestic demand and reinforce an over-dependence upon primary production. When compounded, within the areas subject to English rule, by weakening central and local government, this created a heightened vulnerability to food shortages, to which a resort to violence by both the Irish and the degenerate English became an ever more standard response. A vicious circle was thereby set in train which entrapped the English Crown's once-prosperous Irish lordship in a self-perpetuating state of impoverishment and under-development.