The Journal at Fifty

Abstract

One of the journal's original editors reflects on its birth in 1974, its adolescence and its subsequent evolution.

Irish Economic and Social History first appeared in December 1974. After it had appeared each autumn for a quarter of a century a mid-life health check was commissioned in 2001, and this appeared as a modest essay in self-criticism by Leslie Clarkson. ¹ As a recent editor of the journal and mindful of developments in social history internationally, he pondered about the reasons for the paucity of material on sexuality, gender or women's history, medical history, famine, crime, consumption or religious practice, and for the relative absence of methodologically rigorous papers. He concluded that this pattern reflected the editors’ in-tray, which in turn had been affected by the burgeoning expansion of thematic essay collections in the various sub-fields of Irish social and economic history during the 1970s. Now in 2024, the journal has reached its half-century, prompting the call for some new reflections from the editorial veterans – to look back to 2001 and in my case much further, being one of the veterans who was there at the moment of inception.

The logo of the journal and of the Society is a good starting point. For more than forty years it has long been a sheaf of corn, a steeple, some terraced housing and a factory – no shamrocks or spinning wheels, no greyhounds or Kerry cows, and that choice was no accident. When the journal was a few years old the Society decided to abandon the nondescript mustard-coloured cover of the first volumes and secured the services of Jarlath Hayes, an outstanding Irish typographer and graphic designer (and it is his version of the Irish harp that appears on Irish euro coins). ² He offered a somewhat retro but essentially upbeat message of what the Society's concerns then were. Perhaps that logo was a bit too safe, trying to project a sense of a busy past and of historical calm into which the depressed and very troubled Ireland of the 1980s was being invited to retreat. But it has lasted well.

The precursor of the Society, the Irish Economic History Group, had, however, predated the Troubles. The idea was mooted in Belfast at Easter 1967 at the annual conference of the (British) Economic History Society, following which a meeting of interested parties was convened in Trinity College Dublin the following September. Nineteen men and four women attended, with the Group evenly divided between north and south. Robin Dudley Edwards (University College Dublin) wanted the Group to become a new subcommittee of the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, but others pushed for autonomy and against the odds they got their way. It held its first conference a year later, and in 1970 it reconstituted itself as the Economic and Social History Society, the declared mission being to ‘advance public education in, and research into’ the subject and to hold annual conferences; it produced a cyclostyled Bulletin, the first of which appeared in 1972. Then in autumn 1973, the decision was made to go further and to publish an annual journal. ³ This was a huge risk, given a tiny membership of less than thirty and the proximate existence of the long-established, prestigious and tightly managed Irish Historical Studies. However, during the next twelve months the Society's membership increased by nearly tenfold to over 200, drawn in by hard graft and the promise of an annual journal. An additional risk was giving the editorial hot seats to two junior academics, Peter Roebuck in the New University of Ulster, Coleraine, and this author in Trinity. ⁴

Funding a new journal against the backdrop of the first oil crisis was challenging. After much arm-twisting, the Irish universities, north and later south, each contributed around £50 towards the first issue, with substantially greater start-up support coming from the Esme Mitchell Trust in Belfast and the Northern Ireland Ministry of Education. ⁵ In December 1974 Volume 1 appeared. Its well-publicised launch in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel helped hide the editors’ embarrassment that they had seriously overshot the printing budget. ⁶ They learnt quickly and changed printers.

Northern involvement and support were critical in the Society's beginnings and especially in the take-off of the journal. Queen's University had a tradition of including economic history in its Faculty of Commerce curriculum predating 1914, but the establishment in 1962 of a tiny Department of Economic History was a major milestone, even though the teaching of Irish economic history only got really got going in 1969 with the appointment of Miriam Daly. ⁷ But K. H. (Ken) Connell, in Queen's since 1953, was the progenitor and professor, a totemic figure for everyone involved, and it was entirely appropriate that he should become the first president of the new Society. He was a shy but magnetic presence at the Society's first conferences, the sheer breadth of his historical interests inspiring the Society also to be a broad church. However, Connell died tragically in September 1974, just as the first volume was being prepared for the press. Max Hartwell's pitch-perfect obituary occupied the first pages of the new journal. ⁸

Connell had been the archetypal lone scholar, never an academic organiser nor a systems builder – in contrast to Louis Cullen, who had been teaching and promoting economic history in Trinity College since his arrival there in 1963. ⁹ Cullen was the first secretary and principal driving force behind the Society's early growth, and in so doing he worked less with Queen's economic historians than with the research staff of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, notably W. H. (Bill) Crawford, Brian Trainor and Trevor Parkhill. It is no coincidence that from the Group's beginnings in 1967 the mission to rescue business records (broadly defined) from neglect and destruction became its first plan of campaign.

The international context for all this was the thriving state of economic history and its step-sister social history in the UK, Europe and North America in the post-war world, reflected in the huge growth in staff and university departments, a process that seemed inexorable. Many of the biggest names in the field in Britain reviewed or were readers of the journal in its early days, and a few published in the journal. This infusion was linked to the fact that the indigenous growth of economic and social history within universities in the Republic of Ireland had been very modest and was to change very slowly: in the mid-1970s it was a landscape with a few stars, full of energy and ambition but with little institutional support, notably Joseph Lee, Cormac Ó Gráda, Mary Daly, and Cullen himself, all trained abroad, publishing internationally, and with a growing external profile. There were, it is true, more economic historians in academic posts in the North by then, but only a minority of them contributed to the early issues of the journal.

Therefore in the first years of its existence the fledgling editors, based in Coleraine and Dublin, had to go out and beat the fields in order to get a balanced flow of articles. And while refereeing protocols were in place from the beginning, these were certainly more relaxed until unprompted submissions began to arrive in the early 1980s. And it was out of kindred disciplines, particularly historical geography, that many of these welcome submissions began to arrive. But even in 1983, when the editors were planning a supplementary series of pamphlets, a balance in the appropriate themes was hard to achieve, and the Society had to move slowly in its choice of authors and topics, starting with David Fitzpatrick's remarkably succinct essay on Irish emigration, ¹⁰ and that deliberative approach to commissioning remained with all of the eleven titles in the pamphlet series.

The journal, as originally designed, was intended for a fairly broad constituency of readers, inside and outside the academy, with a balance between three to four articles, an annual bibliography, archives reports, thesis abstracts, and reviews. This mix has remained more or less in place over the decades. And there has nearly always been a mix of pre-1800 and post-1800 articles and reviews, even if the centre of gravity has moved ineluctably forward in time. The journal is now a good deal thicker than it was in the early years (though slimmer than at its peak in the 2010s) and the colour of the cover has gone through a further iteration, but it remains very much the same journal. All issues from 1974 to 2020 are available on JSTOR's archive.

One thing that has changed utterly is the gender profile: the Society was a largely but never entirely male enterprise up to the 1990s, and even since then, with the first female editors and the stronger representation of social history, male dominance remained: in the first decade of the journal 11 per cent of article authors were female, in the most recent decade 42 per cent of articles had at least one female author. That re-ordering reflects both the changing gender profile of practitioners and the shift towards a more inclusive definition of social history. Certainly, the magnificent guest-edited volume in 2020 on the history of Irish childhoods indicated the direction of travel and gave a new generation of researchers the high visibility they deserved. ¹¹

What was certainly not present in the early years were multi-authored papers, or work that was the direct output of funded research projects. It is true that in the 1970s several major data-gathering projects abroad did have some Irish spin-offs, such as the long-running Sound Toll project in Denmark and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which amongst much else facilitated David Eversley's quantitative study of Irish and English Quaker demography between 1650 and 1850. ¹² This was a new kind of history.

But the real sign of the future came with Joel Mokyr, already based in Northwestern University, when a samizdat working paper, ‘The deadly fungus: An econometric investigation into the short-term demographic impact of the Irish Famine …’, circulated in 1978. ¹³ Mokyr was certainly not the first American historian or economist to be involved with the Society or the journal in its early days, Francis Carney and Peter Solar having been major players, and James Donnelly and David Miller helping at a distance, but Mokyr was different both in method and ambition: he was going to ‘solve’ the Famine and he was subsequently successful in getting National Science Foundation funding for a big econometric project – out of which came Why Ireland Starved in 1983. A lot of planning by the journal's editors went into the appropriate reception to be given to a book which immediately generated both controversy and incomprehension; two review essays and a response were the result. ¹⁴ Its reverberations were still evident three decades later with the 2015 retrospective essays on Mokyr's contributions, then and since. ¹⁵

Other big funded research projects have come and gone, but none rivalled Mokyr's in its unsettling impact. The great expansion of medical history, thanks not least to the largesse of the Wellcome Trust, has of course been amply reflected in the journal, but other fields have been poorly represented: it could be argued that the journal has carried too little over the decades on the Great Famine, and even less on earlier catastrophes. Indeed the spin-off from the great 1641 Depositions project ¹⁶ has left little mark, and we had to wait more than twenty years before the appalling demographic consequences of the Cromwellian reconquest were first examined (by Pádraig Lenihan ¹⁷ ); the demographic repercussions of the 1790s (the south Ulster pogroms and the death toll in the 1798 Rebellion) have never been debated in the journal's pages. And, despite the interests of past leading lights in the Society, there has until very recently been a noticeable absence of comparative essays setting Irish patterns of socio-economic development against those elsewhere, whether continental or colonial.

Despite the early appeal for business records, there have been remarkably few articles focusing on individual businesses or manufacturing enterprises apart from those by Frank Geary, Andy Bielenberg, Stuart Nisbet and John Foster. ¹⁸ There has been a near absence of labour history, but that has a simpler explanation: Saothar, the Labour History Society's annual journal, which first appeared in 1975, has thrived as an independent publication, helped by strong trade union patronage.

The early prospect of new work on regional development, landscape and settlement history filling the journal's pages faded in more recent decades, reflecting the apparent eclipse of historical geography in Ireland. However, that discipline has perhaps been reborn as environmental history, so obviously now a growth area as can be seen in the new Cambridge History of Ireland and in the recent RIA Proceedings. ¹⁹ The Society conferences in 2007 and 2008 focused on environment, nature and catastrophe, but there is scope for much more along these lines in the journal itself.

But taken in the round, the journal has reflected intellectual trends and fashions fairly closely. It started as a broad church and it has remained so. In looking back over the fifty years of publication, from its analogue beginnings to its digital present, from the time it was produced by hot-metal printers and anxiously overseen by the Society's officers and editors to its production and dissemination now in the hands of an international publisher with global reach, it is remarkable that the journal, its editors and contributors have maintained a consistently high standard of work over a very long time, and for no personal reward or material profit. It was, I trust, worth it.