Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/311583 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
EHES Working Paper No. 272
Publisher: 
European Historical Economics Society (EHES), s.l.
Abstract: 
Agricultural cooperation is seen as a way to solve collective action problems and has been associated with high social capital and other beneficial impacts in the countryside beyond productivity increases. But what if it comes into conflict with existing private concerns? The Irish dairy cooperatives from the 1890s entered a contested market for milk, and soon became associated with various degrees of conflict: legal disputes and physical violence. We hypothesize that this led to poor social capital, manifesting in conflict during the Irish War of Independence. We analyze novel data on cooperative and private creameries, as well as measures of conflict. Our findings indicate a significant positive correlation between the presence of cooperatives and local conflict intensities, persisting even after controlling for various confounders. An instrumental variable approach based on prior specialization in dairying validates this. Cooperation might thus both reflect social capital but also have pernicious impacts on it.
Subjects: 
Ireland
Cooperatives
Social Capital
Market Contestation
JEL: 
N53
N54
Q13
Z13
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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