There are many theories behind the actual cause of the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1849. Some focus on specific topics of population density, crop production, politics, the prevalent owner-tenant land system of the day, etc. Of course, history teaches that there is rarely one simple culprit and one simple answer. It is clear, however, that the country-wide dependence upon the annual potato crop production left Ireland vulnerable to very problem it experienced, famine. Wide-spread crop failure, with other social and economic factors, led to wide-spread famine and disease, resulting in a loss 1,000,000 lives and the emigration of additional 1,000,000. In all, nearly a quarter of the country’s population was lost in just a few short years.
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The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated.
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The Irish have long suffered the infamy of having had the most documented and well-known famines in history. There are many questions about what caused the famine and why it produced such wide-spread devastation. Every history student has heard the questions asked, can we learn from history? Does history repeat itself? What would we do different? “Sustainable agriculture” is both a concept and a growing movement in America. The movement stands in contrast to massive, single-crop, corporate owned farms and supply chain monopolization. After browsing through the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, I won’t claim to know the answers to food production in the modern world, but I do understand the concerns some have over where our current food production system is taking us. I see why we should ask the questions listed above. I see one more reason to study history. I don’t see a famine in America’s future, but I can see parallels in our system to the Irish famine. I think there are lessons we can learn from this Atlas.
Drawing parallels to modern times is just one aspect of studying the Famine. Family history is large part told through the perspective and eye of those that have departed, those who lived through such events. The Great Famine makes for an interesting historical study. And, regardless of your own individual family line, of which I have no known Irish parentage myself, this Atlas represents an important and thorough study into the Irish Famine. But, for those of Irish descent, the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine offers a perspective on your ancestry.
The Atlas provides an amazing collective of reasoned research along with visually stunning drawings, renderings, painted portraits, amazing photographs, maps and charts. Together, these items tell as complete a story.
“Very few books have been written on the greatest catastrophe in Irish history which encompasses both the diversity of perspectives and the parish-by-parish detail found in this book. This magnificent compilation – a series of essays by over fifty distinguished scholars, combined with the detailed maps, photographs, archival material, paintings and other artistic insights – redresses an imbalance in the literature on the Great Irish Famine. The inclusion of photographs of Famine landscapes, for example, including mass graves and workhouse sites, add to the poignancy of the story being told. Such images invite the reader to contemplate the real human suffering which lies at the heart of the Famine. Remembering is important but it is equally important to remember in ways which challenge our understandings of such tragic events.”
I suppose being a genealogist makes me somewhat partial to history in general, and even more, a good story. The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine is both. There is so much detail and rich content in these pages the book is hard to put down. Actually, the book is so big at 710 pages, printed on nice thick paper, this book is too heavy to hold; so, putting the Atlas down to read it would be a more accurate statement, but you get the idea.
As for the actual contents of the book, I think the cover summery tell the story rather well:
“The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated. Over a million people perished between 1845-1852, and well over a million others fled to other locales within Europe and America. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The 2000 US census had 41 million people claim Irish ancestry, or one in five white Americans. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) considers how such a near total decimation of a country by natural causes could take place in industrialized, 19th century Europe and situates the Great Famine alongside other world famines for a more globally informed approach.
The Atlas seeks to try and bear witness to the thousands and thousands of people who died and are buried in mass Famine pits or in fields and ditches, with little or nothing to remind us of their going. The centrality of the Famine workhouse as a place of destitution is also examined in depth. Likewise the atlas represents and documents the conditions and experiences of the many thousands who emigrated from Ireland in those desperate years, with case studies of famine emigrants in cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow, New York and Toronto.
The Atlas places the devastating Irish Famine in greater historic context than has been attempted before, by including over 150 original maps of population decline, analysis and examples of poetry, contemporary art, written and oral accounts, numerous illustrations, and photography, all of which help to paint a fuller picture of the event and to trace its impact and legacy. In this comprehensive and stunningly illustrated volume, over fifty chapters on history, politics, geography, art, population, and folklore provide readers with a broad range of perspectives and insights into this event.”
Don’t just let my opinion or a 5 Stars average review on Amazon sway you, here are just a few reviews from the academic community:
“Cork University Press has established an enviably high reputation in producing atlases. The latest – of the Great Irish Famine – maintains and enhances this record. Not only are the maps themselves innovative and attractive to look at, but they communicate clearly an abundance of information, often unfamiliar. The cartography is accompanied by a wealth of other images, sometimes strikingly beautiful, and also hauntingly distressful. In addition, a starry cast of experts provides incisive and illuminating commentary on all aspects of the disaster. All in all, this is likely to prove one of the most original and enduring studies of the grievous famine” — Toby Barnard, Oxford University
“This monumental work is far more than an Atlas, it is the definitive summary of all aspects of the Great Irish Famine. The many maps are accompanied by accessible yet scientifically sound texts. The demographics and geography are surveyed with unequaled detail and care, yet the historical background, the politics, and the economics of the Famine are discussed at an equally high scholarly level. Lavishly illustrated and scholarly immaculate, written by the best scholars in the field, this volume belongs in the library of everyone interested in the greatest natural disaster of the modern age” — Joel Mokyr , Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics, Northwestern University, USA
“This Atlas offers a powerful, unflinching and coherent understanding of the Irish Famine as the defining event in Irish history. It balances sweeping survey with minute details, while always attending to the surprising diversity of this small island in the mid nineteenth century. Its unparalleled assemblage of new maps, old images and extensive documentation offers a brilliant teaching aid for the history of Ireland and of the Irish diaspora. Firmly rooted in recent research, saturated in meticulous scholarship, and interdisciplinary in the best sense, it is unafraid to draw the necessary trenchant conclusions. Its broad synthesis offers the best overview we have ever had of this traumatic and defining episode” — Professor Kevin Whelan, Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre, Dublin.
Table of Contents
I. IRELAND BEFORE AND AFTER THE GREAT FAMINE
The story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-52 : a geographical perspective
‘Mapping the people’ : the growth and distribution of the population
1740-41 Famine
The potato : root of the Famine
Baunreagh, County Laois : The failure of the potato
Diet in pre-Famine Ireland
II. THE GREAT HUNGER
The longue durée – imperial Britain and colonial Ireland
The colonial dimensions of the Great Irish Famine
British relief measures
Charles Trevelyan
The operation of the poor law during the Famine
Queen Victoria and the Great Famine
Burying and resurrecting the past : the Queen Victoria statue in University College Cork
The largest amount of good : Quaker relief efforts
‘Born astride a grave’ : The geography of the dead
III. THE WORKHOUSE
The creation of the workhouse system
Classify, confine, discipline and punish – the Roscrea Union : a microgeography of the workhouse system during the Famine
Famine and workhouse clothing
The Cork workhouse
Ulster workhouses – ideological geometry and conflict
Lurgan workhouse
IV. POPULATION DECLINE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Mortality and the Great Famine
‘Variations in vulnerability’ : understanding where and why people died
Medical relief and the Great Famine
‘Report upon the recent epidemic fever in Ireland’ : the evidence from County Cork
Emigration to North America in the era of the Great Famine, 1845-55
The cities and towns of Ireland, 1841-51
The roles of cities and towns during the Great Famine
The impact of the Great Famine on subsistent women
The landed classes during the Great Irish Famine
‘Turned out … thrown down’ : evictions in Bunkilla and Monavanshare, Donoughmore,County Cork
CONNACHT
Introduction : the province of Connacht and the Great Famine
Clifden Union, Connemara, County Galway
In the shadow of Sliabh an Iarainn
Mohill workhouse Union
The Famine in County Roscommon
Ballykilcline, County Roscommon
LEINSTER
Introduction : the province of Leinster and the Great Famine
County Meath during the Famine
Burying the Famine dead : Kilkenny Union workhouse
King’s County during the Great Famine :’poverty and plenty’
The Smith estate of Baltyboys, County Wicklow
MUNSTER
Introduction : the province of Munster and the Great Famine
Mortality and emigration in six parishes in the Union of Skibbereen, West Cork, 1846-47
From ‘famine roads’ to ‘manor walls’ : the Famine in Glenville, County Cork
The Famine in the County Tipperary parish of Shanrahan
The Famine in the Dingle Peninsula
Famine relief in Cove and the Great Island, April 1846-March 1847
Visit of Queen Victoria to Cove, August 1849
ULSTER
Introduction: the province of Ulster and the Great Famine
The Great Famine and religious demography in midnineteenth-century Ulster
The Great Hunger in Belfast
Mapping the Famine in Monaghan
The management of famine in Donegal in the hungry forties
V. WITNESSING THE FAMINE
The Great Famine in Gaelic manuscripts
The artist as witness : James Mahony
Asenath Nicholson’s Irish journeys
Thomas Carlyle and Famine Ireland
‘Le pays classique de la faim’ : France and the Great Irish Famine
VI. THE SCATTERING
Exodus from Ireland – patterns of emigration
Liverpool and the Great Irish Famine
The Fidelia
Irish Famine refugees and the emergence of Glasgow Celtic Football Club
Archaeological evidence of Irish migration? : rickets in the Irish community of London’s East End, 1843-54
Black ’47 and Toronto, Canada
Gross Île, Quebec
The Famine and New York City
New York Famine memorial
The Great Famine and Australia
‘Week after week, the eviction and the exodus’ : Ireland and Moreton Bay, 1848-52
VII. LEGACY
Land reform in post-Famine Ireland
Legacy and loss : the great silence and its aftermath
Famine and the Irish diaspora
VIII. REMEMBERING THE FAMINE
The folklore of the Famine : Seanchas an Drochshaoil
Na prátaí dubha
Tadhg Ó Murchú (1842-928)
Sites of memory
Famine memorial sites in County Cork
‘Remembering, not forgetting’, a commemorative composition
The Big House and Famine memory : Strokestown Park House
A Great Famine discovery of Viking Gold : Vesnoy,Strokestown, County Roscommon
Mapping the Great Famine in Irish art
Sculpting Famine
Literature and the Famine
IX. HUNGER AND FAMINE TODAY
The Great Famine and today’s famines
Food security, food poverty, food sovereignty : moving beyond labels to a world of change?
Images of famine : whose hunger?
Fighting world hunger in the twenty-first century
Endnotes
Index of Places