Edwards Lecture: From boom to bust: The Lordship of Ireland and the European ‘commercial revolution’
Published: 4 March 2020
Wednesday 17 March 2020
Edwards Lecture in Medieval History and Palaeography
From boom to bust: the Lordship of Ireland and the European ‘commercial revolution’
Prof. Bruce Campbell (The Queen’s University of Belfast)
Tuesday 17 March 2020, 17:30 - 19:00
in the Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre
All welcome
In this wide ranging and generously illustrated lecture Professor Bruce Campbell will reassess the economic fortunes of the Lordship of Ireland from the English invasion of 1169-71 to the Scottish invasion of 1315-18. Placing Irish developments within their wider European context and drawing upon a diverse array of archival and other evidence, he revisits G. H. Orpen’s classic claim, made at the height of the 1911 Irish Home Rule crisis and prior to the destruction in 1922 of the Public Record Office of Ireland, that English rule created ‘the comparative peace and order and the manifest progress and prosperity that Ireland enjoyed, during [the thirteenth century]’. He explains why initially dramatic progress failed to be sustained, charts the waning fortunes of the Lordship as, from the closing years of the thirteenth century, difficulties mounted both at home and abroad, and concludes that the Lordship displays all the hallmarks of a poor and under-developed economy.
Professor Campbell is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Economic History at the Queen’s University of Belfast, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Fellow of the British Academy. His 2008 Tawney Memorial Lecture to the Economic History Society was published as ‘Nature as historical protagonist: environment and society in pre-industrial England’, and his 2013 Ellen McArthur Lectures at the University of Cambridge became The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World. The latter was awarded the 2017 Gyorgy Ranki Prize by the Economic History Association for an ‘outstanding book in European economic history’. His other publications include British economic growth, 1270-1870, Land and people in late medieval England, Field systems and farming systems in late medieval England, The medieval antecedents of English agricultural progress, England on the eve of the Black Death: an atlas of lay lordship, land, and wealth, 1300-49, English seigniorial agriculture 1250-1450 (runner up for the 2000 Whitfield Prize), and A medieval capital and its grain supply: agrarian production and its distribution in the London region c.1300.
First published: 4 March 2020
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