Louis Cullen MRIA, historian
Professor Cullen has, over the course of his illustrious career, found himself engaged in topics as diverse as the pre-Revolutionary French brandy trade, the treatment of archives in Japanese feudal society, Japan’s reopening to the world after 1858, and the interpretation of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
I was fortunate to begin my work in history in 1953, during a period of new vigour in history writing. T.S. Ashton, François Crouzet, Richard Pares, Jacob Price, Hayami Akira, François Furet, Peter Matthias, and, among them, an Irishman, David Quinn, were the big names.
History is not only a study resting on fragile or incomplete surviving sources but can pose issues of interpretation. Archives are its key material
The most perfect ones are probably those of Britain or France, held mainly in central, but also in local, repositories (until recent decades in Britain); in France still held in naval stations. In Ireland our archives, were known for poor management in their creation and preservation alike; their present order is a modern one imposed by archivists.
I completed an M.A. thesis on Irish trade with France in 1953 and a Ph.D. at the LSE in 1959 on Anglo-Irish trade. The records of almost all the French brandy houses survived in the French archives. The prominence of Irishmen Richard Hennessy and James Delamain within them prompted me to research the brandy trade. The richness of these sources, unstudied in their home country, led me to write two books: The brandy trade under the Ancien Regime: regional specialisation in the Charente (Cambridge, 2003), and The Irish brandy houses of eighteenth-century France (Lilliput, 2000). Both books later appeared in French.
In the course of this work I was led, step by step, into study of two vast collections, the papers of Thomas Sutton, comte de Clonard (long obscured by cataloguing under the name of a later custodian), and the papers of Richard Warren, who was chosen by the duc de Choiseul as governor of Belle Île en mer. Both Irishmen benefited early in their career from the patronage of Charles O’Brien, sixth viscount Clare, a marechal de France who introduced them to the duc de Choiseul, the leading figure in French government. The politics of the French East India Company also served to bring Choiseul and Sutton together in the politically controversial reform of France’s East India trade.
One striking feature in French business records is an absence of bills of exchange moving rural wealth to Paris. In other words, rents and other income alike remained in the provinces. France had poor government in a rich but fiscally aggrieved society opposed to tax reform, which thus prepared the way for Revolution in 1789.
A supervisor is indebted to the students he supervises, from whom he learns much.
By chance, from 1972 I acted as supervisor for several generations of Japanese students and visiting scholars. Two short visits to Japan, were followed by a year-long stay as a visiting professor in the International Research Centre for Japanese studies in Kyoto, itself leading in turn, over a decade or longer, to annual visits of a month or so. All this led to two works, one A history of Japan: internal and external worlds 1582–1941 (Cambridge, 2003), looking at the elements which made Japan a strong society, and the other Early Japanese trade, administration and interactions with the West (Renaissance Books, 2020), a study of decision making, archives and statistics.
In Japan, archives were seen as the personal property of their creator. Feudal lords (daimyo), who made up the Japanese equivalent of a cabinet, took their papers with them when they left office (and these have survived in the archives of diaimyo domains). Likewise, individual officials retained their papers, which often survive in the possession of descendants. In addition, despite the absence of indirect taxation (until 1859 and later), statistics were compiled. In other words, much has survived, one way or another. The greatest losses were as a result of fire in the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. Surviving archives and statistics, even with gaps, point to the robustness of Japanese administration.
Japan, like pre-Revolutionary France, was characterised by poor government in a rich country, and also by the absence of indirect taxation and a very small military presence, which there resulted in a relatively egalitarian society. Japan’s robust management explains how and why Japan, unlike other societies in east Asia, successfully negotiated for several decades with the West. Instruction of Japanese elites can be characterised as private, competitive and eclectic. Per capita, food supply was in general, by Asian standards, high. Despite the absence of external outlets, production of tea and silk expanded over time, with the result that when Japan opened to the outside world in 1858, quality exports financed a soaring import trade. The Iwakura mission, which visited the outside world in 1871–3, though impressed by what it saw, was in no way daunted. Kume Kunitaki, secretary to the mission and author of its report, was confident that within a generation the gap between Japan and the outside world would be closed.
The irony of Japanese history is that a country which had—contact with the Dutch at Nagasaki apart—withdrawn from the outside world, reopened its shores in and after 1858 in very different circumstances, with six Western countries holding an imperial stake in eastern or southern Asia, and from 1920 the Pacific rapidly becoming an American lake. The long shadow of the future was to spread across land and sea.
When my 1959 Ph.D. thesis on Anglo-Irish trade appeared as a book, Anglo-Irish trade 1660–1800 in 1968, it was seen as a radically new approach. Three general books on Irish history followed in its wake, in 1968, 1972 and 1981. Anglo-Irish trade also served as the foundation of three chapters spread between two volumes of the New History of Ireland published by Oxford University Press. I also contributed to two volumes in the Economy and Society series—chapters on Wicklow and Wexford that looked at the 1790s at length. Of other works I have written, perhaps the main one is a business history: Eason & Son: a history (published by Eason in1989). Over a lifetime, I have also written on the interpretation of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry, and on the quantification of smuggling.
