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Famines in European Economic
History

This volume explores economic, social and political dimensions of three cata-
strophic famines which struck mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
Europe; the Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór) of 1845–1850, the Finnish Famine
(Suuret Nälkävuodet) of the 1860s and the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor) of
1932/1933.
In addition to providing new insights into these events on international,
national and regional scales, this volume contributes to an increased comparative
historiography in historical famine studies. The parallel studies presented in this
book challenge and enhance established understandings of famine tragedies,
including: famine causation and culpability; social and regional famine vulnera-
bilities; core–periphery relationships between nations and regions; degrees of
national autonomy and self-sufficiency; as well as famine memory and identity.
Famines in European Economic History advocates that the impact and long-
term consequences of famine for a nation should be understood in the context of
evolving geopolitical relations that extend beyond its borders. Furthermore,
regional structures within a nation can lead to unevenness in both the severity of
the immediate famine crisis and the post-famine recovery.
This book will be of interest to those in the fields of economic history, Euro-
pean history and economic geography.

Declan Curran is Lecturer in Development Economics and Industrial Eco-

nomics at Dublin City University Business School, Ireland.

Lubomyr Luciuk is Professor of Political Geography at the Royal Military

College of Canada and Fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the Univer-
sity of Toronto.

Andrew G. Newby is Senior Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland, Uni-

versity of Helsinki, Finland.
Routledge explorations in economic history
Edited by Lars Magnusson
Uppsala University, Sweden

1 Economic Ideas and 7 Production Efficiency in

Government Policy Domesday England, 1086
Contributions to contemporary John McDonald
economic history
Sir Alec Cairncross 8 Free Trade and its Reception
1815–1960
2 The Organization of Labour Freedom and trade: volume I
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The gold standard and beyond Reconsidered
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14 The Role of Banks in 23 The Origins of National Financial
Monitoring Firms Systems
The case of the Crédit Mobilier Alexander Gerschenkron
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Edited by Douglas J. Forsyth and
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46 A Cultural History of Finance
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38 Reflections on the Cliometrics
Revolution
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Conversations with economic
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Edited by John S. Lyons,
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Edited by Pedro Lains and Helen J. Paul
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Edited by Joshua Rosenbloom Matthias Matthijs
51 Bengal Industries and the 60 The History of Bankruptcy
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52 The Evolving Structure of the
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since 1700 Disaster and
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plant breeding An economic history 1815–1939
Jonathan Harwood Robert Millward

58 Economic Analysis of 66 Privatization and Transition in

Institutional Change in Ancient Russia in the Early 1990s
Greece Carol Scott Leonard and
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From ancient Babylonia to the Perspectives from economics,
modern world politics and sociology
Edited by R.J. van der Spek, Edited by Francesca Fauri
Jan Luiten van Zanden and
Bas van Leeuwen 71 Famines in European Economic
History
69 Central Banking in a The last great European famines
Democracy reconsidered
The Federal Reserve and its Edited by Declan Curran,
alternatives Lubomyr Luciuk and
John H. Wood Andrew G. Newby
Famines in European
Economic History
The last great European famines
reconsidered

Edited by Declan Curran,

Lubomyr Luciuk and Andrew G. Newby
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 selection and editorial matter, Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk
and Andrew G. Newby; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial matter,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Famines in European economic history: the last great European famines
reconsidered / edited by Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk and Andrew Newby.
pages cm
1. Famines–Europe–History. 2. Europe–Economic conditions–19th
century. 3. Europe–Economic conditions–20th century. I. Curran,
Declan. II. Luciuk, Lubomyr Y. III. Newby, Andrew G.
HC240.9.F3F36 2015
363.8094–dc23 2014044066
ISBN: 978-0-415-65681-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-70852-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

List of figures xi
List of maps xii
List of tables xiii
Notes on contributors xiv

Famines in European economic history: introduction 1

DECLAN CURRAN, LUBOMYR LUCIUK AND ANDREW G. NEWBY

PART I
The Great Irish Famine [An Gorta Mór], 1845 to 1850 17

1 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson: the Irish famine across

many geographical scales 19
DECLAN CURRAN

2 Tracing ‘the march of the enemy’: regional and local

experiences of the Irish famine 48
MARY KELLY

3 ‘The Great British Famine of 1845 to 1850’? Ireland, the

UK and peripherality in famine relief and philanthropy 83
PETER GRAY

PART II
Finnish Famine [Suuret Nälkävuodet], 1867 to 1868 97

4 Finland’s ‘famine years’ of the 1860s: a nineteenth-century

perspective 99
ANTTI HÄKKINEN AND HENRIK FORSBERG
x Contents
5 Feeding the famine: social vulnerability and dislocation
during the Finnish famine of the 1860s 124
MIIKKA VOUTILAINEN

6 ‘The terrible visitation’: famine in Finland and Ireland 1845

to 1868: towards an agenda for comparative Irish–Finnish
famine studies 145
ANDREW G. NEWBY AND TIMO MYLLYNTAUS

PART III
Ukrainian Famine [Holodomor], 1932 to 1933 167

7 The origins and course of the famine of 1932 to 1933 in

Soviet Ukraine 171
BOHDAN KLID

8 Famine losses in Ukraine in 1932 to 1933 within the context

of the Soviet Union 192
OMELIAN RUDNYTSKYI, NATALIIA LEVCHUK,
OLEH WOLOWYNA AND PAVLO SHEVCHUK

9 The uses of hunger: Stalin’s solution of the peasant and

national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933 223
ANDREA GRAZIOSI

Index 261
Figures

A1.1 Irish GDP per capita, 1700 to 2004 40

A1.2 Irish population trends, 1700 to 2000 40
A1.3 Total Irish emigration, 1821 to 1900 41
4.1 Population of Finland, 1750 to 1900 104
4.2 The number of agrarian population of Finland by social
group and year 105
4.3 Annual deaths per 1,000 in Finland, 1749 to 2000 108
8.1 Time series of adjusted numbers of births and deaths for
Ukraine, Central Asia and Transcaucasus, 1927 to 1938 204
Maps

PI.1 Provinces and counties of Ireland 18

2.1 Population change, 1821 to 1841 54
2.2 Population density per acre of crop land, 1841 55
2.3 Potato acres per acre of crops, 1851 56
2.4 Population change, 1841 to 1851 57
2.5 Land valuation per acre, 1851 59
2.6 Farm sizes at county level, 1841 60
2.7 Excess mortality, 1841 to 1851 62
2.8 Workhouses in operation, 1845 67
2.9 Proportion of people not paying rates, 1846 68
2.10 Proportion of rates not collected, 1848 70
2.11 Distressed unions and new unions 72
2.12 Population change, 1851 to 1891 75
2.13 Farm sizes at county level, 1851 76
PII.1 Map of Finland 98
4.1 The Grand Duchy of Finland in 1867 and the areas that
suffered most from the famine 110
5.1 Spatial distribution of clusters: townships in administrational
districts 134
5.2 Excess mortality in administrational districts: crude mortality
in comparison to average of 1861 to 1865 136
PIII.1 Direct famine losses in Ukraine by region, per 1,000
population, 1933 167
Tables

1.1 Comparison of European population growth rates, 1750 to

1845 25
1.2 Provincial population growth rates, 1791 to 1821 and 1821 to
1841 26
1.3 Average annual excess death rates, 1846 to 1851, by county 30
5.1 Township level variables of interest 131
5.2 Estimated two-step clusters 133
5.3 Zero-truncated negative binomial regression results for
township-level excess mortality 137
8.1 Summary of available Soviet birth, death and migration data,
1926 to 1939 194
8.2 Official and adjusted total populations from the 1926 and
1939 Soviet censuses: USSR and seven regions 195
8.3 Population balance for the USSR and seven regions, 1927
to 1938 203
8.4 Year intervals used for linear interpolations of age-specific
mortality and fertility rates to simulate non-crisis mortality
and fertility trends 207
8.5 Direct losses (excess deaths) in numbers and per 1,000
population 209
8.6 Indirect losses (lost births) in numbers and per 1,000
population 211
A8.1 Adjustment steps of 1939 census’ total populations for the
USSR and its seven regions 215
Contributors

Declan Curran lectures in Development Economics and Industrial Economics

at Dublin City University Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics
from University of Hamburg. He is also a contributor to the volume Global
Legacies of the Great Irish Famine (2014). His research interests focus on
industrial development and economic geography.
Henrik Forsberg received his MA degree in History in 2011 and is currently a
doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki. His ongoing research project
compares Irish and Finnish historical cultures and specifically how famine
has been incorporated into various national narratives from the 1850s to the
1960s. He has previously published on the politicisation of Finnish famine
memory and actively engages in international collaborations within the fields
of nationalism, politics of memory and famine studies.
Peter Gray is Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast.
His research specialism is in the history of British–Irish relations c.1800 to
1870, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1850 and
the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. Notable publica-
tions include a history of the origins and implementation of the 1838 Irish
Poor Law Act entitled The Making of the Irish Poor Law 1815–43 (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 2009) and Famine, Land and Politics:
British government and Irish society 1843–1850 (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1999). He served as chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s National Com-
mittee for Historical Sciences from 2007 to 2010 and was elected a Member
of the Royal Irish Academy in 2013.
Andrea Graziosi is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of
Naples ‘Federico II’ (Università di Napoli ‘Federico II’), as well as Research
Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has also served as
president (2011–2013) of the Panel for Research Evaluation in History, Philo-
sophy, Geography, Anthropology, Psychology and Education, Italian State
University System. He has authored numerous books and articles on modern
East European, Soviet and Ukrainian history, including the influential The
Great Soviet Peasant War. Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918–1934 (Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute, 1997).
 Contributors xv
Antti Häkkinen is Docent in Social History at the University of Helsinki, where
he has worked as a researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of Polit-
ical and Economic Studies the since the 1980s. His research fields cover the
history of health, ethnic relations, social problems, economic and hunger
crisis, and the intergenerational transmission of economic, social and human
capital. He is currently managing ‘Ten Generations – Three Centuries: A
Finnish History as Family Stories’, a project which will reconstruct 300 years
of Finland’s history through the life histories of hundreds of Finnish families,
comprising more than 100,000 individual life stories.
Mary Kelly lectures in social and cultural geography at the Department of Geo-
graphy, Geology and the Environment at Kingston University London. Her
research interests are in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. She has
published on population change, literature and identity, and the Irish famine.
Bohdan Klid is Assistant Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
(CIUS), Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta. He is a historian who is also
research director of the Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium
(HREC) at CIUS. He is co-editor of the Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on
the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, 2012), and has authored
articles on Ukrainian historiography and on contemporary popular music and
politics in Ukraine.
Nataliia Levchuk is Senior Researcher at the Ptoukha-Institute of Demography
and Social Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is involved
in a research project estimating 1932 to 1934 famine losses in Ukraine, which is
a part of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Holodomor Atlas Project.
She has published on public health issues and their impact on the demography
of Ukraine and the 1932/1933 Famine. Recent publications are: ‘A Country
Divided? Regional Variation in Mortality in Ukraine’, International Journal of
Public Health 58(6), 837–844, and ‘Demography of a Man-made Human Cata-
strophe: The Case of Massive Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933’, Canadian
Studies in Population (forthcoming).
Lubomyr Luciuk is Professor of Political Geography at the Royal Military College
of Canada. He is the author, editor and co-editor of a number of books dealing
with twentieth-century Ukraine and the Ukrainian Diaspora, among them The
Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on the Great Famine of
1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Limestone Press, 1988), Searching for Place:
Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada and the Migration of Memory (University
of Toronto Press, 2000), Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of
1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kashtan Press, 2008), The Holy See and the
Holodomor (Toronto, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, 2011) and Jews, Ukrainians
and the Euromaidan (Toronto, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, 2014). With Kyiv’s
Dr Volodymyr Viatrovych, he is currently working on a two-volume documen-
tary collection, Enemy Archives, dealing with Soviet counterinsurgency efforts in
western Ukraine before, during and after the Second World War.
xvi Contributors
Timo Myllyntaus is Professor of Finnish History at the University of Turku. He
gained his first two degrees from the University of Helsinki and a PhD in
Economic History from the London School of Economics. His research inter-
ests stretch from social history and environmental history to the development
of everyday technology. His edited volumes include the special issue of ICON
(no. 16) entitled Technology in Everyday Life (2012), and Pathbreakers,
Small European Countries Responding to Globalisation and De-globalisation
(co-edited with Margret Müller (2008)). He is President of the Committee for
the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).

Andrew G. Newby is Senior Research Fellow of the Finnish Academy, and Asso-
ciate Professor (Docent) in European Area and Cultural Studies at the University
of Helsinki. He is principal investigator of the research project ‘ “The Terrible
Visitation”, Famine in Finland and Ireland, c.1845–1868: Transnational, Com-
parative and Long-Term Perspectives’. He is the author of many articles on dif-
ferent aspects of Northern European history, society and culture, of Ireland,
Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands (2007) and The Life and Times of
Edward McHugh (2004). He is also co-editor of Michael Davitt: New Perspec-
tives (2009), and Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements (2012).

Omelian Rudnytskyi is Senior Researcher at the Ptoukha-Institute of Demo-

graphy and Social Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His
area of research is the historical demography of Ukraine and, specifically, the
estimation of population losses of Ukraine in the twentieth century. He is the
author of a comprehensive reconstruction of the population of Ukraine in
the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. His latest publication is ‘Demographic
Aspects of the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine’ in Proceedings of the Confer-
ence on Famines in Ukraine during the First Half of the XXth Century:
Causes and consequences (1921–1923, 1932–1933, 1946–1947) (Kyiv, 20–12
November 2013, pp. 281–289).

Pavlo Shevchuk is Research Fellow at the Department for Demographic Model-

ling and Forecasting, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He graduated
from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1997. He obtained his
PhD in 2002 at the Council of Productive Forces of Ukraine. His research
interests include population projections, population ageing, demographic
methods and models.

Miikka Voutilainen holds an MA in Economic History and an MSc in Eco-

nomics, and is a doctoral student at the University of Jyväskylä. His doctoral
thesis concerns the long-term socio-economic background of the Finnish
famine of the 1860s, with other research interests dealing with long-term eco-
nomic growth and social and economic inequality.

Oleh Wolowyna is Research Fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and
Eastern European Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is
 Contributors xvii
also Director of the Center for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research on
Ukrainians in the United States. He is a contributor to the Holodomor Reader:
A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, 2012),
and has published articles in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies and The
Ukrainian Quarterly.
This page intentionally left blank
Famines in European economic
history
Introduction
Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk and
Andrew G. Newby

The young laughing full faces, and brilliant eyes, and buoyant limbs, had become
walking-skeletons of death! When I saw one approaching, with his emaciated
fingers locked together before him, his body in a bending position, as all gener-
ally crawled along, if I had neither bread nor money to give, I turned from the
path; for, instead of the ‘God save ye kindly,’ or ‘Ye look wary, lady,’ which had
ever been the salutation to me on the mountains, I knew it would be the implor-
ing look or the vacant sepulchral stare, which, once fastened upon you, leaves its
impress for ever.1
(Asenath Nicholson (American Evangelist) on famine in Ireland, 1851)

Bread has also been made of hay, of stems of peas, and of husks of malt, but
these wretched substitutes have failed to stay the progress of the famine, and it
has swept before it the inhabitants of whole villages, whose lifeless and emaci-
ated bodies have alone remained to memorialise at once their past existence and
their suffering. This state of things continues, and help is urgently needed.2
(Thomas Harvey (English Quaker) on famine in Finland, 1868)

We have arrived at the station. My God! what a sight! I shall never forget it.
Poverty, filth, disease and hunger everywhere. Women in rags and tatters are
lying about in the dust and dirt half asleep with emaciated little babies sucking
their empty breasts. I can see one poor woman with four small children . . . I see a
little girl who looks about ten years old to judge from her skinny little body but
her face looks like that of a woman thirty years old. She is taking care of a baby
whose face is purple with cold . . . I smiled at the child but she didn’t smile back;
I’m wondering if she has ever learned to smile.3
(Zetta Wells (American traveller and TV presenter) on famine in Ukraine, 1933)

The testimonies of foreign witnesses to famine often reproduce familiar tropes in

order to convey the extent of the suffering, ensuring that descriptions have a
global resonance. And yet, famines have regularly been treated as distinctive
national calamities, reinforcing the unity of a people through a shared calamitous
experience, or ‘othering’ an imperial power or outside agency. The chapters in
2 D. Curran et al.
this volume explore various aspects of three catastrophic famines which struck
mid-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe: the Great Irish Famine (An
Gorta Mór) of 1845 to 1850, the Finnish Famine of the late 1860s (referred to in
this volume by the Finnish phrase Suuret Nälkävuodet – ‘Great Hunger Years’),
and the Ukrainian Famine (commonly known as the Holodomor, ‘Death by Star-
vation’) of 1932 to 1933. In addition to providing new insights into these events,
on international, national and regional scales, the overall volume contributes to
an increased comparative historiography in historical famine studies, and
responds in particular to calls from Irish scholars to ensure that the Great Irish
Famine is set in a broader international context.4 As is often the case with com-
parative history, the contrasts between the cases, rather than the similarities, can
be the most instructive in reassessing national narratives or in overcoming
exceptionalism or path-dependency.

Recognising comparisons and contrasts

Irish scholars have recognised the Ukrainian famine of 1932/1933 as a tragedy
of comparable proportions to that experienced in Ireland in the 1840s. For
example, Peter Gray, in the context of the 150th anniversary of the Great Irish
Famine, noted the Ukrainian famine experience: ‘no peacetime European social
crisis since the seventeenth century, with the possible exception of the Ukrainian
famine of the early 1930s, has equalled it in intensity of scale.’5 The Finnish case
has also been noted in Irish work. Cormac Ó Gráda, for example, has emphas-
ised the social and spatial disparities and vulnerabilities inherent in both the Irish
and Finnish famine experiences – features explored in this volume: ‘there are
obvious parallels and contrasts worth pursuing: differential impact by region, the
causes of death and the variation in deaths by age and sex, functioning of
markets and communications networks.’6 More recently, Niall Ó Ciosáin’s
review of the Atlas of Great Irish Famine noted a dearth of comparative work,
particularly between Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Finland in the nine-
teenth century.7
From a Finnish perspective, Varpu Ikonen’s broad comparative overview of
the Finnish and Irish famines (1991) highlights Ó Gráda’s assertion that the
Finnish case is ‘internationally relatively unknown’, and discusses the shared
problems of rapid population growth and a lack of pre-famine economic diver-
sity.8 A start towards addressing the historiographical gaps highlighted by
Ó Ciosáin has been made recently with some of output from the Academy of Fin-
land’s project, ‘The Terrible Visitation: Famine in Finland and Ireland
c.1845–68’.9 In the early twenty-first century, the ‘transnational turn’ in historical
research has started to make an impact in both Finland and Ireland. Recent years
have seen the formation of the Transnational Ireland research cluster, and the
Finnish Centre of Excellence in Historical Research features a regular Finland in
Comparison seminar, based at the University of Tampere.10 The International
Network of Irish Famine Studies, based in Nijmegen and established in 2014 with
funding from the Dutch Research Council, also symbolises the willingness to
 Introduction 3
analyse these catastrophes from interdisciplinary but also international perspec-
tives.11 An international perspective also forms part of the mission statement of
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, whose recent Atlas of the Holodomor
project is discussed further below.12 Although the national paradigm seems to
remain dominant in historical research and teaching, these research groups
demonstrate an increased willingness to adopt a comparative approach.

Bilateral and trilateral comparisons

The Finnish and Irish famines were relatively close in time, which allows for
comparison within a context of emerging nationalist (and eventually separatist)
movements in the two countries, as well as the relationship with the imperial
powers and the effect this had on the famine relief efforts. Newby and Myllyn-
taus’ chapter in this volume, in particular, forms an agenda for the comparative
studies of the famines in Ireland and Finland. Here, the authors warn that despite
the superficial similarities between the two countries in the nineteenth century,
there were important constitutional and social differences which affected how
the famines were tackled and remembered.
In seeking bilateral comparisons, it is arguably Ireland and Ukraine that are
more comparable from the point of view of the politicisation of famines, and
their appropriation in collective memory and national identity formation. Recent
research presented by Noack, Janssen and Comerford has initiated a strand of
comparative study of the Great Irish Famine and Ukrainian Holodomor, which
probes the competing national narratives that have sought to interpret the famine
experiences of both Ireland and Ukraine.13 What emerge are complex pictures of
economic, social, cultural, and institutional structures and transformations, both
on the eve of famine and in its aftermath. The literary critic, Terry Eagleton,
referred to the Great Irish Famine as ‘the greatest social disaster of nineteenth-
century Europe, an event with something of the characteristics of a low-level
nuclear attack’.14 The Ukrainian Holodomor has also formed the basis for
evocative narratives. In discussing Ukraine, Heorhiy Kasianov writes: ‘the
1932–33 famine emerged as a topic in Ukrainian political and public discourse
during the mid-1980s and formed part of an overall critique of the Soviet past’,
which characterised the Holodomor as a ‘tragedy of global dimensions, no less
tragic than the Holocaust’.15 A comparative context provides a basis for chal-
lenging established, often evocative, explanations of famine-era phenomena such
as the workings of government relief efforts – and the underlying political pro-
cesses which shaped such responses, famine-induced migration, post-famine
demographic patterns, as well as the wide-ranging social and cultural ruptures
brought about by the famine-era suffering and dislocation.

Death-tolls
Although many of the comparative elements to be found within this volume may
be considered ‘bilateral’, there are nevertheless some common elements in all
4 D. Curran et al.
three cases. For example, the relative death-tolls can be examined – not as a
means of instigating a competition of grief, or grievance, but because of the
ways in which the figures in all cases defy precise enumeration, even though
consensus may be reached on the general order of magnitude. Casualty figures
for the Irish and Ukrainian famines, in particular, remain contested, subject to
different methodologies (such as the time-span for the calamities) and, often,
politically oriented perspectives.
Statistically, there are stark differences in the sheer numbers of deaths caused
by starvation or famine-related disease in the three case studies. Nevertheless,
when examining the relative percentages of the national populations implicated
in the crises, it seems fair to conclude that the contemporary designations of the
three events as ‘Great’ famines withstand scrutiny. In a more general com-
parative sense, a number of trilateral comparisons are evident between the Irish,
Finnish and Ukrainian famine experiences: in each case famine conditions led to
devastating loss of life and social dislocation. This study sees us move beyond
comparison as a means of benchmarking the relative death-toll of a particular
famine, towards a discussion of the spatial and socio-economic processes and
relationships that characterised the onslaught of each famine crisis.
While the most striking parallel across these three famine tragedies is their
appalling level of death and dislocation, the extent of famine-related mortality has
not been resolved in all three cases. A certain level of consensus does appear to
have emerged in recent years regarding estimates of the death-toll resulting from
the Irish and Finnish famines. Excess mortality due to the Irish famine is believed
to be in the region of one million famine-related deaths from a population of 8.5
million, compared to the Finnish famine’s death-toll of between 100,000 and
150,000 from a population of 1.6 million.16 Nevertheless, figures remain contested
and there are still adherents to a higher death toll. In his Famine Plot (2012), Tim
Pat Coogan argues that the under-reporting of victims during the Irish famine, and
the inclusion of averted births in the statistics, would mean that nearly two million
deaths would be a more accurate figure.17 In the Ukrainian context, Donald Ray-
field has argued that the ‘death toll from the famine in 1932–33 seems to depend
upon the methodology and trustworthiness of the demographer’, even while accept-
ing that the Holodomor was genocidal.18 David Marples refers to ‘between three
[million] and ten million’ victims, depending on the source.19 Olga Papash has
argued ‘in current discussions on the 1932–33 famine, figures of up to ten million
victims are quoted’, noting that while these figures are ‘excessive’, they are none-
theless ‘taken for granted in the current Ukrainian historiographical mainstream’.20
Papash then claims that ‘any significant reduction [of the figure of ten million]
would not alter the situation much, as we would still be dealing with millions of
premature deaths’.21 Lubomyr Luciuk makes a similar point, observing that the
Holodomor was arguably ‘an act of genocide without parallel in European history’,
given that ‘many millions’ perished of hunger in Soviet Ukraine over a period of
some six months in 1932/1933.22
While the total extent of famine-related mortality in Soviet Ukraine is still
debated, with estimates of excess famine deaths ranging from 2.6 million23 to
 Introduction 5
five million, or higher, the contribution to this volume by Omelan Rudnytskyi,
24

Nataliia Levchuk and Pavlo Shevchuk (Institute for Demography and Social
Studies, Kyiv) with Oleh Wolowyna (University of North Carolina at Chapel),
as part of the Atlas of the Holodomor project undertaken by the Harvard Ukrain-
ian Research Institute, represents a pioneering initiative to estimate famine mor-
tality in Ukraine over the period 1932 to 1934.25 Their analysis, based on
reconstructed population data, reveals the variation in famine mortality across all
former Soviet republics, from extremely high levels in Ukraine and Kazakhstan
to very low levels in the Russian and Transcaucausian republics. Analyses of
direct population losses by region (oblast) within Soviet Ukraine show large
regional variations, from very high relative values in the Kyiv and Kharkiv
oblasts to very low values in the Donetsk oblast. This contribution yields an
estimate of total famine losses in Soviet Ukraine of 4.5 million, with 3.9 million
direct losses and 0.6 million indirect losses out of a population of approximately
30 million. They have estimated rural and urban excess deaths at equivalent to
16.5 and 4.0 per cent of the respective 1933 populations. Even more telling, and
one of the unique characteristics of the Holodomor, compared to all other
famines, is the extremely high concentration of deaths due to starvation in a very
short time period. Of the 3.9 million deaths during 1932 to 1934, 90 per cent
occurred in 1933, and among all rural deaths 83 per cent took place between
March and August of 1933. At the peak of this six-month period, June, the rate
of deaths by starvation averaged 31,000 per day, with more than 20,000 per day
in July and August 1933.26
In Finland, it was estimated that over 100,000 died in 1868, a figure that,
while much lower than the Ukrainian and Irish cases, nonetheless approached 10
per cent of the total population.27 Even in a country with excellent statistical
information, and a much less politicized historiography of the famine, however,
the figures for Finland can diverge considerably, mainly because of the different
interpretations of famine’s time-span. It should also be noted that the Finnish
historiography’s treatment of the 1860s famine is remarkable when approaching
it from an Irish or Ukrainian perspective, supporting Mary Daly’s more general
point about the Finns’ national ‘amnesia’ around the catastrophe. Some general
histories do not mention the famine years and the excess deaths at all, whereas
others deal with it cursorily.
This volume moves away, consciously, from a description of 1868 as an iso-
lated, remarkable year, and rather builds upon Kari Pitkänen’s earlier characteri-
sation of the period as a ‘decade of misery’.28 From an Irish perspective, of
course, the idea that successive disastrous harvest years led to escalating crisis
seems axiomatic. However, the idea that the Finns were visited by a single disas-
trous year precludes full analysis of the post-Crimean economic crisis, the role
of government in easing or exacerbating the crisis, or the application of ‘entitle-
ment theory’ more broadly to the case. This long-term problem of recurrent
famine was well known to contemporaries, both in Finland and abroad. In 1857,
for example, one English newspaper reported on ‘hundreds of fellow creatures
dwindling away into moving skeletons and at length staggering to their graves
6 D. Curran et al.
the victims of a general starvation’.29 Foreign audiences also read in 1862 of how
‘hosts’ of Finns were dying ‘lingering, fearful’ deaths, and how they would
‘perish on the road, to be devoured by dogs and wolves’.30 As may be seen in the
population graph provided in Häkkinen and Forsberg’s chapter in this volume,
there was a notch in the year 1868, just as there had been during the ‘Finnish
War’ between Sweden and Russia in 1808 to 1809, but overall the upward popu-
lation trend in Finland continued unaltered by the famine.
Of course, the human cost of such a tragedy greatly exceeded that conveyed
by estimated mortality rates. In the Irish case, estimates of excess mortality often
preclude averted births (a bone of contention, as noted above, with comment-
ators such as Tim Pat Coogan), believed to be in the region of 300,000, or
famine-related deaths abroad. The Irish famine also triggered a wave of mass
emigration, with over a million people emigrating from Ireland from 1846 to
1851.31 In the Finnish case, migration was internal in nature and reached a peak
in 1868 when approximately 100,000 individuals (5 per cent of the total popula-
tion) left their home parishes. Large-scale transatlantic emigration from Finland
commenced two decades after the worst of the famine years, and although Finns
did form an active political group in North America, they did not agitate to any
great extent against Russian rule up until Finnish independence in 1917.32 In the
Ukrainian case emigration was not an option, as Soviet Ukraine’s borders were
sealed, with no relief allowed in and no one allowed out, another striking differ-
ence between Ukraine’s famine and the Irish and Finnish experiences.33

Autonomy, causation and culpability

The events which directly triggered the Irish and Finnish famines are also well
established: both were subsistence crises, in the Irish case caused by the arrival
of the fungus phythophtera infestans to Irish shores in autumn 1845 and deci-
mating the potato crop in 1845, 1846 and 1848. In the Finnish case adverse
weather conditions led to widespread cereal crop failure in 1866 to 1867, which
put pressure on a society with grain stores already depleted by several bad har-
vests in the 1850s and early 1860s. Thus, the year of greatest mortality, 1868,
cannot be understood without the context of the previous years of dearth: 1857
to 1858, 1862 and 1865 to 1866.34 The calamity of 1867 to 1868 was not per-
ceived as a fully ‘national’ emergency by the politicians in Helsinki, and the nar-
rative developed around the idea of a general economic setback. This crisis was
deemed to have been caused in part by Finland’s readjustment in the 1860s to
playing a full role in the international economic system, as part of its fiscal auto-
nomy under Russian rule. As a result, Finns perceived their own plight as rather
different from that suffered two decades earlier by the Irish. By examining
Finland along with Ireland and Ukraine, it is possible to demonstrate that even in
the event of famine in an imperial context, it is not inevitable that the imperial
power will be made culpable for the catastrophe. Clearly, the existence of a
Home Rule Parliament in Helsinki offset some of the potential for blaming
the Russians for the 1860s famine, but there was also a strong element of
 Introduction 7
self-sufficiency within the national identity that was being constructed for the
Finns. Antti Häkkinen and Henrik Forsberg’s chapter in this volume notes that
the famine highlighted other social cleavages within Finland – cleavages which
have often been erased under a narrative of common struggle – but blaming the
authorities in St Petersburg was not on the agenda. There was no contemporary
recollection of the biblical term ‘holocaust’, as happened in Ireland, and nor has
there been any subsequent thought of there being an attempted ‘genocide’.
The issue of culpability has also been a contentious one in interpretations of the
Great Irish Famine. In documenting the historiography of the Irish Famine, Lee
and Donnelly note that academic scholarship had long been dismissive of the
genocidal interpretation embodied by John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland
(perhaps), published in 1861.35 This divergence in famine narratives is clearly
illustrated by the contrast between the two most prominent book-length studies of
famine to emerge prior to the 1990s: The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849 by
Woodham-Smith (1962),36 which shared many of Mitchel’s sentiments, and The
Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52 by Edwards and Williams (1957),
a revisionist work which eschewed the traditional nationalist view of the famine.
Since the 1980s a more nuanced characterisation of the Irish Famine has emerged
which challenges both nationalist and revisionist narratives. Terry Eagleton noted
that, although it was ‘misguided’, a nationalist cry of genocide over the Great
Famine was understandable, and that the ‘zealous sanitizing’ of the revisionist
school was ‘as tendentious as any nationalist polemic’.37
‘Post-revisionist’ studies have been influenced conceptually by contemporary
studies of hunger and poverty and methodologically by the emergence of new
statistical and econometric techniques (see e.g. the quantitative study of Mokyr,
and Ó Gráda’s discussion of Amartya Sen’s food entitlement view in the Irish
context). One notable contribution is that of Gray, who analyses the response of
British government and public opinion to the famine, in the context of famine-
era debates about the nature and future of Irish society. Gray, drawing on archi-
val material and the personal correspondence of famine-era policy-makers,
examines the prevailing ideologies among elite British politicians and civil ser-
vants during the famine years. What emerges is a dogmatic disdain among
British policy-makers for publicly funded relief efforts, predicated on ideas of
moralism, a providentialist view of the famine and laissez-faire economics,
which had deadly consequences for those enduring the deteriorating famine con-
ditions. This debate regarding famine culpability can be enriched by comparative
perspectives, as illustrated by Noack, Janssen and Comerford, who contend that
a distinction should be made between culpability which centres on adequacy of
government relief efforts and humaneness of intentions in the face of the crisis,
and culpability in which the government is the instigator of the crisis.38
In Ireland, the Great Famine was also constructed within a ‘less influential
militant socialist narrative, associated especially with James Connolly’, where it
was portrayed as a ‘class crime perpetrated against a peasant proletariat by
capitalist exploiters, domestic and foreign’.39 Where critique emerges in Finnish
historiography, it comes from a similar perspective. During the 1890s, the
8 D. Curran et al.
rapidly expanding Finnish proletariat was starting to mobilise itself under the
banner of socialism, and in the parliamentary elections in 1907 the social-
democratic party won an astounding majority. Finland’s political division was
starting to form along the lines of socialists and bourgeois, which eventually
clashed in the Civil War of 1918. This political demarcation is particularly inter-
esting when we look at the interpretations of the famine in the 1860s. While the
bourgeois side saw the famine as a heroic struggle, as an example of high moral
self-sacrifice for future generations,40 the socialist camp on the other hand saw it
as the starting point of capitalist oppression.41 In Ukraine’s case, the argument
over whether the famine was an act of genocide continues. However, recent
scholarship, notably the work of an interdisciplinary group mapping famine
losses and studying the further consequences of the famine for Ukrainian society,
corroborates the views of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, and
subsequently described the famine in Ukraine as an act of genocide.42

Famine vulnerabilities
One theme which recurs throughout this volume is that of ‘famine vulnerabilities’
– the role played by social and spatial disparities in exacerbating the impact of
famine, be it in Ireland, Finland or Ukraine. In analysing this issue, concepts eman-
ating from economic geography have been particularly informative. Economic
geography is an interdisciplinary field which emphasises both the role of ongoing
processes of economic change, which occur unevenly across a given geographical
or spatial scale, as well as the economic, social, cultural and institutional relation-
ships among regions.43 A prominent theme of economic geography is the diversity
of economic life, with the heterogeneity of people and places being seen as para-
mount – in contrast to the tendency of mainstream economics to seek universal
principles of economic behaviour. The intellectual foundations of economic geo-
graphy are strongly contested by economists and geographers. Within the discip-
line of economics, economic geography focuses on incorporating into international
trade theory the concepts of agglomeration economies, increasing returns to scale
and imperfect competition.44 In this volume, processes of economic and social
change, and the spatial unevenness with which these transformations were experi-
enced, are discussed in the context of specific incidences of famine-induced death,
human misery and social upheaval experienced in Ireland, Finland and Ukraine.

Long-term and multi-scale perspectives

The contribution of Declan Curran considers the spatiality of the Great Irish Famine,
advocating an analysis that situates distinct local and regional dimensions in their
national and international context. In this way, the evolving structure of pre-famine
Ireland’s economy and society in which social and spatial disparities were perpetu-
ated, the devastation wrought by the famine across an Ireland of uneven ‘famine vul-
nerabilities’, as well as the long-term socio-economic consequences for post-famine
Ireland, may be seen as taking place across many geographical scales simultaneously.
 Introduction 9
Bohdan Klid discusses the famine experienced in Ukraine in 1932 to 1933 in
the context of the 15 years of social and political upheaval which preceded it – a
period in which Soviet rule was established in Ukraine, Ukrainian agriculture was
collectivised, and grain procurement quotas were implemented. While situating
the Ukrainian famine in the context of the party-state’s policies towards the peas-
antry, Klid also explores the role played by Soviet policies aimed at quelling
Ukrainian nationalist resistance in exacerbating and exploiting famine conditions,
and the connections between the social and national questions in Ukraine.
Antti Häkkinen and Henrik Forsberg’s chapter sets the famine years of the
1860s into a longer nineteenth-century context, highlighting the economic and
social challenges and opportunities which the Finns experienced after their impe-
rial rulers changed from Sweden to Russia in 1809. Often associated with the
birth of modernity in Finland, Häkkinen and Forsberg argue that there was not a
straightforward causal relationship between the famine and the subsequent mod-
ernisation and economic progress made in Finland towards the end of the nine-
teenth century. Furthermore, they challenge the narrative set out by the founding
fathers of the nation, which promoted the idea of communality and self-
enlightenment, and which erased social and regional cleavages within the
country. The famine was presented as a national calamity as a means of uniting a
previous disparate people, but famine mortality was not shared equally, a point
which is further elucidated by Miikka Voutilainen in this volume.

Regional variations
Comparative studies also have the potential to uncover local details which have
perhaps been masked by grand national master-narratives, and this volume provides
a detailed local- and regional-level spatial analysis of the disparities inherent in how
each respective famine unfolded, as well as a consideration of the subsequent long-
run development of the famine-stricken regions, in terms of population dynamics
and socio-economic indicators. Mary Kelly presents and interprets the geography of
famine vulnerabilities emergent in pre-famine Ireland, utilising Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) methodologies. The social geography of pre-famine
Ireland is shown to be one of mounting destitution and impoverishment, as well as
one of complex but weak social structures. Mid-nineteenth-century Ireland was
characterised by an intricate mosaic of east–west and north–south socio-economic
and cultural-environmental configurations. These pre-existing local conditions
influenced how the ensuing distress was experienced by individuals and house-
holds. This local- and regional-level social complexity and spatial variation is
crucial to understanding the extent of famine suffering, mortality and emigration
flows, as well as obstacles hampering both effective local responses to famine and
the adequacy of official relief efforts at a local level. As Mary Kelly vividly demon-
strates, it was often in those very regions where deprivation was greatest and famine
conditions most severe that local agency and relief infrastructure were in shortest
supply. The contribution of Omelan Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna
and Pavlo Shevchuk, outlined above, further develops this discussion of regional
10 D. Curran et al.
variation of famine mortality. Their detailed reconstruction of population data yields
new estimates of famine mortality, and reveals the marked variation in mortality
rates, both at the level of Ukrainian regions (oblast) and across all former Soviet
republics for the period 1932 to 1934.45 In the Finnish case, Miikka Voutilainen
takes an economic perspective and uses archival data to outline the considerable
class and regional variations which occurred in the levels of suffering during the
worst year of the Finnish famine. Voutilainen supports Antti Häkkinen’s assertion
that social divisions in Finland were much greater than has been acknowledged in
the general historiography, and that although frost-induced harvest failures triggered
the famine, these natural events were exacerbated by man-made social conditions.

Memory and identity

In Holdomor and Gorta Mór, the editors quite rightly argue that ‘an obvious
parallel’ between the Irish and Ukrainian cases would be ‘the centrality of the
two famines for the development of modern Ireland and modern Ukraine’. This
led to both feeling ‘estranged from humanity’, and basing a national identity on
otherness and a key traumatic event in the development of the nation.46 However,
in the case of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932 to 1933 details have only begun to
emerge in recent decades and the events surrounding that famine have not yet
been fully resolved. It was not until 1956 that historians in the USSR were per-
mitted to use the term ‘food difficulties’ in reference to this period and, even
then, there was a prohibition against using the word ‘famine’. Until the late
1980s, the famine of 1932 to 1933 was officially denied by Soviet scholars and
officials. Outside of the Soviet Union, relatively little was known about the
Holodomor until the appearance of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow in
1986, which characterised the famine as an act of mass murder deliberately
inflicted upon Ukraine in order to repress Ukrainian nationalism. Further publi-
cations supporting a genocide interpretation of the Holodomor followed, from
Serbyn and Krawchenko to more recent examples, such as those by Naimark and
Kulchytskyi.47 This genocide thesis has been challenged by Davies and Wheat-
croft,48 Ellman49 and Kuromiya50 among others, who contend that the famine was
the unplanned result of Stalin’s catastrophic anti-peasant policies rather than a
deliberate attempt to inflict famine on Ukraine, even though Raphael Lemkin,
who coined the term ‘genocide’, applied it to the famine in Soviet Ukraine,
describing it as a ‘classic example of Soviet genocide’.51
Clearly, the Great Irish Famine has played a role in the identity of the nation.
Indeed, Vanessa Pupavac has called it ‘a founding myth of Irish nationalism’.52
Pupavac juxtaposes Ireland with the ‘virtually unknown’ Finnish crisis:

Strikingly, the later devastating Finnish famine of the 1860s did not lead to
political crisis and remains virtually unknown outside Finland; instead, the
traumatic experience prompted the Finnish state to industrialise its economy
and to shift from its reliance on subsistence farming. Such capacity for pro-
gressive social change seems anathema in today’s prevailing disaster models.53
 Introduction 11
Arguably, Pupavac could have gone even further – some histories of Finland do
not mention the famine at all, despite Arne Reunala’s assertion that the events of
1868 are ‘indelibly marked in the memory of the Finns’.54 Antti Häkkinen’s asser-
tion that ‘the impact of the [1868] famine on the economy was of short duration,
and better times soon compensated for the losses’ exemplifies the standard Finnish
economic historical narrative.55 The elision of the famine years into a narrative of
general economic crisis, the birth pangs of a nation, have certainly been one reason
why the 1860s do not have the same resonance in Finland as the 1840s in Ireland. A
further reason is the rather different core–periphery relationship between Finland
and the Russian Empire. In today’s Ukraine, meanwhile, the Holodomor has
increasingly come to be seen in the context of a Soviet legacy that undermined,
demographically, perhaps even spiritually, the corpus of the nation, this understand-
ing echoing James Mace’s description of Ukraine as a ‘post-genocidal society’.56

Core and periphery

One of the comparisons which is highlighted in Newby and Myllyntaus’ chapter is
that between the constitutional relationships of Ireland and Finland to their respec-
tive empires. As a largely self-governing Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire,
Finland took ever-increasing control over its own political and economic affairs
during the nineteenth century, at least until the imposition of ‘Russification’ in 1899
and afterwards. The centralised control exercised by London over Ireland was
generally absent from the Finnish case. Peter Gray’s chapter builds upon the pro-
vocative assertion made by William J. Smyth in the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine,
when he argued that ‘the proper geographical and political unit for the analysis of
the Great Famine is Britain and Ireland’.57 Moreover, in stressing the imperial–colo-
nial relationship between Great Britain and Ireland, Smyth emphasised that ‘an out-
standing feature’ of the famine period ‘was the exercise of centralised political and
administrative control over Ireland and the Irish people, which increased after the
passing of the union’.58 Gray expands upon this concept by outlining the ‘Great
British Famine’, which never existed in the minds of the British or Irish public, but
which, arguably, would have been the correct constitutional framing of the events
of the 1840s. Gray argues that Charles Trevelyan, who oversaw the Irish relief
efforts, held a view that Ireland’s difference from Britain was ‘essentially moral’
rather than ‘socio-economic or even political’. In formulating famine relief policy
in Finland, J.V. Snellman, as outlined by Myllyntaus, may have held the view that
‘what is rotten may collapse’, but this attitude had none of the religious or ethnic
overtones implied by Trevelyan’s attitude towards the Catholic, Celtic, Irish. Snell-
man was seeking to crystallise a nation – his economic policies were presented as
guarding the nation’s long-term survival by eschewing Russian intervention.
Thus, Myllyntaus and Gray demonstrate the existence of very different con-
stitutional situations in Finland and Ireland in the nineteenth century, reflected in
their diverging historiographies. As Andrew G. Newby has argued, the core–
periphery relationship between Finland and Russia differed considerably from
Ireland (and Britain) and Ukraine (and the Soviet Union) during these famines.
12 D. Curran et al.
In a European context, arguably all three case studies here deal with peripheries.
In an ‘imperial’ context, the issue is rather more complex – with Ireland and
Finland both being relatively close to the imperial core (London and St Peters-
burg respectively), but Finland operating with a devolved ‘home rule’ adminis-
tration. Thus, explains Newby,

even if Snellman’s policies failed, it was considered important that Finland

should be left to fail alone, rather than be saved by Russian intervention.
The Russians were not subsequently blamed for failing to come to Finland’s
rescue, nor for creating conditions in which famine could occur by treating
Finland as a colony.59

In Ireland and Ukraine the famines ‘othered’ the imperial power. In Finland it
bound the Finns in a national cause. Midway through the ‘decade of calamities’,
in the face of another harvest failure, one influential Finnish newspaper expanded
on the perceived link between hunger, self-sufficiency and nation building:

Let us busy ourselves as one in providing aid, it really should not burden
anyone and indeed the feelings awakened in the helpers will be a marvellous
and adequate reward, the sense that the Finns have been able to help Finns
out of hunger and destruction, and aid would help the overall spirit of our
nation, demonstrating that the inhabitants of our country feel that they are
brothers, who suffer misfortune together just as they share good times, and
are faithful towards each other. This assistance binds together the children
of the fatherland with an iron grip, and through this it is possible to see that
they can rely on each other’s help in times of hardship.60

Andrea Graziosi reconstructs pre-famine events in Ukraine from a com-

parative perspective, making reference both to overall Soviet political develop-
ments and to ‘regional’ or, more precisely, to national tensions. Grazioisi argues
that while the famine may have initially been the inadvertent consequence of
Soviet policy responses to the resistance of the peasantry to collectivization and
the threat of an agricultural collapse, it subsequently in Ukraine became a politi-
cally orchestrated weapon of state power. According to Grazioisi, a fuller under-
standing the Holodomor necessitates a recognition of the overlapping nature of
social (that is, the peasant) and national (that is, the Ukrainian) factors, bridging
the divide between those scholars who offer an interpretation based largely on
one or the other perspective.
Any study of the onset and consequences of famine is inevitably a study of death
and despair. In that context, it may well be impossible to adequately convey the
depths of suffering experienced by those caught up in such a maelstrom, be it at an
individual level, within family units, or across localities. That said, seeking to
comprehend why famine-induced death, human misery and social upheaval occur
and how these shocking developments unfold remains a worthwhile endeavour. It is
hoped that the parallel studies presented in this volume will challenge and enhance
 Introduction 13
established understandings of famine tragedies along a number of lines, including:
famine causation and culpability; social and regional famine vulnerabilities; core–
periphery relationships between nations and regions; degrees of national autonomy
and self-sufficiency; as well as famine memory and identity. Beyond contributing
to contemporary scholarship, it is hoped that this volume will help to keep alive the
memory of the many millions who suffered and perished due to famine in Finland,
Ireland, and Ukraine.

Notes
1 Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New
York, 1851), 82–83.
2 Leeds Mercury, 14 April 1868.
3 Zetta Wells was the wife of the American explorer, author and radio commentator
Carveth Wells. She went on to present the TV Show Geographically Speaking on
NBC after 1946. This extract from her diary is recorded in Carveth Wells, Kapoot:
The Narrative of a Journey from Leningrad to Mount Ararat in Search of Noah’s Ark
(London: Jarrolds, 1933), 139–140. It is also quoted in ‘Memorandum: The United
Ukrainian Organisation of the United States’, Svoboda, 12 June 1934; and in Famine
in Ukraine (New York: United Ukrainian Organizations of the United States,
1934), 15.
4 Niall Ó Ciosain, ‘Cartography and Commemoration: the Atlas of the Great Irish
Famine’, Irish Historical Studies 38 (2013), 705; Gerry Kearns (ed.), ‘Debating The
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine’, Irish Geography 46(3) (2013), 240, 242, 254;
Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Dublin:
UCD Press, 2006), 22, 76.
5 Peter Gray, ‘Famine Relief Policy in Comparative Perspective: Ireland, Scotland, and
Northwestern Europe, 1845–1849’, Eire–Ireland 32:1 (1999), 86–108. Ó Gráda has
also highlighted the high death rates in Moldova during the Soviet famine of 1946–
1947, which he calls ‘the last famine to strike Europe’. Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A
Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 241.
6 Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994),
208.
7 Ó Ciosain, ‘Cartography and Commemoration’, 705.
8 Varpu Ikonen, ‘Kaksi 1800-luvun nälkäkriisiä – Suomi ja Irlanti’, in Kun Halla Nälän
Tuskan Toi, ed. Antti Häkkinen, Vappu Ikonen, Kari Pitkänen and Hannu Soikkanen
(Porvoo: WSOY, 1991), 273–282.
9 See, inter alia, Andrew G. Newby, ‘ “The Cold Northern Land of Suomi”: Michael
Davitt and Finnish Nationalism’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 6:1 (2012),
71–92; Andrew G. Newby, ‘ “Neither Do These Tenants or their Children Emigrate”:
Famine and Transatlantic Emigration from Finland in the Nineteenth Century’, Atlan-
tic Studies: Global Currents, 11:3 (2014), 383–402; Andrew G. Newby, ‘ “Rather
Peculiar Claims Upon Our Sympathies”: Britain and Famine in Finland, 1856–68’, in
Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Per-
spectives, ed. Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, Lindsay Janssen and Ruud
van den Beuken (London: Peter Lang, 2014), 61–80.
10 See http://transnationalireland.com (accessed 19 September 2014); www.uta.fi/yky/
coehistory/index.html (accessed 19 September 2014).
11 See www.nwo.nl/en/research-and-results/research-projects/56/2300187256.html (acces-
sed 19 September 2014).
12 The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s mission statement includes the study of
the diverse religious and ethnic groups that make their home in Ukraine, as well as
14 D. Curran et al.
acting as a bridge between Ukrainian studies and the study of Russia, Poland, Turkey,
Belarus and Moldova. See www.huri.harvard.edu/about-huri/mission.html (accessed
22 October 2014).
13 Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent Comerford (eds), Holodomor and Gorta
Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland
(London: Anthem Press, 2012).
14 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London:
Verso, 1995), 23.
15 Heorhiy Kasianov, ‘Holodomor and the Politics of Memory in Ukraine after Independ-
ence’, in Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of
Famine in Ukraine and Ireland, ed. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent Com-
erford (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 168. For the findings of the Commission on the
Ukraine Famine (22 April 1988) see Appendix A in L. Luciuk, ed., Holodomor: Reflec-
tions on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press,
2008). Appendix B reproduces the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry
into the 1932 to 1933 Famine in Ukraine (10 March 1990). On 28 November 2006
Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, promulgated a law defining the Holodomor
as an act of genocide.
16 Phelim P. Boyle and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Fertility Trends, Excess Mortality, and the Great
Irish Famine’, Demography 23:4 (1986), 543–562; Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: a
Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (2nd edn)
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 265–266; Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Mortality and the
Great Famine’, in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, ed. John Crowley, William J. Smyth
and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 170.
17 Coogan here uses figures from Ó Gráda and Mokyr. Tim Pat Coogan, The Famine Plot:
England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 10.
18 Donald Rayfield, ‘The Ukrainian Famine of 1933: Man-made Catastrophe, Mass Murder
or Genocide?’, in Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet
Ukraine, ed. Lubomyr Luciuk (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2008). This does, however,
reinforce the extent to which the events of 1932 to 1933 remain contentious, particularly
in a context in which some states, such as Canada, and several international organisations
have classed the Holodomor as genocide, despite the concerted efforts of the Russian
Federation. For a succinct English-language overview of the Ukrainian famine histori-
ography, see Paul R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd edn)
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 799–801. More recently Naimark has
made the case for the Holodomor being an example of genocide. See Norman M.
Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
19 David Marples, ‘Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine’, in Holodomor and
Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland,
ed. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent Comerford (London: Anthem Press,
2012), 45.
20 Olga Papash, ‘Collective Trauma in a Feature Film: Golod-33 As One-Of-A-Kind’, in
Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in
Ukraine and Ireland, ed. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent Comerford
(London: Anthem Press, 2012), 197.
21 Ibid.
22 Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, ‘What was Sown Shall be Reaped’, Foreword to Holodomor:
Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press,
2008).
23 See Jacques Vallin, France Meslé, Sergei Adamets and Serhii Pyrozhkov, ‘A New
Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses During the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s’,
Population Studies 56:3 (2002), 249–264; and France Meslé, Jacques Vallin, Vladimir
Shkolnikov and Serhii Pyrozhkov, Mortality and Causes of Death in 20th Century
Ukraine (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012).
 Introduction 15
24 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror –
Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 249. Conquest made a passing
reference to a 1953 address by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’ and
applied it to the famine in Soviet Ukraine. This speech, along with a foreword by
Douglas Irvin-Erickson, has been reissued as Raphael Lemkin, Soviet Genocide in the
Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2014).
25 See Omelan Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Pavlo Shevchuk and Oleh Wolowyna,
‘Demography of a Man-made Human Catastrophe: The Case of Massive Famine in
Ukraine 1932–1933’, Canadian Studies in Population 42:1–2 (2015, forthcoming);
and Воловина, Олег, ‘Щомісячний розподіл демографічних втрат в наслідок
голоду 1933 року в Україні’. Голод в Україні у першій половині ХХ століття:
причии та наслідки (1921–1923, 1932–1933, 1946–1947). Матеріали Міжнародної
Наукової Конференції. (Київ, 2013), 233–242.
26 James E. Mace, ‘Is the Ukrainian Genocide a Myth?’, Canadian American Slavic Studies
Journal 37:3 (2003), 45–52, reprinted in L. Luciuk (ed.), Holodomor: Reflections on the
Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2008).
27 Kari J. Pitkänen, Deprivation and Disease. Mortality During the Great Finnish Famine of
the 1860s (Helsinki: Suomen Väestötieteellisen Yhdistyksen Julkaisuja, 1993), 116; Antti
Häkkinen, ‘Nälkä, Valta ja Kylä 1867–1868’, in Talous Valta ja Valtio: Tutkimuksia
1800-luvun Suomesta, ed. Pertti Haapala (Tampere: Vastapaino, 1990), 125; John Lefgren,
‘Nälänhätä Suomessa 1867–68’, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 72:3 (1974), 198–201.
28 Pitkänen, Deprivation and Disease, 51.
29 Ladies’ Newspaper, 11 April 1857.
30 Quoted in Glasgow Herald, 17 January 1863.
31 S.H. Cousens, ‘The Regional Variations in Emigration from Ireland Between 1821
and 1841’, Transactions and Papers of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1960),
15–30; David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration 1820–1914 (Dublin: Irish Economic and
Social History Society, 1984).
32 Newby, ‘Neither Do These Tenants’, 395.
33 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, 73.
34 As distinct from the Suuret Kuolonvuodet (‘Great Death Years’) of the late seven-
teenth century.
35 James S. Donnelly, The Irish Potato Famine (London: Stutton, 2001); Joseph J. Lee,
‘The Famine as History’, in Famine 150: Commemorative Lecture Series, ed. Cormac
Ó Gráda (Dublin: Teagasc and University College Dublin).
36 Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849 (New York and
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962).
37 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London:
Verso, 1995), 16, 23.
38 Noack et al., ‘Introduction’, 12.
39 Ibid., 5.
40 See Senator August Hjelt’s presentation held on 5 August 1918 at the Suomen Histor-
iallinen Seura (Finnish Historical Society). This was published as A. Hjelt, ‘Surmavu-
osista Suomessa 1860-luvulla’, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 16 (1918), 70–71. Hjelt
argued that ‘Unforgettable was the beauty of the virtuous strength and sublime sub-
missiveness with which our nation stood up to its misfortunes. It did so without any
grumble or tremble from the path of honesty.’
41 Edvard Gylling, ‘Nälkävuodet 1867–68: Puolivuosisatamuisto’, Työväen Kalenteri 11
(1918), 110–121; Samuli Paulaharju, ‘Kun Petäjäinen Taas Pyrkii Pöydälle’, Nuori
Suomi Joulualbumi 27 (1917), 133–141.
42 See Graziosi (Chapter 9, this volume), 223–260.
43 Gordon L. Clark, Meric S. Gertler and Maryann P. Feldman, Oxford Handbook of
Economic Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–18.
16 D. Curran et al.
44 Paul R. Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Masa-
hisa Fujita, Paul Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities,
Regions and International Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
45 For more information on the Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute project,
MAPA, go to http://gis.huri.harvard.edu/map-gallery/demography/population-losses.
html. A map of the political geography of the Great Famine was presented in Marco
Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan, The Foreign Office and the
Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet
Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 1988). A recent publication, edited by A. Graziozi,
L.A. Hajda and H. Hryn, After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great
Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) explores the
short- and long-term consequences of the famine for Ukrainian society.
46 Noack et al., ‘Introduction’, 1–2.
47 Stanislav V. Kulchytskyi, ‘Holodomor in Ukraine 1932–1933: An Interpretation of
Facts’, in Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories, and Representations of
Famine in Ukraine and Ireland, ed. Christopher Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent
Comerford (London: Anthem Press, 2012).
48 R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture,
1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
49 Michael Ellman, ‘Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited’, Europe-Asia
Studies 59 (2007), 663–693.
50 Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Reconsidered’, Europe-Asia
Studies 60 (2008), 663–675.
51 ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, Raphael Lemkin Papers, Raphael Lemkin ZL-273, Reel 3, Box 2, Folder 16.
From the point of view of the British Foreign Office ‘the fundamental ill is communism,
not the weather; & famine will be more or less chronic in Russia until either communism
goes or the population is greatly reduced by nature’s cruel and drastic methods’. Cited in
L. Luciuk, Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migra-
tion of Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), fn. 2, p. 413 (from
‘Famine in Russia’, FO 371/8150). This prescient comment was penned on 18 August
1922. During and after the famine of 1932 to 1933 the British government covered up
news about the causes and consequences of what has been described as a ‘politically
engineered famine’. See ‘Choosing Not to See’, in Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y.
Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan, The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents
on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston: Kashtan
Press, 1988), and the Foreword to this volume by Michael Marrus.
52 Vanessa Pupavac, ‘Natural Disasters: Trauma, Political Contestation and Potential to
Precipitate Social Change’, in Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte (eds), Memory and
Trauma in International Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 82.
53 Ibid., 82.
54 Aarne Reunala, ‘The Forest and the Finns’, in Finland: People, National, State, ed.
Max Engman and David Kirby (London: Hurst, 1989), 45.
55 Antti Häkkinen, ‘On Attitudes and Living Strategies in the Finnish Countryside in the
Years of Famine 1867–68’, in Just a Sack of Potatoes? Crisis Experiences in Euro-
pean Societies, Past and Present, ed. Antti Häkkinen (Helsinki: SHS, 1992), 150.
56 Mace, ‘Is the Ukrainian Genocide a Myth?’, 45–52.
57 William J. Smyth, ‘The longue durée – Imperial Britain and Colonial Ireland’, in
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, ed. John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike
Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 46.
58 Ibid., 61.
59 Newby, ‘Neither Do These Tenants’, 394.
60 Suometar, 19 September 1862.
Part I
The Great Irish Famine
[An Gorta Mór], 1845 to 1850
 D erry
D onegal
P rovincial boundary A n trim
C ou nty b oundary
Ulster
Tyrone

.Ferm anagh D ow n
A rm a gh

Sligo M onaghan

Leitrim Cavan
M ayo
Louth:
R oscom m on
Connaught rLongford
M eath

W e stm e a th
D u b lia
G a lw a y

O ffaly K ildare
Leinster
Laois W icklow

C lare

C arlow
Tip pe ra ry
K ilke n n y
Lim erick W exford

W aterford
K erry Munster

C ork

Map PI .1 Provinces and counties of Ireland.

1 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson
The Irish famine across many
geographical scales
Declan Curran

Introduction
Where does the local end and the regional, national or international begin?
When the impact of a natural disaster, such as an epidemic or famine, or a
man-­made­calamity,­such­as­armed­conflict­or­an­economic­crisis,­is­character-
ised as being, say, localised or regional, does this adequately capture the
manner in which this event unfolds across places and over time? Similarly,
does the notion of a national or international emergency convey the variation
in how such a widespread development might be experienced ‘on the ground’?
While what follows is ostensibly an overview of socio-economic aspects of
the Great Irish Famine, this chapter highlights the fact that the impacts of such
a disaster are felt across many geographic scales simultaneously and that pre-
existing­local­and­regional­differences,­both­spatial­and­social,­influence­how­
the ensuing distress is experienced by individuals and households.1 This
chapter discusses pre- and post-famine Ireland in an international context,
while at the same time acknowledging the local and regional distinctions
within­ Ireland­ that­ had­ become­ firmly­ established­ in­ the­ years­ prior­ to­ the­
famine.2

Ireland before the famine

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, Ireland experienced a period of rapid
social and economic change. In an international context, a series of technological
improvements in textiles and a major geopolitical event, the Napoleonic Wars of
1793 to 1815, provided a great stimulus to Irish economic development and,
through their interaction with existing social and economic structures within
Ireland, these developments had far-reaching consequences for Irish living
standards. The Napoleonic Wars, in particular, brought about a wartime boom in
farm­prices,­which­benefited­not­only­large­dairy­farmers­but­also­smallholders­
involved in tillage and pig production. At the same time, textiles had emerged as
an important cottage industry, supplementing rural farm incomes. These eco-
nomic developments were accompanied by an unprecedented population explo-
sion, particularly in Connaught and Munster whose greater proportion of small
20 D. Curran
farmers­reaped­the­benefits­of­the­wartime­boom.3 However, the end of the war
in 1815, along with the collapse of the domestic textile industry, ushered in an
era of economic turbulence between 1815 and the eve of the famine.

Pre-famine economic development

As the 1700s progressed, increased British industrialisation led to a strengthen-
ing in demand for Irish agricultural exports and ushered in an era of prolonged
agriculture price increases. Crotty points to the repeal of the Cattle Acts in 1760
as­ the­ embodiment­ of­ Britain’s­ changing­ economic­ orientation­ from­ finding­
markets­for­its­own­agricultural­output­to­finding­food­supplies­for­its­manufac-
turers and commercial consumers.4 The Cattle Acts, enacted in the 1680s, placed
an embargo on the British importation of livestock from Ireland. In Crotty’s
view, these acts had inadvertently served as the catalyst for Ireland’s one great
industry of the eighteenth century: the provisions trade. Trade in salted meats
emerged in place of the export of livestock, and these foodstuffs were exported
to Britain, its colonies, and mainland Europe. Subsidiary trades such as cooper-
age, tanning and tallow manufacturing also emerged, and the resultant increase
in employment and income created a strong domestic demand for dairy produce
and corn.
Irish agriculture was further boosted by Britain’s involvement in the Napo-
leonic wars (1793–1815). These wars were characterised by economic warfare
between Britain and France, as each tried to restrict the other country’s trade.5
The outlook for Irish agriculture remained positive as long as Britain continued
to wage war. War necessitated the suspension of the Gold Standard (the convert-
ibility­ of­ paper­ currency­ notes­ into­ a­ fixed­ quantity­ of­ gold)­ and­ ushered­ in­ a­
period­of­price­inflation,­it­conferred­near-­monopoly­status­on­Ireland­as­supplier­
of British foodstuff due to the blockade of continental food supplies, and it pre-
sented Irish Agriculture with the lucrative requirements of the British army and
navy for provisions.6 However, Cullen notes that Irish prosperity during this
period may have owed more to price increases than to increased volumes of
exports: Irish exports rose by 120 per cent in monetary terms over the duration
of the Napoleonic wars, while the volume of exports rose by only 40 per cent
over this period.7
­ It­ was­ grain­ exports,­ in­ particular,­ that­ benefited­ from­ the­ surge­ in­ British­
wartime demand and this gave impetus to a restructuring of Irish agricultural
production from pasture to tillage.8 Tillage gave a higher gross output per acre
than either dairy farming or grazing.9 Legislation providing government bounties
to grain exporters in 1758 and 1784 reinforced this trend.10 The emergence of the
potato in Irish society in the 1750s, with its appeal both as a high-yield root crop
and as a nutrition-rich subsistence food for labourers, also contributed to both
economic growth and rapid population growth. According to Crotty, the labour-
intensive nature of tillage encouraged the subdivision of landholdings in order to
provide additional labourers with a means of subsistence through potato cultiva-
tion.11 Cullen, on the other hand, contends that the expansion of the potato crop
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 21
was a response to, rather than a cause of, Irish population growth: the growing
population reduced the price of labour and thus made a shift into more labour-
intensive arable crops more attractive.12 As Mokyr notes, arable production as a
whole­benefited­from­a­technological­improvement­in­the­shape­of­accelerating­
diffusion of potatoes after 1750.13 Taken together, the wartime boom and the
potato’s emergence as the ultimate subsistence crop brought about a vast agri-
cultural expansion in the form of increased tillage acreage.
­ The­end­of­the­war­in­1815­brought­with­it­severe­difficulties­for­Irish­agricul-
ture, particularly for tillage farming.14 The reopening of the British market to
grain imports from continental Europe, demobilisation of the British army and
navy, and the falling prices associated with the return to the gold standard all
combined to create a more challenging environment for Irish agriculture. A
banking crisis in 1820, due to Bank of Ireland’s efforts to restrict credit in the
face­of­Britain’s­deflationary­return­to­the­gold­standard,­and­again­in­1826,­as­a­
currency union between Ireland and Britain was being implemented as part of
the­1800­Act­of­Union,­prolonged­the­difficulties­of­the­agricultural­industry.15
Irish agriculture did overcome this post-war slump, as prices of grain, livestock
and livestock products began to recover in the 1830s, and export volumes of
livestock, grain and butter expanded once again.16 However, the domestic tex-
tiles industry, which had been the second major area of economic expansion in
eighteenth-century Ireland, entered into a terminal decline during this period.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, exports of non-agricultural goods,
particularly­ linen,­ cotton­ and­ woollen­ goods,­ increased­ significantly­ relative­ to­
agricultural exports. By the 1790s, the Irish Customs Ledger indicated that tex-
tiles accounted for 60 per cent of the value of total Irish exports, almost double
the value of all Irish agricultural exports combined.17 O’Malley attributes the
burgeoning Irish textile industry at this time to the labour-intensive nature of the
work and relatively low Irish wages, while he traces the origins of the Ulster’s
strength­ in­ this­ industry­ to­ the­ seventeenth-­century­ influx­ of­ Hugoenot­ and­
British immigrants skilled in textile manufacturing.18 Linen was the most suc-
cessful of the Irish textile industries and by 1800 linen had developed into a
major rural cottage industry, emerging in northeast Ulster and spreading across
the northern half of the country and into isolated parts of the west.19 The prin-
cipal export markets for Irish linen were Britain and North America.20 The textile
industry provided an additional source of employment and income, with many
families working in both agriculture and domestic textile production. Many land-
less labourers and smaller tenant farmers earned additional income, either by
spinning yarn or weaving coarser fabrics, while many weavers rented a plot of
land where they grew potatoes but paid the rent from weaving earnings.21
In the early 1800s, the linen industry was adapting to mechanised technology
at a slower pace than the cotton industry. Belfast experienced a move away from
linen to cotton, and cotton spinning mills began to concentrate in the Belfast
area. Outlying districts of Ulster and beyond remained active in the linen indus-
try,­ particularly­ in­ fine­ linen­ where­ they­ had­ established­ a­ strong­ competitive­
position.22 Eventually, technological advances were incorporated into Irish linen
22 D. Curran
production. Wet spinning, devised in France in 1810, was introduced in Britain
and Ireland in the 1820s.23­Now­powered­spinning­of­fine­linen­was­possible­and,­
in the face of competitive pressures, many Belfast cotton mills changed over to
linen production. Belfast’s large population of skilled weavers and existing mills
put it in a strong position to capitalise on the new linen technology and establish
itself­ as­ an­ early­ centre­ of­ mechanised­ fine­ linen­ spinning.24 However, the
domestic textile industry that had provided supplementary income to the rural
poor could not compete in the face of large-scale mechanised production. Land-
less labourers, cottiers and smaller tenant farmers were now almost exclusively
dependent on farming, and in particular the potato crop, for subsistence.
While there appears to be a consensus that Ireland experienced a process of
deindustrialisation­ in­ the­ first­ half­ of­ the­ nineteenth­ century,­ a­ divergence­ of­
views has emerged with respect to the extent and cause of this deindustrialisa-
tion.25 Regarding the extent of deindustrialisation, Cullen argues that deindustri-
alisation­was­confined­to­the­textile­industry,­and­that­other­domestic­industries­
such as milling, brewing, iron founding, shipbuilding, rope making, paper and
glass­ making­ benefited­ from­ large-­scale­ production­ and­ centralisation.26 Both
Mokyr and Solar, on the other hand, speak of a wider deindustrialisation
process.27 As for the causes of deindustrialisation, the traditional nationalist
view, as articulated by O’Brien, held that the removal of protective tariffs
brought about by the Act of Union left Irish industry exposed to free trade with
Britain’s larger, more advanced industries.28 Ó Gráda, however, questions
whether or not the 10 per cent tariffs (Union dues) removed in the 1820s as a
consequence­ of­ the­ Act­ of­ Union­ would­ have­ been­ sufficient­ to­ protect­ Irish­
industry from competitive pressures exerted by British industry, given the dra-
matic decline in the prices of British industrial output.29 Mokyr attributes Irish
deindustrialisation to weak trading performance in the face of competition
arising from proximity to newly industrialised Britain.30 Lee points to the trans-
port improvements that exposed Irish rural industries to competition from British
large-scale producers, and attributes the absence of Irish large-scale producers to
the lack of Irish entrepreneurship, as well as a dearth of natural resources.31
However, O’Malley argues that deindustrialisation may not have been primarily
due­to­internal­inadequacies­in­local­social­or­economic­conditions,­such­as­defi-
ciencies in entrepreneurship, capital availability or education levels, but to the
existence­of­a­strong­competitor­in­the­form­of­Britain,­who­benefited­from­being­
a pioneer of large-scale, specialised and geographically concentrated production
processes.32 Bielenberg characterises the impact of British industrialisation upon
Ireland as a mixed story: while it presented Irish industry with enhanced oppor-
tunities in terms of technology, capital, markets, trade networks and consumer
goods, British competition brought about the decline of a number of Irish indus-
tries and contributed to regional economic decline and emigration.33
Ó Gráda cautions against painting an overly pessimistic picture of Irish eco-
nomic development in the decades prior to the famine.34 Advances took place in
road and sea transport, as well as in carriage of mail and goods, and the Irish
banking sector developed in a similar manner to its English counterpart.
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 23
However,­the­decline­of­Irish­industry­and­fluctuations­in­Irish­agriculture­led­to­
a deterioration of the position of the poor, who accounted for at least half of the
population prior to the famine, and left them particularly vulnerable to the
famine onslaught when it struck.35

Pre-famine economic geography and land ownership

The changing economic fortunes of the pre-famine decades were played out in
the context of a broader social transformation, which exacerbated Ireland’s sus-
ceptibility to the oncoming famine crisis. Inherent in this social transformation
were spatial and social differences that created distinct vulnerabilities to famine
across the country.
Mokyr notes that, in terms of economic geography, pre-famine Ireland has
tended to be characterised as comprising three main regions: (1) the eastern,
central and southeastern counties, including Leinster and east Munster, which
included much of the land held as large tenant farms, with landless labourers and
smallholders providing the supply of labour; (2) the northern counties, including
most of Ulster and north Connaught, where farming was combined with rural
industry, and smallholders held a large proportion of the land, and (3) the west
and southwest, which contained features similar to those of the other two
regions, but was relatively more backward and less prosperous.36 Daly provides
further detail on the regional dispersion of agriculture across the country, noting
that commercial farming was prominent on the better and drier land of the east
and southeast, which was also nearer to the British market, while the transport of
grain from the midlands was facilitated by a network of canals.37 The more
remote areas of the west, northwest and southwest suffered from poorer soil
quality,­a­wetter­climate,­and­from­greater­difficulties­in­gaining­access­to­export­
markets due to high transport costs.
These regional and social differences in pre-famine agricultural commerciali-
sation­ are­ also­ highlighted­ by­ Ó­ Gráda,­ who­ points­ first­ to­ the­ west­ of­ the­
country as undertaking less commercial farming, due to farm sizes being small-
est and dependence on the potato as a subsistence crop being greatest, and
second to smallholders and labourers nationwide undertaking less commercial
farming, partly because they consumed the subsistence potato crop produced on
their plot of land and paid their rent mostly in labour.38
An indication of the socio-economic variation within pre-famine Ireland may
be­gleaned­from­the­1841­census.­The­1841­census­classifies­families­according­
to their means into four categories: (1) property owners, and farmers of more
than 50 acres; (2) artisans, and farmers of 5 to 50 acres; (3) labourers and small-
holders­of­up­to­five­acres;­and­(4)­a­‘means­unspecified’­category.­For­rural­dis-
tricts­of­the­country­as­a­whole,­the­first­two­categories­accounted­for­30­per­cent­
of families.39 A further 68 per cent of rural families consisted of labourers, small-
holders­with­less­than­five­acres,­and­less­prosperous­artisans,­while­2­per­cent­of­
families­ were­ unspecified.­ However,­ these­ first­ two­ categories­ of­ larger­ land-
holdings combined ranged from 40 to 42 per cent in some eastern counties to
24 D. Curran
below 23 per cent in the western counties of Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Roscom-
mon, Mayo, Galway and Clare. These percentages actually understate the vari-
ation within these counties, as sharp contrasts existed between better-off and
poorer districts. Districts of impoverished smallholders were also to be found in
peninsular Kerry and southwest Cork.40
Land ownership in pre-famine Ireland largely resided in the hands of several
thousand landlords, most of whom were descendants of families granted land
either by Cromwell or the British Crown in the seventeenth century. Landlords
were typically of Anglo-Irish stock and Protestant religion, though some tradi-
tional Irish landlords had survived.41 Few landlords were actively involved in
managing their estates. Instead they rented their land on long-term leases in
order­to­receive­a­secure­fixed­income.­These­leases­were­often­granted­to­large­
tenants, known as middlemen, who then sublet portions of land to numerous
smaller­ tenants.­ However,­ the­ fluctuations­ in­ agricultural­ prices­ from­ the­ late­
1700s onward, initially rising during the Napoleonic wars and then declining in
the period after 1815, led many landlords to reconsider their leasing practices.
The­inflation­of­the­late­1700s­reduced­the­real­value­of­landlords’­rental­income­
from­long-­term­leases,­and­long-­term­leases­also­left­landlords­unable­to­benefit­
from rising land values. As a result, landlords increasingly came to favour
shorter leases.42 The turbulent economic conditions after 1815 brought about a
situation whereby grazing, rather than tillage, began to generate higher yields.
This created an incentive for landlords to consolidate holdings and led to a dete-
rioration in the tenant–landlord relationship.43
As well as the subdivision of land undertaken by middlemen, the labour
requirements of tillage farming also led to the division of land into smaller plots.
Commercial famers made agreements with permanent labourers, known as cot-
tiers,­whereby­the­cottier­provided­his­labour­to­the­farmer­for­a­fixed­daily­rate.­
The cottier would also rent a portion of land (conacre)­from­the­farmer­for­a­fixed­
annual sum on a short-term lease. On this parcel of land, the cottier could build a
cabin and grow the subsistence potato crop. The rent on this plot of land was paid
through days of labour provided to the farmer. Casual labourers (spalpeen) also
rented conacre plots, but their employment was less secure than that of cottiers.
These casual labourers often received monetary payment, although potatoes, turf
and other provisions were also used as a means of payment.44
Subdivision of land also took place on smaller non-commercial farms. In
some cases, small and medium-sized farmers supplemented their income by sub-
letting small plots of land to labourers. More often, subdivision took place within
families to provide for a son or act as a dowry for a daughter’s marriage.45 This
process of subdivision led to the formation of ever smaller landholdings as fam-
ilies were pushed on to marginal land suitable only for potato cultivation.

Pre-famine living standards and demographics

Irish living standards in the decades leading up to the famine compared poorly
with the rest of the United Kingdom and were characterised by increasing
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 25
inequality and regional disparity. Irish income per capita in the early 1840s
46

have been estimated to be approximately half that of the prevailing British wage
level, and O’Rourke concludes that unskilled wages were stagnant, if not falling,
in pre-famine Ireland.47
Mokyr and Ó Gráda, in a detailed analysis of Irish living standards in the
half-century prior to the famine, conclude that while the urban and middle
classes may have seen some moderate increase in their incomes, the landless
poor experienced increasing impoverishment.48 Although the nutritional content
of the potato and widespread access to heating fuel in the form of turf may have
ameliorated conditions somewhat for landless labourers and cottiers, the collapse
of the cottage textile industry had a devastating impact in many rural areas and
led to an increased dependence on the potato crop as a means of subsistence. The
marked regional disparities in living standards are evident from the illiteracy
data reported in the 1841 census, which put illiteracy in the 16- to 25-year age
cohort at 27.6 per cent and 29.5 per cent for Ulster and Leinster, respectively,
compared to 48.5 per cent and 62.5 per cent for Munster and Connaught, respec-
tively. The proportion of illiteracy for older age cohorts in Munster and Con-
naught was within a range of 60 to 80 per cent. In the words of Mokyr and
Ó Gráda, ‘Leinster and Ulster were relatively literate, while throughout Con-
naught and Munster one of the last mainly pre-literate cultures in north-western
Europe was to be found’.49
The deteriorating conditions of the Irish poor brought about by economic
turmoil, dependence on the potato crop and subdivision of landholdings occurred
in an era of rapid population growth. In the century preceding the famine, the
Irish population increased at a rate unparalleled anywhere else in Western
Europe (see Table 1.1). On the eve of the famine, Ireland’s population stood at
8.5 million.
Pre-famine population growth had both a social and spatial dimension. Popu-
lation grew most rapidly among labourers as a class generally and in counties
where large regions of smallholders existed, such as Galway, Clare, Mayo and
Donegal.50 In these regions, the continued subdivision of landholdings and
movement of families on to marginal, poorer quality plots of land which yielded
little beyond potatoes had coincided with the decline of the cottage textile

Table 1.1 Comparison of European population growth rates (% per annum), 1750 to
1845

Country Population growth (%)

France 0.4
England 1.0
Ireland 1.3
Scotland 0.8
Sweden 0.7

Source: J. Mokyr and C. Ó Gráda, ‘New Developments in Irish Population History, 1700–1850’,
Economic History Review (1984, p. 476, table 2).
26 D. Curran
industry. Together, these factors exerted pressure on the living standards of the
pre-famine rural poor and contributed to the mounting regional and spatial
inequalities. Table 1.2 documents provincial population growth rates in the
decades prior to the famine.
­ The­expanding­Irish­population­in­the­first­half­of­the­nineteenth­century­with-
stood the impact of two other prominent pre-famine demographic adjustments: a
fall in birth rates and a sharp increase in emigration. Boyle and Ó Gráda provide
estimates of falling Irish birth rates in the 20 years before the famine, declining
from an estimated crude birth rate of 42 per 1,000 in 1822 to 36 per 1,000 in
1841.51 As Boyle and Ó Gráda note, these birth rates and their downward trajec-
tory bear strong similarities to British birth rate trends for the same period.52
While­large-­scale­emigration­may­be­regarded­as­a­defining­characteristic­of­the­
famine­ years,­ the­ phenomenon­ had­ already­ become­ firmly­ established­ in­ the­
decades prior to the famine. In the three decades after 1815 over one million
emigrants left Ireland, as the country became the largest European source of
long-distance emigrants relative to home population.53
Movement between Ireland and Britain had long been commonplace, particu-
larly in the context of the seasonal migration of labourers. Irish emigrants to Britain
were not registered at any port, but the British Census of 1841 reported the number
of persons born in Ireland residing in Britain as 419,256.54 Transatlantic movement
had been impeded by the Napoleonic wars, but it resumed on a large scale when
hostilities ceased in 1815. Emigration to North America is estimated to have risen
from 13,000 per annum in the early 1820s to well in excess of 50,000 per annum
on the eve of the famine.55 The majority of early emigrants to North America were
from Ulster, of Scots Presbyterian heritage, whose departure was triggered by the
deterioration of the linen industry. Daly points to New York emigration statistics
which show that, for the period 1820 to 1834, Ulster and Leinster had around equal
shares, together accounting for almost 80 per cent of emigrants, whereas Con-
naught accounted for a mere 6.7 per cent of emigrants. However, in the decade
leading up the famine the Connaught share of Irish emigrants to New York almost
doubled and it doubled again during the famine years.56

Table 1.2 Provincial population growth rates (% per annum), 1791 to 1821 and 1821 to
1841

Province Population growth (%)

1791–1821 1821–1841

Leinster 1.3 0.6

Munster 1.6 1.1
Ulster 1.1 0.9
Connaught 2.0 1.2

Source: C. Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History (p. 6, table I.I), based on W.E. Vaughan and
A.J. Fitzpatrick (eds) Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821–1971 (Royal Irish Academy,
Dublin, 1978).
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 27
­ Cousens­posits­that­a­number­of­interrelated­factors­influenced­the­regional­dis-
tribution of emigration between 1821 and 1841: the decline of the textile industry;
tenant rights that facilitated emigration, such as the ‘Ulster Custom’ whereby an
outgoing tenant was entitled to payment for improvements made to landholdings;
religious and cultural minority groups fearful of hostility; and the expiry of old
leases that had previously been held under favourable terms.57 The deteriorating
economic conditions of the pre-famine decades brought about a change in the
emigrant­profile.­According­to­Daly,­the­poorest­parts­of­Ireland­were­underrepre-
sented among the early emigrants, possibly due to prohibitive travel costs, lack of
information regarding opportunities abroad, or the barrier posed by the Irish
language.58 But Fitzpatrick notes that ‘from the 1840s onwards, emigration was
not only intensive from virtually every county but also most heavily concentrated
in the regions of greatest poverty and least off-farm employment’.59

The famine onslaught

The blight that decimated the Irish potato crop for three harvests over the period
1845 to 1848 was the catalyst for one of the last major famines to be seen in the
Western world. Despite being unsuited to storage or transportation, the potato’s
high nutritional content, relatively dependable yield even in poor soil during the
pre-famine years, and its suitability as a foodstuff for both man and livestock led
to an over-dependence on the crop, particularly among the poorer layers of Irish
society. By 1845, according to Ó Gráda, the potato’s share in tilled acreage was
little short of one-third and about three million people were largely dependent on
it for food.60 As Kinealy notes, ‘the Great Irish Famine remains unsurpassed, in
relative terms, in terms of demographic decline with the Irish population falling
by approximately 25% in just six years, due to a combination of excess mortality
and emigration’.61 While the devastation of the potato crop may have triggered
the famine, the interaction of the complex set of economic and social issues dis-
cussed in the previous section exacerbated Irish vulnerability to famine and ulti-
mately contributed to the shocking levels of distress witnessed during the famine
years.

The onset of potato blight

The direct cause of the Great Irish Famine was the fungus Phytophthora
infestans, which decimated the Irish potato crop in the harvesting seasons of
1845, 1846 and 1848. The introduction of the pathogen to Europe has been well
documented by Bourke and Dowley.62 Phytophthora infestans was recorded in
the northeastern area of the USA between 1843 and 1845, with initial theories
suggesting that it may have originated in the northern Andes region of South
America and more recent research pointing to Mexico.63 As European potato
crops had endured problems with dry rot in the preceding years, large quantities
of more resistant potato varieties were brought into Belgium from the USA for
the 1844 planting season. The disease appears to have entered Europe with these
28 D. Curran
imports, as its presence was detected in Belgium by the end of June 1845. The
fungus had spread from Belgium to the Netherlands by mid-July, and on to
France, Germany and southern England by mid-August. By late August Phy-
tophthora infestans­ had­ arrived­ in­ Ireland,­ where­ it­ was­ first­ observed­ in­ the­
Dublin area. When the potato blight struck Ireland in autumn 1845, it destroyed
about one-third of that year’s potato crop and nearly the entire potato crop of
1846. After a respite in 1847, the potato blight returned with a vengeance in
1848, destroying most of that year’s harvest.
From its introduction into Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, the potato
crop established itself as the mainstay of the Irish diet prior to the famine. The
progress of the potato in pre-famine Ireland is chronicled by Bourke, who
tracks the crop’s role from being a supplementary food in a diet comprising
cereal and milk, as well as being a fall-back foodstuff in case of famine in the
early 1700s to a standard winter food of the poor later in the mid-1700s.64 It
eventually became the staple diet of small farmers over the greater part of the
year, and an important part of the diet of all classes in the late 1700s. In the
decades prior to the famine this progression culminated in an over-dependence
on inferior potato varieties. By the early 1800s, superior potato varieties such
as the Black Potato and the Apple had given way to the infamous Lumper
potato, which was high yielding but low in nourishment and better suited to
use­as­animal­fodder.­The­significance­of­the­potato­crop­reverberated­through­
the social and demographic development of pre-famine Ireland. For example,
Daly contends that as potato cultivation removed the need to invest in cattle, it
may have facilitated earlier marriages, a higher birth rate and greater popula-
tion density.65 Potatoes could be cultivated in soil which was unsuitable for
other tillage crops, particularly wetter, poorer quality lands of the west of
Ireland. As a nutritious source of subsistence food whose cultivation required
smaller plots of land than either milk or grain production, the potato crop facil-
itated the subdivision of landholdings into ever smaller plots and ultimately
contributed to pre-famine Ireland’s rapid population expansion.
As mentioned above, Ireland was not alone in being struck by potato blight in
1845. The disease was prevalent across many European countries. However, the
experiences of other European countries differed markedly from the Irish experi-
ence, as social and economic structures and development differed markedly both
between and within European countries. For example, the Netherlands boasted
the highest levels of GDP per capita of the Western European countries in the
1850s (more than twice that of Ireland), as well as greater levels of non-
agricultural employment and urbanisation.66
The role of the potato in the average Irish diet was far greater than in the
rest of Western Europe, with Irish daily potato consumption per capita more
than double the Prussian or Netherlands equivalent.67 Within Ireland the share
of the average diet accounted for by potatoes exhibited a marked social vari-
ation. Ó Gráda estimates that, on the eve of the famine, Irish labourers – 40
per cent of the Irish population – accounted for over 60 per cent of human
annual potato consumption. Cottiers (17 per cent of the population) and small
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 29
farmers (6 per cent of the population) accounted for 13 per cent and 5 per cent
of annual potato consumption, respectively.68 When the potato blight struck in
autumn 1845, potato yields in Ireland and regions of northern France declined
by 20 to 30 per cent, whereas Belgium and the Netherlands suffered losses of
closer to 80 per cent. However, in 1846 the potato crop in both Ireland and
the Scottish Highlands was decimated, with yields down by over 80 per cent.
Potato yields improved in Belgium and the Netherlands in 1846, though
yields in these countries and in Prussia were still around 50 per cent less than
normal yields. It was the failure of the rye harvest and the greatly reduced
wheat harvest that exacerbated the situation in these countries in 1846, as
bread from these crops was more prominent than potatoes in the continental
European diet.69 As cereal yields improved after 1846, the impact of the
potato blight was considerably less in continental Europe relative to the Irish
experience.

Famine mortality
While precise enumeration of the famine death-toll is impossible, estimates place
the level of excess mortality due to the famine at one million deaths, nearly one-
eighth of the entire population.70­ This­ figure­ does­ not­ include­ births­ which­ did­
not take place due to the famine, estimated to be in the region of 300,000, or
famine-­related­deaths­abroad.­Boyle­and­Ó­Gráda­also­find­that­famine­mortality­
was­ particularly­ heavy­ on­ the­ young­ (under­ five)­ and­ the­ old­ (over­ 60)­ age­
cohorts.71­Daly­speculates­that­these­groups­probably­had­the­greatest­difficulty­
in gaining access to food or relief, were the least capable of earning a living, and
were the least mobile in the search for food. Furthermore, according to Daly:
‘the young had the least resistance to dysentery or infectious diseases, while
typhus, which was extremely prevalent during famine years, caused many deaths
among the elderly because it affected the heart’.72 The vast majority of those
who perished succumbed to dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, and other hunger-
induced infectious diseases. Outright starvation was not a major cause of death
during the famine years.73
While the famine’s grip extended across the whole of Ireland, its death-toll
was distributed very unevenly across the country. Donnelly reports the provin-
cial breakdown of excess mortality as follows: Connacht accounted for 40.4
per cent, Munster for 30.3 per cent, Ulster for 20.7 per cent, and Leinster for
8.6 per cent.74 Mokyr’s county-level estimates of excess mortality resulting
from the famine (Table 1.3), as well as earlier county-level estimates of
Cousens, illustrate that, rather than being uniform across provinces, mortality
levels varied markedly from county to county.75 Excess mortality was highest
in the western counties of Galway, Leitrim Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo.
High excess mortality was also evident in the Munster counties of Cork, Kerry
and Tipperary, as well as in south Ulster (Cavan and Monaghan). In contrast,
excess mortality rates were relatively lower in east Leinster (particularly
Dublin) and in northeast Ulster (Antrim, Down and Derry). The protracted
30 D. Curran
Table 1.3 Average annual excess death rates, 1846 to 1851, by county (per 1,000)

County Upper bound Lower bound County Upper bound Lower bound

Antrim 20.3 15.0 Limerick 20.9 10.0

Armagh 22.2 15.3 Londonderry 10.1 5.7
Carlow 8.8 2.7 Longford 26.7 20.2
Cavan 51.8 42.7 Louth 14.6 8.2
Clare 46.5 31.5 Mayo 72.0 58.4
Cork 41.8 32.0 Meath 21.2 15.8
Donegal 18.7 10.7 Monaghan 36.0 28.6
Down 12.5 6.7 Queen’s 29.1 21.6
Dublin 0.7 −2.1 Roscommon 57.4 49.5
Fermanagh 39.1 29.2 Sligo 61.1 52.1
Galway 58.0 46.1 Tipperary 35.0 23.8
Kerry 36.1 22.4 Tyrone 22.3 15.2
Kildare 12.0 7.4 Waterford 30.8 20.8
Kilkenny 18.1 12.5 Westmeath 26.3 20.0
King’s 24.9 18.0 Wexford 6.6 1.7
Leitrim 50.2 42.9 Wicklow 14.6 10.8

Source: Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (1983, p. 267, table 9.2).

nature of the famine is also borne out in the regional mortality rates. The south
and west of the country is thought to have been hit particularly hard by the
amendment of the Poor Law in 1847 (discussed below), which placed the full
burden­ of­ financing­ poor­ relief­ on­ the­ Irish­ rate­ payer­ and­ facilitated­ large-­
scale eviction by landlords.76
Mokyr’s quantitative analysis points to a number of explanatory variables
which may account statistically for variation in excess mortality across Irish
counties: income levels – higher income facilitated greater dis-saving or borrow-
ing and made emigration less of an obstacle; literacy – which Mokyr speculates
may have been correlated with other socio-economic characteristics such as per-
sonal hygiene, ability to adapt to other foods such as Indian corn, and knowledge
about emigration opportunities; and farm size of under 20 acres, which includes
both the smallest farmers and somewhat larger holdings.77 The Devon Commis-
sion, established by the British Parliament to undertake an examination of Irish
landholding practices, reported in 1845 that only a quarter of Irish farm holdings
prior to the famine exceeded 20 acres.78
A more palpable sense of the horrors of the famine emerges from the recol-
lections and ‘memories’ passed in oral tradition from famine survivors to the fol-
lowing generations. Oral histories, such as those gathered by the Irish Folklore
Commission in the 1940s have been studied by McHugh and Póirtéir, among
others.79 Below are a number of extracts which convey the manner in which suf-
fering and trauma had become commonplace during the famine:

The beginning of 1847 saw want and hunger all over the country. The poor
were the worst. They had nothing. What made matters very trying and hard
 From the ‘haggart’ to the Hudson 31
in these districts was the number of starving creatures that having left their
homes in the Skibbereen and Bantry districts travelled around these parts
looking for a bite to eat.
(Séamus Reardon, b.1873, Boulteen, Eniskeane, Co. Cork
[IFC 1071:77–154, as reported in Póirtéir (1995, p. 111)])

The ‘black fever’ followed. This appeared in black spots which gradually
crossed the body, lips became bloodless. Death followed at home if they
were not removed to the workhouse and there seems to be no tradition that
anyone catching the disease survived. . . . It was dreaded more than actual
hunger­and­when­persons­were­found­dead­in­the­fields­or­along­the­road,­
their own kith and kin often denied knowing them.
(Thomas Flynn, John Melody, Attymass, Ballina, Co. Mayo
[IFC 1069: 351–378, as reported in Póirtéir (1995, p. 105)])

1847 was a worse year here than the previous two. People in general were
weaker from the effects of the two previous years of scarcity, and less able
to resist the attack of any epidemic. There were more deaths in 1847 than in
1845–46 due more to fever than starvation.
(Michael Gildea, b. 1872, Dromore, Ballintra, Co. Donegal
[IFC 1074: 441–454, as reported in Póirtéir (1995, p. 96)])

Relief efforts
A national system of poor relief had been established in Ireland prior to the famine
by the Irish Relief Act of 1838. The Irish Poor Law differed from the English model
in that relief was to be provided within the workhouse, rather than outdoors.80 The
Act established a system of 130 administrative unions, each to have a workhouse
where the destitute would work for their keep. However, this workhouse system was
only designed to deal with levels of destitution experienced in normal times, and
with a capacity of 100,000 it was not adequate to cope with the distress levels wit-
nessed during the famine.81 With the onset of the famine, the earliest measure taken
by the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel was the procurement of £100,000 worth
of Indian corn and meal from the United States, with the supplies arriving in Ireland
from February to June 1846. Local relief committees and a network of food depots
were set up to distribute the food, though with some delay. A scheme of public
works, mostly involving road improvements, was established in order to provide
employment so that the destitute could purchase food. The public works schemes
were overseen by either county grand juries, in which case the entire cost of the
works was borne by the county, or a local Board of Works, whereby half of the
funds advanced were to be repaid to the British Treasury and half chargeable to a
consolidated fund.82 By March 1847 the public works employed 700,000 people
(one-twelfth of the Irish population) but this did not succeed in containing the
famine, as the public works schemes did not target the neediest, paid too low a wage,
and exposed the malnourished and poorly clothed to harsh weather conditions.83
Another random document with
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gradually lowered. For perhaps half a minute the flagstaff stood
bare; and then a small white standard, dirty, and, if my eyes
deceived me not, a little torn, was run up. Immediately the guns
from every quarter of the city fired a salute. By such of our people
as kept guard at the outposts that day, it was asserted that each gun
was crammed with sand and mud, as if this turbulent garrison had
been resolved to insult, as far as they could, an authority to which
they submitted only because they were compelled to do so. On our
parts the salute was answered with a feu-de-joie from all the
infantry, artillery, and gunboats; and then a hearty shout being
raised, we filed back to our respective stations and dismissed the
parade.
From this date till the general breaking up of the camp, nothing like
friendly or familiar intercourse took place between us and our former
enemies. We were suffered, indeed, by two at a time, to enter the
city with passports; and some half-dozen French officers would
occasionally wander down to Boucaut and mingle in the crowd which
filled its market-place. But they came with no kindly intention. On
the contrary, all our advances were met with haughtiness; and it
seemed as if they were anxious to bring on numerous private
quarrels, now that the quarrel between the countries was at an end.
Nor were these always refused them. More duels were fought than
the world in general knows anything about; and vast numbers were
prevented only by a positive prohibition on the part of the two
generals, and a declaration that whoever violated the order should
be placed in arrest and tried by court-martial.
We were still in our camp by the Adour, when various bodies of
Spanish troops passed through on their return from Toulouse to their
own country. Than some of those battalions I have never beheld a
finer body of men; indeed, many of them were as well clothed,
armed, and appointed as any battalions in the world. But they were,
one and all, miserably officered. Their inferior officers, in particular,
seemed to be mean and ungentlemanly in their appearance; and
they possessed little or no authority over their men. Yet they were
full of boasting, and gave themselves on all occasions as many
absurd airs as if their valour had delivered Spain and dethroned
Napoleon.
Like my companions, I embraced every opportunity that was
afforded of visiting Bayonne, and examining the nature of its works.
Of the town itself I need say no more than that it was as clean and
regularly built as a fortified place can well be, where the utmost is to
be made of a straitened boundary; and houses obtain in altitude
what may be wanting in the extent of their fronts. Neither is it
necessary that I should enter into a minute description of the
defences, sufficient notice having been taken of them elsewhere. But
of the inhabitants I cannot avoid remarking that I found them uncivil
and unfriendly in the extreme, as if they took their tone from the
troops in garrison, and were nowise thankful that events had
preserved them from the horrors of an assault.
Our visits to the town, which were not very frequent, inasmuch as
they generally subjected us to insult from a brutal garrison, we
varied with other and more agreeable occupations. The trout began
to stir in the Adour, and the fishing-rods of such as came provided
with tackle of the sort were brought into play. A race-course was
marked out on the sands, near the river's mouth, and the speed of
our horses, we ourselves riding, was tried with excellent effect. We
established balls in the village, whereat the bands of the different
regiments performed; and ladies of all ranks—from the towns and
villages near—favoured us with their company. But never could we
thaw the ice that seemed to have gathered round the hearts of the
French officers. They embraced every opportunity of bringing on
personal quarrels, and, as I have already hinted, though reluctant to
accede to the matter at the outset, we came by degrees to see the
necessity of indulging them; and I am inclined to think that they
sometimes got enough of it.
Such was the general tenor of my life from the 20th of April till the
8th of May. On the latter day the regiment struck its tents, and
marched one day's journey to the rear, where it remained in quiet till
the arrival of the order which sent it first to the neighbourhood of
Bourdeaux, and afterwards to North America.

Thus ends the narrative of the adventures of a single year in the life
of a subaltern officer. Whatever may be thought of it by the public, it
has not been compiled without considerable satisfaction by the
narrator; for the year referred to is one on which he now looks back,
and probably shall ever look back, with the melancholy satisfaction
which accompanies a retrospect of happiness gone by. If ever there
existed an enthusiastic lover of the profession of arms, I believe that
I was one. But the times were unfavourable; and he must live for
very little purpose who knows not that enthusiasm of any kind rarely
survives our youth. I loved my profession as long as it gave full
occupation to my bodily and mental powers; but the peace came,
and I loved it no longer. Perhaps, indeed, the kind of feeling which I
had taught myself to encourage was not such as, in the present
state of society, any prudent person is justified in encouraging; for I
care not to conceal that the brightest hopes of my boyhood have all
faded, and that manhood has produced none capable of taking their
place. The friend who shared with me so many dangers and
hardships fell at my side by the hand of an unworthy enemy. The
walk of life which I pursued for a while so merrily has been
abandoned; my sabre hangs rusty upon the wall; and my poor old
faithful dog is gathered to her fathers. She lies under the green sod
in a little lawn, on the surface of which she used to stretch her limbs
many a day in the noon-tide sun, after age had begun to stiffen
them. Well, well, all this is as it ought to be. It is quite right that we
should learn the folly of fixing our affections too strongly upon
anything in a scene so shifting and uncertain as human life; and I
suspect that there are few persons who are not taught that lesson,
at least occasionally, long before their prime be past.
Let it not, however, be supposed, that he who thus expresses
himself must therefore be discontented with his lot, or that he
murmurs against the Providence which has cast it for him. By no
means. If in my new mode of existence there be less of excitement
and of wild enjoyment than in my old, at least there is more of calm
and quiet gratification. Other ties, likewise, are around me, different
in kind, indeed, but not less tender than those which time has
severed; and if there be nothing in the future calculated to stir up
ambitious longing, there is still sufficient to defend against
discontent. At all events, I am certain that my present occupations
are such as will prove more permanently and vitally beneficial to
others than those which preceded them; and let me add, that a man
need not be accused of fanaticism who is convinced that to look
back upon a life not uselessly spent is the only thing which will bring
him peace at the last.
But enough of moralising, when, in the Minstrel's words, I wish to
such as have honoured my tale with a perusal—
"To all, to each, a fair good-night,
And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light."
 POSTSCRIPT.
Soon after the first appearance of "The Subaltern" in 'Blackwood's
Magazine,' there were published, in the same able work, lines to the
memory of my faithful dog, which sorrow for the loss of a creature
so dear to me had called forth.
They do not appear to myself to be worthy of republication; but as
others have thought differently, I cannot refuse to give a place to
them in a volume which, indirectly at least, has told how long and
how faithfully Juno served me. I therefore subjoin
MY DOG'S EPITAPH.
Sleep on, sleep on, thou gentle one!
Light lie the turf upon thy breast;
Thy toil is o'er, thy race is run—
Sleep on, and take thy rest!
In vain for thee were the 'larum note
Poured from the bugle's brazen throat—
The rolling drum thou heedest not,
Nor noise of signal-gun.
Let charger tramp or warrior tread
Over the place of thy narrow bed,
They will not wake thee from the dead—
Thy mortal strife is done!

Sleep on, sleep on, thou faithful slave!

Unmindful though thy master keep
His vigils by thy nameless grave,
And think of thee and weep;
Not even his voice, beloved of yore,
That stirred thee when the cannon's roar
Hath failed to rouse, shall rouse thee more
 Out of thy slumbers deep!
No more for thee his whistle shrill
Shall sound through wood, o'er moor and hill—
Thy cry is mute, thy limbs are still
In everlasting sleep!

Sleep on, sleep on! no morrow's sun

Shall light thee to the battle back;
Thy fight hath closed, thy laurels won,
And this thy bivouac.
On tented field or bloody plain,
For thee the watch-fire flares in vain—
Thou wilt not share its warmth again
With him who loved thee well;
Nor when with toil and danger spent,
He rests beneath the firmament,
Thine eye upon his form be bent,
Thou trusty sentinel!

Sleep on, thou friend and comrade tried,

In battle, broil, and peaceful bower!
Thou hast left for once thy master's side,
But never in danger's hour.
Not thus inactive wert thou laid,
On that night of perilous ambuscade,
When levelled tube and brandished blade
Were at thy master's throat;
Then fierce and forward was thy bound,
And proud thy footstep pressed the ground,
While the tangled greenwood echoed round
With thy loud warning-note.

Sleep on, sleep on! it is not now

The soldier's cloak, a covering meet
For that kind head—no more art thou
 Couched at a soldier's feet.
What boots it thee if storms be high,
Or summer breezes fan the sky?
Unheeded both will pass thee by,
They cannot reach thee there;
Hunger and thirst assail thee not—
Peril and pain alike forgot—
Be foul or fair thy master's lot,
That lot thou canst not share.

Then sleep; though gladly would I give

Half of the life preserved by thee,
Couldst thou, once more, my comrade, live
Thy short space o'er with me.
Vain wish, and impotent as vain;
'Tis but a mockery of pain,
To dream that aught may bring again
The spirit that hath flown.
But years steal by, and they who mourn
Another's fate, each in his turn
Shall tread one path, and reach one bourne,—
Then, faithful friend, sleep on!
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUBALTERN
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