Black '47 and beyond

by Cormac Ó Gráda

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in O Grada's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, O Grada concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and demographic features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders