Oct 19 Ireland under the Union
"His majesty's subjects of Great Britain and Ireland shall...be entitled to the same privileges, and be on the same footing as to encouragements and bounties on the like articles, being the growth, produce, or manufacture of either country respectively, and generally in respect of trade and navigation in all ports and places in the united kingdom and its dependencies.... All prohibitions and bounties on the export of articles the growth, produce, or manufacture of either country to the other shall cease...." [Act of Union]
I. The pre-famine economy
Irish population growth:
Source: Oxford Companion to Irish History
A) increasing dependence on agriculture
B) lack of economic diversification
C) the structure of rural society: landlords, middlemen, small farmers and agricultural laborers (cottiers)
Beggars on the O'Connell Estate, 1846 [Views of the Famine]
Irish Cabin, 1846
Scalpeen, 1849
Cabin interior, 1846
Cabin interior, 1847
II. Famine
William Trench (1808-1872), land agent for the Lansdowne estate, "Realities of Irish Life" (1868)
A) The potato (paragraph 1)
Potato dinner, 1846
Searching for potatoes in a Stubble Field, 1849
B) Blight (paragraphs 2, 3, and 4)
phytopthera infestans
victims
1-1.5 million deaths (Moving body to coffin cart, 1847)
typhus, relapsing fever, dystentery, vitamin deficiencies
evictions (Eviction, 1848)
C) Government response (paragraph 5)
Robert Peel (Tory PM, 1841-1846)
Indian meal ("Peel's brimstone")
Government sale of Indian Corn at Cork, 1846
Beggars and peasants assembled for Indian meal, 1847
Lord John Russell (Whig MP, 1846-1852)
Charles Trevelyan (Chief Secretary for Ireland)
liberalism
soup kitchens (1847)
Dublin soup kitchen, 1847
application of the New Poor Law (1848-9)
Workhouse exterior
Workhouse interior
D. Private relief (paragraphs 7 and 8)
Quakers
Cork Society of Friends Soup House, 1847
E. Consequences (paragraph 6)