Black '47 and Beyond: the Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory. By Cormac Ó Gráda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 302. $21.50, cloth; $17.95, paper.

Extract

During the 1970s and 1980s the Irish historical profession, which was challenging nearly all the old verities of nationalist historiography, proved strangely reticent on the single event in Irish history most likely to be familiar to non-Irish readers: the Great Famine of the 1840s. That all changed in 1995, however, when the sesquicentennial observances called forth a huge outpouring of famine research. This research has shed new light on a wide range of social, political, administrative and cultural issues, but the work under review is the first full-length monograph on the Famine by an historical econometrician since Joel Mokyr's pioneering exploration of Malthusian explanation, Why Ireland Starved, appeared in 1983.