Voices from the Global Margin: Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes Book

Economic history can be fascinating when written by using economic theory to illuminate the past. But there is another way of writing it and this book is an example. This approach simply collects data and piles it up willy nilly in the hope that something will emerge. Thus, we have a table (p. 183) which shows Irish merchandise exports to the UK in various years

1929 - 92%
1938 - 93%
1950 - 88%
1960 - 75%
1970 - 62%
1980 - 43%
1985 - 33%

This is followed immediately by the following text

"In the 1920s over 90 per cent of merchandise exports went to the UK and the proportion remained at a similar level until the mid-1950s. Since then Ireland's dependence on the British market has fallen progressively. By 1972, the year before EEC entry, the share of exports going to Britain had fallen to 61 per cent, and thereafter the share fell even more rapidly to 33 per cent in 1985"

All of which we can see just by looking at the column of numbers above.

The first half of this book is a decent enough summary of Irish economic history from the First World War to the doldrums of the mid-1980s. The second half is thematic and is a deadly dull data dump which does little to enlighten.