Introduction

If ‘the statistics of agricultural production’ for a country like nineteenth-century Ireland are equal to ‘an index of national prosperity’, then for this country there is a better opportunity than for most to construct that index. Agricultural historians of post-Famine Ireland are well provided with annual agricultural statistics which in their diversity are richer than British sources. While the English and Welsh June Returns began in 1866 and have become a widely used source, the Irish Returns preceded them by a clear twenty years. For investigating output they provide acreages under crops, average crop yields, animal numbers which distinguish within animal groups those of different ages, and other ‘vital’ statistics. As the appendixes show, the bulk of these data are pretty well available annually from 1847 to the Great War. Armed with such riches it should be a simple task to combine these classes of data with the price material which is available. There are many prices to choose from, though many of them are Dublin based, yet making the correct choice of so-called ‘standard prices’ is not easy.

In the simple equation of per unit factor productivity based upon output divided by unit factor inputs (land, labour etc.), it has been precisely the absence of measures of output which encouraged historians to look for indirect measurements of productivity, such as yields peracre. The fulsome nature of the nineteenth-century Irish data allow a more certain, though not an absolutely certain, estimation of output to be made, and this is the concern of this chapter.