[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/ieshis/v44y2017i1p3-18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Irish Famine and Unusual Market Behaviour in Cork

Author

Listed:
  • Charles Read

    (University of Cambridge, UK)

Abstract
Scholars have long debated whether there was enough food in Ireland to feed the population during the Great Irish Famine; there has been less detailed examination of high-frequency data to understand how markets distributed food after the harvests failed. This article explores a hitherto unused weekly price and quantity data set from the Cork city markets to analyse how markets may have hindered the distribution of available food from 1846 to 1849. Although, historically, economists have long suspected that raw data on the market for potatoes during the Irish Famine behaved like that for a classical ‘Giffen’ good, there is little evidence for this among foodstuffs available throughout the crisis in Cork. But bacon pigs – a food that never reached a stable equilibrium but completely disappeared from the market in 1847 – exhibited some characteristics which do not appear to accord with the classical law of demand. Further analysis of this data suggests that middle-class purchasing power outbid the poorest people in Ireland at a time when there was a surplus of superior foods and a deficiency of inferior foods. These circumstances indicate that unusual market behaviour may have made the crop failure’s redistributive consequences – as well as its mortality toll – much worse.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles Read, 2017. "The Irish Famine and Unusual Market Behaviour in Cork," Irish Economic and Social History, , vol. 44(1), pages 3-18, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:ieshis:v:44:y:2017:i:1:p:3-18
    DOI: 10.1177/0332489317705461
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0332489317705461
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0332489317705461?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:ieshis:v:44:y:2017:i:1:p:3-18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.