「一九世紀前半アイルランドの農村社会と麻工業」 : 比較地域史的考察

From the eighteenth century onward, Ireland has been divided into two different regions, the east where the British systems worked stronger and the west where the native systems still survived. The regional difference generated as a result of British colonization and settlement, particulary during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, proved to be very significant in the subsequent course of Irish history. The north-eastern part of Ireland (six counties in the Ulster province) is now separated from the rest of the country and constitutes the United Kingdom with Great Britain, for this is the region where the British settlement took place most densely and consequently it became the most anglicized society in Ireland. The author pays particular attention to this dualistic nature of Ireland and this paper intends to compare these two regions in terms of the nature of the rural society and the economy with special reference to the linen industry. The period under consideration is of importance in the economic history of Ireland in that it was a period of the post-Napoleonic wars depression with the Great Famine looming on the horizon. In this paper, a parish was chosen from each region for comparison-Keady parish (Co.Armagh) in the north-east and Kilmacrenan parish (Co.Donegal) in the north west. Both parishes are situated in the estates of the Trinity College, Dublin. Due to the influences of British settlers and also tot he rich water flow, Keady parish developed tied to the British market as an important area of the linen bleaching. In this parish the British settlers and the native Irish tended to co-reside and the latter also contributed to the development of the linen industry. In Kilmacrenan parish, on the other hand, there was a residential segregation between the British settlers and the native Irish, the settlement of the former being limited to the fertile lowland. The hand spinning of flax once developed in this parish contracted from the late eighteenth century as a result of the technological changes in both the British cotton industry and the Irish linen industry. Since then the flax cultivation and its scutching in the lowland area became the only distinct form of the economic support of this parish. In the least fertile highland where the native Irish formed their own closed society, a traditional agrarian community still survived, the market economy not being diffused. It must be noted however that even in Keady parish where the situation looked better, there were problems of high population pressure and subdivision of holdings arising from the particular form of the development of the linen industry.