Abstract

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The 'proto-industrialization' thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognize the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialization and deindustrialization.