Abstract Pawnbroking, one of the oldest and most accessible forms credit, was a common feature life in pre‐famine famine Ireland. This article studies role pawnbroking Irish financial system during this important period, applying insights from modern on fringe banking. In period under study, formal tiered existed; regulated joint‐stock banks offered services to industry better off, while provid...

The Great Persian Famine of 1917–1919 is one the greatest calamities in history Iran. While some scholarly work has explored causes and dynamics famine, less attention been paid to its memorialisation. This paper aims understand how remembered – or not public personal spheres Discussing historical events that have silenced, neglected publicly recognised commemorated before after Islamic Revolut...

Abstract Historians generally portray the Irish immigrants who came to United States, fleeing Great Famine of mid-nineteenth century, as hopelessly mired in poverty and hardship due discrimination, a lack occupational training, oversaturated job markets East Coast cities where most them settled. Although digitization census data other records now enables tracking nineteenth-century Americans fa...

This paper has developed estimates of the age-specific mortality rates prevailing during the Great Irish Famine and has analyzed fertility trends during the 25 years before the Famine. Our calculations confirm that 1 million Irish people perished as a result of this disaster. This figure does not include the deaths among the 1.3 million emigrants who left Ireland during the Famine period. The F...

The writings of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen caused a huge stir when it challenged the popular view that famine was due to shortage of food. Though this view of Professor Sen was based on analysis of the Bengal famine that occurred in the year 1943, he subsequently analysed the contemporary famine of Asia and Africa and generalized his conclusion. Thus the criticism of the popular view on fam...

10740 words This is an abbreviated version of a paper given at a conference on famine demography at Les Treilles, France, 25-30 May 1999. The longer version is available as Mokyr and Ó Gráda, 1999. We are grateful to co-participants for their comments.