Eighteenth-Century Irish Population: New Perspectives from Old Sources

Abstract

The lack of other data has made fiscally motivated house counts the main basis of pre-censal Irish population estimates in the past. The source is potentially treacherous: in this paper spatial autocorrelation analysis of house counts at the county level is used to monitor its reliability over time. The new house totals which emerge, coupled with new estimates of mean household size, yield a different picture of aggregate and provincial population change between 1700 and 1821 than suggested in Connell's classic work. The final section of the paper suggests an interpretation of population change consistent with our revised figures.