Re: Irish famine

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The revisionists set about destroying the idea that the famine of the
1840s was any big deal or the fault of British rule.  So there was a
stream of awful bookjs on the famine in the later 1970s and 1980s.

The best refutation of them is Christine Kinealy's "This great calamity
: the Irish famine 1845-52" (1994).  Very scholarly and very sharp.

She also has a new book, just out this year: "The great Irish famine :
impact, ideology, and rebellion".

I'm just trying to recall the old classic book on the famine, but my
mind's gone blank and I can't find it on the library computer.  It's by
a woman called Cecil someone - Woodham-Smith or something like that.
The Great Hunger?  It came out yonks ago, and then decades later,
withthe arrival of the (pro-imperilaist) revisionist school in Irish
history it came under big attack.

More latterly, with Kinealy and other works, the pendulum has swung back
to a recognition of the full horror of the famine.  Unfortunately, some
of the more recent stuff is a bit victim-culturish, kind of
incorporatring the famine as a psychologically traumatic event but
depoliticising it at the same time.  Kinealy's 1994 work is much more
sound, as she situates the disaster in the pattern of land ownership
imposed by the Brits, the role of laissez-faire economics, and the way
in which the famine was seen as a blessing by the British ruling class
in allowing for a much more capitalistic transformation of Irish
agriculture by wiping out that great mass of surplus peasantry who were
wasting all that land on subsistence potato-growing.

Phil

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