Irish Potato Famine

The proximate cause of the Great Irish Famine (1846-52) was the fungus phythophtera infestans (or tater blight), which reached Ireland in the fall of 1845. The fungus destroyed more or less one-third of that years crop, and few all that of 1846. After a seasons remission, it also ruined about of the 1848 harvest. These repeated attacks made the Irish famine more protracted than most. Partial failures of the potato crop were nothing new in Ireland before 1845, but damage on the scale form by the ecological shock of potato blight was deathly unprecedented (Solar 1989; Bourke 1993; Clarkson and Crawford 2001). However, the famine would not have been n early on so lethal had Irelands dependence on the potato been less. The experience of different European economies in the 1840s is telling in this respect. In Ireland the workaday intake of the third or so of the population principally reliant on the potato was awful: 4-5 kilos workaday per plenteous-grown male equival ent for most of the year. After allowing for non-human spending and render for seed, the 2.1 million acres (or 0.8 million hectares) under potatoes in the early 1840s produced 6.2 million metric tons for human consumption. That amounted to an amount up daily intake of 4.6 lbs (or over two kilos) per man, woman, and child.

In France, by comparison, the average daily intake of potatoes was only one hundred sixty-five grams in 1852; in Norway in the early 1870s, 540 grams; in the Netherlands about 800 grams in the 1840s; in Belgium 640 grams. A few European regions -- Belgian Flanders, parts of To see in Cormac Ã" Gráda , Richard Paping and Eric Vanhaute (! eds.), The potato famine of 1845-1850: causes and effects of the last European subsistence crisis (CORN Publication Series: Comparative coarse History of the northwesterly Sea Area). 1 1 Prussia, and Alsace -- came close to the Irish norm, however (for sources see Ã" Gráda 1999: 18, 237). Table 1 (based on Bourke 1993: 90-113; Mokyr 1981) gives a sense of the potatos enormousness in the Irish rural...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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