The Irish Crisis


Book Description




Famine in European History


Book Description

The first systematic study of famine in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages to present. It compares the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine in regional case studies by leading experts to form a comprehensive picture of when and why food security across the continent became a critical issue.




The Great Irish Famine


Book Description

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 was one of the great disasters of the nineteenth century, whose notoriety spreads as far as the mass emigration which followed it. Cormac O'Gráda's concise survey suggests that a proper understanding of the disaster requires an analysis of the Irish economy before the invasion of the potato-killing fungus, Phytophthora infestans, highlighting Irish poverty and the importance of the potato, but also finding signs of economic progress before the Famine. Despite the massive decline in availability of food, the huge death toll of one million (from a population of 8.5 million) was hardly inevitable; there are grounds for supporting the view that a less doctrinaire attitude to famine relief would have saved many lives. This book provides an up-to-date introduction by a leading expert to an event of major importance in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain.




The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis


Book Description

The Irish famine of the 1840s is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom's history. Within six years of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845, more than a quarter of its residents had unexpectedly died or emigrated. Its population has not yet fully recovered since. Historians have struggled to explain why the British government decided to shut down its centrally organised relief efforts in 1847, long before the famine ended. Some have blamed the laissez-faire attitudes of the time for an inadequate response by the British government; others have alleged purposeful neglect and genocide. In contrast, this book uncovers a hidden narrative of the crisis, which links policy failure in Ireland to financial and political instability in Great Britain. More important than a laissez-faire ideology in hindering relief efforts for Ireland were the British government's lack of a Parliamentary majority from 1846, the financial crises of 1847, and a battle of ideas over monetary policy between proponents and opponents of financial orthodoxy. The high death toll in Ireland resulted from the British government's plans for intervention going awry, rather than being prematurely cancelled because of laissez-faire. This book is essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in Anglo-Irish relations, the history of financial crises, and why humanitarian-relief efforts can go wrong even with good intentions.




Ireland's Great Famine


Book Description

The essays in this volume range widely over topics associated with Ireland's great famine of 1846-52. Taken together, the essays give a full account of the famine, its effects, what was and was not done to alleviate it, how it compares with other famines, and how successive scholars have tackled these matters.




This Great Calamity: The Great Irish Famine


Book Description

The Great Famine of 1845-52 was the most decisive event in the history of modern Ireland. In a country of eight million people, the Famine caused the death of approximately one million, while a similar number were forced to emigrate. The Irish population fell to just over four million by the beginning of the twentieth century. Christine Kinealy's survey is long established as the most complete, scholarly survey of the Great Famine yet produced. First published in 1994, This Great Calamity remains an exhaustive and indefatigable look into the event that defined Ireland as we know it today.




The Great Hunger


Book Description

The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British ‘obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance’ – and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire ‘solutions’ – largely caused the disaster and prevented any serious efforts to relieve suffering. The continuing impact on Anglo-Irish relations was incalculable, the immediate human cost almost inconceivable. In this vivid and disturbing book Cecil Woodham-Smith provides the definitive account. ‘A moving and terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It explains much in modern Ireland – and in modern America’ D.W. Brogan.




The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 3, 1730–1880


Book Description

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.




The Famine Plot


Book Description

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diaspora of nearly 80 million people today.