Kearns, Gerard (2012) Guest editorial: Colonialism and the Irish Famine. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2 (1). pp. 76-77. ISSN 2043-8206

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Abstract

There are at least three sets of intellectual issues with which Nally engages in his book on the Irish Famine of 1845–1852. In the first place, Nally looks at how disasters are explained. Following the work on the social distribution of vulnerability (Blaikie et al., 1994; Sen, 1982), Nally looks at the longer- term effect of the colonial administration of Ireland and at the shorter-term management of the famine itself. In broad terms, Nally accepts that while the presence of a potato blight was to some extent an event from the realm of, admittedly humanly reorganized, nature, the famine itself was instead a matter of social and political choices, for grain that could have been used to feed humans was exported, or was used in distilling, or was fed to animals. Nally uses modern discussions of food security and food sovereignty to raise questions about the relations between commodification and food distribution

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Colonialism; Irish Famine;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	4342
Depositing User:	Gerry Kearns
Date Deposited:	08 May 2013 10:24
Journal or Publication Title:	Dialogues in Human Geography
Publisher:	Sage Publications
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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