Cork’s position in 1776 illustrates the asymmetry of British imperial trade policy. As Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations, the Navigation Acts — designed to direct all colonial trade through British ports — were “a burden” on the very societies they purported to govern. Irish wool, glass, and provisions were banned from markets where they competed with British goods, while Irish merchants were denied the right to trade directly with the colonies.
In Cork, the provisions embargo of 1776 — which ordered that salted beef and pork could only be exported to Britain first — devastated the city’s economy and galvanised political opposition. Companies of volunteers formed across Cork in 1776 in direct response to the trade crisis. Their rhetoric directly mirrored the American colonists’ arguments, and Irish newspapers printed the Declaration of Independence with visible sympathy.
Smith too was sympathetic: he called the trade restrictions on Ireland “unjust.” It was absurd that Irish farmers feared selling cattle to Britain, and British farmers feared buying them, when both sides would gain from the exchange (WN IV.ii.17). He argued that Ireland’s incorporation into a genuine free trade union with Britain would benefit both countries. When the Irish Parliament voted for free trade in 1779, the politician Henry Dundas wrote to Smith: “The bearing down of Ireland was in truth bearing down a substantial part of the Naval and Military strength of our own Country.” Smith agreed. “The general opulence and improvement of Ireland might certainly, under proper management, afford much greater resources to Government, than can ever be drawn from a few mercantile or manufacturing towns.”
In 1782, the Volunteers would force Britain to grant Ireland limited legislative independence, but after a major Irish rebellion in 1798, the settlement was reversed and Ireland formally annexed into the United Kingdom in 1801.
Image: “Old” Cork City Hall, from the collection of the National Library of Ireland on Flickr Commons