Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850Technical changes in the first half of the nineteenth century led to unprecedented economic growth and capital formation throughout Western Europe; and yet Ireland hardly participated in this process at all. While the Northern Atlantic Economy prospered, the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50 killed a million and a half people and caused hundreds of thousands to flee the country. Why the Irish economy failed to grow, and ‘why Ireland starved’ remains an unresolved riddle of economic history. Professor Mokyr maintains that the ‘Hungry Forties’ were caused by the overall underdevelopment of the economy during the decades which preceded the famine. In Why Ireland Starved he tests various hypotheses that have been put forward to account for this backwardness. He dismisses widespread arguments that Irish poverty can be explained in terms of over-population, an evil land system or malicious exploitation by the British. Instead, he argues that the causes have to be sought in the low productivity of labor and the insufficient formation of physical capital – results of the peculiar political and social structure of Ireland, continuous conflicts between landlords and tenants, and the rigidity of Irish economic institutions. Mokyr’s methodology is rigorous and quantitative, in the tradition of the New Economic History. It sets out to test hypotheses about the causal connections between economic and non-economic phenomena. Irish history is often heavily coloured by political convictions: of Dutch-Jewish origin, trained in Israel and working in the United States. Mokyr brings to this controversial field not only wide research experience but also impartiality and scientific objectivity. The book is primarily aimed at numerate economic historians, historical demographers, economists specializing in agricultural economics and economic development and specialists in Irish and British nineteenth-century history. The text is, nonetheless, free of technical jargon, with the more complex material relegated to appendixes. Mokyr’s line of reasoning is transparent and has been easily accessible and useful to readers without graduate training in economic theory and econometrics since ists first publication in 1983. |
From inside the book
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... peasant unfavorably to black slaves, Russian peasants, and Indian savages, and clearly believed that the material condition in Ireland was vastly inferior to that in their own countries. While the Irish west was obviously regarded as ...
... peasants, most of the 33 percent of the potato crop fed to animals must be considered exports. All in all, it is reasonable to assume that the potato crop alone provided the Irish with at least 4,200 x 109 calories per year, which is ...
... peasant's ... contentment has made him rest satisfied with shelter and turf fire, and potatoes and water to live upon ... and is happy so long as he can get them, and he strives for nothing better”. Beaumont (1839, Vol. 2, pp. 19—20) ...
... peasantry could not be found in the world, for which they credited the potato. Kane (1845, pp. 400-1) reported that the average height of the Irish was 70 inches, compared to 685 inches for the English and 68 inches for the Belgians ...
... peasant-proprietors. Landlords, of whom there were about 8,000 (Pim, 1848, p. 43), could hardly be defined as a class. The vast bulk of Irish society worked on the land but did not own it. From the point of view of economic geography ...
Contents
1 | |
6 | |
Was Malthus Right? | 30 |
4 Land Leases and Length of Tenure | 81 |
5 The Economics of Rural Conflict and Unrest | 112 |
6 The Problem of Wealth | 151 |
Entrepreneurship and Labor | 197 |
8 Emigration and the Prefamine Economy | 230 |
the Economics of Vulnerability | 261 |
10 Explaining Irish Poverty | 278 |
Bibliography | 295 |
Index | 317 |
Other editions - View all
Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish ... Joel Mokyr Limited preview - 2006 |
Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish ... Joel Mokyr No preview available - 2010 |