Why Ireland Starved after Three Decades: The Great Famine in Cross-Section Reconsidered

This short paper revisits two questions that were central to Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved (2^nd edn, 1985). These are, first, what determined the variation in population change across Ireland during the Great Famine decade of 1841–51 and, second, whether and in what sense can pre-famine Ireland be characterised as ‘malthusian’.