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librarianonparade's review against another edition
4.0
The Irish famine is one of the most tragic and contentious periods in the long and often tragic and contentious history of Anglo-Irish relations. Talk about the famine still causes controversy and outrage today, more than 150 years later; and the mass exodus of Irish citizens fleeing the desperate situation at home has had a lasting influence on the populations of Ireland, Britain, Canada and the United States. One could quite reasonably argue that the Irish famine went further towards creating the modern state of Ireland than almost anything else in its history.
'God sent the potato blight but England sent the famine' is the traditional, and most certainly the Irish, view of the great famine of the nineteenth century - and as John Kelly points out in this admirably even-handed book this view is not entirely without merit. The British government of the time was guilty of a mass of faults and failings when it came to Ireland - to quote, 'bureaucratic delays and incompetence, shipping shortages, legislative measures and tax policy, cowardice on the part of some officials and stupidity on the part of others' - but the Irish famine was never the result of any kind of intentional policy of genocide or even wilful and deliberate neglect. The government in fact did embark upon an unprecedented programme of emergency relief: government provision of food, an extension of the poorhouse and soup kitchen scheme, funding of public labour works to employ the poor, charity drives - but in too many cases it proved to be too little and too late, and therefore cannot excuse the disappearance of nearly a third of the Irish population through starvation, disease and emigration.
The famine was a perfect storm of circumstances: the potato blight; poor weather; a worldwide food shortage; an Irish peasantry almost entirely dependent on the potato crop and living in a barter economy with almost no access to ready cash; the lack of development of the Irish infrastructure which meant there were no rural shops to supplement the potato diet and few links between town and country to facilitate emergency distribution of relief; the greed and avarice of a home-grown Irish merchant class who were more concerned with protecting their profit margins than feeding their fellow citizens; an Anglo-Irish aristocracy with no qualms about evicting tenants in order to lower their poor rates; and yes, a British government who held the Irish in contempt and who in many cases looked on the famine as an opportunity to 'remake' Ireland in England's image.
It's a heart-rending period in history, and John Kelly tugs at all the heartstrings. He succeeds in presenting both views of the famine - the official government and bureaucratic records alongside the stories of a people barefoot and half-naked, diseased and desperate, greeting inevitable death with a resignation only seen in people beyond all hope. The need to blame someone, anyone, is all too understandable, reading this book, and the Victorian government deserves to shoulder the lion's share, it not entirely all, of the blame.
'God sent the potato blight but England sent the famine' is the traditional, and most certainly the Irish, view of the great famine of the nineteenth century - and as John Kelly points out in this admirably even-handed book this view is not entirely without merit. The British government of the time was guilty of a mass of faults and failings when it came to Ireland - to quote, 'bureaucratic delays and incompetence, shipping shortages, legislative measures and tax policy, cowardice on the part of some officials and stupidity on the part of others' - but the Irish famine was never the result of any kind of intentional policy of genocide or even wilful and deliberate neglect. The government in fact did embark upon an unprecedented programme of emergency relief: government provision of food, an extension of the poorhouse and soup kitchen scheme, funding of public labour works to employ the poor, charity drives - but in too many cases it proved to be too little and too late, and therefore cannot excuse the disappearance of nearly a third of the Irish population through starvation, disease and emigration.
The famine was a perfect storm of circumstances: the potato blight; poor weather; a worldwide food shortage; an Irish peasantry almost entirely dependent on the potato crop and living in a barter economy with almost no access to ready cash; the lack of development of the Irish infrastructure which meant there were no rural shops to supplement the potato diet and few links between town and country to facilitate emergency distribution of relief; the greed and avarice of a home-grown Irish merchant class who were more concerned with protecting their profit margins than feeding their fellow citizens; an Anglo-Irish aristocracy with no qualms about evicting tenants in order to lower their poor rates; and yes, a British government who held the Irish in contempt and who in many cases looked on the famine as an opportunity to 'remake' Ireland in England's image.
It's a heart-rending period in history, and John Kelly tugs at all the heartstrings. He succeeds in presenting both views of the famine - the official government and bureaucratic records alongside the stories of a people barefoot and half-naked, diseased and desperate, greeting inevitable death with a resignation only seen in people beyond all hope. The need to blame someone, anyone, is all too understandable, reading this book, and the Victorian government deserves to shoulder the lion's share, it not entirely all, of the blame.
thehlb's review against another edition
3.0
This wasn't the book I thought it was going in. I think I was hoping for more personal stories about the famine and more particularly the migration of the Irish people. Instead I was presented with an extremely thorough and complicated history of the politics and policies which contributed to the needless deaths and emigration of millions of Irish (Including my ancestors).
It was extremely enlightening, though not a quick or easy read. The author goes in great detail in some areas and assumes prior knowledge on the part of the reader in the other. I had to keep my phone handy to frequently look up names, terms, and titles that I felt I still needed to better understand.
A good knowledge of nineteenth century British government and the landlord/tenant relationship and tax structure, as well as some history of the Catholic/Protestant issues of the time would be helpful in getting through the book with a more complete understanding.
It was extremely enlightening, though not a quick or easy read. The author goes in great detail in some areas and assumes prior knowledge on the part of the reader in the other. I had to keep my phone handy to frequently look up names, terms, and titles that I felt I still needed to better understand.
A good knowledge of nineteenth century British government and the landlord/tenant relationship and tax structure, as well as some history of the Catholic/Protestant issues of the time would be helpful in getting through the book with a more complete understanding.
kiwi_fruit's review against another edition
3.0
This is an informative and comprehensive book on the potato famine which wiped out a third of the Irish population from 1845 to 1849. Drawing both from facts and anecdotes, it illustrates the social, economic and political situation of Ireland in the middle of 1800s when the potato blight hit the country. It chronicles, in exhaustive detail, its swift spread trough the countryside and vividly describes the snowballing consequences of deadly famine, life-threatening diseases (typhus, dysentery and fevers) and mass emigration.
It’s a hard book to read. While I loved the start, as the book progressed, it really dragged for me. The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming; there is so much information on human misery and suffering that the reader can absorb.
I felt that the author piled historical data and figures on top of each other without structuring his arguments with clarity, the author seeming to randomly point the finger to either side of the Irish sea for causes of the human catastrophe. At times he blames the Celtic peasant roots, the backward economic model, the poor infrastructure, the Anglo-Irish land owners’ management of their land or Nationalist rebellious factions for the catastrophic situation, and then, a couple of sentences later, puts the responsibility squarely on the impotence of the British government, the “education” program of the Moralist politicians, the greed of the food merchants, the racist propaganda of the press or insensitive political economists.
The timeline of the middle chapters was also inconsistent (jumping around often), contributing to my confusion. The ending of the was also quite abrupt, book concludes with 1947, the afterward briefly mentioning the years 1848 and 1849, but in fact the potato blight did not end then, it reappeared in 1848, so it would seem that the author simply ran out of time.
After such comprehensive analysis of the economic and human disaster caused by the blight, I would have liked more information how Ireland successfully overcome the ordeal. Unfortunately, the author limit himself to only the following scanty statements in the afterword section:
““During the 1850s, Irish farms grew steadily larger and Irish agricultural profits steadily bigger
...
In the mid-1860s, peasant agitation for land reform revived. The agitation led to the Land War in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Land War produced a series of reforms that reversed the land seizures of the plantation era. On the eve of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres were again owned by Irish proprietors, and, as before the famine, many of the proprietors were small farmers.”
Overall this was eye opener book for me and a great source of information. Although it it proved not as good as I hoped it would be, I don't regret reading it. 3.5 stars
Fav. Quotes:
The plan presupposed conditions that existed only in a nation with a modern economy and a modern infrastructure, and, except for the regions around Belfast and Dublin, Ireland was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Unlike Britain and France, she had no significant class of rural shopkeepers to distribute food in the interior; and the relief committee system was an imperfect substitute, particularly in remote regions of the west and midlands, where local gentry was lacking to organize a committee and the nearest source of commercial food might be twenty or thirty miles away. The Irish economy was also too small to efficiently regulate food prices through market competition, as the British economy did; and the deficiency of domestic mills meant that, in a time of acute food shortages, relief provisions had to be ground in England or sent 1,300 miles away, to the mills at the big British naval base in Malta.
British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.
The Times and The Economist stopped lecturing the Irish on sloth, violence, ignorance, superstition, personal hygiene, and dependence on government; there were fewer comparisons with the Eskimos and South Sea Islanders; the adjective “aboriginal” was used less frequently to modify the noun “Irish,” as in the construction “aboriginal Irish”
It’s a hard book to read. While I loved the start, as the book progressed, it really dragged for me. The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming; there is so much information on human misery and suffering that the reader can absorb.
I felt that the author piled historical data and figures on top of each other without structuring his arguments with clarity, the author seeming to randomly point the finger to either side of the Irish sea for causes of the human catastrophe. At times he blames the Celtic peasant roots, the backward economic model, the poor infrastructure, the Anglo-Irish land owners’ management of their land or Nationalist rebellious factions for the catastrophic situation, and then, a couple of sentences later, puts the responsibility squarely on the impotence of the British government, the “education” program of the Moralist politicians, the greed of the food merchants, the racist propaganda of the press or insensitive political economists.
The timeline of the middle chapters was also inconsistent (jumping around often), contributing to my confusion. The ending of the was also quite abrupt, book concludes with 1947, the afterward briefly mentioning the years 1848 and 1849, but in fact the potato blight did not end then, it reappeared in 1848, so it would seem that the author simply ran out of time.
After such comprehensive analysis of the economic and human disaster caused by the blight, I would have liked more information how Ireland successfully overcome the ordeal. Unfortunately, the author limit himself to only the following scanty statements in the afterword section:
““During the 1850s, Irish farms grew steadily larger and Irish agricultural profits steadily bigger
...
In the mid-1860s, peasant agitation for land reform revived. The agitation led to the Land War in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Land War produced a series of reforms that reversed the land seizures of the plantation era. On the eve of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres were again owned by Irish proprietors, and, as before the famine, many of the proprietors were small farmers.”
Overall this was eye opener book for me and a great source of information. Although it it proved not as good as I hoped it would be, I don't regret reading it. 3.5 stars
Fav. Quotes:
The plan presupposed conditions that existed only in a nation with a modern economy and a modern infrastructure, and, except for the regions around Belfast and Dublin, Ireland was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Unlike Britain and France, she had no significant class of rural shopkeepers to distribute food in the interior; and the relief committee system was an imperfect substitute, particularly in remote regions of the west and midlands, where local gentry was lacking to organize a committee and the nearest source of commercial food might be twenty or thirty miles away. The Irish economy was also too small to efficiently regulate food prices through market competition, as the British economy did; and the deficiency of domestic mills meant that, in a time of acute food shortages, relief provisions had to be ground in England or sent 1,300 miles away, to the mills at the big British naval base in Malta.
British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.
The Times and The Economist stopped lecturing the Irish on sloth, violence, ignorance, superstition, personal hygiene, and dependence on government; there were fewer comparisons with the Eskimos and South Sea Islanders; the adjective “aboriginal” was used less frequently to modify the noun “Irish,” as in the construction “aboriginal Irish”
oisin175's review against another edition
4.0
I always enjoy when history authors add personal stories to their accounts to truly humanize the occurrence. After reading this book it is difficult to understand how the English of the early 1900s were confused about the Irish desire for independence. Considering the a significant portion of English discourse during the potato famine revolved around treating the Irish as a separate entity that was only nominally part of the UK, it seems absurd that after the Easter Rising their was a strong Unionist sentiment in England. It is also interesting to see that political argument concerning "dependence on government" and the need to make any government aid painful and infrequent apparently goes back until at least the early 1800s.
hobby33's review against another edition
4.0
Brutal read. Even though it's a 150 years later, Ireland has yet to fully recover from the devastation caused by this famine. The suffering of the poor in Ireland is so disturbing because there seems to be no real reason why it needed to be so severe. Yes, the blight destroyed the potato crops that the poor were relying on for survival. But it seems to be the mismanagement by the British government and the lack of support from the Irish landowning class (along with a healthy dose of anti-Irish prejudice) that ultimately condemned the poor in Ireland to mass starvation and death. The blight, not being man-made, couldn't have been avoided, but the other causes of the Irish famine easily could have.
jamielea86's review against another edition
5.0
Fascinating, emotional, filled with accurate information. I learned something with each chapter as well as feeling the sorrow of the story. Well told!
bridgetrose89's review against another edition
4.0
Very good book. What a horrific time, 1 million dead, and 2 million fled. Ireland's population reduced by one third. As a fourth generation Irish-American, this book made me appreciate all that my Irish ancestors went through so that I could be born and raised in America.