The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914.

• Author: Margo, Robert A.

By Timothy W. Guinnane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii, 335. $49.50.

In many poor countries, the population problem is one of excessive growth. Not so in postfamine Ireland. As the title of Timothy Guinnane's book suggests, the Irish seem to have "vanished." Some departed for the New World or for England. Others were never born, because marriage rates were low, and illegitimacy uncommon. Yet, among those Irish who chose to marry and remain in their homeland, fertility was relatively high. Guinnane takes dead aim at the conventional wisdom that the Irish were simply "exceptional" in their demography. Rather, he insists, Irish demographic behavior can be understood once the incentives to marry and procreate are spelled out, along with the constraints and institutions that circumscribed demographic decisions.

The Vanishing Irish is divided into a preface, introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter 1 sets forth the basic issues to be addressed and the approach taken. That approach differs in its avoidance of Malthusian models, which Guinnane views as unhelpful in the Irish case. Guinnane's method is to think about behavior - when and if to marry; when and if to emigrate; when and if to marry - in standard neoclassical terms so that individuals are at the center of the analysis, not Irish "social norms." Despite the explicitly economic approach, Guinnane is highly sensitive to institutions and culture, so the analysis is always grounded in historical context. The chapter also briefly introduces the novel dataset studied in the book, samples from the Irish manuscript censuses of population of 1901 and 1911.

Chapters 2 and 3 set the stage for the demographic analysis. Chapter 2 focuses on the rural economy. Guinnane reviews agriculture before the famine (including the potato) and postfamine developments such as rising labor productivity and shifts away from grains and potatoes toward livestock production. The structure of the agricultural labor force changed as agricultural laborers "disappeared" while average farm size rose. Guinnane also reviews various features of Irish land tenure (such as the concept of "elastic" rent), land reform (the 1881 Land Act, which Guinnane downplays in importance), and Ireland's allegedly high rate of agrarian violence. Although Ireland industrialized to a limited degree in the 19th century, real wages managed to converge significantly on those in England and the United...