Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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 inHungry 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