This paper advances the current debates on famine and famine history, with a focus on the first half of the 18th century in Ireland. Ireland was often hit by severe famines and two of them, specifically the famines of 1728–1729 and 1740–1741, are at the center of this article. The analysis of those famines will show the relevance of weather extremes as one driver in the functional chain of fami...

Beginning in 2001, smallholder peasant households in Malawi faced two life-threatening risks: AIDS and famine. Malawi registers the 8 highest HIV/AIDS prevalence in the world (UNAIDS 2004) and is one of the continent’s least urbanized countries with 85 per cent of the national population living in rural areas. Much of the countryside has a reputation for being ‘deep rural’ in the sense that it ...

The leading Chinese-language newspaper in late nineteenth-century China, the Shanghai-based Shenbao, began in 1877 and 1878 to cover on an almost daily basis the famine engulfing North China. The news that millions of people were starving to death in the drought-stricken northern provinces shocked Chinese reformers and gentry philanthropists living in Shanghai and other parts of the Jiangnan re...

The sanitary and medical aspects of the late famine-sickness at Bombay are sufficiently important to engage the attention of epidemiologists in England, both of themselves and in the interests of onr great Indian dependency. Though I could not hope to add materially to the natural history of famine-fever, yet experience in W. India has not been without its special teachings; and this brief reco...

This paper attempts to explain the nature of recurrent famine, not just as a result of a series of adventitious effects, but more importantly as the unintended outcome of an exclusionary growth model. This adventitious effects matter a great deal, but their impact can only be understood in the light of the inherent weakness of the growth model, which impoverished the peasantry and hence generat...

Millions of infants and young children in Third World countries die every year. For those children under the age of six who manage to survive, the world is a threatening place. Infant death and problems in growth and development in the early years have many causes. Famine, war, and unemployment all take their toll. Lack of potable water and poor sanitary conditions are common. Childhood and tro...

Plasma levels of corticosterone are often used as a measure of "stress" in wild animal populations. However, we lack conclusive evidence that different stress levels reflect different survival probabilities between populations. Galápagos marine iguanas offer an ideal test case because island populations are affected differently by recurring El Niño famine events, and population-level survival c...

The number of losses due to the 1932-34 Famine in Ukraine has been the subject of many studies and controversies (Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, 1988; Kulchytskyj, 2003; Wolowyna, 2007). The different estimates vary from around 2.6 millions to more than 10 millions. The figure of 10 million, extensively used by the government of Ukraine and some Ukrainian diaspora leaders, seems to be base...

where POPt21 is the total population in the previous year; ADR t and EDR t are, respectively, the actual and expected death rates in year t ; and ABR t and EBR t are, respectively, the actual and expected birth rates in year t. Expected death and birth rates are those that would have prevailed if there had been no famine. In other words, the difference between ADR t and EDR t is an increased de...

Twenty years after Poverty and Famines elaborated the entitlement approach as an innovative and holistic approach to famine analysis, debates about some of its fundamental assertions remain unresolved. This paper examines four limitations acknowledged by Sen himself: starvation by choice, disease-driven rather than starvation-driven mortality, ambiguities in entitlement speciŽ cation and extra-...