Breandán Mac Suibhne

Enda Delaney

Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–52 was among the most devastating food crises in modern history. A country of some eight-and-a-half-million people lost one million to hunger and disease and another million to emigration. According to land activist Michael Davitt, the starving made little or no effort to assert "the animal’s right to existence," passively accepting their fate. But the poor did resist. In word and deed, they defied landlords, merchants and agents of the state: they rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty. The essays collected here examine the full range of resistance in the Great Famine, and illuminate how the crisis itself transformed popular politics. Contributors include distinguished scholars of modern Ireland and emerging historians and critics. This book is essential reading for students of modern Ireland, and the global history of collective action.

Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics

The Great Irish Famine tells of the last great famine in European history. First-hand accounts and writings by four contemporary real people are used to give a complete and personal picture of the historic tragedy.

A History in Four Lives

The Great Irish Famine

Between the foundation of the new Irish state in 1921–22 and the early 1970s approximately one-and-a-half million people left independent Ireland, the vast majority travelling to Britain. Demography, State and Society is the first comprehensive analysis of the twentieth-century Irish exodus to Britain. Meticulously researched, using an exhaustive range of previously unused source materials, this book provides a detailed examination of the many ways in which migration shaped twentieth-century Irish society. The book focuses on a number of vital themes, many of them rarely mentioned by previous studies: state policy in Ireland; official responses in Britain; gender dimensions; individual migrant experience; patterns of settlement in Britain; and the crucial phenomenon of return migration. A major study of Irish migration, this book also offers much that will be of interest to scholars, students and general readers in the wider fields of modern British and Irish history.

Enda Delaney

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