Malcomsons of Portlaw and Clonmel: some new evidence on the Irish cotton industry 1825-50
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fate of the Irish cotton industry in the latter stages of the British industrial revolution is hard to trace after 1822 since separate official trade data for Irish ports ceased at that point as a consequence of the Act of Union. One way to bridge this information gap is to examine the statistical evidence on the cotton industry at a local level. The historiography on Irish cotton manufacture between the 1820s and 1840s has largely focussed on Belfast, although much of the industry was located in the south, notably at Portlaw, where the Malcomsons had built the largest integrated mill in Ireland, and at Clonmel, where they had a weaving factory. This study illustrates the significance of this family business during the second quarter of the nineteenth century by examining Waterford trade records and a surviving business ledger for the early 1830s. It concludes that the growth of Malcomsons from the mid-1820s to the 1840s offset much of the decline in cotton spinning elsewhere in the south of Ireland, providing additional evidence that the decline of the Irish industry was later than the 1820s.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".