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
Results 1-5 of 86
... farms of the midlands , and in the Wicklow mountains . It was almost synonymous with life in Ireland . But why ? Answering questions concerning causation in economic history is always controversial . It is not possible to prove anything ...
... farms , which used landless laborers and cottagers for their labor supply . In the northern counties , including most of Ulster and north Connaught , farming was combined with rural industry , and smallholders held a large proportion of ...
... farm size before the famine are available from two separate and independent sources . The 1841 Census listed the number of farms by county in its " Tables of the Rural Economy " with three cutoff points : 5 , 15 , and 50 acres . These ...
... farms was quite substantial . In county Dublin 55.3 percent of all farms were smaller than 1 acre , but the small gardens tilled by the inhabitants of the capital accounted for a large number of reported tiny farms . Removing Dublin ...
... farming , relatively large agricultural units which were either grazing or mixed farms . This sector produced the vast bulk of the live cattle that Ireland exported , as well as most of the cereal crops . It is to these graziers and farmers ...
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 |