Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years.
Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish.
Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition.
The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.
The Irish famine of 1847 and 1848, when harvests failed and more than 3 million Irish died or were forced to emigrate, is one of the signal events of Irish history. The famine that devastated the country, notes Cormac Ó Gráda, professor of economics at University College, Dublin, was exceptional in its severity. "The cost in deaths of many highly publicized Third World famines in the recent past is modest by comparison," he writes, adding that real comparisons come only on the scale of China's catastrophic Great Leap Forward famine of 1959 to 1962 (when, Walter Becker alleges in
Hungry Ghosts, 30 million Chinese died). The reason the Irish famine struck so hard, " Gráda argues, is that the Irish food supply was already tenuous; dispossessed from their land and made to rely on a single crop, the potato, the tenant agriculturists of Ireland simply had no resources or stores on which to fall back.
Important though the famine was to Ireland's history, Gráda notes, historians began to study it closely only in the last decade; in that time, dozens of books and monographs have been issued, amplifying a hitherto sparse literature. His scholarly book, heavily documented and full of statistics drawn from censuses and other demographic surveys, is itself a major contribution to historical writing on the subject. --Gregory McNamee
