Great Irish Famine Research Articles

Climax of Clearance: Famine, Race and Compulsory Emigration

This public lecture considers the impact of the 1840s European potato blight on Scotland. It focuses especially on the Highlands, where phytophthora infestans exposed the people of the region to acute life-threatening crisis. Throughout, comparisons and contrasts are drawn with the Great Irish Famine ( an Gorta Mór) which has attracted much more scholarly and popular attention than the famine in Scotland. One key question is why did the Highlands not starve, unlike the appalling tragedy over the Irish Sea? Devine further describes how Highland famine triggered an unprecedented scale and intensity of ‘clearance’, forced removal of people from their traditional holdings, which emptied entire districts of their people. He concludes by querying whether the era of Clearance ended with the removal of forced mass eviction, or whether other strategies by the landed class served to compel Highlanders to leave.

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine, by Cian T. McMahon

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine, by Cian T. McMahon

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine

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 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)

Cian T. McMahon. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine.

Journal Article Cian T. McMahon. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. Get access Cian T. McMahon. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 314. Paper $23.00. Marguerite Corporaal Marguerite Corporaal Radboud University, Netherlands Email: m.corporaal@let.ru.nl Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1030–1031, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad221 Published: 22 June 2023

The Great Irish Famine in Irish and UK history textbooks, 2010–2020

This article considers the representation of the controversial issue of the Great Irish Famine (1845–50) in 27 recent Irish and UK history textbooks for the secondary level. Key contested issues – imports and exports, the British government’s laissez-faire economic policy, providentialist interpretations, and victim–perpetrator discourses – have long formed part of the narrative repertoire of Famine history; their representation and narrativisation in textbooks is analysed through narrative and content analysis. Historical contextualisation and perspective taking are considered key skills for students studying history; these skills become even more important when dealing with controversial issues. The questions central to this research are: How do secondary-level history textbooks from Ireland and the UK represent the key contested elements regarding the Famine? Do they provide sufficiently complex accounts, thereby facilitating historical contextualisation and perspective taking? While some Irish and UK textbooks offer learners complex representations of the Famine, several others provide students with insufficient opportunity for perspective taking, and for developing a thorough understanding of the historical context. Specifically, the majority of the textbooks provide simplistic victim–perpetrator discourses. As such issues complicate historical contextualisation, perspective taking and, relatedly, empathy formation, the article suggests including more complex subject positions in textbook discussions of the Famine.

Cian T. McMahon. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. The Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. $35.00 (cloth).

Cian T. McMahon. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. The Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. $35.00 (cloth). - Volume 62 Issue 1

Archives as 'Thin Places': Resurrecting ghosts of Australia's earliest refugees through poetics of resistance

Drawing on the Irish notion of a ‘thin place’ (where the veil between us and the spirit world is so thin that we can sense those on the other side), this paper outlines an approach to archival research and creative practice which seeks to reawaken and give voice to the ghosts of some of Australia’s earliest refugees. This work uncovers new connections between the Great Irish Famine, a humanitarian crisis which halved Ireland’s population and the cyclical incarceration and abuse of young women in New South Wales in the 1860s and 1870s—to highlight a small but significant, yet largely unwritten, chapter in Irish-Australian history. Employing poetics of resistance incorporating elements of these young women’s outlawed native Irish language and culture, this work seeks to decolonise their memories and restore voice to those who suffered the brutal consequences of colonisation in both their native and adopted countries.

Population and Poverty in Ireland on the Eve of the Great Famine

We revisit the link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland and harness highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 census in our analysis. The results indicate that on the eve of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, population pressure was positively associated with two measures of poverty-illiteracy and the prevalence of poor-quality housing. Malthus mattered in the sense that our results indicate that a "no population growth" scenario between 1800 and 1841 would have led to a 6% improvement in poor-quality housing and a 4% reduction in illiteracy. However, the strength of this relationship is reduced when additional explanatory factors are considered, and factors relating to location and economic geography offer greater explanatory power. Incorporation of data from the 1821 census reveals that in the two decades before 1841, population growth was fastest in areas under less population pressure, supporting the notion that preventive check forces were at play. These findings are consistent with some elements of Malthusian theory, although ultimately they refute the notion that overpopulation was the principal cause of pre-Famine Irish poverty.

Re-staging the 1916 Rising: Eugene McCabe’s Pull Down a Horseman (1966)

ABSTRACT The essay addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

Famine and Free Trade in the Covid Age: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine

Governments over two centuries have repeatedly confronted whether freer trade helps or hinders the problem of widespread food shortages. This issue is of utmost concern in the current pandemic and the accompanying reaction of food markets to COVID-19, in which food insecurity is now a central challenge. This article will consider the historical record of the Great Famine in Ireland and its economic, agronomic, and political lessons for food and trade policy. These lessons include the likelihood of supply chain disruptions and panic buying as well as export restrictions, food purchases from abroad and the complexities of political and military strife. It finds that allowing market forces to cause freer flows of commodities is important if not sufficient to deal with the crises that pandemics cause. Resolute political intervention is also critical: the historical record reinforces the role of political leadership in this process. Corn Laws, Tariffs, COVID-19, Potato Blight, Great Irish Famine, Robert Peel

“A Painful and Tender Sympathy Pervaded Every Class of Society”

AbstractThe Great Irish Famine was a moment of unprecedented global giving. Sympathy for the suffering Irish traversed class hierarchies and vast geographical spaces, with indentured workers in the West Indies donating alongside members of the royal family and attendees at charity balls and galas in New York, Port Elizabeth, and Surrey. This article examines the socioeconomic geographies of this giving. It provides a quantitative analysis that brings together donations from both sides of the Atlantic, approaching these donors as a single global community. This famine giving is also considered within the context of wider traditions of Western humanitarianism. The article suggests that although famine humanitarianism mobilized a vast community of donors and traversed class, gender, and ethnic groups, it was ultimately a conservative force that upheld social hierarchies and replicated the socioeconomic and racial inequalities that characterize Western humanitarianism more generally.

A Modest Proposal: New directions in researching and understanding Ireland's Great Famine

AbstractThe Great Irish Famine of 1845–1852 was a defining event in the development of modern Ireland. As a result of large‐scale and sustained emigration, it was also a transnational event, creating diasporas that regarded the Famine as their foundation story. Following decades of silence and limited scholarship, the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of potato blight in 1995 triggered a global interest that extended far beyond academia. This overview of the historiography and recent debates concerning the Great Famine suggests a vibrancy and an interest that shows no sign of abating. It has resulted in an ever‐growing body of scholarship that is constantly providing fresh and nuanced ways of understanding this tragedy, through the use of new methodological and theoretical approaches and partnerships with professionals outside the academy.

Politics as Usual: Charles Edward Trevelyan and the Irish and Scottish Fisheries Before and During the Great Famine

Since the Great Irish Famine a debate has raged concerning the culpability of the British government, especially in the person of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan, and its failure to come to the aid of the starving Irish. On one end of the debate, Trevelyan is accused of severe prejudice against the Irish, with some ultra-nationalists even accusing him of genocide. On the other end, Trevelyan is viewed simply as an ideologue intent on enforcing the Whig view of laissez-faire economics. However, a study of government involvement in the Irish and Scottish fishing industries shows that the political situation before and during the Famine was more complex than the traditional debate indicates. This paper argues that the government’s treatment of the Irish fisheries, which were in a dismal state compared to the Scots, had more to do with political realities that Trevelyan inherited and could not ignore.

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Cian T. McMahon

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Cian T. McMahon

Potatoes in Ireland: Sixty years of potato research and development, market evolution and perspectives on future challenges

Potato is often considered synonymous with Ireland, due to the great Irish famine in 1845, and remains the most important primary food crop in Ireland. Over the last 60 yr, the area of potatoes has reduced from 86,000 ha to 9,000 ha. This trend has occurred in most developed countries but in Ireland it is due to decreasing consumption, increasing yield, decline in seed production and potatoes no longer being use for animal feed. Significant specialisation occurred in the industry during the 1990s, with improvements in agronomy, on farm investment in storage and field equipment, consolidation of packing facilities, and a significant shift in cultivar choice, with Rooster becoming the dominant cultivar. These developments led to an increase in yield from 20 t/ha in the mid-1980s to over 40 t/ha today. Potato research in Ireland has focused on breeding, pathology and agronomy, while there have been significant changes in how knowledge is communicated to growers and the industry in this period. The industry faces many challenges in the future, largely framed by climate change, the need to reduce fertiliser and plant protection products as part of the EU Farm to Fork Strategy and industry size constraints. New superior potato varieties and novel breeding techniques will have potential to help address many challenges in combination with integrated pest management principles. Multi-actor approaches will be necessary to address all challenges but particularly to aid the industry grow and exploit emerging opportunities.

Book Review: The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea During the Great Irish Famine

Book Review: The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea During the Great Irish Famine

Financial Inclusion with Hybrid Organizational Forms: Microfinance, Philanthropy, and the Poor Law in Ireland, c. 1836–1845

The turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form, Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenable.

The Great Irish Famine: visual and material culture. Edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. Pp xvi, 275. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2018. £24.95. - The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations. Edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray. Pp xiv, 322. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2019. €75.95.

The Great Irish Famine: visual and material culture. Edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. Pp xvi, 275. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2018. £24.95. - The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations. Edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray. Pp xiv, 322. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2019. €75.95. - Volume 45 Issue 167

Was the Great Irish Famine a Colonial Famine?

This article reviews the historical debate on the colonial causation and dimensions of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50. It does so by briefly reviewing the evolution of the colonial relationship between Great Britain and Ireland before focusing on a number of specific fields of debate relating to the coloniality of the Irish famine. These include the economic structures and dynamics developing over the century before 1845 and the vulnerability of Irish society, the vector of the potato blight and its impact on food availability, and, most extensively, the motivations for and characteristics of British state response to the catastrophe. The variant interpretations of these factors in the nationalist, revisionist, post-revisionist, and post-colonial historiography are reviewed. The author concludes by drawing on his own primary research to suggest that, while shaped by colonial stereotypes and a preoccupation with social engineering, the British state and public response to the Irish crisis was varied and not intentionally genocidal, although ultimately subordinating humanitarianism to perceived British national interest. Critical British contemporaries drew negative parallels between the neglect of Ireland and the prioritization of imperial expansion overseas, while Irish nationalists concluded that the mortality of the famine demonstrated the bankruptcy of the British-Irish Union of 1800.