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Why Ireland Starved and the Big Issues in Pre-Famine Irish Economic History

This reflection on Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved discusses the way in which Mokyr addressed three big issues in pre-famine Irish economic history: Why population grew so rapidly, why the Irish were so dependent on the potato and what role British control played in Irish economic development. It suggests that differences among Irish counties were small relative to the differences between Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, hence cross-section analysis within Ireland, Mokyr's preferred method, may not be able to capture the causes of rapid population growth and potato dependence. As for the influence of British control, the way in which seventeenth-century changes in landownership shaped subsequent economic development is neither fully elaborated nor tested empirically.