Chapter 5 - Famine and Ecology, 1750–1900

Summary

This chapter provides a crucial historical perspective on the repeated crises of hunger leading up to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Margaret Kelleher argues that “Although the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1851 is the best-known occurrence, the experience of large-scale famine in Ireland was of much longer duration.” Ireland of course had experienced a number of famines (smaller in scale) before the devastation of the 1840s. Kelleher points to “periods of great hardship in 1756–57, 1782–84, 1800–1801, 1816–18, 1822, and 1831,” and relies on the environmental history of the eighteenth century for a longue durée historicization of the Great Hunger.