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CUSTOMS 15: a digital data archive of Ireland’s international trade 1698–1829
Dr Aidan Kane Dr Patrick A. Walsh Dr Eoin Magennis
Economics School of History & Archives InterTrade Ireland NUI Galway UCD
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
The award of a “New FoundaGons” grant, by the Irish Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. www.research.ie
www.duanaire.ie/trade
11th November 2014
The “Customs 15 Ledgers of Exports and Imports” at the UK National Archives
We got the UK National Archives to digitise 12 of the 140 volumes in this set of bound, handwritten ledgers. Each has about 100 A3 pages. Later years have more. They cover the years 1698 to 1829. The data eventually get much less complete/reliable. After about 120 years. We’ve captured a fraction of the data in our 12 sample volumes.
We’d like to capture all of the rich data here, and make it all available. For everyone.
Trade of Ireland 300 year ago. An overall summary of exports and imports by region in the year ended 25th March (Our Lady’s Day) 1714. Regions include British North America—both the mainland colonies, and the British West Indies islands in the Caribbean.
What’s in the ledgers?
Here’s one page.
Exports only, 1714. The ledgers distinguish between the “Produce of this Kingdom”, i.e., exports of Irish goods from exports of “Foreigne Commodities” i.e., goods imported ^irst, then immediately re-‐exported.
Fifty years later, 1764, essentially the same format. And for another 50 years.
There’s more. A drilling down into exports for 1714. On the left are commodities. The main cells of this spreadsheet contain quantities exported to each region. Rightmost columns are totals, price per unit, and total value. To the farthing.
A detail from the previous table. It’s all about (salted) beef in 1714. To supply the Plantations.
Check your totals. This clerk does. At the end of the account, the page totals are brought forward and added up, to give the total as before. It goes on like this, for over a century.
From 7 sample volumes, we reckon there are about 350 distinct commodities. We’ve had a ^irst cut at categorising the data and re-‐calculating it in various ways. Our tables are not as beautiful as the originals. But they are a bit more ^lexible.
We can view the data for each region i.e., trade partner … and drill down into the pattern of trade for each commodity. In this case, it’s a broad commodity group. It’s all about beef. But not quite.
It’s also about linen. And hundreds of other commodities.
If we had the full data set, we’d have over a hundred data points in these charts. You can interact with these sample charts on our project web site.
There are also ….
Fish. (and kelp.)
The most extraordinary level of detail: tables showing the trade for each of (usually) 20 ports. This is the 1704 port table for exports to Holland. There are similar tables for exports to each of the other regions, and for imports. from those regions. This format is followed, page after page, year after year, for about 120 years.
The records invite unique explorations of local and regional economic and commercial histories
on the island of Ireland.
Also, a table of shipping & tonnage, and the region of that tonnage appears each year, listing the ports.
Because it’s only one page per year, we photographed these tables from 1719 to 1764 to give a nice run of data to chart.
Towards the detailed history of ports …
All this care and attention is expended because his Majesty needs tax revenue. Each year, he can see where he gets it, by type of tax, for each port.
We photographed these one-‐pagers too, from 1719 to 1764. And we took just one column from each, i.e., total trade-‐related tax revenue, for each port, for each year.
By the 1780s, the data for each trade partner become even more detailed. Now we see many more countries/regions, including
individual states/areas in the United States, and in the Caribbean, details are given of islands. This table is a just a summary. The volume contains all of the ^ine detail of commodities and ports in earlier ones for each region.
These are extraordinary records.
Technology matters Each page in this volume (no 67 i.e., for 1764) when digitised, is about 170MB. So the resolution is rather good. It means we should be able to capture the data very accurately. Including fractions.
Because that’s the kind of people we are.
A diverse skills-‐set is required.
We need academics, students, librarians, technologists, so that lots of people can engage with the data, and with the history of Ireland.
Customs 15 as digital images Excel
MySQL database
Browse as web pages Cross tabs (incl. Excel)
dynamic charts
Dataverse
OCR/data entry
schema
php
highcharts
perl
Tools of the trade
This is the basic set of technology tools we’ve used so far to capture data. We have to scale it up, carefully, completely, and robustly. And then we have the data. For ever.
We’ve developed Excel spreadsheets which mimic the layout and arithmetic in the originals. -‐> Our excel sheets are
probably not as quick on the arithmetic as
those clerks.
Excel is OK for this, but to process all this data ef^iciently, we take it into MySQL, a very powerful database programme.
<-‐ MySQL is fast. And free.
Part of the challenge is to write software which deals with prices and complicated commodities. This is part of a MySQL programme written for this dataset.
We’ve found, so far, that the arithmetic in the ledgers is generally correct.
Generally.
25
In order to check the arithmetic, we had to get MySQL to add fractions exactly, i.e., … not by rounding them to decimals which would not go down well,
in the 18th century. This is part of the MySQL programme which does that.
So …
• 130 volumes • 120 years • c.350 commodiGes • prices, quanGGes, values. • 7 trading partners, (and aUer c.1780, 35 trading partners) • usually 20 ports on the island of Ireland • perhaps 18,000 pages, slightly bigger than A3.
Let’s open all this up for everyone.
www.duanaire.ie/trade [email protected]