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38647 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1322 of 1933

  • 9 - The Irish Working Class and the Role of the State, 1850–2016

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Henry Patterson, Emeritus Professor of Irish Politics, University of Ulster
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 145-160

  • Summary

    The Working Class and Colonialism

    We know considerably more about the various aspects of the history of the Irish working class than we did twenty years ago when the editors of Saothar, the journal of the Irish Labour History Society, commented that the Irish tradition of labour history was relatively weak and ‘less than generously served by academe’. The implicit comparison was with the historiography of the trade union movement and the Labour Party in the UK. In the intervening years there has been an increase in the number of books and articles published on the Irish working class and labour movement, but it is still a stream compared with the torrent of work on political and cultural history. Although labour history in the UK has to a large extent become an unfashionable ghetto in academia, it still maintains a much more substantial presence than its Irish counterpart.

    Nevertheless, perhaps because of the relative lack of scholarly work on the Irish working class, there has been a tendency for the scholarship that does exist to emphasise the centrality of colonialism as an explanation for the weakness of labour and socialist parties and ideologies in Ireland as compared with Britain and other European states, particularly in the 1880–1914 period. A considerable part of the literature on the Irish working class remains explicitly or implicitly structured by a colonial framework of analysis. Although this framework has been challenged in other areas of Irish history, the development of labour and working-class history was largely unperturbed by the ‘revisionist’ versus ‘anti-revisionist’ debate. This reflected not so much the development of some alternative macro-analysis of Irish history from ‘below’ as the fact that most contributions to the field were focused on discrete issues, regions and localities.

    Thus J. W. Boyle in what remains the most substantial scholarly history of the Irish labour movement in the nineteenth century noted that, at the level of trade unionism, Ireland had a history of organisation that, for considerable periods of time, developed in a similar fashion to what was happening on the other island. Combinations of journeymen developed in the eighteenth century as the power of guilds weakened, manufactures developed and the gap between masters and journeymen widened.

  • 18 - Celebrations and the Rituals of Life

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
    • By Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Professor of Irish Language and Literature, Concurrent Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 297-311

  • Summary

    Introduction

    To study the celebrations and rituals of life is to focus on the collective, the ‘people’, the force of tradition. ‘Traditional’ cultures hence are often characterised by the notion of the commons – farmers sharing their seeds and storytellers sharing their tales – though traditions are no more likely to be evenly shared than other resources. Often it was only through the legal criterion of delinquency that individual agency in popular culture was identified: the background to a sensational murder trial in 1895, for example, was the ‘collective’, ‘traditional’, belief in fairy abduction. The antiquaries, travel writers, and proto-folklorists and proto-anthropologists who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘discovered’ and described popular culture indeed saw a collective phenomenon. As scientific fields, folklore and anthropology were conceptualised in the German-speaking lands in the 1770s and 1780s ‘as part of the Enlightenment endeavour to create some order in the growing body of data on peoples, nations or Völker in the world of that era’. These data contributed both to the study of the inhabitants of a single polity (Volkskunde) and to the comparative study of peoples (Völkerkunde). But it is in the Herderian Volksgeist and in its Romantic expansion that we find the key notion that is at the core of the later development of these fields.

    Herder's location of cultural authenticity in the traditions peculiar to each people – expressed in his anthology of Volkslieder (1778–9) – thus was an essential development: the oral artistic genres of folksong and folktale transcended the material conditions of rural life – as ‘art’. The word ‘folk-lore’ dates from 1846 and was coined by William John Thoms who, in a letter to the antiquarian journal The Athenaeum, sought the editor's aid ‘in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop’. Raymond Williams sees the genesis of the ‘folk’ term and its derivatives in English in the context of the new urban industrial society, contending that it had the effect of ‘backdating all elements of popular culture’, in contradistinction to modern forms ‘either of a radical and working-class or of a commercial kind’.

  • 22 - Crime and Punishment

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 363-382

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Crime and punishment are two dimensions of Ireland's political as much as social history since throughout the period under consideration in the present volume. In government circles, disorder was frequently taken to be characteristic of Irish life, capable of remedy only through ever more inventive techniques for disciplining the unruly Irish. Behind the stereotypes, however, lie the paradoxes – long periods of evident tranquillity, and a capacity to reshape policing and repression along lines that make possible the restoration of civil order. And every perspective we take on these dimensions reveals rich social and institutional histories, whose significance reaches out beyond the borders of the island. In this chapter we consider the changing contours of crime and the responses to it, embodied not only in the history of the Irish constabulary and its successors, but also in punishment, capital and carceral.

    Crime and Responses

    Our knowledge of historical crime is tied to the conditions that make it known. For the pre-Great Famine period the sources are newspaper reports and a scanty record of court prosecutions (for the most part destroyed in 1922). The mid-Victorian consolidation of government through information found one expression in the publication, from 1863, of Judicial statistics, a wide-ranging record of police arrest, prosecutions and punishment outcomes, aggregated and also by county or smaller districts. Earlier counts were published, including the Return of Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office and the Statistical returns of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, but even in combination these do not allow a reliable longitudinal measure of the pattern of crime prior to the late 1830s. How far official statistics reflect the incidence of crime is a perennial question of criminology and policy. And so it becomes necessary at any point in time to consider the context from which crime figures arise, and the possible factors shaping reporting and official attention.

    With these qualifications we can paint in broad strokes the patterns of crime after 1740 and through the long nineteenth century. Throughout this period there is apparent continuity – evidence of relatively low criminality in everyday life qualified by intense outbreaks of violence exercised against people and property at periods of acute economic and political stress. The point is not uncontroversial.

  • Epilogue: Remembering and Forgetting in Modern Irish History

    • By Guy Beiner, Lecturer in Modern History, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Eunan O'halpin, Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary History, Trinity College Dublin
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 586-603

  • Summary

    The Formation of Modern Irish Memory, c.1740–1914

    The long nineteenth century saw the formation of modern Irish memory, although the nature of its novelty is open to debate, as it maintained a continuous dialogue with its traditional roots. A preliminary period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century has been identified by Joep Leerssen – following the German school of history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck – as a Sattelzeit, which accommodated the Anglicisation and modernisation of what had formerly been a predominantly Gaelic society. In particular, antiquarian fascination with the distant past played a key role in re-adapting native bodies of knowledge for Anglo-Irish readerships, whether in the music collecting of Edward Bunting, the song translations of Charlotte Brooke or the writings of Samuel Ferguson, to name but a few. This concept of cultural transition is useful for understanding the changes in memorial practices, which came about through reinvention, rather than simple invention and imposition from above, of Irish traditions.

    A record of remembrance in the countryside at the time of the transformation was captured between 1824 and 1842 by the Ordnance Survey, which, under the supervision of the noted antiquarian George Petrie, sent out fieldworkers, among them the illustrious Gaelic scholars John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, to compile detailed memoirs of local customs, originally designed as supplements for the topographical maps. Characteristically, the agents of change also engaged in documentation and preservation of traditional memory. Whereas the loss of Irish language has been poignantly decried by Alan Titley as ‘the Great Forgetting’, the modernisation of Ireland was not a straightforward linear progression from a largely Irish-speaking traditional culture, steeped in memory, to an English-speaking capitalist society, supposedly clouded by amnesia. It should be acknowledged that the Irish language maintained a substantial presence well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, during the cultural revival of the fin de siècle, language enthusiasts such as Douglas Hyde collected folk traditions in Irish in order to make them available as a resource for a modern national society. Overall, the increase in literacy in English did not necessarily eradicate oral traditions. Examination of popular print reveals that it functioned as a vehicle for reworking memories, which then fed back into oral culture.

  • 7 - Solutions

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 150-176

  • Summary

    Introduction

    If the world were made of pure substances, our development of the thermodynamic model would now be complete. We have developed a method, based on measurements of heat flow, that enables predictions to be made about which way reactions will go in given circumstances. But one of the reasons why the world is so complex is that pure substances are relatively rare, and strictly speaking they are nonexistent (even “pure” substances contain impurities in trace quantities). Most natural substances are composed of several components, and the result is called a solution. Therefore, we need to develop a way to deal with components in solution in the same way that we can now deal with pure substances – we have to be able to get numerical values for the Gibbs energies, enthalpies, and entropies of components in solutions. We will then be able to predict the outcome of reactions that take place entirely in solution, such as the ionization of acids and bases, and reactions that involve solids and gases as well as dissolved components, such as whether minerals will dissolve or precipitate. Our thermodynamic model will then be complete.

    In this chapter we have a look at how to deal with dissolved substances – solutes. When we mix two substances together, sometimes they dissolve into one another, like sugar into coffee or alcohol into water, and sometimes they do not, like oil and water. In the former case, if we thought about it at all, we would probably expect that the properties of the mixture or solution would be some kind of average of the properties of the two separate substances. This is more or less true for some properties, but decidedly not true for the most important one, Gibbs energy.

    After making sure we understand how to express the composition of solutions, we begin by considering properties of ideal solutions, which are, as you might expect, the simplest possible properties that solutions might have. As you might also expect, no real solutions are in fact ideal, although some come fairly close.

  • 3 - Famines and Famine Relief, 1740–2000

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Mary E. Daly, Professor Emerita of Modern History at University College Dublin and President of the Royal Irish Academy
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 38-52

  • Summary

    The Irish famine of the 1840s ranks among the greatest natural disasters in modern history, and it is generally seen as a major dividing line in the history of modern Ireland. Yet Ireland experienced not one but two acute famines in little more than a century. The famine of the 1740s, though largely forgotten, probably killed an even higher proportion of the population. The fact that Ireland experienced two major famines within a century was mainly due to poverty, but the inadequacy of relief systems, or unresponsiveness – especially when compared with elsewhere in western Europe – is also noteworthy.

    Famine or its Absence, 1740–1840

    Ireland escaped lightly during the major European food crises of the 1690s and the early eighteenth century. However, ‘twenty-one months of bizarre weather’, beginning in December 1739, which affected a large area of northern Europe, resulted in a major crisis. The Great Frost of 1740 was the longest period of extreme cold in modern European history. In Ireland 1741 was known as blian an áir – the year of the slaughter. Frozen waterways disrupted trade and business: water wheels could not function, so milling came to a halt. Potatoes, which had traditionally been left in the ground until needed, were destroyed, so households had to rely on oatmeal; many consumed the seed grain and seed potatoes reserved for the coming season. Dublin food prices rose sharply during the summer of 1740, but as the new season crops were small and late, prices peaked again in December 1740, prompting food riots. Cattle and sheep perished from lack of fodder; many horses died because of an epizootic disease. In some areas livestock numbers did not recover for many years, and many under-tenants were ruined by the crisis, if they didn't die. The famine ended with a bumper harvest in 1741.

    The primary cause was the damage caused to crops by acute weather, but the lack of food imports, because of extreme weather in Europe, was a contributory factor. Burials in Dublin city in January–February 1740 were three times the normal figure. In St Catherine's parish burials from January 1740 to the end of September 1741 were double those of previous years.

  • 31 - Missionary Empires and the Worlds They Made

  • from PART III - Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World
    • By Sarah Roddy, Lecturer in Modern Irish History, University of Manchester
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 534-550

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Stretching back more than two hundred years, modern Irish Christian missionary endeavour has involved dozens of organisations across all denominations, each with its own separate structures and histories and each peopled by hundreds of individual missionaries, both male and female. These orders, societies and missions have reached over the entire world, criss-crossing rising and falling empires and perhaps even creating ‘spiritual empires’ of their own in the process. In that time they each encountered millions of men, women and children of all classes and races and of many established and emerging ethnic and national identities, impacting upon myriad lives, for better or worse, as they went. Thus, there is a need to map, insofar as possible, the field of Irish missionary history as it stands, but, equally importantly, to point to ways in which it might develop and grow from here. The chapter will therefore present an overview of Irish Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic missionary structures and geographical scope based on existing scholarship. It will then draw out some significant themes surrounding the missionary work itself, something that ought to be done at least partly in conversation with the historiographies of Christian missionary endeavour originating from elsewhere in the western world. Finally, it will attempt to locate Irish missions within the broader sweep of Irish social history and suggest some possibilities for how that history might be taken forward in the future.

    Who were Irish Missionaries?

    Before establishing who Irish missionaries were in detail, it is necessary to determine who they were in abstract. Who counted as a missionary? This question is more complicated than it might appear, and is an especially knotty one in relation to Ireland. Although in most modern contexts ‘missionary’ has come to denote a person engaged in the conversion of ‘heathens’ on so-called ‘foreign’ missions, it has historically been a much more elastic term. Essentially, anybody who left his or her home area on defined religious business for an extended period could be seen to be engaging in mission. Thus, Protestant and Catholic clergy fundraising among their respective diasporas, newly ordained priests temporarily joining an English Catholic parish (which were known as ‘missions’ until the early twentieth century) or even priests bringing spiritual renewal to other Irish parishes could all claim the title of missionary.

  • 17 - Old Age, Death and Mourning

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
    • By Patricia Lysaght, Professor Emerita in Irish Folklore, University College Dublin
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 282-296

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In Irish society until relatively recent times, an extensive array of highly formalised traditional protocols for dealing with a deceased person were known to and practised by members of the community, on the occasion of death. An overview study of death ceremonial in Ireland appeared in the 1950s and a regional work on the same topic was published in the 1990s. Both of these publications have dealt fairly extensively with mortuary practices largely in the circumstances of ‘good death’, that is death from old age in the presence of family and community. The present chapter also treats of ‘good death’ as the full range of mortuary customs as practised in Ireland, extending from the moment of death onwards, can thereby be brought into play. While Hartmann's 1952 work was essentially a contribution to the study of Indo-Germanic religion, and Tyers's 1992 publication was largely of a descriptive nature, this chapter proposes to examine traditional death ceremonial in Ireland in the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, in the light of Arnold van Gennep's 1909 (translated 1960) theory of passage rites or ceremonial patterns which, in different cultures, mark an individual's transition from one phase of life to the next, or from one social world to another. Van Gennep divided passage rites into three sub-groups in accordance with the order in which they were observed: rites of separation, rites of transition and rites of incorporation. These corresponded to the stages of the transition involved, namely, separation from the first group, the actual transition itself and union with the second group.

    According to van Gennep's analytical framework, the passage rites in the case of death can be understood as marking the deceased person's separation from the living social group, his or her transition to, and incorporation into, the community of the dead. As we shall see in this chapter, this symbolic structure can be applied, to a greater or lesser extent, to traditional mortuary practices in Ireland, ranging from the moment of death to the burial process and to the visitation of the grave thirty days after interment.

  • 23 - Associational Life, Leisure and Identity since 1740

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
    • By William Murphy, Lecturer in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 383-402

  • Summary

    Introduction

    At the end of April 1739 the trial began of Lord Santry, a leading member of Dublin's Hellfire Club. Nine months earlier when drunk at Palmerstown Fair, he had stabbed an unfortunate porter named Laughlin Murphy. Murphy died of his wounds: Santry was sentenced to death but received a reprieve from George II. Santry's actions and the publicity these attracted confirmed the notorious image and ‘hastened the demise’ of the club with which he was so closely associated. During its brief existence, the elite Dublin Hellfire Club had acquired a reputation that was irredeemable.

    While participation in associational life for the purposes of leisure would rarely result in such scandal again, it has remained vital. Writing of Britain during the modern period, R. J. Morris asserted that the establishment of voluntary associations – clubs and societies with defined rules and typically charging a membership fee – has been ‘one major response to the problems posed by change and complexity’. This is also true of Ireland, and in recent years it has been the subject of increased scholarly attention. As yet, however, this scholarship has scarcely scratched the surface of the range of clubs and societies or of the variety of their roles, but we know enough about the subject of this chapter – associational forms of leisure, with an emphasis on sport – to state with certainty that between 1740 and the present day this phenomenon has consistently constituted a vibrant aspect of Irish life, reflecting and affecting the dynamics of identity formation and reformation across the period.

    1740–1840

    In his influential study of clubs and societies, Peter Clark contended that by 1800 ‘British voluntary associations had come of age’ and that the English and Scottish, particularly urban-dwellers, lived in ‘An Associational World’. In Ireland, on the other hand, he suggested, there existed a ‘lower incidence of societies’, a state of affairs he ascribed to ‘lower levels of urbanization, the problematic state of the Irish economy in the later eighteenth century, the small size of the Protestant elite, and the importance of traditional forms of socializing and solidarity’, including those associated with the Catholic Church.

  • 11 - The Changing Role of the Middle Classes in Twentieth-Century Ireland

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Joseph Ruane, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University College Cork, Jennifer Todd, Professor of Politics, University College Dublin
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 177-192

  • Summary

    Introduction

    There is an extensive literature on elites and the middle classes in the two parts of Ireland during the twentieth century, but it is uneven by discipline, theme, methodology and time period, and most studies focus only on one part of the island. The dominant historical narrative of twentieth-century Ireland is written in terms of the conflicting projects of unionism and nationalism, their division of the island, the states they built and their subsequent trajectories; discussion of class fills out the narrative. Our analysis foregrounds class as a key analytical category in the making and managing of political divisions and in subsequent developments. We focus on three periods – the late nineteenth century to partition in 1921; 1921 to the transitional period of the 1950s–1960s; the 1960s to the present.

    We give particular attention to the middle class. The concept is notoriously fuzzy and yet unquestionably useful. Viewed in the broadest sense, it is the class that occupies the space between the upper (landowning or industrialist) and the lower (working or landless) class. In Ireland's case – as indeed in other European countries – it includes a large section of farmers, a rural middle class, which is discussed elsewhere in the present volume. Viewed more narrowly, it refers to a largely urban-based commercial, white-collar and professional stratum with a relatively high educational level and distinctive lifestyle and values. We find Bourdieu's concepts of cultural, symbolic, social and economic capital valuable in defining the resources which give the middle class, and the various strata within it, very different degrees of control over their conditions of life, work and familial reproduction, and very different interests and values, than other classes and strata.

    The middle class, broadly understood, possesses sufficient capital to escape the absolute want and dependence of the working class, but without the manoeuvrability or security of those above them. The middle class more narrowly conceived has a further characteristic: the close, reciprocally supportive, relationship that often exists between it and the state. It may be critical of some state policies, but it accepts the state's legitimacy; it staffs the state's middle and higher levels and carries out many of its functions; in return the state provides it with the resources, particularly education, on which it depends.

  • Preface

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp xiii-xvi

  • Summary

    Why another book on thermodynamics?

    I wrote the first edition of this book because Thermodynamics in Geochemistry (Anderson and Crerar, 1993) was not suitable for the teaching I was doing at the time, a second-year geochemistry course for geology specialists and geological engineers. I wanted something shorter and less detailed. Later I wanted to write something more suitable for my students and other graduate students, resulting in the second edition.

    But then the first edition went out of print, and several people told me that it was better for teaching than the second edition, which was seen as more of a reference book despite the fact that it includes just about all of the first edition. So the objective with this edition is to make a book more like the first edition available again, that is, one more suitable for a first introduction to thermodynamics, though with many improvements. Several chapters and appendices of the second edition have been cut, and others made shorter and more concise. Because thermodynamic potentials are the central concept in chemical thermodynamics, the first four chapters extend the ball-in-valley analogy to introduce these, as well as exact and inexact differentials, considerably improving the introduction to thermodynamic theory. There is also an increased emphasis on the importance of field observations in the application of thermodynamics to natural systems.

    The three editions of this book and Thermodynamics in Geochemistry have several features in common, besides the fact that they have an Earth science point of view, and regarding which they differ from other books on thermodynamics. These differences include the following points.

  • • Presentation of thermodynamics as a model or idealization of real systems.

  • • Emphasis on the significance of the fact that thermodynamics consists of single-valued continuous functions.

  • • An approach to entropy which avoids discussion of cycles and the entropy of the Universe: Gibbs, not Carnot/Clausius.

  • • Emphasis on the importance of metastable equilibrium states and thermodynamic constraints.

  • • Emphasis on the fact that time is not a thermodynamic variable.

    • The presentation is exclusively classical, meaning that statistical mechanics is barely mentioned; only equilibrium states and macroscopic variables are considered. Some consider this approach obsolete, believing that classical thermodynamics has largely been superseded by the greater explanatory power of statistical mechanics.

  • 14 - Food in Ireland since 1740

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 233-243

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In 2010, the average Irish adult consumed less than half a pound of potatoes per day: this was a significant drop from an average of just over one pound per day recorded in the late 1940s, but a huge decline from the estimated ten pounds consumed by the pre-Great Famine labourer. Bread, sugar and meat all form a much larger proportion of the diet in Ireland today than in the past. Yet these dramatic changes took place relatively gradually over the period and they are only one aspect of the relationship between Irish society and food. Food is affected by cultural and technological change and the practices of preparing and sharing meals have significance beyond the provision of basic nutrients. Dietary change, especially in the period 1740 to 1900, has been well studied. However, the broader relationship between Irish society and food is only beginning to be explored. This chapter attempts to synthesise a body of existing research on diet with the emerging scholarship on ‘foodways’ to offer some new and old insights into food and diet in Ireland.

    For convenience, the chapter is divided into five chronological sections that coincide with events that affected food preparation and consumption. The Great Famine marks the division between the first two sections and the transition from an early modern to a modern diet. The disruptions of the First World War, the Irish Revolution and the Second World War suggest a third division because of their impacts on farming and trade. The end of the Second World War was not an immediate end to rationing (relevant especially to Northern Ireland), but agriculture and trade gradually stabilised and further changes through rural electrification and the establishment of a Department of Health in the Republic mark a new departure. A further all-island nutritional survey in 1999 conveniently marks the division between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The division is imperfect, but offers a working scaffold for existing research.

    1740–1845

    For the period between 1740 and the Great Famine there is a sizeable literature on food and diet, much of which has focused on the potato. Throughout the eighteenth century, the potato assumed an ever greater importance in Irish diets. The causes and consequences of the potato diet are still debated.

Page 1322 of 1933