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Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

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Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance ((PSHF))

Abstract

What taxes were levied on the Irish population in the eighteenth century and by whom? How was the burden of taxation spread across society, and how did popular resistance shape the distribution and typologies of Irish taxation? This chapter addresses these subjects through an analysis of the patterns of Irish taxation in the period from the Williamite wars to the Act of Union. It is concerned with ascertaining what was the burden of taxation in eighteenth-century Ireland, how was it borne, by whom, and where. Drawing on the most complete dataset of Irish taxation yet assembled, it provides an innovative and hopefully definitive analysis of Irish taxation. Finally this analysis of the political economy of Irish taxation and the geographies of fiscal extraction is situated, throughout the chapter, within a comparative context looking at both England and Scotland.

Cíos rí, cíos tire, cíos cléire,

cíos sróna, cíos tóna, cíos téite,

airgead ceann igceanngach féile,

airgead teallaigh is bealaigh do réiteach.

King’s tax, land tax and clerical tax,

a nose tax, an arse tax and a heating tax,

a poll tax at the end of each gale,

hearth money and money for repairing roads.

Seán Ó’Gadhra, ‘Staid nua na hÉireann, 1697 (Ireland’s new state, 1697)’, quoted in Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), 62–63

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Notes

  1. 1.

    K. H. Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’, in K. H. Connell, Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1–50; David Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, ed. Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 37–63; Louis Cullen, ‘Smugglers in the Irish Sea in the Eighteenth Century’, in L. M. Cullen, Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants at Home and Abroad, 1600–1988 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), 118–36; Timothy D. Watt, ‘Taxation Riots and the Culture of Popular Protest in Ireland, 1714–1740’, English Historical Review 130, no. 547 (2016): 1418–48.

  2. 2.

    The analysis and methodology pursued in this chapter owes a significant debt to Julian Hoppit’s path-breaking analysis in his Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), esp. chap. 9. Elsewhere I have sought to situate the phenomenon of the fiscal-military state within a ‘four nations’ comparative framework; see Patrick Walsh, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Fiscal Military State: A Four Nations Perspective’, in Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A Disunited Kingdom?, ed. Naomi Lloyd Jones and Margaret Scull (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 85–110.

  3. 3.

    M. J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1996); D’Maris Coffman, Excise Taxation and the Origins of Public Debt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. 157–81; Charles Ivar McGrath, The Making of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Constitution: Government, Parliament and the Revenue, 1692–1714 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 24–31.

  4. 4.

    Maurice J. Bric, ‘Priests, Parsons and Politics: The Rightboy Protest in County Cork, 1785–88’, in Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland, ed. C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 163–90.

  5. 5.

    For contemporary comment see Thomas Waite to Sir Robert Wilmot, 23 July 1763, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter, PRONI), T3019/4655. See also Eoin Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian Insurrection”? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak Disturbances of July 1763’, Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 122 (1998): 165–87.

  6. 6.

    Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies, 58. For some discussion of increasing taxation at the county level see Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection’, 50–52.

  7. 7.

    David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), 191.

  8. 8.

    Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection’, 39; Walsh, ‘Towards a Four Nations History’, 91–92.

  9. 9.

    McGrath, Irish Constitution, 42–43.

  10. 10.

    Patrick Walsh, ‘The Fiscal State in Ireland, 1691–1769’, Historical Journal 56, no. 3 (2013): 639.

  11. 11.

    David Dickson, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Stuart Daultrey, ‘Hearth Tax, Household Size and Irish Population Change, 1672–1821’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section c, 82 (1982): 135–39.

  12. 12.

    Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41, no. 1 (1988): 1–32; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin, 1989).

  13. 13.

    Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies, 302.

  14. 14.

    Walsh, ‘Fiscal State’, passim.

  15. 15.

    David Dickson identified this trend in revenues for the period after 1780, but it holds true for the whole century; see Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection’, 39. 

  16. 16.

    For a vigorous argument about the role of tax policy in shaping the English industrial revolution see William Ashworth, The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

  17. 17.

    See James Guilfoyle’s chapter in this volume.

  18. 18.

    McGrath, Irish Constitution, 73–118; D. W. Hayton, ‘Introduction: The Long Apprenticeship’, Parliamentary History 20, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.

  19. 19.

    Charles Ivar McGrath, Ireland and Empire, 1692–1770 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 44–45.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 69–106.

  21. 21.

    McGrath, Ireland and Empire, 177.

  22. 22.

    Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, 1429–30.

  23. 23.

    Patrick Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal State: The Army, the Revenue and the Irish Experience of the Fiscal-Military State, 1690–1769’, in The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660–c. 1783, ed. Patrick Walsh and Aaron Graham (London: Routledge, 2016), 131–58.

  24. 24.

    Minutes of the Irish Revenue Commissioners (hereafter, Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks.), 28 June 1759, 12 Sept. 1760, 6 Nov. 1769, The National Archives (hereafter, TNA): CUST 1/63, f. 7; CUST 1/65, ff. 25–27, CUST 1/110, f. 64; Waite to Wilmot, 16 Jan. 1772, PRONI, T3019/6267.

  25. 25.

    McGrath, Ireland and Empire, 140–42, 165–66.

  26. 26.

    Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection’, 43; A. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Economic Effects of the French Revolutionary and Napoleanic wars on Ireland’ (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 1973), 7–12; Patrick Given, ‘Calico to Whiskey: A Case Study on the Development of the Distilling Industry in the Naas Revenue Collection District, 1700–1921’ (PhD diss., Maynooth University, 2011), 88–90, 215.

  27. 27.

    James Hamilton to Lord Abercorn, 23 June 1780, PRONI, D623/A/44/36.

  28. 28.

    Given, ‘Calico to Whiskey’, 222.

  29. 29.

    Data on licence yields comes from the Irish fiscal accounts. For the situation in 1785 see CJI, xi, app., dccx.

  30. 30.

    The phrase is Hoppit’s, Britain’s Political Economies, 39. For the growth in Irish legislation see Hayton, ‘The Long Apprenticeship’, 13.

  31. 31.

    The classic revisionist dismissal of the economic significance of the post-1782 Parliament is J. J. Lee, ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, in The Irish Parliamentary Tradition, ed. Brian Farrell (Dublin, 1973), 149–59.

  32. 32.

    On the Irish Parliament’s increasing regulatory role see Eoin Magennis, ‘The Irish Parliament and the Regulatory Impulse: The Case of the Coal Trade’, Parliamentary History 33, no. 1 (2014): 54–72.

  33. 33.

    Eoin Magennis, ‘Coal, Corn and Canals: The Dispersal of Public Moneys, 1695–1772’, Parliamentary History 20, no. 1 (2001): 71–86; Andrew Sneddon, ‘Legislating for Economic Development: Irish Fisheries as a Case Study for the Limitations of Improvement’, in The Eighteenth-Century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689–1800, ed. D. W. Hayton, James Kelly, and John Bergin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 136–59.

  34. 34.

    Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies, 131.

  35. 35.

    Dickson, Ó Gráda, and Daultrey, ‘Hearth Tax’.

  36. 36.

    Patrick Walsh, Aidan Kane, and Eoin Magennis, ‘Ireland, 1698–1829’ in Revue de l’OFCE, 140 (2015): 269–74.

  37. 37.

    The bureaucratic structure is laid out in T. J. Kiernan, History of the Financial Administration of Ireland to 1817 (London: P. S. King and Son, 1930), 255–65.

  38. 38.

    Hoppit, British Political Economies, 281–88.

  39. 39.

    The geographical dispersal of revenue officials can be captured on a quarterly (i.e. three-monthly) basis for the period 1686–1769 in the Irish Establishment books, TNA: CUST 20/56–137. After 1769, inland excise officers are no longer listed, making it difficult to make direct comparisons with earlier periods, except for 1789 when an isolated excise establishment survives, National Library of Ireland (hereafter, NLI) MS 3877.

  40. 40.

    Trade flows for individual ports can be seen at www.duanaire.ie/trade.

  41. 41.

    Quoted in Given, ‘Calico to Whiskey’, 41.

  42. 42.

    David Dickson, ‘Seven Sisters? The Seaport Cities of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Ireland, France and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757, ed. Thomas M. Truxes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 95.

  43. 43.

    Hoppit, British Political Economies, 284.

  44. 44.

    John Fitzgibbon to John Beresford, 14 May 1793, Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. John Beresford, ed. William Beresford, 2 vols. (London: Woodfall and Kinder, 1854), 2:13.

  45. 45.

    David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), 148–59.

  46. 46.

    Irish Import and Export Ledgers, TNA: CUST 15/27, 101.

  47. 47.

    For an incisive analysis of the fluctuating fortunes of Ireland’s port cities see Dickson, ‘Seven Sisters?’, 93–107.

  48. 48.

    On the Newry Canal see L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660, 2nd ed. (London: Batsford Press, 1987), 88–89.

  49. 49.

    See charts for imports of port and Spanish wine in the CUST 15 database of Irish trade at www.duanaire.ie/trade.

  50. 50.

    Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 257.

  51. 51.

    George Macartney, ‘A Sketch of the Revenue of Ireland’ (1773), NLI MS 11,967, ff. 53–67.

  52. 52.

    Dickson, New Foundations, 215.

  53. 53.

    Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies, 286.

  54. 54.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 12 Sept. 1760, TNA: Cust 1/65, ff. 25–27.

  55. 55.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 18 Dec. 1738, 28 Mar. 1764, TNA: Cust 1/30, f. 69, Cust 1/81, f. 27; Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760 (London: Yale University Press, 2001), 119, 130.

  56. 56.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 16 Nov. 1739, 10 June 1760, 15 Sept. 1764, TNA: Cust 1/30, f. 244, Cust 1/64, f. 134, Cust 1/83, f. 102.

  57. 57.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 16 May 1738, TNA: Cust 1/29, f. 184.

  58. 58.

    D. A. Fleming, Politics and Provincial People: Sligo and Limerick, 1691–1761 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 166–68.

  59. 59.

    See, for example, the Boyle, Bessborough, and Boyne, amongst others.

  60. 60.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 19 Oct. 1759, TNA: Cust 1/63, 145. Mercer had previously commanded the Thompson Galley and the Bessborough; Customs Establishment books, 25 Mar. 1734, 15 Mar. 1744, TNA: Cust 20/102, 112.

  61. 61.

    Patrick Walsh, ‘Ireland and the Royal Navy in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750–1820, ed. John McAleer and Christer Petley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51–76.

  62. 62.

    Walsh, ‘Fiscal State’, 643.

  63. 63.

    James Kelly, ‘Harvests and Hardship: Famine and Scarcity in Ireland in the Late 1720s’, Studia Hibernica 26 (1992): 65–106.

  64. 64.

    Waite to Wilmot, 16 Jan. 1772, PRONI, T3019/6267.

  65. 65.

    Given, ‘Calico to Whiskey’, 106–08. Similarly, the 1782–1784 subsistence crisis explains the dip in excise revenues at the beginning of the 1780s.

  66. 66.

    For a detailed analysis of Naas district see Given, ‘Calico to Whiskey’, 179–99, 211–18.

  67. 67.

    Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’, 40.

  68. 68.

    Monck Mason, Report, NLI P4047 n.p.

  69. 69.

    Based on a comparison of the excise data and the Establishment books for these districts.

  70. 70.

    Timothy D. Watt, ‘Order and Disorder in Ireland, 1692–1735’ (PhD diss., Queen’s University Belfast, 2013), 139.

  71. 71.

    Walsh, ‘Fiscal State’, 642.

  72. 72.

    Kiernan, Financial Administration, 266; for the excise establishment in 1789 see NLI MS 3877.

  73. 73.

    Walsh, ‘Fiscal State’, 644.

  74. 74.

    Watt, ‘Order and Disorder’, 5, 7, 156.

  75. 75.

    Walsh, ‘Fiscal State’, 654.

  76. 76.

    Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, passim.

  77. 77.

    Cullen, ‘Smugglers in the Irish Sea’, passim; Gerard J. Lyne, Murtaí Óg Ó Súilleabháin (c. 1710–54): A Life Contextualised (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2017).

  78. 78.

    Walsh, ‘Ireland and the Royal Navy’, 58–59.

  79. 79.

    ‘Report of the commissioners of revenue in Ireland on the running of wool from Ireland to France’, 29 Jan. 1755, Treasury Papers, TNA: T 1/361/21; see also Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal-Military State’, 131.

  80. 80.

    Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, 1418.

  81. 81.

    Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal-Military State’, 148.

  82. 82.

    Incidences of ‘riot and rescue’ can also be calculated from the same source; see Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, 1431.

  83. 83.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 1760–69, TNA: CUST 1/64–110; Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, 1430–32.

  84. 84.

    Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’, 1432.

  85. 85.

    Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal-Military State’, 151–52.

  86. 86.

    Rev. Commrs. Min. Bks., 16 Mar. 1762, 25 June 1766, 27 Sept. 1767, TNA: Cust 1/71, f. 32, Cust 1/92, f. 100, Cust 1/99, f. 52; Diary of a journey through England and Wales to Ireland, made by Rev. J. Burrows, entry for 15 June [1773], PRONI, T3551/1.

  87. 87.

    Walsh, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal-Military State’, 144, 150.

  88. 88.

    Quarters of the Army in Ireland, 1784, Kilmainham Papers, NLI MS 1007. On the revenue police see Jim Herlihy, The Irish Revenue Police: A Short History and Genealogical Guide to the ‘Poteen Hussars’ (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018).

  89. 89.

    Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’, passim; Cullen, Economic History of Ireland, 168; Nicholas M. Wolf, An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

  90. 90.

    Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’, 34.

  91. 91.

    On Scotland see Hoppit, British Political Economies, 299–300; Philipp Robinson Rössner Scottish Trade in the Wake of Union (1700–1760): The Rise of a Warehouse Economy (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 38–40.

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  1. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Patrick Walsh

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  1. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Douglas Kanter

  2. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Patrick Walsh

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4.8 Customs, excise, and property revenues, 1695–1795
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Walsh, P. (2019). Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. In: Kanter, D., Walsh, P. (eds) Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016. Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04309-4_4

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