NOTES

Introduction: Irish Questions

1. Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Commissariat Series), January–March 1847, Command Papers 796 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847), 164.

2. Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 185; Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850, new ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 275–277.

3. Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (September 1, 2019): 701.

4. On the spread of the potato in Europe, see William H. McNeill, “How the Potato Changed the World’s History,” Social Research 66, no. 1 (1999): 67–83; Redcliffe N. Salaman, “The Early European Potato: Its Character and Place of Origin,” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 53, no. 348 (February 1, 1946): 1–27.

5. On the potato as a technical innovation in European farming, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, 1st Vintage reprint ed. (New York: Vintage, 1996), 166.

6. On Irish and British identity, and on Irish involvement in imperial administration, see R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993); Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 90–122.

7. Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda, “Poor and Getting Poorer? Living Standards in Ireland Before the Famine,” Economic History Review 41, no. 2 (1988): 209–235; R. B. McDowell, “Ireland on the Eve of the Famine,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 22–30.

8. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political: In Two Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 2:727; Monthly Chronicle: A National Journal of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, vol. 6 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840), 334–335.

9. John Stuart Mill, England and Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), 3; John Wiggins, The “Monster” Misery of Ireland: A Practical Treatise on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant, with Suggestions for Legislative Measures, and the Management of Landed Property, the Result of Above Thirty Years’ Experience and Study of the Subject (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 283–284.

10. Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:19; House of Commons Debates, February 16, 1844, vol. 72, cc. 1016–1017.

11. [Douglas Jerrold], “Ireland,” Punch, October 18, 1845, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992.

12. Extracts from the Information Received by His Majesty’s Commissioners as to the Administration and Operation of the Poor Laws (London: B. Fellowes, 1834), 227; Michael Quinn, “Jeremy Bentham on the Relief of Indigence: An Exercise in Applied Philosophy,” in Jeremy Bentham, ed. Frederick Rosen (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017).

13. On the allure of the market in Europe in this era, see Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 (London: Allen Lane, 2023), chap. 1.

14. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), xiii; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 2004), 395.

15. William Parsons, Earl of Rosse, Letters on the State of Ireland (London: John Hatchard and Son, 1847), 10; Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: Originally Presented to the Right Hon. William Pitt, in the Month of November, 1795 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1800), 32.

16. Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), 270; Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), 306.

17. On the tension between idealised and real markets, see Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 59; Hans Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy,” in Industrialization Before Industrialization, ed. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohm, trans. Beate Schempp (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 44–45; on markets and inequality, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003).

18. Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 201.

19. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 35.

20. On faith in markets, see Ó Gráda, Ireland, 193; on laissez-faire, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 145.

21. Trevelyan, Irish Crisis, 184; To-Day in Ireland (London: Charles Knight, 1825), 3:163–164; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 622.

22. Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays, 1:178–180.

23. From The Liberator, March 27, 1846, Philip Foner, ed., Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 138. Thomas Carlyle’s contempt for Ireland paled only in comparison with his bilious hatred of Black people, in the Caribbean and elsewhere; see Thomas Carlyle, “The Present Time,” in Latter-Day Pamphlets [1850], Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), 3–58; Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question [Reprinted, with Additions, from Fraser’s Magazine] (London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853), 8.

24. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books, ed. Thomas M. Cooley, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago: Callaghan, 1884), 1:417.

25. Charles Greville, The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, ed. Henry Reeve (New York: Appleton, 1885), 387–388; Trevelyan, Irish Crisis, 8.

26. The iconic historical analysis downplaying the impact of the Great Famine is W. E. H. Lecky, “Why Home Rule Is Undesirable,” North American Review 152, no. 412 (1891): 361. For commentary on these arguments, see Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved, 289–292; K. H. Connell, “The Potato in Ireland,” Past and Present 23, no. 1 (1962): 65. See Trevelyan, Irish Crisis, 201; John Mitchel, The Crusade of the Period and Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Irish-American Library 4 (New York: Lynch, Cole, and Meehan, 1878), 322–325. On hunger as a symbol in Irish revolutionary politics, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 42–43; Kevin Grant, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, Berkeley Series in British Studies 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). For an overview of the academic historiography of the Great Famine, see Ó Gráda, Ireland, 174–176; Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), xv–xvi; Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 1–3; Mary E. Daly, “Historians and the Famine: A Beleaguered Species?,” Irish Historical Studies 30, no. 120 (1997): 591–601; Christine Kinealy, “Beyond Revisionism: Reassessing the Great Irish Famine,” History Ireland 3, no. 4 (1995): 28–34; Colm Tóibín, “Erasures,” London Review of Books, July 30, 1998, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n15/colm-toibin/erasures.

27. On starvation and international law, see Conley and de Waal, “Purposes of Starvation.”

28. Lawrence J. Taylor, “Bás InEirinn: Cultural Constructions of Death in Ireland,” Anthropological Quarterly 62, no. 4 (1989): 175.

29. On the Irish “volcano,” see Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 110; on European phenomena “nationalized in retrospect,” see Clark, Revolutionary Spring, 2, 45.

30. On Victorian famines, see Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 7–11; see also David Lloyd, “Afterword: The Afterlife of the Untimely Dead,” in Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Marguérite Corporaal et al. (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2014), 285–296.

31. David Lloyd, “The Political Economy of the Potato,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2007): 312; John Pitt Kennedy, Instruct, Employ, Don’t Hang Them: Or, Ireland Tranquilized Without Soldiers and Enriched Without English Capital (London: Thomas and William Boone, 1835), 28–29.

32. On the Anthropocene and ecological crisis, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (March 2015): 171–180; Jennifer Marshman, Alison Blay-Palmer, and Karen Landman, “Anthropocene Crisis: Climate Change, Pollinators, and Food Security,” Environments 6, no. 2 (February 2019): 22; Ricardo Rozzi, “Biocultural Homogenization: A Wicked Problem in the Anthropocene,” in From Biocultural Homogenization to Biocultural Conservation, ed. Ricardo Rozzi et al., Ecology and Ethics 3 (Cham, Germany: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 21–48.

33. On subsistence farming and globalisation, see B. Davis et al., “Estimating Global and Country-Level Employment in Agrifood Systems,” FAO Statistics Working Paper Series (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, February 20, 2023); June Nash, “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 1 (1994): 7–30.

1 

Chapter 1: A Hungry Island

1. Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies, vol. 16 (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1823), 612–613.

2. L. De Bussche, Letters on Ceylon: Particularly Relative to the Kingdom of Kandy (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1817), 78–88; Colburn’s United Service Magazine and Naval and Military Journal, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1834), 110.

3. Thomas Bartlett, “Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62. Greville’s comments are quoted often in histories of eighteenth-century Ireland. See Thomas Bartlett, “‘This Famous Island Set in a Virginian Sea’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 253. On Ireland and Britain as conjoined twins, see Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland: As to Their Conduct for the Service of Their Country (Dublin: R. Reilly, 1816), 67–70.

4. Johann Georg Kohl, Travels in Ireland (London: Bruce and Wyld, 1844), 164; see also Alvin Jackson, “Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960,” in Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, 133–137; David Nally, “‘That Coming Storm’: The Irish Poor Law, Colonial Biopolitics, and the Great Famine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 3 (September 2008): 715.

5. On Catholic dispossession, see Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, updated ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004), 121.

6. David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 30.

7. Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1897), 44–45; Daniel O’Connell, A Memoir on Ireland, Native and Saxon, 2nd ed. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1844), 1:345.

8. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Giving the Derivation, Source, or Origin of Common Phrases, Allusions, and Words That Have a Tale to Tell (London: Cassell, 1895), 597; Aubrey De Vere, The Church Settlement of Ireland, or, Hibernia Pacanda (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 23. For the folktale of Cromwell and the spurting milk, see “Cromwellian Stories,” Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (hereafter Schools’ Collection), vol. 0880, p. 373.

9. R. B. McDowell, “Ireland on the Eve of the Famine,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 63–71. On the circuit ridden by Catholic priests, see David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 1 (1975): 88–90.

10. On steep exchange rates, see William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland with the Establishment for That Kingdom When the Late Duke of Ormond Was Lord Lieutenant (London, 1691), 71–73. On Irish trade to the Caribbean, see Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2023), 23–24.

11. Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick [1729],” in Volume IV of the Author’s Works, Containing, a Collection of Tracts Relating to Ireland (Dublin: G. Faulkner, 1735), 276–277.

12. First Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, with Appendix (A.) and Supplement, Sessional Papers 369 (London: House of Commons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [369]), 603. See also Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part I, Command Papers 606 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845), 169–170.

13. On the patchwork of townlands, see Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13. On the complexity of rundale and other customary systems of land use, see “Ireland,” Times, July 31, 1844, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 9, 2021); David Lloyd, “The Political Economy of the Potato,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2007): 311–312; Dean M. Braa, “The Great Potato Famine and the Transformation of Irish Peasant Society,” Science and Society 61, no. 2 (1997): 200–203.

14. On Irish units of measurement, see Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Board of Works Series), July 1846–January 1847, Parliamentary Papers, Command Papers 764 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1847), 4.

15. David Nally, “The Colonial Dimensions of the Great Irish Famine,” in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, ed. John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 66; John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 147; William Maunsell, Letters to the Right Honourable and Honourable the Dublin Society, on the Culture of the Potatoes from the Shoots (Dublin: William Sleater, 1794), 24.

16. On peat bogs, see Hely Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare, with Observations on the Means of Improvement (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1808), 4; other references are from Robert Kane, The Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1844), 2–3; Arthur Young, Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1776–1779), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 1:5–6.

17. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2010), 403.

18. “Tenure of Land and Landlordism in Ireland,” Our Continent, 1882, 562; Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship “Bacchante,” 1879–1882, vol. 1, The West and the South (London: Macmillan and Company, 1886), 53–54; Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1882), 125–127; “A Day in Barbados,” Timehri: Being the Journal of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana, New Series, 9 (1895): 75–76; Hermann Schomburgk, The History of Barbados: Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island; a Sketch of the Historical Events Since the Settlement; and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 84.

19. On Irish emigration, see Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, 94–95. For “poor Catholicks,” see Young, Tour in Ireland, 2:67.

20. On Irish imperial service, see Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” 105–106; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 326–327. For “sinewy arms,” see Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare, 173–174. For “Irish courage,” see “Ireland,” Economist, January 16, 1847, 67, The Economist Historical Archive (accessed October 14, 2021). On military wages, see Thomas Robert Malthus, “Newenham and Others on the State of Ireland,” Edinburgh Review 12 (1808): 350–351; for O’Connell’s praise of Irish imperial soldiers, see Henry Shaw, ed., Shaw’s Authenticated Report of the Irish State Trials, 1844 (Dublin: Henry Shaw, 1844).

21. On Irish shipping, see William J. Smyth, “The Longue Durée: Imperial Britain and Colonial Ireland,” in Crowley et al., Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, 59; on Irish commodities in the Atlantic, see Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 382; Berg and Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, 59.

22. William Thomas Thornton, A Plea for Peasant Proprietors: With the Outlines of a Plan for Their Establishment in Ireland (London: John Murray, 1848), 197–199.

23. William Smith, The Substance of Mr. William Smith’s Speech on the Subject of a Legislative Union Between Great Britain and Ireland: Delivered in the Irish House of Commons, on Thursday, January 24th, 1799, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Marchbank, 1799), 2; Thomas Goold, An Address to the People of Ireland, on the Subject of the Projected Union (Dublin: Printed by James Moore, 1799), 87.

24. Great Britain Parliament, The Parliamentary Register; Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Lords and House of Commons, vol. 7 (London: J. Debrett, 1799), 637–638; see also Bartlett, “Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801,” 83–87.

25. George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1921), 454.

26. “The Class Election,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0596, p. 132; Poor Man’s Guardian, no. 226, October 3, 1835, 688; see also Colley, Britons, 322–344.

27. “To Correspondents,” Times, October 20, 1829, 2, The Times Digital Archive; “Ireland,” Times, July 24, 1829, 2, The Times Digital Archive.

28. Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), iv; Mary Leadbeater, The Landlord’s Friend, Intended as a Sequel to Cottage Dialogues (Dublin: J. Cumming, 1813), 101–107; see also Helen O’Connell, “The Nature of Improvement in Ireland,” in Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Matthew Kelly (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 18–20.

29. Daniel Defoe, Giving Alms, No Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation (London, 1704), 5; on yields and the labour force, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, 1st Vintage reprint ed. (New York: Vintage, 1996), 150; Cornelius Walford, The Famines of the World: Past and Present (London: Edward Stanford, 1879), 110.

30. Sir William Petty, “The Political Anatomy of Ireland, 1672,” in Tracts; Chiefly Relating to Ireland (Dublin: Boulter Grierson, 1769), 355–356; Young, Tour in Ireland, 1:463; Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 64–65.

31. Petty, “Political Anatomy of Ireland,” 367; Edward Gibbon Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political: In Two Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 2:811–812; Martin Doyle, Hints for the Small Farmers of Ireland, 4th ed. (Dublin: J. Charles, 1830), 51, 12; Kane, Industrial Resources, 381.

32. Madden, Reflections and Resolutions, 23, 72–73; George Nicholls, Poor Laws—Ireland: Three Reports by George Nicholls, Esq. to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1838), 10–11; see also Leadbeater, Landlord’s Friend, 109–110; O’Connell, “The Nature of Improvement in Ireland,” 18–20; for a summary from the perspective of political economy, see Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 2:30–31.

33. Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (F)—Contains Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre, Quarter, or Score Ground, Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry, Emigration, Landlord and Tenant, Nature and State of Agriculture, Taxation, Roads, Observations on the Nature and State of Agriculture, and Supplement, Contains, Answers to the Questions Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 38 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836), 317; see also R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 246.

34. George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law: In Connexion with the Condition of the People (London: John Murray, 1856), 97–98; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part III, Command Papers 657 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845) (hereafter HC 1845 [657]), 454; O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 43–45; Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 97.

35. Colley, Britons, 150; John Moseley, The Causes and Remedies for General Distress, and the Principles of an Equitable Adjustment, Impartially Discussed in a Letter to Sir W. Parker, Bart (Bury, Suffolk: Gedge, Son, and Barker, 1830), 5; Edward Solly, On Free Trade, in Relation to the Present Distress (London: James Ridgeway, 1830), 6.

36. On Irish clubs and capital flight, see O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 454–462.

37. Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 7.

38. Joseph Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, or, A Practical Treatise on Farming, Planting and Gardening: Adapted to the Circumstances, Resources, Soil and Climate of the Country (Dublin: William Curry, 1829), 112–113; on falling commodity prices, see Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (E) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings’ Banks, Drinking and Supplement Containing Answers to Questions 13 to 22 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 37 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1836), 31; Condition of the Labouring Poor in Ireland and Application of Funds for Their Employment: Report from the Select Committee on the Employment of the Poor, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, Sessional Papers 561 (London: UK House of Commons, 1823) (hereafter HC 1823 [561]), 115; Louis M. Cullen, Anglo-Irish Trade, 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 120; Brian Gurrin, “Population and Emigration, 1730–1845,” in The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 3, 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 204–230; Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 11; Walford, Famines of the World, 110; John Pitt Kennedy, Instruct, Employ, Don’t Hang Them: Or, Ireland Tranquilized Without Soldiers and Enriched Without English Capital (London: Thomas and William Boone, 1835), 3; P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop in Pre-famine Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 21 (1967–1968): 81; Kane, Industrial Resources, 389; Henry D. Inglis, A Journey Throughout Ireland, During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834 (London: Whittaker and Company, 1834), 1:131.

39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 2004), 860; E. R. R. Green, “Agriculture,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 99–101; Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, updated ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004), 162; Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 6; HC 1823 (561), 162–164, 183, 189.

40. Horace Green, On the Manufacture of Pettitt’s Fish Guano (London: A. Williams, 1853), 10; Farmer’s Magazine, vol. 21, 1850, 146–49; HC 1823 (561), 25; “Why Is There a Deficient Town Population in Ireland?” Economist, April 18, 1846, 499, The Economist Historical Archive (accessed October 19, 2021).

41. “Why Is There a Deficient Town Population in Ireland?”; John Workman, The Fallacy of the Late Speeches in Parliament, in Support of Corn Laws, Exposed (Belfast: Francis D. Finlay, 1815), 2; HC 1836 (369), 426, 480; Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20–22; William Graydon, Reflections on the State of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (London: J. Ridgway, 1825), 133.

42. Correspondence Explanatory of Measures Adopted by H.M. Government for Relief of Distress Arising from Failure of Potato Crop in Ireland, Command Papers 735 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1846), 4–5; on the structure of Irish trade, see Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics; Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County Clare, 67–69; Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 1:747.

43. Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, 109; HC 1836 (369), 360, 198; on drill planting, see Green, “Agriculture,” 96; on cattle ranching, see Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (D.) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure; and Supplement, Containing Answers to Questions 1 to 12 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 36 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836).

44. HC 1836 (369), 599–601; Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 123; HC 1836 (369), 540–541; Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 35; Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, 112–113; on the rise in subsistence crises, see Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 2:727.

45. Inglis, Journey Throughout Ireland, 2:290–291; Kohl, Travels in Ireland; on Ireland’s coach routes and train network, see McDowell, “Ireland on the Eve of the Famine,” 16–17.

46. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a Preface Written in 1892, trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, reprint ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 90–92; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writings, ed. L. I. Golman, V. E. Kunina, and R. Dixon, trans. Angela Clifford et al. (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 74–76; “Explosion of the Emancipation Bubble,” Leeds Times, February 14, 1835, 2; John Maxwell, Manual Labour versus Machinery; Exemplified in a Speech on Moving for a Committee of Parliamentary Inquiry into the Condition of Half-a-Million Hand-Loom Weavers… with an Appendix (London: Cochrane and McCrone, 1834), 43–44; William Cobbett, Selections from Cobbett’s Political Works: Being a Complete Abridgment of the 100 Volumes Which Comprise the Writings of “Porcupine” and the “Weekly Political Register”; with Notes, Historical and Explanatory, ed. John M. Cobbett and James P. Cobbett (London: Anne Cobbett, 1837), 780.

47. Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 48–49; HC 1823 (561), 38–39.

48. Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, 191–193; Thomas Carlyle, Chartism: By Thomas Carlyle (London: James Fraser, 1840); John Wiggins, The “Monster” Misery of Ireland: A Practical Treatise on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant, with Suggestions for Legislative Measures, and the Management of Landed Property, the Result of Above Thirty Years’ Experience and Study of the Subject (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 90–91.

49. On steamships, see Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 166–167; on Smithfield and Irish pork, see J. C. Platt, “Smithfield,” in London, ed. Charles Knight, vol. 2 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1841), 321–322; the reference to “folios of bacon” is from Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 164.

50. Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 164; Kennedy, Instruct, Employ, Don’t Hang Them, 23; see also Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics, 7; Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 31.

1 

Chapter 2: Working for the Dead Horse

1. Evelyn Philip Shirley, Lough Fea (London: Chiswick Press, 1859), 3–20; John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland: A List of All Owners of Three Thousand Acres and Upwards, Worth £3,000 a Year; Also, One Thousand Three Hundred Owners of Two Thousand Acres and Upwards, in England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales, Their Acreage, and Income from Land, Culled from the Modern Domesday Book, 4th ed. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1883), 406; for historical conversions of the pound, see “Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets,” MeasuringWorth, accessed January 30, 2024, www.measuringworth.com/index.php; “Purchase Power of the Pound,” MeasuringWorth, accessed January 30, 2024, www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare.

2. Johann Georg Kohl, Travels in Ireland (London: Bruce and Wyld, 1844), 89; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part I, Command Papers 606 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845) (hereafter HC 1845 [606]), 925; William Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 65–66.

3. Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 2.

4. R. B. McDowell, “Ireland on the Eve of the Famine,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 7–8; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part II, Command Papers 616 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845) (hereafter HC 1845 [616]), 263–264; R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 6; “The Tenure of Land in Ireland,” Times, February 22, 1845, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20 (1960): 7–11; P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 21 (1967–1968): 82–86; Arthur Young, Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1776–1779), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 1:456; “The Present State of Ireland,” Freeman’s Journal, October 14, 1847, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 20, 2021); E. R. R. Green, “Agriculture,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 89.

5. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 9; M. J. Daunton, “‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ and British Industry, 1820–1914,” Past and Present, no. 122 (1989): 119–158; John Wiggins, The “Monster” Misery of Ireland: A Practical Treatise on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant, with Suggestions for Legislative Measures, and the Management of Landed Property, the Result of Above Thirty Years’ Experience and Study of the Subject (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 54–55; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manner of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 (London: R. Hunter, 1828), 23.

6. James Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847: A Letter Addressed to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, Dublin, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848), 6; Correspondence Explanatory of Measures Adopted by H.M. Government for Relief of Distress Arising from Failure of Potato Crop in Ireland, Command Papers 735 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1846), 109–110; Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop in Pre-Famine Ireland,” 81; on wage rates, see First Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, with Appendix (A.) and Supplement, Sessional Papers 369 (London: House of Commons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [369]), 161.

7. HC 1845 (606), 105–106; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part III, Command Papers 657 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845) (hereafter HC 1845 [657]), 888–889; Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 31; historical conversions of value from “Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets.”

8. HC 1845 (606), 384, 241–242; Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), 435.

9. “Ireland,” Times, November 14, 1829, 3, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 8, 2021); “Ireland,” Times, March 28, 1844, 6, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 11, 2021).

10. HC 1836 (369), 515.

11. “Ireland,” Times, November 14, 1829, 3, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 8, 2021); “To the Editor of The Times,” Times, October 29, 1832, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 11, 2021); HC 1845 (657), 279; Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the State of Agriculture in England and Wales; with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, Sessional Papers 464 (London: House of Lords, 1837) (hereafter HL 1837 [464]), 30; HC 1845 (606), 225; Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (F)—Contains Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre, Quarter, or Score Ground, Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry, Emigration, Landlord and Tenant, Nature and State of Agriculture, Taxation, Roads, Observations on the Nature and State of Agriculture, and Supplement, Contains Answers to the Questions Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 38 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [38]), 19.

12. Bradford Observer, June 22, 1843, 4, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 28, 2021); Times, April 25, 1842, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); “Ireland,” Times, March 29, 1844, 6, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); HC 1836 (369), 304.

13. HC 1845 (657), 780, 119, 396; “Ireland,” Morning Post, April 23, 1841, 6, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 28, 2021). See also Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20; E. R. R. Green, “Agriculture,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 95.

14. “The Hiring-Market,” Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (hereafter Schools’ Collection), vol. 0975, pp. 102–103, 135; Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (D.) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure; and Supplement, Containing Answers to Questions 1 to 12 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 36 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [36]), 25; “Ireland,” Morning Post, January 24, 1838, 5, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 23, 2021); “Ireland,” Morning Post, January 24, 1838, 5, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 23, 2021); Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (C)—Parts I and II—Part I: Reports on the State of the Poor, and on the Charitable Institutions in Some of the Principal Towns, with Supplement Containing Answers to Queries—Part II: Report on the City of Dublin, Command Papers 35 (London: House of Commons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [35]), 35, 86; George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1921), 387; HC 1845 (616), 747.

15. HC 1836 (35), 31–32; HC 1845 (616), 747; HC 1836 (35), Part II, 8.

16. Hely Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare, with Observations on the Means of Improvement (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1808), 298–299; HC 1845 (657), 486; Wiggins, “Monster” Misery of Ireland, 21–23; see also L. M. Cullen, “Irish History Without the Potato,” Past and Present 40, no. 1 (1968): 81.

17. Jonathan Pim, Observations upon Certain Evils Arising Out of the Present State of the Laws of Real Property in Ireland and Suggestions for Remedying the Same (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1847), 20; HC 1836 (369), 434; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 104–105; HC 1836 (369), 379–380, 428–429.

18. “Buying and Selling,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0638, p. 57; “Buying and Selling,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0294, p. 50; HC 1845 (616), 238; HC 1845 (606), 340; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 308.

19. HC 1845 (606), 345–346; HC 1836 (369), 357–358; on the loan fund, see Tyler Beck Goodspeed, Famine and Finance: Credit and the Great Famine of Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

20. “Buying and Selling,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0318, p. 179; see also “The Condition of the People of Ireland,” Times, October 7, 1845, 6, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 11, 2021); Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 238, 307–308; “Money Lenders,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 1112, p. 415; HC 1836 (369), 457, 360–361.

21. HC 1836 (369), 397; HC 1845 (606), 85–86; Condition of the Labouring Poor in Ireland and Application of Funds for Their Employment: Report from the Select Committee on the Employment of the Poor, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, Sessional Papers 561 (London: House of Commons, 1823), 140; HL 1837 (464), 360; HC 1836 (369), 379–380.

22. HC 1836 (369), 401; HC 1836 (36), 65–66.

23. “To the Editor of The Times,” Times, October 29, 1832, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 11, 2021).

24. Tadhg Foley, Death by Discourse?: Political Economy and the Great Irish Famine, Famine Folio Series (Hamden, CT: Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University, 2016).

25. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776), 1:28–29.

26. George Poulett Scrope, Letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, on the Expediency of Enlarging the Irish Poor-Law to the Full Extent of the Poor-Law of England (London: James Ridgway, 1846), 9–10; Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:58; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 115; Henry D. Inglis, A Journey Throughout Ireland, During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834 (London: Whittaker and Company, 1834), 1:155–156; on debt, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, rev. ed. (London: Melville House, 2014), 34–41.

27. “The Real Grievance of Ireland,” Manchester Guardian, February 24, 1844; William Cobbett, Cottage Economy: Containing Information Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread, Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry and Rabbits, and Relative to Other Matters Deemed Useful in the Conducting of the Affairs of a Labourer’s Family, 1st American ed., from the 1st London ed. (New York: Stephen Gould and Son, 1824), 37.

28. Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 86–88.

29. Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), 299; Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 95; Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850, new ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 144; “Ireland,” Times, January 9, 1822, 2, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 12, 2021); “Ireland,” Lancaster Gazetter, June 19, 1841, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 15, 2021).

30. “Ireland,” Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers (accessed November 2, 2021); HC 1845 (657), 372; HC 1836 (369), 420; Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays, 1:42–43; Charles Buller, Abstract Return of Number of Persons Committed for Trial in Ireland, 1844–45; Return of Outrages Reported to Constabulary Office in Ireland, 1842–45, Sessional Papers 217 (London: House of Commons, 1846), 1–5.

31. On rental income, see Bateman, Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 189.

32. Bateman, Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 208; HC 1845 (616), Supplement, 72–73.

33. HC 1836 (369), 386.

34. Berkshire Chronicle, September 1, 1832, 1, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 13, 2021); Morning Chronicle, January 21, 1833, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 13, 2021).

35. McDowell, “Ireland on the Eve of the Famine,” 26–30.

36. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), 2:85.

37. Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues, 270; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 17–18, 306; Robert Alexander Shafto Adair, The Winter of 1846–7 in Antrim: With Remarks on Out-Door Relief and Colonization (London: James Ridgway, 1847), 50–51; Francis Barker and John Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Fever Lately Epidemical in Ireland (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1821), 41.

38. HC 1836 (369), 402–404; Cornelius Walford, The Famines of the World: Past and Present (London: Edward Stanford, 1879), 15–16; Jonny Geber, “Skeletal Manifestations of Stress in Child Victims of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852): Prevalence of Enamel Hypoplasia, Harris Lines, and Growth Retardation,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 155, no. 1 (2014): 151.

39. Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 35; William Butler Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888), 81; Leland L. Duncan, “Folklore Gleanings from County Leitrim,” Folklore 4, no. 2 (1893): 183; William George Black, Folk-Medicine: A Chapter in the History of Culture (London: Folk-lore Society, 1883), 30–31; HC 1836 (369), 373; see also George Nicholls, Poor Laws—Ireland: Three Reports by George Nicholls, Esq. to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1838), 16; O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 232; “Potatoes,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0108, pp. 18–20; George Shaw-Lefevre Baron Eversley, Peel and O’Connell: A Review of the Irish Policy of Parliament from the Act of Union to the Death of Sir Robert Peel (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1887), 258; Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (E) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings’ Banks, Drinking and Supplement Containing Answers to Questions 13 to 22 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 37 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1836), 16; William Robert Wilde, “The Food of the Irish,” Dublin University Magazine 43, no. 254 (1854): 30–31.

40. HC 1836 (38), 370; Barker and Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline, 35, 40–41; HC 1836 (369), 161, 379, 624; William Thomas Thornton, Over-Population, and Its Remedy: Or, An Inquiry into the Extent and Causes of the Distress Prevailing Among the Labouring Classes of the British Islands, and into the Means of Remedying It (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), 92–93.

41. HC 1836 (369), 548–549, 676–677; Denis Charles O’Connor, Seventeen Years’ Experience of Workhouse Life (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1861), 9; HC 1836 (369), 497.

42. HC 1836 (369), 689, 659–660, 517.

43. HC 1836 (369), 635; Dublin Review, vol. 29 (London: Thomas Richardson and Co., 1850), 352; Barker and Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline, 139; Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847, 6; James M. Bergquist, Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1820–1870 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008), 66; Wilde, “Food of the Irish,” 129.

44. Nicholls, Poor Laws—Ireland, Three Reports, 91–92; on hiring fairs, see Thomas Walter Freeman, Pre-Famine Ireland: A Study in Historical Geography (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1957); for the lyrics reproduced in full, see “An Irish Wedding,” Dublin University Magazine, September 1862.

45. Barker and Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline, 15, 301.

46. Barker and Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline, 60–64, 299–300; William Harty, An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress, Extent, and Mortality of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland During the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819. With… Tables, Etc. (Dublin: Hodges and McArthur, 1820), 10–21.

47. HC 1836 (369), 287, 303.

48. Correspondence and Accounts Relating to Occasions on Which Measures Were Taken for Relief of People Suffering from Scarcity in Ireland, Command Papers 734 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1846), 5.

49. Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: Originally Presented to the Right Hon. William Pitt, in the Month of November, 1795 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1800), 6; Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, reprint ed. (London: Ridgways, 1817), 13; see also William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. William Carey Jones (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney, 1915), 500; Thornton, Over-Population, and Its Remedy, 206–208.

50. Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 16; Report from the Select Committee on Labourers’ Wages (London: House of Commons, 1824), 4; Harriet Martineau, The Moral of Many Fables, Illustrations of Political Economy 15 (London: Charles Fox, 1834), 82–84; Times, September 22, 1846.

51. Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson, 1798); Thomas Robert Malthus, “Newenham and Others on the State of Ireland,” Edinburgh Review 12 (1808): 343; see also Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003), 19; Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 86–89.

52. Nicholls, Poor Laws—Ireland, Three Reports, 70–71, 5, 24–26.

53. Nicholls, Poor Laws—Ireland, Three Reports, 16; Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (H), Part. 2. Remarks on the Evidence Taken in the Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Contained in the Appendices (D.) (E.) (F.) by One of the Commissioners, Sessional Papers 42 (London: House of Commons, 1836), 5–6; see also David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 109–111; Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 33; O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 192; Philip Harling, “Sugar Wars: The Culture of Free Trade Versus the Culture of Anti-Slavery in Britain and the British Caribbean, 1840–1850,” in The Cultural Construction of the British World, ed. Barry Crosbie and Mark Hampton (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 63; Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, 32.

54. Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 175–183; on slums, see also June Nash, “Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 1 (1994): 7–30; on the demography of Irish poverty, see Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849, reissue ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 165; on the “upper hand,” see HC 1845 (606).

1 

Chapter 3: The People’s Potato

1. For estimates of potato consumption in Europe and Britain, see Report of the Committee of the Board of Agriculture, Appointed to Extract Information from the County Reports, and Other Authorities, Concerning the Culture and Use of Potatoes (London: George Nicol, 1795), 71; John Chalmers Morton, ed., A Cyclopedia of Agriculture, Practical and Scientific: In Which the Theory, the Art, and the Business of Farming Are Thoroughly and Practically Treated, vol. 2 (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1855), 686; Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 65–66. Among numerous examples of sources that refer to very large portions of potatoes in Ireland, see William Williams, Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 97; James H. Murphy, Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119; Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), 53; Leslie Clarkson and Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500–1920 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93; Jean Beagle Ristaino, “Tracking Historic Migrations of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen, Phytophthora infestans,” Microbes and Infection 4, no. 13 (November 1, 2002): 1369; Thomas Edward Jordan, Ireland’s Children: Quality of Life, Stress, and Child Development in the Famine Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 35; Rick Steves and Patrick O’Connor, Rick Steves Ireland (New York: Avalon, 2016), 361. For early versions of the twelve-to-fourteen-pounds figure, see Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (E) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings’ Banks, Drinking and Supplement Containing Answers to Questions 13 to 22 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 37 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [37]), 31; First Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, with Appendix (A.) and Supplement, Sessional Papers 369 (London: House of Commons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [369]), 429; Isaac Weld, Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon, Drawn Up Under the Directions of the Royal Dublin Society (Dublin: R. Graisberry, 1832), 429. For more plausible estimates of Irish potato consumption, see Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (H), Part 2. Remarks on the Evidence Taken in the Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Contained in the Appendices (D.) (E.) (F.) by One of the Commissioners, Sessional Papers 42 (London: House of Commons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [42]), 11; Edward Gibbon Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political: In Two Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 2:714–715; Morton, Cyclopedia of Agriculture, 2:2:686. For an example of the largest figures quoted as authoritative, see Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 2:714–715. On speculation on potato nutrition, see Substances Used as Food, as Exemplified in the Great Exhibition (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1853), 297.

2. J. L. W. Thudichum, “The Diseases of Plants, with Special Regard to Agriculture and Forestry,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 35, no. 1815 (1887): 904.

3. Report… Culture and Use of Potatoes, 71; Morton, Cyclopedia of Agriculture, 2:686; Meagher, Columbia Guide to Irish American History, 65–66. On Irish physical adaptation to the potato, see Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis: Being a Narrative of the Measures for the Relief of the Distress Caused by the Great Irish Famine of 1846–7 (London: Macmillan, 1880), 143; see also Jordanna Bailkin, “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (April 2006): 462–493.

4. Hely Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare, with Observations on the Means of Improvement (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1808), 178–179; Robert Kane, The Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1844), 242; K. H. Connell, The Population of Ireland, 1750–1845, reprint ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 155. The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explores the phenomenon of crops both inside and outside capitalism, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

5. On the history of the use of straw and rushes, see Anne O’Dowd, Straw, Hay and Rushes in Irish Folk Tradition (Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2022); on the potato as staple, see K. H. Connell, “The Potato in Ireland,” Past and Present 23, no. 1 (1962): 63.

6. John Ramsay McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy: With Some Inquiries Respecting Their Application, and a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Science, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1849), 403–404; James F. W. Johnston, Notes on North America, Agricultural, Economical, and Social (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1851), 1:79–80; George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written During the Expedition Under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby: Including Observations on the Island of Barbadoes, and the Settlements Captured by the British Troops, Upon the Coast of Guiana; Likewise Remarks Relating to the Creoles and Slaves of the Western Colonies, and the Indians of South America: With Occasional Hints, Regarding the Seasoning, or Yellow Fever of Hot Climates, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), 428; Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, vol. 15 (Philadelphia: E. Littell and Brother, 1829), 469.

7. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 27–52; James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 22.

8. Joseph Sabine, “On the Native Country of the Wild Potatoe, with an Account of Its Culture in the Garden of the Horticultural Society; and Observations on the Importance of Obtaining Improved Varieties of the Cultivated Plant, Read November 19, 1822,” Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London 5 (1824): 257–259; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books 1–3, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 1:264–265; John E. Davies, “Giffen Goods, the Survival Imperative, and the Irish Potato Culture,” Journal of Political Economy 102, no. 3 (1994): 547–565; William H. McNeill, “How the Potato Changed the World’s History,” Social Research 66, no. 1 (1999): 71; John Ramsay McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation: Illustrated with Maps and Plans, new ed. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838), 938–939.

9. HC 1836 (37), 24–29; HC 1836 (369), 667–668; “The Famine,” Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (hereafter Schools’ Collection), vol. 0608, p. 564; Henry D. Inglis, A Journey Throughout Ireland, During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834 (London: Whittaker and Company, 1834), 2:194–195; William Robert Wilde, “The Food of the Irish,” Dublin University Magazine 43, no. 254 (1854): 130–131. On water with pepper, see Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), 105. Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 77; L. M. Cullen, “Irish History Without the Potato,” Past and Present 40, no. 1 (1968): 77; John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847: With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1875), 27–30; Times, July 25, 1840, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 21 (1967–1968): 78–80.

10. William Maunsell, Letters to the Right Honourable and Honourable the Dublin Society, on the Culture of the Potatoes from the Shoots (Dublin: William Sleater, 1794), 14–16; The Farmer’s Guide, Compiled for the Use of the Small Farmers and Cotter Tenantry of Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1842), 91; An Account of the Culture of Potatoes in Ireland (London: Shepperson and Reynolds, 1796), 28.

11. Maunsell, Culture of Potatoes from the Shoots, 11; for lists of early nineteenth-century potato cultivars, see Report… Culture and Use of Potatoes, 1–4; Roger J. McHugh, “The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 391–393.

12. HC 1836 (42), 10; R. Barry O’Brien, Thomas Drummond, Under-Secretary in Ireland, 1835–40, Life and Letters (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1889), 208; Warren H. R. Jackson, An Address to the Honorable the Members of the House of Commons, on the Landlord and Tenant Question (Cork: George Purcell and Co., 1848), 6–7; Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 6.

13. See P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20 (1960): 7–11; Joseph Decaisne, Histoire de la maladie des pommes de terre en 1845 (Paris: Librarie agricole de Dusacq, 1846), 85–87; Brian J. Haas et al., “Genome Sequence and Analysis of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen Phytophthora Infestans,” Nature 461, no. 7262 (September 2009): 393–398.

14. Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County Clare, 43; Poor Inquiry (Ireland): Appendix (F)—Contains Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre, Quarter, or Score Ground, Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry, Emigration, Landlord and Tenant, Nature and State of Agriculture, Taxation, Roads, Observations on the Nature and State of Agriculture, and Supplement, Contains Answers to the Questions Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 38 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [38]), 323, 272; Robert Fraser, Statistical Survey of the County of Wexford: Drawn Up for the Consideration, and by Order of the Dublin Society (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1807), 98–99; “On Raising Potatoes from Seed,” Irish Farmer’s and Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural Affairs 1, no. 9 (July 1834): 429–430; David Ferguson, “Remarks on the Potato Plant,” Farmer’s Magazine, Old series, 39, no. 3 (September 1853): 226–228.

15. An Account of the Culture of Potatoes in Ireland, 26; Wilde, “Food of the Irish,” 127–128; on religion and the planting calendar, see David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 1 (1975): 90–91; Redcliffe N. Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, ed. J. G. Hawkes, rev. ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 117.

16. Farmer’s Guide, 91–92; An Account of the Culture of Potatoes in Ireland, 13–14, 17–18; “Potatoes,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0108, pp. 18–20; Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 1:360–363; Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County Clare, 36–39; on lazy-beds, see Report… Culture and Use of Potatoes, 23–39; Joseph Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, Or, A Practical Treatise on Farming, Planting and Gardening: Adapted to the Circumstances, Resources, Soil and Climate of the Country (Dublin: William Curry, 1829), 126–127; E. R. R. Green, “Agriculture,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 99–101.

17. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 1:360–363; Salaman, History and Social Influence of the Potato, 233; Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County Clare, 36–39; HC 1836 (38), 401.

18. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 14–15; An Account of the Culture of Potatoes in Ireland, 27–28.

19. “Foods Long Ago,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0278, p. 137; “How Bread was Made Long Ago,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0278, p. 137; “How Bread was Made Long Ago,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0022, p. 0260; Asenath Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger: Or an Excursion Through Ireland, in 1844 & 1845, for the Purpose of Personally Investigating the Condition of the Poor (London: Charles Gilpin, 1847), 218.

20. Wilde, “Food of the Irish,” 127–128; McHugh, “The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition,” 391–393; Kane, Industrial Resources, 381–382; Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 271–272; Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 2:716–717; Report… Culture and Use of Potatoes, 53–54.

21. Sabine, “On the Native Country of the Wild Potatoe,” 257–259.

22. Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), 45–48; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part I, Command Papers 606 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845), 36.

23. H. D. Richardson, Pigs: Their Origin and Varieties, Management with a View to Profit, and General Treatment in Health and Disease (London: William S. Orr and Company, 1847), 48; William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, new ed. (London: Routledge, 1852), 409–411; William Youatt, The Pig: A Treatise on the Breeds, Management, Feeding, and Medical Treatment of Swine; with Directions for Salting Pork, and Curing Bacon and Hams (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1847), 73–74; Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, 97; Richard Parkinson, Treatise on the Breeding and Management of Live Stock, vol. 2 (London: Cadell and Davies, 1810), 259.

24. Cullen, “Irish History without the Potato,” 78; Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (D.) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure; and Supplement, Containing Answers to Questions 1 to 12 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 36 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836) (hereafter HC 1836 [36]), 84; Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17; Bourke, “The Use of the Potato Crop in Pre-Famine Ireland,” 83–85.

25. Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 31; Youatt, The Pig, 24; Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 1:353–354; HC 1836 (36), 88–89.

26. Martin Doyle, A Cyclopædia of Practical Husbandry and Rural Affairs in General, ed. W. Rham (London: Jeremiah How, 1844), 548; Charles Knight, Cyclopædia of the Industry of All Nations (London: Charles Knight, 1851), 1337; Youatt, The Pig, 73–74; William Charles Linnaeus Martin, The Pig: Its General Management and Treatment (London: George Routledge and Co., 1852), 56–61; John Gamgee, “The Prevalence and Prevention of Diseases Amongst Domestic Animals in Ireland,” Journal of the Royal Dublin Society 4 (1866): 60.

27. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, 1:353–354; Martin, The Pig, 20; Johann Georg Kohl, Travels in Ireland (London: Bruce and Wyld, 1844), 50; Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 411; Lambert, Observations on the Rural Affairs of Ireland, 98–99.

28. William Cobbett, Cottage Economy: Containing Information Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread, Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry and Rabbits, and Relative to Other Matters Deemed Useful in the Conducting of the Affairs of a Labourer’s Family, 1st American ed., from the 1st London ed. (New York: Stephen Gould and Son, 1824), 37; “Ireland,” Times, September 27, 1845, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed November 12, 2021); Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), 310–311.

29. Brett Mizelle, Pig (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 116–119; for a version of the Dolocher ghost story, see Leitch Ritchie, Ireland Picturesque and Romantic (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1837).

30. Ireland Census Office, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Take the Census of Ireland, for the Year 1841 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1843), 539.

31. Gamgee, “Diseases Amongst Domestic Animals,” 58–59; Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 111.

32. B. Daniel, “Parasitical Diseases as Influenced by Cooking,” The Lancet 70, no. 1782 (October 24, 1857): 415–416; Great Britain Parliament House of Commons, Public Health Act: Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1862, Sessional Papers 161 (London: House of Commons, 1863) (hereafter HC 1862 [161]), 232; Gamgee, “Diseases Amongst Domestic Animals,” 58–59.

33. Doyle, A Cyclopædia of Practical Husbandry and Rural Affairs, 549; HC 1862 (161), 232; George Armatage, Every Man His Own Cattle Doctor: With Copious Notes, Recipes, Etc. and Upwards of Three Hundred and Fifty Practical Illustrations, Showing Forms of Disease and Treatment (New York: Orange Judd, 1882), 748–751; “A Few Words on Our Meat,” Once a Week, October 16, 1863, 425–426.

34. Lorenzo Gitto et al., “Death Caused by a Domestic Pig Attack,” Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology 17, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 469–474; Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 43; Youatt, The Pig, 117; Martin, The Pig, 23.

35. Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues, 2–3; Frederick Douglass, “The Liberator,” March 27, 1846, Philip Foner, ed., Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 138.

36. Robert Jameson, ed., Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1831), 116–117; John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland: A List of All Owners of Three Thousand Acres and Upwards, Worth £3,000 a Year; Also, One Thousand Three Hundred Owners of Two Thousand Acres and Upwards, in England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales, Their Acreage, and Income from Land, Culled from the Modern Domesday Book, 4th ed. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1883), 192.

37. On peatlands and folklore, see William Butler Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888), 81; John Feehan et al., The Bogs of Ireland: An Introduction to the Natural, Cultural and Industrial Heritage of Irish Peatlands (Dublin: University College Dublin, Environmental Institute, 1996), 169–170. On peat and the carbon cycle, see J. Leifeld and L. Menichetti, “The Underappreciated Potential of Peatlands in Global Climate Change Mitigation Strategies,” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (March 14, 2018): 1071; Andrea Hinwood and Clemencia Rodriguez, “Potential Health Impacts Associated with Peat Smoke: A Review,” Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 88 (January 1, 2005): 133–138; David L. A. Gaveau et al., “Major Atmospheric Emissions from Peat Fires in Southeast Asia During Non-Drought Years: Evidence from the 2013 Sumatran Fires,” Scientific Reports 4, no. 1 (August 19, 2014): 6112.

38. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, “Traditional Forms of the Dwelling House in Ireland,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 102, no. 1 (1972): 77–96; Feehan et al., Bogs of Ireland, 7–17; Weld, Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon, 316–18; Martin Doyle, Hints for the Small Farmers of Ireland, 4th ed. (Dublin: J. Charles, 1830), 16.

39. On peat-powered steamships, see Feehan et al., Bogs of Ireland, 76–77; on regional peat shortages, see Feehan et al., Bogs of Ireland, 7–8; Muiris O’Sullivan and Liam Downey, “Turf-Harvesting,” Archaeology Ireland 30, no. 1 (2016): 31; Liam Kennedy, “‘The People’s Fuel’: Turf in Ireland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” RCC Perspectives, no. 2 (2013): 26–27.

40. Kohl, Travels in Ireland, 37; Feehan et al., Bogs of Ireland, 2; Kevin O’Neill, Family and Farm in Pre-Famine Ireland: The Parish of Killashandra (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 117.

41. On ancient pollen and particulate matter preserved in boglands, see Chunshui Lin et al., “Characterization of Primary Organic Aerosol from Domestic Wood, Peat, and Coal Burning in Ireland,” Environmental Science and Technology 51, no. 18 (September 19, 2017): 10624–10632; Martin Novak et al., “A Comparison of Lead Pollution Record in Sphagnum Peat with Known Historical Pb Emission Rates in the British Isles and the Czech Republic,” Atmospheric Environment 40, no. 42 (2008): 8997–9006; T. M. Mighall et al., “An Atmospheric Pollution History for Lead-Zinc Mining from the Ystwyth Valley, Dyfed, Mid-Wales, UK, as Recorded by an Upland Blanket Peat,” Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis 2, no. 2 (May 1, 2002): 175–184; on “bog people” found in Ireland, see Raghnall Ó Floinn, “Irish Bog Bodies,” Archaeology Ireland 2, no. 3 (1988): 95; Feehan et al., Bogs of Ireland, 470–471.

42. Arthur Young, Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland (1776–1779), ed. Arthur Wollaston Hutton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 36.

43. James Fintan Lalor, The Writings of James Fintan Lalor: With an Introduction Embodying Personal Recollections, ed. John O’Leary (Dublin: T. G. O’Donoghue and Francis Nugent, 1895), 14; Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:18; see also David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 86.

44. On folkloric accounts of plenty, see McHugh, “The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition,” 395.

45. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/; on moral economies, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971): 131.

46. HC 1836 (37), 24–29; HC 1836 (369), 667–668; “The Famine,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0608, p. 564; Inglis, Journey Throughout Ireland, 2:194–195; Wilde, “Food of the Irish,” 130–131.

47. HC 1836 (42), 11; HC 1836 (369), 493; on gifts and the value of a “good name,” see Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 31.

48. Young, Tour in Ireland, 1:59–60; HC 1836 (369), 393–394.

49. HC 1836 (42), 5–6; Inglis, Journey Throughout Ireland, 1:129; Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” 86–87.

50. Robert Allan, The Sportsman in Ireland, with His Summer Route Through the Highlands of Scotland (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), 71; Young, Tour in Ireland, 2:120.

51. Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland, 369; “Band-Begging or Straw Men,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0229, p. 206; Young, Tour in Ireland, 1:446–447; Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues, 277; “Wakes,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0788, pp. 47–48; “The Origin of Tobacco at Wakes,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0122, p. 329; Martin Doyle, Irish Cottagers (Dublin: William Curry Jr. and Co., 1830), 19.

52. Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County Clare, 179–180; Farmer’s Guide, 169–170; on the circulation of clothing, see William Graydon, Reflections on the State of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (London: J. Ridgway, 1825), 78; William E. Devlin, “Shrewd Irishmen: Irish Entrepreneurs and Artisans in New York’s Clothing Industry, 1830–1880,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy Meagher, paperback ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 170–172.

53 Quoted in Salaman, History and Social Influence of the Potato, 291; Tadhg Foley, Death by Discourse?: Political Economy and the Great Irish Famine, Famine Folio Series (Hamden, CT: Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University, 2016), 19.

54. Farmer’s Guide, 95; HC 1836 (38), 313; see also Salaman, History and Social Influence of the Potato, 288.

55. Times, September 22, 1846, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 20, 2024); Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 56.

56. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 2–9.

1 

Chapter 4: Peel’s Brimstone

1. Correspondence Explanatory of Measures Adopted by H.M. Government for Relief of Distress Arising from Failure of Potato Crop in Ireland, Command Papers 735 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1846) (hereafter HC 1846 [735]), 245; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (hereafter Schools’ Collection), vol. 0151, p. 374; William Robert Wilde, “The Food of the Irish,” Dublin University Magazine 43, no. 254 (1854): 134.

2. M. Bergman, “The Potato Blight in the Netherlands and Its Social Consequences (1845–1847),” International Review of Social History 12, no. 3 (December 1967): 390–431; Esther Beeckaert Vanhaute Eric, “Whose Famine?: Regional Differences in Vulnerability and Resilience During the 1840s Potato Famine in Belgium,” in An Economic History of Famine Resilience (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019).

3. V. K. Agarwal and James B. Sinclair, Principles of Seed Pathology (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1996), 467; Andrew F. Smith, Potato: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 51–52.

4. On the reproductive cycle of the blight mould, see William E. Fry and Stephen B. Goodwin, “Resurgence of the Irish Potato Famine Fungus,” BioScience 47, no. 6 (1997): 363–371; on ecological invasions, see C. Dutech et al., “Multiple Introductions of Divergent Genetic Lineages in an Invasive Fungal Pathogen, Cryphonectria parasitica, in France,” Heredity 105, no. 2 (August 2010): 220–228; Marie-Laure Desprez-Loustau et al., “The Fungal Dimension of Biological Invasions,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 9 (September 1, 2007): 472–480; on the theory of a single lineage for the European pandemic, see S. B. Goodwin, B. A. Cohen, and W. E. Fry, “Panglobal Distribution of a Single Clonal Lineage of the Irish Potato Famine Fungus,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91, no. 24 (November 22, 1994): 11591–11595; Kentaro Yoshida et al., “The Rise and Fall of the Phytophthora infestans Lineage That Triggered the Irish Potato Famine,” ed. David Baulcombe, eLife 2 (May 28, 2013): e00731; D. Andrivon, “The Origin of Phytophthora infestans Populations Present in Europe in the 1840s: A Critical Review of Historical and Scientific Evidence,” Plant Pathology 45, no. 6 (1996): 1027–1035; Jean Beagle Ristaino, “Tracking Historic Migrations of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen, Phytophthora infestans,” Microbes and Infection 4, no. 13 (November 1, 2002): 1369–1377.

5. Ristaino, “Tracking Historic Migrations of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen,” 1371–1372; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0051, p. 231; John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847: With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1875), 48.

6. See Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 1, 2012): 1028–1060; E. C. Large, The Advance of the Fungi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 25–26; P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20 (1960): 7–11; Joseph Decaisne, Histoire de la maladie des pommes de terre en 1845 (Paris: Librarie agricole de Dusacq, 1846), 85–87; Brian J. Haas et al., “Genome Sequence and Analysis of the Irish Potato Famine Pathogen Phytophthora infestans,” Nature 461, no. 7262 (September 2009): 393–398; Dieter Bruneel, Hanne Cottyn, and Esther Beeckaert, “Potato Late Blight Follows Crowding and Impoverishment,” in Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-8680488.

7. Rapport fait au conseil de Salubrité publique sur la maladie des Pommes de Terre (Brussels: Delevingne et Callewaert, 1845), 3; Smith, Potato, 36–38; John Kelly, The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, reprint ed. (London: Picador, 2013); Large, Advance of the Fungi, 20.

8. George Phillips, “On the Nature and Cause of the Potato Disease,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 7 (1846): 313.

9. Jacob Bell, ed., “The Potato Disease,” Pharmaceutical Journal: A Weekly Record of Pharmacy and Allied Sciences 5 (1846): 262–263; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 63–64; “Potatoes” in Family Herald: A Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement for the Million, vol. 3 (London: George Biggs, 1845), 333.

10. Phillips, “On the Nature and Cause of the Potato Disease,” 301; Gardeners’ Chronicle, August 23, 1845; Large, Advance of the Fungi, 15–16.

11. For estimates of crop loss, see Potatoes (Ireland): Copy of a Report of Dr. Playfair and Mr. Lindley on the Present State of the Irish Potato Crop, and on the Prospect of Approaching Scarcity, Sessional Papers 28 (London: House of Commons, 1846); Robert Peel, Memoirs by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Part II: The New Government, 1834–5 and Part III: Repeal of the Corn Laws, 1845–6 (London: John Murray, 1857), 172.

12. Bell, “Potato Disease,” 265–268; [Douglas Jerrold], “Tremendous Potato Discovery,” Punch, September 19, 1846, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992 (accessed June 20, 2024).

13. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 51–52.

14. William Cooke Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (London: Peter Jackson, Late Fisher, Son and Co., 1851), 3:450; An Insight into the Political Character of Sir Robert Peel, Bart., in a Letter to the Electors of Great Britain (London: James Ridgway, 1837), 12; Sir Lawrence Peel, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert Peel (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), 12.

15. Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1889), 1:384–400.

16. On O’Connell’s politics within a wider European context, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, 1st Vintage reprint ed. (New York: Vintage, 1996), 138.

17. Times, August 17, 1843, 6, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 15, 2023); Times, August 18, 1843, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 15, 2023).

18. Thomas Doubleday, The Political Life of Sir Robert Peel: An Analytical Biography (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), 2:365; “Suppression of the Repeal Agitation,” Times, October 9, 1843, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 15, 2023).

19. Charles Greville, The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, ed. Henry Reeve (New York: Appleton and Co., 1885), 81–82; Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel, 3:200–201; on the timeline of Peel’s change of heart, see Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 59.

20. Correspondence and Accounts Relating to Occasions on Which Measures Were Taken for Relief of People Suffering from Scarcity in Ireland, Command Papers 734 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1846), 8–9; Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Organisation and Administration of Relief in Ireland,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 212–213; Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), 37–38.

21. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849, reissue ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 48–49; Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, updated ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004), 164–165; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 54; John Mitchel, The Crusade of the Period and Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Irish-American Library 4 (New York: Lynch, Cole, and Meehan, 1878), 199; George Shaw-Lefevre Baron Eversley, Peel and O’Connell: A Review of the Irish Policy of Parliament from the Act of Union to the Death of Sir Robert Peel (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1887), 267; [William Newman], “The Real Potato Blight of Ireland (From a Sketch Taken in Conciliation Hall),” Punch, December 13, 1845, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992 (accessed June 20, 2024).

22. Louis J. Jennings, ed., The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1885), 3:68.

23. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 50; Relief in Ireland—A Statement of the Total Expenditure for the Purposes of Relief in Ireland Since November 1845, Distinguishing Final Payments from Sums Which Have Been or Are to Be Repaid, Sessional Papers 615 (London: House of Commons, 1846).

24. [Douglas Jerrold], “A Prophecy from the Potato,” Punch, February 28, 1846, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992 (accessed June 20, 2024).

25. Peel, Memoirs, 113–114; Greville, Greville Memoirs, 99–100.

26. John Sherren Bartlett, Maize, or Indian Corn: Its Advantages as a Cheap and Nutritious Article of Food for the Poor and Labouring Classes of Great Britain and Ireland, with Directions for Its Use (New York, 1845), 4, 12; N. B. Cloud, ed., The American Cotton Planter: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Improved Plantation Economy, vol. 3 (Montgomery, AL: N. B. Cloud, 1855), 346; Thomas J. Sumner, “Suggestions as to the Successive Cultivation of Cotton and Indian Corn,” ed. J. S. Skinner, The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil 1, no. 2 (1848): 111–113; Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford’s Essay on Food, and Particularly on Feeding the Poor, Published in the Year 1795 and Now Reprinted for the Friends of the Poor (Youghal, Co. Cork, 1846), 33–34.

27. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 72–73; Jennings, Croker Papers, 3:42–43, 341–343.

28. Times, December 4, 1845, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 15, 2023).

29. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 104.

30. Greville, Greville Memoirs, 99–100; Jennings, Croker Papers, 3:142–143; “Cotton Twist,” The Free Trader. Plenty to Do, High Profits, Good Wages, and Cheap Bread. Letters to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart. By Cotton Twist (London, 1842), 45.

31. Eversley, Peel and O’Connell, 269–270; Greville, Greville Memoirs, 106; Peel, Memoirs, 289–293; House of Commons Debates, April 3, 1846, vol. 85, cc. 506; Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, 3rd ed. (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), 159–161.

32. Greville, Greville Memoirs, 117–118; House of Commons Debates, June 25, 1846, vol. 87, cc. 990–991; see also O’Neill, “Organisation and Administration of Relief,” 209.

33. For an easily accessible version of the Philalethes letter, see “Repeal Agitation in Ireland,” Southern Australian (Adelaide), April 5, 1846, 4, accessed June 22, 2023, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71628757.

34. G. Kitson Clark, “‘Statesmen in Disguise’: Reflexions on the History of the Neutrality of the Civil Service,” Historical Journal 2, no. 1 (1959): 30–31.

35. “To the Citizens of Kilkenny,” Freeman’s Journal, October 19, 1843, British Library Newspapers (accessed June 21, 2023).

36. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 105; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 37; Tim Pat Coogan, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 61–64; Peter Gray, “National Humiliation and the Great Hunger: Fast and Famine in 1847,” Irish Historical Studies 32, no. 126 (2000): 194; Charles Read, “Laissez-Faire, the Irish Famine, and British Financial Crisis,” Economic History Review 69, no. 2 (2016): 411–434.

37. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, ed., The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880), 1:339–341.

38. Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran, eds., The History of the Irish Famine (London: Routledge, 2020), 371.

39. David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 59.

40. Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 190, 201.

41. Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: Originally Presented to the Right Hon. William Pitt, in the Month of November, 1795 (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1800), 1–2, 10; HC 1846 (735), 113.

42. Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, 1840–1845 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), 1:173; “The Commissariat and the Treasury, with Personal Sketches and Anecdotes,” Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 1850, 40–47; Robert Phipps Dod, The Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Whittaker and Co., 1848), 146.

43. Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Board of Works Series), July 1846–January 1847, Parliamentary Papers, Command Papers 764 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1847), 15–16; Weekly Reports of Scarcity Commission Showing Progress of Disease in Potatoes, Complaints and Applications for Relief, March 1846, Sessional Papers 201 (London: House of Commons, 1846), 1–2.

44. HC 1846 (735), 219–223; Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Commissariat Series), July 1846–January 1847, Command Papers 761 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847), 2.

45. HC 1846 (735), 4, 152–153.

46. HC 1846 (735), 15–17.

47. HC 1846 (735), 178, 95–96; National Archives of Ireland, Relief Commission Papers: Numerical Sub-Series, Cork, RLFC3/1/3174.

48. HC 1846 (735), 33.

49. HC 1846 (735), 166; Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 30–33.

50. HC 1846 (735), 158, 174–175.

51. HC 1846 (735), 36; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 42.

52. “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0012, p. 241; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0277, pp. 109–110.

53. Times, April 21, 1846, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 27, 2021); RLFC 3/1/3174; HC 1846 (735), 131–132.

54. Times, April 21, 1846, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 27, 2021).

55. HC 1846 (735), 122–123.

56. HC 1846 (735), 197–198, 99–100, 279, 124–125.

57. HC 1846 (735), 295.

58. HC 1846 (735), 293, 318, 107–109.

59. George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law: In Connexion with the Condition of the People (London: John Murray, 1856), 312–313; HC 1846 (735), 351–353.

60. HC 1846 (735), 293, 351–353; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 58–59.

61. HC 1846 (735), 274–275.

62. HC 1846 (735), 351–353, 341–343.

63. HC 1846 (735), 109–110; “Ireland,” Daily News, April 11, 1846, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 6, 2021).

64. National Archives of Ireland, Relief Commission Papers: Numerical Sub-Series, Galway, RLFC3/1/4693.

65. Disease (Ireland)—Abstracts of the Most Serious Representations Made by the Several Medical Superintendents of Public Institutions (Fever Hospitals, Infirmaries, Dispensaries, &c.) in the Provinces of Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught, Sessional Papers 120 (London: House of Commons, 1846), 1–9.

66. Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34; HC 1846 (735), 223–226.

67. “Shall England Furnish Ireland with Food,” Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, September 19, 1846, 3.

68. HC 1846 (735), 149, 201.

69. John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 143; Michael J. Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 463; Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 288.

70. National Archives of Ireland, Relief Commission Papers: Numerical Sub-Series, Cork, RLFC3/1/3712; HC 1846 (735), 128.

1 

Chapter 5: The End of the World

1. William Carleton, The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine (London: Simms and McIntyre, 1847), 20, vii; Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Commissariat Series), July 1846–January 1847, Command Papers 761 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847) (hereafter HC 1847 [761]), 4–5, 10.

2. Andrew F. Smith, Potato: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 46–48.

3. Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), 71; Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Organisation and Administration of Relief in Ireland,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 222; Isaac Butt, The Famine in the Land: What Has Been Done and What Is to Be Done, A Voice for Ireland (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1847), 6–7.

4. Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 83.

5. Karl Marx, “Lord Russell [1855],” in Marx/Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 14:371.

6. “Measures for Ireland,” The Economist 4, no. 156 (August 22, 1846), 1082–1083; House of Commons Debates, March 22, 1847, vol. 91, c. 310; House of Commons Debates, August 17, 1846, vol. 88, c. 778; Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Board of Works Series), July 1846–January 1847, Parliamentary Papers, Command Papers 764 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1847) (hereafter HC 1847 [764]), 144–145; Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 337; Peter Gray, “National Humiliation and the Great Hunger: Fast and Famine in 1847,” Irish Historical Studies 32, no. 126 (2000): 194.

7. Charles Read, “Laissez-Faire, the Irish Famine, and British Financial Crisis,” Economic History Review 69, no. 2 (2016): 412–413.

8. Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 31; John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847: With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1875), 376–377; Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849, reissue ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 119–120; “Ireland,” Manchester Times, March 5, 1847, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 21, 2021); HC 1847 (761), 479–492; Thomas Power O’Connor, The Parnell Movement with a Sketch of Irish Parties from 1843 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1886), 46–47; Times, January 13, 1847, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 28, 2021); Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 71; O’Neill, “Administration of Relief,” 225–226.

9. HC 1847 (761), 96–97, 361–362; Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Commissariat Series), January–March 1847, Command Papers 796 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847) (hereafter HC 1847 [796]), 15–16.

10. Charles Edward Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis: Being a Narrative of the Measures for the Relief of the Distress Caused by the Great Irish Famine of 1846–7 (London: Macmillan, 1880), 54.

11. HC 1847 (761), 199, 381–382; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 76–77.

12. “Ireland,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, January 16, 1847, 34, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 28, 2021); HC 1847 (761), 16–17.

13. Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 77; P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20 (1960): 12; Smith, Potato, 44–45.

14. Kinealy, Death-Dealing Famine, 77; Times, February 26, 1847, 3, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 28, 2021); Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 123; Thomas Francis Meagher, Meagher of the Sword: Speeches of Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland, 1846–1848, His Narrative of Events in Ireland in July 1848, Personal Reminiscences of Waterford, Galway, and His Schooldays (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1916), 57.

15. An Account of All Cattle, Sheep, and Swine Imported into Great Britain from Ireland, from 5 July 1846 to 5 January 1847, Sessional Papers 133 (London: House of Commons, 1847); HC 1847 (761), 333–334; H. D. Richardson, Pigs: Their Origin and Varieties, Management with a View to Profit, and General Treatment in Health and Disease (London: William S. Orr and Company, 1847), 49.

16. House of Commons Debates, January 25, 1847, vol. 89, cc. 459–460; David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 142–143.

17. Anti-Slavery Society, Negro Apprenticeship in the British Colonies (London: Anti-Slavery Society and Hatchard and Son, 1838), 51; Padraic X. Scanlan, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, 1st paperback ed. (London: Robinson, 2022), chap. 8; Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1889), 1:439.

18. George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1921), 253; HC 1847 (764), 14–15.

19. “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin (hereafter Schools’ Collection), vol. 0151, p. 374; Butt, Famine in the Land, 14; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 173–174, 194; see also Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics, 133.

20. HC 1847 (764), 81–82, 423–425; see also S. H. Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Mortality During the Great Irish Famine,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 63 (1962): 132.

21. Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:287–291; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 229–232.

22. HC 1847 (761), 363–366, 128; Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849, ed. James Anthony Froude (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), 192–193.

23. Correspondence Relating to Measures for Relief of Distress in Ireland (Board of Works Series), January–March 1847, Command Papers 797 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847) (hereafter HC 1847 [797]), 13–15; HC 1847 (761), 331; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 214–215.

24. HC 1847 (764), 273–275, 189, 195–199, 252, 271–272; HC 1847 (797), 23; see also Kinealy, Death-Dealing Famine; George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law: In Connexion with the Condition of the People (London: John Murray, 1856), 314.

25. HC 1847 (761), 399–400.

26. Times, December 21, 1847, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 16, 2021); “To the Editor of the Times,” Times, October 5, 1847, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 17, 2021); HC 1847 (761), 399–400; HC 1847 (764), 143–144.

27. Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays, 1:191–192.

28. Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland. Part I, Command Papers 606 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1845), 84–85; HC 1847 (764), 167–168, 94–96, 115, 93, 309–311.

29. HC 1847 (797), 271; HC 1847 (764), 162–163, 172, 159, 161; Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), n. 59.

30. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 301–302; HC 1847 (764), 27; O’Neill, “Administration of Relief,” 231; “England and Ireland,” Bristol Mercury, February 20, 1847, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 22, 2021).

31. For historical currency conversions, see “Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets,” MeasuringWorth, accessed January 30, 2024, www.measuringworth.com/index.php; for lists and census data, see Kinealy, This Great Calamity; HC 1847 (796), 179–180.

32. HC 1847 (764), 326–327, 344–345; Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 151.

33. Zohar Lederman and Teck Chuan Voo, “The Minnesota Starvation Experiment and Force Feeding of Prisoners: Relying on Unethical Research to Justify the Unjustifiable,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (2021): 408; see also Kevin Grant, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, Berkeley Series in British Studies 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 23–26.

34. Manfred James Müller et al., “Metabolic Adaptation to Caloric Restriction and Subsequent Refeeding: The Minnesota Starvation Experiment Revisited 12,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 102, no. 4 (October 1, 2015): 807–819; Harold Steere Guetzkow and Paul Hoover Bowman, Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers (Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing House, 1946), 21–24; see also David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (New York: Doubleday, 2023), 113–122.

35. James Fintan Lalor, The Writings of James Fintan Lalor: With an Introduction Embodying Personal Recollections, ed. John O’Leary (Dublin: T. G. O’Donoghue and Francis Nugent, 1895), 14; Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 112–113.

36. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 234–235; HC 1847 (796), 162–164; “Ireland,” Times, December 31, 1846, 8, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 15, 2021); “Ireland,” Times, February 4, 1847, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 11, 2021); John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland: A List of All Owners of Three Thousand Acres and Upwards, Worth £3,000 a Year; Also, One Thousand Three Hundred Owners of Two Thousand Acres and Upwards, in England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales, Their Acreage, and Income from Land, Culled from The Modern Domesday Book, 4th ed. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1883), 363; Poor Inquiry (Ireland). Appendix (D.) Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure; and Supplement, Containing Answers to Questions 1 to 12 Circulated by the Commissioners, Command Papers 36 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1836); HC 1847 (797), 158–159; Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 202–203; HC 1847 (764), 286.

37. The letter was widely quoted. It appeared in the Times and many other publications and in histories of the Great Famine throughout the nineteenth century and afterward—for example, in William Patrick O’Brien, The Great Famine in Ireland: And a Retrospect of the Fifty Years 1845–95; with a Sketch of the Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Congested Districts (London: Downey and Co., 1896), 79–80; HC 1847 (761), 459–460; “The Famine of 1847,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0298, p. 68.

38. Guetzkow and Bowman, Men and Hunger, 26–27; National Archives of Ireland, Relief Commission Papers: Baronial Sub-Series, Mayo, RLFC3/2/21/16; “The Famine in This District,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0393, p. 026; “The Famine,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0288, pp. 20–22; “The Famine of 1847,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0021, p. 260; “Famine Stories IV,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0096, pp. 498–499; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0016, pp. 341–342; “The Famine,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0406, p. 469; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0401, pp. 080–081.

39. Quoted in Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1897), 44–45; Times, September 22, 1846, The Times Digital Archive (accessed June 20, 2024).

40. HC 1847 (797), 112; Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 14, 31–37; “Penal Times and Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0282, p. 427.

41. National Archives of Ireland, Relief Commission Papers: Baronial Sub-Series, Mayo, RLFC3/2/21/16; HC 1847 (796), 194–195; Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, with Notes and a Preface by Maria Edgeworth, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), 254; Laurence Geary, “Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine,” History Ireland 4, no. 1 (1996): 28–30; Nicholls, History of the Irish Poor Law, 326; Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda, “What Do People Die of During Famines: The Great Irish Famine in Comparative Perspective,” European Review of Economic History 6, no. 3 (December 2002): 40–52.

42. Geary, “Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine,” 32; William P. MacArthur, “Medical History of the Famine,” in Edwards, Williams, and Gráda, Great Famine, 265–306; Mokyr and Ó Gráda, “What Do People Die of During Famines,” 341–343; Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 193; HC 1847 (797), 180–181; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 390–402.

43. Phelim P. Boyle and Cormac Ó Gráda, “Fertility Trends, Excess Mortality, and the Great Irish Famine,” Demography 23, no. 4 (1986): 553–555; Jonny Geber, “Reconstructing Realities: Exploring the Human Experience of the Great Famine Through Archaeology,” in Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Corporaal et al. (Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2014), 142–148; “Wakes,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0788, pp. 47–48; “Ancient Customs,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0118, p. 58; “Horrors of the Famine,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0288, pp. 061–062.

44. Times, March 8, 1847, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 15, 2021); Times, December 19, 1846, 4, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 17, 2021); James Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847: A Letter Addressed to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, Dublin, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848), 26–27; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 163–165.

45. HC 1847 (796), 14; Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland, in 1846 and 1847 (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1852), 54.

46. HC 1847 (761), 333; Ó Gráda, Ireland, 197.

47. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 172; O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 254–257.

48. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 172; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 428; HC 1847 (796), 105–109.

49. Charles Read, The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2022), 120; David Morier Evans, The Commercial Crisis, 1847–1848 (London: Letts, Son, and Steer, 1848), 55–56; Charles Read, Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 137–138.

50. Read, Calming the Storms, 148–151.

51. O’Neill, “Administration of Relief,” 232; O’Connor, The Parnell Movement with a Sketch of Irish Parties from 1843, 63; House of Commons Debates, March 25, 1847, vol. 91, cc. 375–376; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, May 15, 1847, 2, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 22, 2021); Bristol Mercury, March 27, 1847, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 22, 2021); HC 1847 (797), 251.

52. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1880 ed.), 85–86.

53. Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, 44–50; Gray, “National Humiliation and the Great Hunger,” 209; Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 126–132; Henry Barnard, ed., American Journal of Education, vol. 1 (Hartford, CT: F. C. Brownell, 1856), 635–636; Christine Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Padraig Kirwan, “Recognition, Resilience, and Relief: The Meaning of Gift,” in Famine Pots: The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange, 1847–Present, ed. LeAnne Howe and Padraig Kirwan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020), 3–38.

54. This comment is from the foreword to a later edition of the book, published as the movement for Irish Home Rule became a more organised force in Irish and British politics: Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1880 ed.), v; Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 125.

55. Alexis Soyer, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer: With Unpublished Receipts and Odds and Ends of Gastronomy, ed. F. Volant, J. R. Warren, and J. G. Lomax (London: W. Kent and Company, 1859), 100.

56. Soyer, Memoirs, 88–100; HC 1847 (796), 148–149, 156.

57. Alexis Soyer, Soyer’s Charitable Cookery: Or the Poor Man’s Regenerator (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1848), 39–42, 107–108; Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 178–179.

58. O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 435–436; Nicholson, Annals, 231–235; William Robert Wilde, “The Food of the Irish,” Dublin University Magazine 43, no. 254 (1854): 139–140.

59. Soyer, Memoirs, 109–111; HC 1847 (796), 195; Soyer, Charitable Cookery, vi; Mrs. White, “Man Versus Metal: The Hated Weight of Poverty,” ed. William Harrison Ainsworth, Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance, General Literature and Art 16 (1849): 312; Wilde, “Food of the Irish,” 140.

60. Soyer, Charitable Cookery, 14; “The Proposed Relief of Irish Famine by M. Soyer’s Soup-Quackery,” The Lancet: A Journal of British and Foreign Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, Physiology, Chemistry, Pharmacology, Public Health and News 1, no. 9 (1847): 232–233; Henry Marsh, On the Preparation of Food for the Labourer: In Letter to Joshua Harvey, M.D. (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1847), 6–8; O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 428–429.

61. J. Wesley Van der Voort, The Natural History of the Ocean: A Graphic Account of the Mighty Deep: Its Laws and Phenomena, Its Products and Inhabitants, Its Currents, Tides and Trade Winds, Pearls, Shells and Sponges (New York: Union Publishing House, 1890), 327–328.

62. Kinealy, Death-Dealing Famine, 98–99; Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37–39; Mohamed Salah Harzallah, “Accountability and Administrative Efficiency: The Administration of the Soup Kitchen Act in Ireland (1847),” The Historian 8, no. 2 (2010): 99; Christine Kinealy, “Beyond Revisionism: Reassessing the Great Irish Famine,” History Ireland 3, no. 4 (1995): 32; Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics, 266–267; Liam Kennedy and Donald M. MacRaild, “Perspectives on the Great Irish Famine,” QUCEH Working Paper Series (Belfast: Queen’s University Centre for Economic History, 2022), 17–20, www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/252318; Steven Roberts and Paul Switzer, “Mortality Displacement and Distributed Lag Models,” Inhalation Toxicology 16, no. 14 (January 1, 2004): 879–888; Shakoor Hajat et al., “Mortality Displacement of Heat-Related Deaths: A Comparison of Delhi, São Paulo, and London,” Epidemiology 16, no. 5 (2005): 613–620.

63. Harzallah, “Accountability and Administrative Efficiency,” 103; Alexander Martin Sullivan, New Ireland (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1878), 88–90; Mohamed Salah Harzallah, “The Construction of Famine Memory in the Irish Oral Tradition,” Nordic Irish Studies 6 (2007): 47; Times, March 23, 1847, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 29, 2021).

64. Irene Whelan, “The Stigma of Souperism,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995), 135–154; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 142; Harzallah, “Accountability and Administrative Efficiency,” 119; “Famine Times,” Schools’ Collection, vol. 0029, p. 0326.

65. Times¸ April 20, 1847, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 17, 2021).

66. Norbert Götz, “Lionel de Rothschild and the Great Irish Famine: The Origins of the British Relief Association,” History Ireland 30, no. 5 (2022): 24; Times, March 15, 1847, 6, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 29, 2021); Harzallah, “Accountability and Administrative Efficiency,” 117.

67. Gray, “National Humiliation and the Great Hunger,” 213–214.

68. “Ireland: Ejectments by Irish Landlords,” The Observer, February 1, 1847; Times, April 14, 1851, 7, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 11, 2021).

69. Oliver MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies During the Famine,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 320–321; House of Commons Debates, January 25, 1847, vol. 89, cc. 448–449; O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland, 242.

70. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1880 ed.), 100–101; MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration,” 322; Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 270.

71. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 272; HC 1847 (797), 144–145; on Irish immigrants and North American authorities, see Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848 ed.), 132–133; Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

72. [Percival Leigh], “The Mishaps of Ministers; A Song for the Premier,” Punch, July 24, 1847, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992 (accessed June 20, 2024); Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 1:439.

73. Quoted in O’Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, 331–332; see also O’Neill, “Administration of Relief,” 240.

74. House of Commons Debates, January 25, 1847, vol. 89, 429–430; HC 1847 (797), 3, 150–151; O’Neill, “Administration of Relief,” 230; Nicholson, Annals, 83.

1 

Chapter 6: Expulsions

1. Richard Lalor Sheil, Sketches of the Irish Bar (New York: Redfield, 1854), 1:166; The Encumbered Estates of Ireland (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850), 81–82; Morning Chronicle, July 5, 1851, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 27, 2021).

2. This chapter draws on work in political theory and sociology analysing the relationship between the development of capitalism and processes of eviction and expulsion. See especially Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014); Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown, 2016).

3. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849, reissue ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 134–135.

4. Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Organisation and Administration of Relief in Ireland,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards, T. Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, new ed. (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994), 246–249.

5. Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1889), 70–76.

6. Peter Gray, “Famine and Land, 1845–80,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed. Alvin Jackson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 552.

7. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845–1849 (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin and Co, 1883), 84.

8. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 348.

9. Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 329; Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 2:462–464.

10. Irish Felon 1, no. 1 (June 24, 1848); Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 2:67–68; “The Irish Insurrection,” Leeds Times, July 22, 1848, 4, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 22, 2021).

11. “Cutlasses Ready in Alarm over Ireland,” Manchester Guardian, July 29, 1848; “The Anticipated Outbreak,” Times, July 29, 1848, 8, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 19, 2023).

12. “The Insurrectionary Movement,” Times, July 31, 1848, 8, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 19, 2023).

13. Times, August 1, 1848, 8, The Times Digital Archive; “Encounter with the Rebels,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, August 2, 1848, 3, British Library Newspapers (accessed September 19, 2023).

14. Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 2:73; David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 1 (1975): 81–98; John Newsinger, “Revolution and Catholicism in Ireland, 1848–1923,” European Studies Review 9, no. 4 (October 1, 1979): 457–480; Irish Felon 1, no. 4 (July 15, 1848); on peasant conservatism, see Joseph Henrich and Richard McElreath, “Are Peasants Risk‐Averse Decision Makers?,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 1 (February 2002): 172–181; George M. Foster, “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” American Anthropologist 67, no. 2 (1965): 293–315; George Dalton, “How Exactly Are Peasants ‘Exploited’?,” American Anthropologist 76, no. 3 (1974): 553–561.

15. “Battle of Boulagh,” Melbourne Argus, November 28, 1848, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4766099.

16. [Tom Taylor], “English Definitions, for an Irish Dictionary,” Punch, May 20, 1848, Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992; Select Committee on Poor Laws (Ireland): Seventh Report with Minutes of Evidence, Sessional Papers 237 (London: House of Commons, 1849), 27; Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 2:79–81.

17. Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 70–76; Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 375; Charles Greville, The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, ed. Henry Reeve (New York: Appleton and Co., 1885), 334–335, 387–388.

18. John Mitchel, The Crusade of the Period and Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), Irish-American Library 4 (New York: Lynch, Cole, and Meehan, 1878), 315.

19. Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, in 1847, 1848, and 1849 (New York: E. French, 1851), 166–171.

20. R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 120–121; John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847: With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1875), 505.

21. Papers Relating to Proceedings for Relief of Distress, and State of Unions and Workhouses in Ireland (Fifth Series), Sessional Papers 919 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1848) (hereafter HC 1848 [919]), 25–27; Papers Relating to Aid to Distressed Unions in the West of Ireland, Sessional Papers 1010 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1849) (hereafter HC 1849 [1010]), 24; Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland, in 1846 and 1847 (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1852), 76–77; Papers Relating to Proceedings for Relief of Distress, and State of Unions and Workhouses in Ireland (Sixth Series), Sessional Papers 955 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1848) (hereafter HC 1848 [955]), 17–18; Nicholson, Annals, 172–174.

22. HC 1848 (919), 21; S. H. Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Mortality During the Great Irish Famine,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 63 (1962): 3; Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), 269–270; currency conversions based on data from “Relative Worth Comparators and Data Sets,” MeasuringWorth, accessed January 30, 2024, www.measuringworth.com/index.php.

23. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 208–209; Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, 67–68.

24. Cousens, “Regional Variation in Mortality,” 135–146; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 233; Woodham-Smith, Great Hunger, 310.

25. “Ireland,” Manchester Guardian, April 8, 1848; Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849, ed. James Anthony Froude (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), 64–65.

26. HC 1848 (919), 393–394, 430–432.

27. HC 1848 (919), 393–394; Further Papers Relating to the Aid Afforded to the Distressed Unions in the West of Ireland, Sessional Papers 1019 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1849) (hereafter HC 1849 [1019]), 28–29; Further Papers Relating to the Aid Afforded to the Distressed Unions in the West of Ireland (in Continuation of Papers Presented 8th February 1849), Sessional Papers 1023 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1849) (hereafter HC 1849 [1023]), 36–37.

28. HC 1849 (1023), 16–17; HC 1848 (955), 816–820.

29. HC 1848 (919), 219–222, 354.

30. HC 1848 (955), 143; HC 1848 (919), 71.

31. Denis Charles O’Connor, Seventeen Years’ Experience of Workhouse Life (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1861), 14–15.

32. HC 1848 (919), 44–46.

33. O’Connor, Seventeen Years’ Experience, 50; Nicholson, Annals, 172–174.

34. HC 1848 (955), 701–704, 312–315; O’Connor, Seventeen Years’ Experience, 29.

35. HC 1848 (955), 597–598, 13.

36. HC 1848 (955), 185–186; HC 1849 (1010), 9.

37. William P. MacArthur, “Medical History of the Famine,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 306–307; HC 1849 (1019), 28–29.

38. HC 1848 (919), 43; O’Connor, Seventeen Years’ Experience, 19–20; Papers Relating to Proceedings for Relief of Distress, and State of Unions and Workhouses in Ireland (Seventh Series), Sessional Papers 999 (London: William Clowes and Son, 1848), 146–147.

39. HC 1848 (955), 906–908; Thomas Power O’Connor, The Parnell Movement with a Sketch of Irish Parties from 1843 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1886), 19–20; HC 1848 (955), 312–315.

40. Morning Chronicle, July 5, 1851, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 27, 2021).

41. Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:293–294; Irish Felon 1, no. 5 (July 22, 1848).

42. HC 1848 (955), 205–207; HC 1849 (1010), 14–15.

43. HC 1848 (955), 43–44.

44. HC 1848 (955), 816–820.

45. HC 1849 (1010), 4–9.

46. HC 1849 (1019), 4–5; HC 1849 (1010), 47–48.

47. HC 1849 (1023), 31–33.

48. HC 1849 (1023), 33, 34–35.

49. Gray, “Famine and Land,” 554.

50. Cousens, “Regional Variation in Mortality,” 143; HC 1849 (1023), 49; Greville, Greville Memoirs, 387–388.

51. House of Commons Debates, March 15, 1847, vol. 90, cc. 1398–1399; see also William Smith O’Brien, Plan for the Relief of the Poor in Ireland: With Observations on the English and Scotch Poor Laws, Addressed to the Landed Proprietors of Ireland (London: J. M. Richardson, 1830), 11–12; John George Hodges, Report of the Trial of W. S. O’Brien for High Treason, with the Judgment of the Court of Queen’s Bench, Ireland, and of the House of Lords, on the Writs of Error (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1849), 542.

52. “Ireland,” Economist, April 28, 1849, 470, The Economist Historical Archive (accessed October 19, 2021); “The Question Still Is—What Is to Be Done with Ireland?” Economist, October 20, 1849, 1157ff, The Economist Historical Archive (accessed October 18, 2021).

53. Robert Alexander Shafto Adair, The Winter of 1846–7 in Antrim: With Remarks on Out-Door Relief and Colonization (London: James Ridgway, 1847), 55–56.

54. W. L. Burn, “Free Trade in Land: An Aspect of the Irish Question,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1949): 69; David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 150–151.

55. George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law: In Connexion with the Condition of the People (London: John Murray, 1856), 309; Encumbered Estates of Ireland, 1–9.

56. Encumbered Estates of Ireland, 2–3; Times, September 8, 1852, 8, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); Oliver MacDonagh, Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1977), 44–45; Times, June 11, 1849, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 14, 2021); David Nally, “‘That Coming Storm’: The Irish Poor Law, Colonial Biopolitics, and the Great Famine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 3 (September 2008): 731; see also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

57. Nally, Human Encumbrances, 158–159; George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1921), 59; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 216–219.

58. HC 1848 (919), 365–367; Manchester Times, June 20, 1849, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 27, 2021).

59. HC 1848 (919), 365–367; Manchester Times, June 20, 1849, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 27, 2021).

60. James Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847: A Letter Addressed to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, Dublin, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1848), 63–64; HC 1848 (955), 193; HC 1849 (1023), 16–17; HC 1848 (919), 466–470.

61. “Agricultural Intelligence,” Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, May 18, 1850, 2, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 22, 2021); Hack Tuke, A Visit to Connaught, 65–66.

62. HC 1848 (955), 184–185.

63. HC 1849 (1023), 16–17; Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 314; on emigration, see Auguste J. Thébault, The Irish Race in the Past and Present (New York: Peter F. Collier, 1879); Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 297; Oliver MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies During the Famine,” in Edwards, Williams, and Ó Gráda, Great Famine, 324.

64. Leicestershire Mercury, May 20, 1848, 1, British Library Newspapers (accessed November 2, 2021); Times, July 26, 1850, 5, The Times Digital Archive (accessed September 13, 2021).

65. Walpole, Life of Lord John Russell, 1:467, 2:28.

66. MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration,” 328–331.

67. “Ireland,” Norfolk News, November 13, 1847, 1, British Library Newspapers (accessed October 26, 2021).

68. Megan Specia, “‘The Social Contract Has Been Completely Ruptured’: Ireland’s Housing Crisis,” New York Times, January 15, 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/world/europe/ireland-housing-crisis.html; on the political economy of the Irish housing market, see Rory Hearne, Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House, and What We Can Do About It, rev. ed. (Dublin: HarperCollins, 2023).

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Epilogue: The Crystal Palace

1. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Osmund Airy, Text-Book of English History from the Earliest Times for Colleges and Schools (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1891), 499.

2. The Crystal Palace and Its Contents: Being an Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851, Embellished with Upwards of Five Hundred Engravings (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), 1.

3. “The Census for Ireland, 1841–1851,” Medical Times and Gazette, July 12, 1851; P. M. Austin Bourke, “The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20 (1960): 62–63; Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62–63.

4. James Fintan Lalor, The Writings of James Fintan Lalor: With an Introduction Embodying Personal Recollections, ed. John O’Leary (Dublin: T. G. O’Donoghue and Francis Nugent, 1895), 11–12; Colm Tóibín, “Erasures,” London Review of Books, July 30, 1998, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n15/colm-toibin/erasures.

5. Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell (London: Longmans, Green, and Company 1889), 1:451.

6. Richard Stivers, “Historical Meanings of Irish-American Drinking,” in The American Experience with Alcohol: Contrasting Cultural Perspectives, ed. Linda A. Bennett and Genevieve M. Ames (Boston, MA: Springer US, 1985), 109–129; Colm Kerrigan, “The Social Impact of the Irish Temperance Movement, 1839–1845,” Irish Economic and Social History 14 (1987): 20–38; James Kelly, “The Consumption and Sociable Use of Alcohol in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 115C (2015): 219–255.

7. Jill Bender, “The Imperial Politics of Famine: The 1873–74 Bengal Famine and Irish Parliamentary Nationalism,” Éire-Ireland 42, no. 1 (2007): 135.

8. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 27–32.

9. Allen’s Indian Mail and Official Gazette, vol. 35 (London: William H. Allen and Co., 1877), 250; Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 36–37; Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 71.

10. Robert Kane, The Industrial Resources of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1844), 407; Robert Hunt, ed., Hunt’s Hand-Book to the Official Catalogues: An Explanatory Guide to the Natural Productions and Manufactures of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, and W. Clowes and Sons, 1851), 1:44–45; The Illustrated Exhibitor, a Tribute to the World’s Industrial Jubilee: Comprising Sketches, by Pen and Pencil, of the Principal Objects in the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: John Cassell, 1851), 178; Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations: 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, and W. Clowes and Sons, 1851), 2:568; William Gaspey, The Great Exhibition of the World’s Industry Held in London in 1851: Described and Illustrated by Engravings, from Daguerrotypes by Beard, Mayall, Etc (London: J. Tallis and Co., 1852), 4:165.

11. Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1:341; Hunt, Hunt’s Hand-Book, 1:449.

12. Louise Purbrick, “Defining Nation: Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851,” in Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (London: Routledge, 2016), 47–76; Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 2:675; Connemara and the Irish Highlands: A Pocket Guide (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1852), front matter; Gaspey, Great Exhibition, 143–144; Illustrated Exhibitor, 165; Hunt, Hunt’s Hand-Book, 1:172; Guide-Book to the Industrial Exhibition, with Facts, Figures and Observations on the Manufactures and Produce Exhibited (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1851), 130–131.

13. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, 4th ed., vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), 426–428; Nassau William Senior, Journals, Conversations and Essays Relating to Ireland (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868), 1:viii–ix.

14. Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence,” Current Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2004): 307; Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2011), 54.

15. James Hewitt, Thoughts on the Present State of Ireland (London: John Murray, 1849), 21.

16. Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (September 1, 2019): 721–722; Hunger Hotspots: FAO–WFP Early Warnings on Acute Food Insecurity: November 2023 to April 2024 Outlook (Rome: United Nations, 2023); Alex de Waal, “Starvation as a Method of Warfare,” LRB Blog, January 11, 2024, www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/january/starvation-as-a-method-of-warfare.

17. Kiran Stacey, “Sunak Says He Wants to Reduce Workers’ Taxes This Year and May Cut Benefits,” Guardian, January 7, 2024, www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/07/rishi-sunak-says-he-wants-to-cut-workers-taxes-this-year-and-may-reduce-benefits; Xander Elliards, “Rishi Sunak Pledges to Cut Welfare and Benefits to Fund Tax Cuts,” Yahoo News, January 7, 2024, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/rishi-sunak-pledges-cut-welfare-124654127.html.

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