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.

The Barren Fig Tree parable is modeled on features of the famine in Egypt to portray the imminent coming of God’s kingdom. The dying tree and dead earth beneath, reminiscent of threatening conditions during the Egyptian famine in Joseph’s time, evoke the prospect of the end of the world in Jesus’ time.

Many people fleeing the massacres, village burnings, slave raids, and famines across southern Sudan from the early 1980s followed paths north to the capital. This chapter starts at the height of this wartime displacement in the mid-1980s, detailing the emergency mutual support and organisation that people undertook, based on older associational cultures and systems rooted in long histories of migration and displacement north. The chapter locates the people whose lives and work are followed through the book, as they build new neighbourhoods and negotiate access, safety, and work within the hostile capital.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.