Book contents
- Managing Mobility
- Reviews
- Modern British Histories
- Managing Mobility
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘An Awful Remedy’
- 2 ‘A Long Train of Moral Evils’
- 3 ‘The Most Perfect Skeletons I Ever Saw’
- 4 ‘A Stranger to the Facts Will Hardly Credit the Negligence’
- 5 ‘Not Altogether of a Hopeful Character’
- 6 ‘A New Epoch in the History of the Experiment’
- Conclusion
- Index
1 - ‘An Awful Remedy’
Irish Famine Migration and Laissez-Faire Theodicy, 1846–1853
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
Book contents
- Managing Mobility
- Reviews
- Modern British Histories
- Managing Mobility
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘An Awful Remedy’
- 2 ‘A Long Train of Moral Evils’
- 3 ‘The Most Perfect Skeletons I Ever Saw’
- 4 ‘A Stranger to the Facts Will Hardly Credit the Negligence’
- 5 ‘Not Altogether of a Hopeful Character’
- 6 ‘A New Epoch in the History of the Experiment’
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
There was an ideological framework to the ostensibly ‘spontaneous’ Famine migration of the late 1840s and early 1850s, when over two million Irish people fled the island. It exemplified the mid Victorian imperial state’s commitment to taking advantage of the Famine to convert the Irish countryside from a subsistence economy of peasants and potatoes to an export economy of large-scale graziers. In the case of the Irish Potato Famine, laissez-faire implicated the British government in mass death.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Managing MobilityThe British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840–1860, pp. 22 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024