‘Tales of the Peasantry and Famine’ finds the term ‘peasant’ to be both problematic in occluding the complexity of Irish rural society, and, at the same time, inescapable, with the Irish peasants recurring in Irish fiction throughout the nineteenth century. Peasants feature across a range of popular genres of the period, including the historical novel, such as John Banims’ Boyne Water (1826), the national tale, and in novels specifically about peasant life, of which the works of William Carleton provide the best-known examples. The Famine of the 1840s accelerated this interest in Irish peasant culture as a disappearing world, as the numbers of the rural poor were decimated by hunger, disease, and emigration, also giving rise to a series of novels focusing on the Famine itself, notably Carleton’s Black Prophet (1847). By the end of the century, Emily Lawless’ Hurrish (1886) would treat the pre-Famine period as a lost time.

‘A Splintered Past: History in the Irish Novel since 1990’ considers the ways in which contemporary Irish novelists have represented three phases of modern Irish history: the Famine; the revolutionary period; social liberalisation since the 1960s. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), in its relative optimism about the contribution of the catastrophe to national self-consciousness, is contrasted with Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016). Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) provides a child’s-eye view of the Easter Rising, while Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) witnesses the Rising from the perspective of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) filters partition through childhood memories. As we reach Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (2014) or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), historical traumas become comprehensible only in personal terms, and the capacity for collective narrativisation is less prevalent or accessible.

‘Religion, Migration and the Irish Novel’ considers the way in which the bitter sectarian divisions that characterised Irish society in the nineteenth century were both reflected in and produced by the fiction of the period. Novels such as William Parnell’s Maurice and Berghetta: or, the Priest of Rahery (1819) were written with the clear intention of repealing the Penal Laws that restricted the rights of Irish Catholics, while Selina Bunbury’s The Abbey of Innismoyle (1828) uses Gothic tropes of abduction by malicious friars to stoke Protestant fears of Catholic conspiracies. These sectarian divisions were reinforced for Irish migrants in novels such as Mary Anne Sadlier’s New Lights (1853), a Famine novel that pits a charitable Catholic priest against a rapacious Protestant evangelical, and which was published in New York for Irish-American readers, taking its place with Irish-American novels such as Peter McCorry’s The Lost Rosary (1870).

‘Property and the Irish Novel’ begins from the premise that the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century, particularly from the Famine onwards, can be understood as a struggle over possession of land. Changes in the understanding of land, and landowning, in the period can be traced in the arc of novels stretching from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), which establishes the template for the castle novel, to later novels including Charles Lever’s Lord Kilgobbin (1872). The involvement of the landowning class in the writing of fiction complicates this situation, in a figure such as Mary Letitia Martin, who was both a novelist, and the inspiration for the heroine of Lever’s The Martins of Cro’ Martin (1856), after she perished while trying to aid her tenants during the Famine. It is the Irish Famine, perhaps more than any other event, that sharpens the ethical concerns of later castle novels.

Production continues to rise globally, with significant increases in crops, meat, milk, eggs, and fish since 2000. Agricultural productivity has grown, using less land and labour, reducing hunger and improving nutrition in many regions. However, this progress is shadowed by severe environmental costs. Climate change threatens yields, especially in vulnerable areas, while food systems contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Historically, fears of population outstripping food supply—from Malthus in the 18th century to the warnings of the 1960s—were averted not by chance, but by deliberate action. The challenge ahead is to transform how we produce and consume food—sustainably increasing output while protecting the planet for future generations.

Chapter 6 examines migration management aid in Ethiopia – a semi-democracy. Ethiopia’s history of foreign aid and migration is intertwined with intra-regional conflicts, the politicization of famine, and forced resettlement in service of centralizing control and statebuilding. The EU and its member states built on shifting alliances throughout the 1990s and 2000s to become the largest humanitarian and development donors in Ethiopia, all while pushing European interests in the region and overlooking the government’s human rights record. The EUTF grants fit within this pattern of conditional aid in which the EU dangled the carrot of €281 million, in exchange for ambitious promises to reform refugee protection. By the end of 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, had fought a devastating war in the Tigray region, relocated refugee camps, blocked aid to displaced people in Tigray, and redirected economic investments toward his allies. In the case of Ethiopia, migration management aid was used to tie domestic actors to central authorities in the refugee agency (pathway III), and ultimately to redirect aid away from Tigray (pathway II).

This chapter explores the human causes of famine, and its consequences. It starts with definitions, an examination of the epidemiology of starvation, and the way it is measured (i.e., stunting, food insecurity, etc.). The next part delves into the evolutionary history of human starvation and the evidence for its current impacts on our biology. In the contemporary era two famines stand out, and the history and causes of each are described. The first is the Irish potato famine of 1845–1849, which had such a devastating impact that even now Ireland's population is less than it was before the famine struck. The second is the catastrophic Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, which was wholly 'man-made' and killed between 36 and 45 million people. The latter part of the chapter looks at the psychobiology of acute and chronic starvation, especially in children (the protein-energy malnourishment spectrum), and its remediation (and the ineffectiveness of diet alone). Finally, the relationship between overabundance of food in some countries and food insecurity in others is examined.

Chapter 1 challenges the scholarly assumption that the devil, as he appears in early Christian writings, is little more than a useful way of covering a gap in theological reasoning. This widespread misconception undercuts the breadth and complexity of early Christian thought and adopts anachronistically the concerns of eighteenth-century philosophers, gathered up into what is known as the classic ‘problem of evil’. By disentangling the devil from the conceptual webs that surround evil and suffering, this chapter argues that for the Cappadocians, the devil does not resolve the question of why humans experience evil. Chapter One closes by establishing a more suitable theological context in which to study the devil.

This chapter examines the complex evolution of Irish Tory political thought during the 1830s and 1840s, revealing a more fluid and conditional unionism than traditional narratives suggest. Following the loss of their power base with the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1801, Irish Tories struggled to define their role in the new constitutional order, oscillating between staunch support for the Union and moments of profound disillusionment. The chapter analyses how figures like Sir Samuel Ferguson and contributors to the Dublin University Magazine articulated a distinctively Irish conservative vision that sought to reconcile traditional Protestant Ascendancy values with the realities of post-emancipation Ireland. Some Tories even briefly embraced the idea of restoring an Irish parliament as they witnessed the British government’s catastrophic failure of governance during the Famine. The chapter demonstrates how Irish Tory thought evolved from unconditional unionism to a more pragmatic position that viewed the Union as contingent upon its ability to deliver good government for Ireland, challenging the monolithic portrayal of conservatism in this period.

This chapter analyses the Repeal movement led by Daniel O’Connell during the 1830s and 1840s, which attempted to undo the Act of Union and restore Ireland’s parliament. O’Connell framed Repeal as a constitutional restoration - a return to Grattan’s Parliament - but infused it with mass mobilization tactics honed during Catholic emancipation. The movement’s tensions are revealed through its ideological factions: O’Connell’s moderate "Old Ireland" favouring gradual reform within British frameworks, and the more radical "Young Ireland," influenced by classical republican ideals. The chapter explores how Young Irelanders like Thomas Davis conceptualised Irish self-government not just as legislative autonomy but as cultural and economic sovereignty, diverging from O’Connell’s pragmatic focus on institutional restoration. The catastrophic Famine (1845–52) deepened these divides, exposing the Union’s failures and radicalizing demands for self-rule. Ultimately, the chapter shows how Repeal became a crucible for competing visions of Irish representation - from O’Connell’s loyalist parliamentarianism to Young Ireland’s revolutionary separatism - laying groundwork for later republican and Home Rule movements.

Chapter 3 examines the blood libel invented by Hyppolitus Guarinoni in 1619, Tyrol, Austria. The fictional murder of the boy, Andreas of Rinn, would have taken place in July of 1462. The accepted explanation for this unusual blood libel is a response to Protestant incursions into the Tyrol area, where Rinn is located. The chapter provides a systemic account of the blood libel, which includes complex responses to drought, plague, famine, along with the continuing influence of pagan magic. These elements created an internal dissonance within the Catholic system that Guarinoni was trying to fortify.

Irrigation development in British India is widely cited as a main achievement of the Raj. The hydraulic projects, which built upon indigenous practice and evolved through ‘learning by doing’, were impressive engineering constructs that brought water to extensive areas of the subcontinent. They permitted expanded agricultural production and exports, bolstered public finances and protected the population from famine. However, the colonial context of the developments has produced contention among historians as to their role and value. This chapter discusses the different forms of irrigation in operation, and the impact of the increasingly large and integrated new systems in changing the pattern of investment and benefits between geographical regions from 1800 to 1947. Taking account of the changing technological and management aspects of the systems over time, and the way cultivators reacted to them, a broad assessment is made of the irrigation inheritance at independence.

When colonial rule began in the mid-nineteenth century, India and Britain were both poor by modern standards, although Britain was somewhat richer. In 1947, when colonial rule ended, the gap between the two was gigantic. Britain was a sophisticated and wealthy economy where per capita income, health and education had improved dramatically, whereas India was still exceedingly poor on all these metrics. India’s economy changed over 200 years: it was far more engaged in international trade, a modern industrial sector had developed and railways criss-crossed the country. At the same time, productivity was low in all sectors of the economy, especially in agriculture. Life was precarious: as late as 1943, a devastating famine took millions of lives in Bengal, a horror that indicted colonial rule. We introduce the reader to this complex story of transformation without enrichment, briefly commenting on how each chapter fits in the narrative.

The Irish parliament was abolished in 1800 and those who supported its abolition were then and thereafter known as unionists. The 1798 rebellion, organized by Irish republicans led by Wolfe Tone, incorporating Catholic and Protestant and partly supported by the French, had alarmed the British. Most Penal legislation was gone by 1792 but Catholics were still not allowed to stand for parliament. Daniel O’Connell challenged this with a campaign culminating in Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and his subsequent campaign to repeal the union continued this constitutional nationalism. Various administrative, legal and educational reforms in the 1830s dismantled Protestant privilege some more. Meanwhile, the population of the poorest continued to grow, surviving precariously on the potato, until over a million died in the Great Famine of 1845–1849, and another 900,000 panic-emigrated. The small and unsuccessful Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 expressed a physical force nationalism that O’Connell had disavowed, and kept the focus on Irish grievances.

By 1850, the Irish language was in serious decline all over the country.

Several themes shape the historiography of economics in western India in colonial times, including the history of ryotwari land tenure, international factors like the growing engagement of agriculture with the world markets via cotton exports, dependence on monsoon agriculture and the outbreak of famines and epidemics, and the industrialization of Bombay and Ahmedabad. Although these processes may seem disparate, there were also deep connections between them. The chapter offers an economic history integrating these processes, and shows how western India in the colonial period saw significant innovation and entrepreneurship in industry, in the broader context of an economy that remained largely agricultural, with low productivity and high risk.

From 1830, Irish literature shares with official and state documentation an intense interest in the details of everyday life while also drawing energy from O’Connellite mobilisation of the mass of the Irish people. An uncertain new sociology of literature emerged, characterised by hesitations and questions, part of an Irish romanticism darkened by detail. The chapter tracks Irish romanticism through to the period of the Great Famine and offers discussions of works by Maria Edgeworth, James Clarence Mangan and William Carleton.

The Second World War is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the understanding of malnutrition and starvation, whereas the significance of the First World War has been largely overlooked. This chapter examines some of the major lines of research into hunger and malnutrition during the war of 1914–18, as well as the state of scientific knowledge on the eve of that conflict. It argues that the war brought major shifts in the understanding of a number of deficiency diseases – scurvy, pellagra and beriberi – as well as in the physiology and pathology of hunger. Privation of military and civilian populations and the opportunity to study malnutrition in controlled environments created opportunities for scientific research, while wartime imperatives, both political and military, provided the impetus and resources necessary for systematic investigation. Cumulatively, these advances were transformational but not all of them resulted in lasting achievements. In this respect, nutritional science provides some useful insights into the complex relationship between war and scientific and medical change.

While much of Europe experienced hunger and hunger-related deaths during the era of the First World War, famine, as defined by an excess mortality rate of 40 per thousand, occurred mainly in the Russian Empire and later Soviet Russia. Furthermore, famine continued in Russia through 1922. In Russia there were two stages of the food problem. 1914–19 was characterized by mutual international blockades that upset regular international trade and caused general hunger with some elevated mortality. Patterns of supply were strained, especially in areas where mortality rose to famine levels. Leaders were slow to recognize the crisis, believing that excess grain production in other parts of the Empire would compensate for regions with reduced food supplies, which they did not. From 1919 to 1922, while trade had opened back up in much of Europe, it did not in Russia, which remained subject to blockade and to civil and international war. Hunger and famine in this period was much more severe, and US aid relief did not enter Soviet Russia until 1921, the final and most terrible year of the famine.