WORKSHOP, WAREHOUSE AND THE PRIMACY OF DUBLIN

Abstract

This chapter highlights Dublin's commercial primacy and its status as a great pre-industrial manufacturing city. The chapter explores how Dublin became the country's principal port of entry for fine cloth, metal goods, and emerged as the national warehouse for imports. It reviews Dublin's contribution to customs revenue between 1615 and 1619 and the city's success in cornering the wholesale market in high-value imports. Being the principal high-value warehouse in the country brought about Dublin's transition to being the national workshop for luxury and quality goods — not the only such location, but the dominant one for more than a century. The chapter also discusses the expansion of the guild membership in Dublin, noting that the renaissance of Dublin's guilds in the seventeenth century was an enabling factor in the city's rapid development as a manufacturing hub. Ultimately, the chapter elaborates the growth of the apparatus of government and the arrival in the city of large numbers of upper-class families.