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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... crop was directly consumed by humans . To that we have to add the amount consumed indirectly through potato - fed animals , but since meat or pork were not a daily fare of most Irish peasants , most of the 33 percent of the potato crop ...
... crop was not harvested until September . A Leitrim witness explained ( ibid . , p . 4 ) that " we have never experienced the distress which so often occurs in the West of Connaught where the degree of misery and starvation may be ...
... crops raised by the landed poor , potatoes and pigs . Table 2.1 is based on the assumption that the witnesses ... crop of potatoes and pigs , their 10 WHY IRELAND STARVED.
... crop of potatoes and pigs , their income can be readily estimated . The 1841 census provides exact figures on the value of the stock of pigs , and as the turnover period of pigs was approximately one year , the value of the stock was ...
... crops , it is likely to have involved a partial setback in the commercialization of the Irish economy ( Hoffman and Mokyr , 1981 ) . One feature shared by all parts of Ireland is the total absence of a group of peasant - proprietors ...
Contents
1 | |
6 | |
30 | |
Land Leases and Length of Tenure | 81 |
The Economics of Rural Conflict and Unrest | 112 |
The Problem of Wealth | 151 |
Entrepreneurship and Labor | 197 |
Emigration and the Prefamine Economy | 230 |
the Economics of Vulnerability | 261 |
Explaining Irish Poverty | 278 |
Bibliography | 295 |
Index | 317 |