Taking a bit of a break from the Russian Ukraine War with this book.
This is one of the easiest to read texts I have ever read, finishing it in just a few days.
I was motivated to buy the book from the film, presented on Netflix, "Black '47." (It now is available on Tubi) As an interesting aside, one of the main characters was Hugo Weaving, the actor who payed the evil Agent Smith in the 1999 film "The Matrix."
The author does a masterful job of laying out the calamity, never quite blaming one segment of Irish and British society, and writing a sympathetic portrayal of nearly all the British and Irish officials involved, as well as the landowners. He writes of an obscure incident that occurred during the famine, tying it to the crisis at at hand, and then draws the reader along by placing it in context of the famine. This he does repeatedly and it makes for an informative and compelling read.
The cause of the famine, aside from the potato blight was structural. Irish society had an extensive tenant farmer system, a layered one if you will, in which landowners at the top allotted their lands to farmers, with those farmers in turn doing the same. At the very bottom and at the most wretched were the poorest farmers, whose very lives depended on the potato crop.
What struck me the most about the incident was just how fast the blight spread: less than five weeks in the first year and less than four in the second.
By the third year, many of those who farmed potatoes were either dead, left for America, or were too weak to plant a new crop.
You can't help but understand that at the tail end of the Age of Enlightenment, when regards for economic markets were Holy Writ in British society. How during the famine, food, plentiful in other crops, were exported, while the rest of Irish society was left to suffer. But it is hard to blame them. How are you going to get food into the country, if the exporters didn't help? Except that that is all they could do.
For many in the end, even leaving for America and Canada didn't help. Many emigrants were so destitute, they didn't have enough money for food and water for their five month voyage. They were packed together in makeshift facilities aboard ship, which caused the other factor in the famine, pestilence.
Things were so bad that in Canada, government authorities tried to quarantine passengers. This caused a backlog of ships entering the St Lawrence River. Many died waiting to be quarantined. One ship had a 75 percent mortality of passengers.
This book is a fine historical narrative of a calamity written in a most readable format. The book turned out to be a welcome break from the military history I normally read.
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