The Great Famine In Ireland And Britain S Financial Crisis

The Irish famine of the 1840s is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom's history. Within six years of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845, more than a quarter of its residents had unexpectedly died or emigrated. Its population has not yet fully recovered since. Historians have struggled to explain why the British government decided to shut down its centrally organised relief efforts in 1847, long before the famine ended. Some have blamed the laissez-faire attitudes of the time for an inadequate response by the British government; others have alleged purposeful neglect and genocide. In contrast, this book uncovers a hidden narrative of the crisis, which links policy failure in Ireland to financial and political instability in Great Britain. More important than a laissez-faire ideology in hindering relief efforts for Ireland were the British government's lack of a Parliamentary majority from 1846, the financial crises of 1847, and a battle of ideas over monetary policy between proponents and opponents of financial orthodoxy. The high death toll in Ireland resulted from the British government's plans for intervention going awry, rather than being prematurely cancelled because of laissez-faire. This book is essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in Anglo-Irish relations, the history of financial crises, and why humanitarian-relief efforts can go wrong even with good intentions.

A concise analysis of one of the great disasters of Irish history.

The most wide-ranging series of essays ever published on the Irish famine.

The Irish potato famine of the 1840s - the 'Great Famine' or 'An gorta mór' - is one of the defining events in modern Irish history. Over a five-year period a population of 8.2 million was reduced to 6.5 million through starvation, disease and emigration. The famine permanently changed one of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom as it then stood and its legacies of depopulation, socio-economic and cultural change, political resentment, and the expansion through mass emigration of an Irish 'diaspora' in Britain, North America and the British Empire still have a resonance today. Now, in the first installment of a new collaboration between Pen and Sword and History Ireland magazine, some of the world's leading experts on the Great Famine explore the crisis from a range of perspectives. From the importance of the potato in Irish history, to food exports, political change, the provision of charity, the impact of disease, the role of the authorities, the experience of emigration and the changing interpretation of the famine, this volume explores how this seminal event in Irish, British and world history still has a relevance to the globalised world of the twenty-first century.

Drawing on postcolonial and famine theory, Nally shows how British colonial policies undermined Irish rural livelihoods and made Ireland vulnerable to catastrophic food crises.

This book exposes, for the first time in modern scholarship, the role that the rise of the Carry Trade played in British financial crises between 1825 and 1866, how in reaction the Bank of England improved its management of monetary policy after 1866 and how those lessons have been forgotten since the 1970s. Britain is one of the few major capitalist economies in the world to have avoided policy-induced systemic financial crises for more than 100 years of its history—between 1866 and 1973. Beforehand, it suffered a series of serious banking panics, in 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857-58 and 1866. Since the 1970s banking instability has returned again, with the global financial crisis of 2007-09 hitting Britain hard. Economists and policymakers have asked what can be learnt from Britain’s experience of the disappearance and reappearance of crises to help efforts to prevent future ones. This book answers that question with a major reassessment of Britain’s financial history over the past two centuries. It does so by applying the long-neglected ideas of the British Banking School to explain how crises can occur because of the Carry Trade. This book is essential reading for economists and historians of modern Britain, practitioners and policymakers, as well as anyone who is affected by financial crises and their consequences.