The Great Irish Famine

Date

1845–1852

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Ireland (United Kingdom); diaspora to North America and Australasia

Era

Modern

Significance

From 1845 to 1852 Ireland suffered the Great Famine, or An Gorta Mór, one of the most catastrophic subsistence crises of nineteenth-century Europe.

The proximate cause was the water mould Phytophthora infestans, a potato blight that arrived from the Americas and repeatedly destroyed the crop on which a third of the population depended for food. The disaster was magnified by structural causes: dependence on a single, genetically uniform potato variety, an absentee-landlord system, mass rural poverty, and a British government committed to laissez-faire economics that limited relief and permitted the continued export of grain and livestock from a starving island. The worst year, 1847, is remembered as "Black '47". Roughly one million people died of starvation and associated diseases such as typhus and cholera, and at least another million emigrated, chiefly to the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. Between 1845 and 1855 over two million people left, one of the largest exoduses ever from a single island. Ireland's population fell by around a quarter, from about 8.5 million on the eve of the famine toward 4.4 million by 1901, as continued emigration entrenched depopulation. The famine reshaped Irish society, fuelled a vast and politically influential diaspora, and became a lasting symbol of the human cost of food insecurity and colonial governance.

Empires active in 1845–1852

• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related social & demographic events

• Emancipation of the serfs in Russia
  3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)
• Influenza pandemic of 1918–1920
  1918–1920
• The Holocaust and the 'Final Solution'
  1941–1945
• Bengal Famine of 1943
  1943–1944
• The Seneca Falls Convention launches the organised women's rights movement
  19–20 July 1848
• Indian indenture system begins in Mauritius
  2 November 1834

Further reading

The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People

If you read one book

The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People

John Kelly

Narrative history of the famine and its human toll.

Get it on Amazon →

Also worth reading

• The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 — Cecil Woodham-SmithAmazon →

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