dual economy thesis

dual economy thesis, a briefly influential thesis, originating with John Lynch and Patrick Vaizey, Guinness's Brewery and the Irish Economy 1759–1867 (1960). They divided late 18th‐ and early 19th‐century Ireland into two distinct regions: a ‘maritime’ cash economy linked to that of Great Britain, which was confined to the eastern coastal fringe, Limerick, and Galway, and a ‘subsistence’ sector occupying the remainder of the island. Subsequent writing has rejected any such neat geographical division: social groups inhabiting the same region could have very different levels of involvement in the money economy. The notion of a commercialized sector confined to the east coast also greatly understates the extent to which rural Ireland as a whole in the years before 1845 saw changes in land use, agricultural techniques, and demographic behaviour, all in response to market forces. Indeed one of the most striking features of the pre‐ Famine economy was the extent to which poverty was linked, not to economic backwardness, but to exceptionally high levels of commercialization.