Microcredit and adjustment to environmental shock: Evidence from the Great Famine in Ireland

The Great Famine of Ireland from 1845-51 ranks as one of the most lethal of all time, claiming approximately one eighth of the country’s population. Utilizing Famine Relief Commission reports to develop a micro-level dataset of blight severity, I find that in the short run, districts more severely infected by blight experienced larger population declines and accumulations of buffer livestock. In the medium and long runs, however, worse affected districts experienced greater substitutions toward other tillage crops and grazing livestock. Using annual reports of the Irish Loan Funds, I further find that access to microfinance credit was an important factor in short- and long-run adjustment to blight. Districts with at least one microfinance fund during the Famine experienced substantially smaller population declines and larger increases in buffer livestock during and immediately after the Famine, and greater medium- and long-run substitutions toward other crops and grazing livestock, than districts without a fund.

The historiography of the Great Famine in Ireland has largely been concerned with the role played by the British Government in providing relief in the years after 1845. Less attention has been given to the involvement of private charity. Private relief, however, played a crucial role in saving lives throughout the Famine. Moreover, its interventions were often swift, practical, and less hampered by the bureaucratic restrictions that slowed down, and at times rendered ineffective, much government relief. While the contribution of the Society of Friends has been generally acknowledged in Famine historiography, the British Relief Association for the Relief of Distress in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland has received little scholarly attention. Nonetheless, the latter organization raised double the amount of money that was donated to the Quakers. This article will examine the origins, activities and impact of the British Relief Association.

The Great Famine was a devastating event that had profound and persistent effects on Irish population and agriculture. Initial short- to medium-run responses to blight, in the form of greater accumulations of buffer livestock assets and demographic decline, were eventually superseded in the medium and long runs by changes in land use, namely, substitutions away from the potato toward other tillage crops and pasture. Thus, while proto capital markets and labor were much more flexible in the short and medium runs, land was for the most part initially fixed, with fundamental changes in land use only occurring over the long run. Access to microcredit from the Irish Loan Funds was an important factor in enabling non-demographic adjustment to adverse environmental shock.

Despite the fact that more than half of all who died in the Great Famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 were children, relatively little research has focused on their experiences of this period. Following the archaeological excavation of a Famine-period workhouse mass burial ground in Kilkenny City, the physical reality of the catastrophe for over 500 of its child victims has become evident. The experience of poverty, famine and institutionalization can be discerned from markers of stress in their skeletons and, when discussed in a biocultural research setting, these markers provide a unique insight into the tragic veracity of one of the worst subsistence crises in history. The historical records reveal that amongst high child mortality rates, the well-being of the children was in fact a priority for workhouse officials. Though many died, a large number of children's lives would also have been saved in the institution.

Perhaps the first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was a flamboyant, larger-than-life character who nonetheless took his profession very seriously. As the chef of the Reform Club, he modernised its kitchens, installing refrigerators and gas cookers. In 1851, during the Great Exhibition, he prepared spectacular (but financially ruinous) culinary extravaganzas at his restaurant, the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations. In stark contrast, he organised soup kitchens during the Great Famine in Ireland and volunteered his services in the Crimea in 1855 to improve military catering. He was also a prolific inventor of kitchen gadgets, notably promoting the Magic Stove, used for cooking food at the table. Several of his highly popular cookery books have been reissued in this series. Following his death, his secretaries François Volant and James Warren published this anecdotal and admiring biography in 1859, together with recipes and other cookery writings.

Perhaps the first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was a flamboyant, larger-than-life character who nonetheless took his profession very seriously. As the chef of the Reform Club, he modernised its kitchens, installing refrigerators and gas cookers. In 1851, during the Great Exhibition, he prepared spectacular (but financially ruinous) culinary extravaganzas at his restaurant, the Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations. In stark contrast, he organised soup kitchens during the Great Famine in Ireland and volunteered his services in the Crimea in 1855 to improve military catering. He was also a prolific inventor of kitchen gadgets, notably promoting the Magic Stove, used for cooking food at the table. First published in 1938, this biography by Helen Soutar Morris (1909–95) is based on François Volant and James Warren's anecdotal account of 1859 (also reissued in this series), and it faithfully conveys the adulation that Soyer engendered in his lifetime.

Despite the extensive scholarly literature on both the Great Famine in Ireland and the Famine immigration to the United States, little is known about precisely which Irish men and women emigrated from Ireland in the Famine era. This article makes use of a new dataset comprised of 18,000 Famine-era emigrants (2 per cent of the total) who landed at the port of New York from 1846 to 1854 and whose ship manifests list their Irish county of origin. The data is used to estimate the number of emigrants from each county in Ireland who arrived in New York during the Famine era. Because three-quarters of all Irish immigrants intending to settle in the United States took ships to New York, this dataset provides the best means available for estimating the origins of the United States’s Famine immigrants. The authors find that while the largest number of Irish immigrants came from some of Ireland’s most populous counties, such as Cork, Galway, and Tipperary, surprisingly large numbers also originated in Counties Cavan, Meath, Dublin, and Queen’s County, places not usually associated with the highest levels of emigration. The data also indicates that the overall level of emigration in the Famine years was significantly higher than scholars have previously understood.

The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis by Charles Read, and: Dublin and the Great Irish Famine ed. by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Ciarán McCabe, and Ciarán Reilly (review)

The literature of both Wales and Ireland in the modern period has used the imagined figure of the peasant to emblematize the nation. Yet the peasant is a contradictory emblem, especially for modernity, since he is associated with the past and with stasis. Consequently, both literary traditions reveal a repeated pattern of creation of an idealized peasantry, followed by its destruction in order to make way for a reinvented form of national identity. To demonstrate this, the early nineteenth-century representations of the Irish peasantry in the work of William Carleton are compared with those of the Welsh peasantry in the work of Anne Beale, followed by a comparison of the constructions of the peasant in the late nineteenth-century Celtic revivals of both countries in the wake of the Blue Books Report in Wales and the Great Famine in Ireland. Finally, the satirical portraits of the peasantry in the twentieth-century short stories of George Moore and Caradoc Evans are considered side by side. Ultimately, the peasant may be seen as embodying the contradictions of nationalism itself in the context of modernity, since the figure contains both residual and emergent cultural formations. Thus, the peasant is continually resurrected in analogous ways by writers in both countries, revealing again the proximity of the Welsh and Irish constructions of cultural nationalism and literary history.

“The Noblest Offering that Nation Ever Made to Nation”: American Philanthropy and the Great Famine in Ireland

10 - Electronic books

Editors’ Introduction: New Approaches to Irish Migration Piaras Mac Éinrí (bio) and Tina O’Toole (bio) The field of historical and contemporary migration to and from Ireland is a discordant one of multiple enquiries, meanings, discourses, and processes. This discordancy is also found in debates about the fluid and inchoate process of “migrancy” itself—the ontological state or condition of migrant mobility, constituting an ambivalent, “in-between” area of identity and enquiry. In the first place, migration to and from Ireland is marked by a series of historical, spatial, political, and sociocultural disparities. Ireland has long been an emigration nation, with a focus since the Act of Union in 1800 (after several centuries of links with Britain, but also with France, Spain, and other parts of continental Europe) on English-speaking destinations (Québec and Argentina are notable exceptions) and on the various and scattered parts of the British Empire. During that time, by contrast, the numbers migrating in the other direction remained extremely modest. There were already small numbers of black immigrants (usually servants) in eighteenth-century Ireland. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw modest numbers of Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Indian, and other immigrants. Their combined numbers never challenged the formation of a dominant identity, or rather, of two competing, partly confessional and partly ethnic, identities within Ireland. The combined presence of the English, Scots, and Welsh also constituted at all times and for obvious reasons the most significant foreign migrant community in Ireland. Yet they were rarely considered “immigrants,” possibly because their largely hegemonic presence or an assumption of a shared identity of Britishness/Irishness, albeit based upon an unequal relationship, [End Page 5] was taken in some way as self-evident and therefore rendered them invisible. More recent discourses concerning immigration placed a disproportionate emphasis on distinctions of skin color. Today, British people living in Ireland still constitute the largest ethnic minority in the country, but they are never referred to as such. In Britain itself, and for similar reasons, the twentieth-century Irish were not always recognized as a separate ethnic community, at least until Hickman and Walter’s pioneering work challenged the conventional wisdom concerning “race” and immigration.1 The same fundamental asymmetry in migratory flows, reflecting a dominant paradigm of movement from less-developed to more-developed Europe, can be observed in other peripheral European regions. In the twentieth century the Finns went to Sweden and southern Europeans from the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Spain, and Portugal went to various parts of northern Europe. The Irish, no exception to this general rule, continued to migrate to Britain irrespective of the changed political relationship between the two countries. Irish emigrants had also gone to destinations, notably the United States but also Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in which they themselves played a central, constitutive role in the dynamics of evolving, ethnically mixed societies. In this sense, for example, it is possible to argue that the Great Famine in Ireland and its accompanying outpouring of desperate people was a formative event, not just in Irish history, but also in the transformation of urban America. Ultimately, the Irish achieved radical transitions in terms of their own social advancement and positioning. In so doing, they became insider players in a complex process of emergent societies delineated, for better or for worse, by ethnicity, class, and gender. In the case of migration to the United States in particular, while Irish migrants were part of a broader movement of transatlantic European emigration, they had certain advantages (even while constructed as an often despised “alien other” in terms of religion, education, and class) in language and political and organizational experience, which, over time, gave them a prominent role in American [End Page 6] political life. In a society where the individual’s opportunities were often defined by ethnic identity and by its accompanying advantages or disadvantages, the Irish were ultimately accepted. To acknowledge this is not to reject the problematic elements of that inheritance. In particular, the Irish “became white,” to use Ignatiev’s phrase, and went on to play a less than glorious role, with honorable exceptions, in the construction of American racial politics. In the period...

Perhaps the first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was a flamboyant, larger-than-life character who nonetheless took his profession very seriously. As the chef of London's Reform Club, he modernised its kitchens, installing refrigerators and gas cookers. They became something of a showpiece, even opening for tours. In contrast, Soyer also organised soup kitchens during the Great Famine in Ireland and volunteered his services in the Crimea in 1855 to improve military catering. He was also a prolific inventor of kitchen gadgets, notably promoting the Magic Stove, used for cooking food at the table. This work, first published in 1849, was aimed at the middle classes. Conceived as a dialogue between two housewives, it contains hundreds of recipes and tips, giving modern readers a rich insight into household management of the time. Also reissued in this series are Soyer's Gastronomic Regenerator (1846) and Culinary Campaign (1857).

Perhaps the first celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58) was a flamboyant, larger-than-life character who nonetheless took his profession very seriously. As the chef of London's Reform Club, he modernised its kitchens, installing refrigerators and gas cookers. They became something of a showpiece, even opening for tours. In contrast, Soyer also organised soup kitchens during the Great Famine in Ireland and volunteered his services in the Crimea in 1855 to improve military catering. He was also a prolific inventor of kitchen gadgets, notably promoting the Magic Stove, used for cooking food at the table. This work, first published in 1846, is an illustrated culinary textbook - complete with plans for different types of kitchen and nearly 2,000 recipes - written primarily for grander households with a large kitchen staff, but not neglecting those with more modest budgets. Also reissued in this series are Soyer's Modern Housewife or Ménagère (1849) and his Culinary Campaign (1857).

ABSTRACTOver half of all victims of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) were children. Many of these deaths took place in the union workhouses: institutions of government poor relief which for many were the last resort in a desperate struggle to survive famine-induced conditions such as starvation and infectious disease. Archaeological excavations of a mass burial ground dating to 1847–1851 at the former workhouse in Kilkenny City have provided the opportunity to undertake a detailed interdisciplinary exploration of non-adult mortality in an Irish workhouse during the height of the Famine.