Bourke / O'Grada The Visitation of God

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84351-456-5
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten

The dramatic failure of the potato crop in mid-19th century Europe caused widespread hunger and distress. In Ireland the impact was probably the greatest, where a million people died and many more emigrated. In this book, Austin Bourke seeks to explain how, from being welcomed originally as a protection against hunger, the potato became the very emblem of famine. The text brings together the author's papers, essays and research spanning a 30-year period. It places the onset of potato blight in its European and American context and reconsiders the role of English ministers and their attempt to stem the disaster.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bourke, Austin

O'Grada, Cormac

Leseproben

Editors’ foreword

Patrick Martin Austin Bourke was born on 10 May 1913, in Dungarvan, where his father was station-master for the Great Southern and Western Railway, and was educated at Ballyduff National School, Mount Sion CBS and at University College, Cork. He graduated from UCC in mathematics and mathematical physics in 1933, winning the Peel Memorial Prize for outstanding graduate of the year. He remained at UCC until 1938, lecturing, completing his M.Sc., and toying with the notion of an academic career in mathematics. Austin, the brilliant student, found time too for an amazing range of extra-curricular activities. He spent a year as president of the Students’ Union, served as editor of the student newspaper, and played active roles in the student dramatic society and the hurling club. He also distinguished himself as a chess player, competing for Ireland at the Warsaw chess olympiad in 1935. Much later, in 1951, Austin would become Irish chess champion. Chess and classical music would remain lifelong loves.

Austin Bourke was a founder-member of the Irish Meteorological Service in 1939. After stints at Foynes, Rineanna, and Dublin Airport, he became assistant director of the service in 1948, and director in 1964, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. Early on, Austin developed a particular interest in agricultural meteorology, the field in which he was to become a world authority. From 1958 to 1962 he presided over the World Meteorological Organisation’s commission for agricultural meteorology. In 1975 he was awarded the William F. Peterson gold medal for his work in the field of plant biometeorology.

As he recounts in the autobiographical memoir reproduced below, in 1955 Austin was seconded by the Meteorological Service to the Chilean government under a United Nations technical co-operation scheme. The Chilean potato crop had been badly ravaged by phytophthora infestans, or potato blight, and Austin’s brief was to analyse meteorological links. The sojourn in Chile, 1956–6, turned his mind to aspects of Irish history, and so began Austin’s lengthy researches on Ireland’s involvement with the potato. These soon began to generate a flow of learned papers, but the culmination of this research was a Ph.D. from the National University of Ireland in 1967 for his thesis on ‘The potato, blight, weather and the Irish famine’.

Obtaining the degree was never a career goal, since for Austin the pleasures of research (like those of playing chess) were truly their own reward. Yet the target of a Ph.D. provided some useful discipline and focus. Curiously, perhaps, the degree was awarded, not in history in Dublin, but in science in Cork. The bureaucratic reason for this was that he had had no formal training in history, but another reason is that Austin’s interdisciplinary brand of history was before its time. However, Kenneth Connell of Queen’s University, Austin’s external examiner, was very enthusiastic about the thesis. It is said that he deemed it worthy of a D. Sc.! The D.Sc. itself was to come in due course, in 1973. It came from the National University of Ireland, in recognition of Austin’s contribution to science.

Remarkably, for many years Austin managed to combine his ambitious interdisciplinary historical researches with a successful professional career in meteorology. Since leaving the Meteorological Service Austin has kept up his professional and academic interests, publishing more papers and working on an EC project on the consequences of climatic change.

Austin’s thesis, ‘The potato, blight, weather and the Irish famine’, was never published, yet it remains a brilliant and awe-inspiring piece of work. It combines great erudition, originality, and readability. It manages to be both objective and sensitive about a topic – the great famine – which popular accounts had tended to over-simplify and historians to shun. Before Bourke, serious Irish famine history was basically administrative history – the tragedy seen from the perspective of the politician, the medical practitioner, the emigration commissioner or the relieving officer. Bourke’s shift of focus to the potato and plant disease and to their impact on the rural economy both before and during the famine opened the field for the economic historian. But Bourke’s account of the potato in Ireland is not confined to the famine era; his treatment of the early history of the potato is simply the best there is, superseding that in Redcliffe Salaman’s enduring classic, The histoiy and social influence of the potato (Cambridge, 1949). The remarkable bibliography – reproduced here in updated form – speaks for the breadth of Bourke’s scholarship. The thesis spawned a wide range of papers by Austin in scientific, historical, agricultural, and meteorological journals, both Irish and international. Most of these papers are included in this volume. Their subject-matter ranges from Irish potato consumption in the pre-famine heyday of the potato to the early spread and diagnosis of phytophthora infestans, the fateful potato blight – a disease unknown in Europe before the 1840s. The potato’s role in the famine prompted Austin to estimate Irish crop yields before and after 1845 and to analyse the foreign grain trade before and during the famine. All these topics are at the core of current research into nineteenth-century Irish economic and social history, and this is evident in the number of citations of Austin’s work in recent research. Whether in estimating the output of Irish agriculture before the famine, in assessing the regional impact of the blight, or in testing claims that Ireland produced enough food to feed its people in the late 1840s, or that a catastrophe such as the famine was on the cards in the 1830s and 1840s, modern economic historians simply cannot ignore the contributions of Austin Bourke.

For the most part Austin’s historical studies have hitherto been known mainly to specialists. We believe that they deserve a wider audience, and hence this book. In addition to the key articles just noted, we have also included long sections of the thesis, previously unpublished, and two series of articles first published in The Irish Times. One debunks some over-simplistic interpretations of the great famine that were in the air in the 1960s (and perhaps are still). The other provides a spirited defence of Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant who controlled the purse-strings in Whitehall during the famine, and the main bête noire of traditional accounts of the tragedy. At the same time, Austin is no apologist for the doctrinaire policies pursued by ministers in the mid-and late 1840s. His work remains as fresh and scintillating as ever.

It is a great pleasure to honour Austin Bourke, a great scholar and a lovely man. Now in his eightieth year, go maire se an cead!

Cormac Ó Gráda,
University College, Dublin

I first heard Austin Bourke talk about the potato blight and the great famine at a lecture arranged by the Biology Society in Maynooth in 1983. Many things stand out about that occasion, but I was particularly struck (as a historian) by the sheer unfamiliarity of the sources used: weather charts, extracts from the Gardeners’ Chronicle, contemporary continental journals published in Dutch, French, German. And then, the effortless mastery of the pre-famine potato varieties, and what each meant in the extraordinary potato-dominated economy that by the early 1800s had come to govern the lives of so many of the poorer classes in Ireland.

It was apparent, too, that years of grappling with the circumstances that combined to produce the terrible tragedy of the famine had not dented the speaker’s humanity, or his sense of balance. It struck me as strange then that Austin Bourke’s research was not better known, not simply by historians, but by the public at large: for his scholarship is worn lightly, and his work is highly readable.

In 1988, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Irish Historical Studies, the opportunity arose to acknowledge the importance of this work. Austin was invited to lecture on the famine at the journal’s anniversary conference; and such was the impact of that lecture that the idea emerged of bringing out a selected edition of his writings as a permanent and accessible record of his famine research. The present volume represents our tribute to this outstanding scholar.

Inevitably, in the course of bringing this work to publication, Irish Historical Studies has built up many obligations to a great many people. For help with funding, we wish to acknowledge the contributions of An Foras Talúntais, Agrolon (Seed Potato Specialists) Ltd. (Croydon), Seed Potato Promotions (Northern Ireland) Ltd., T. Rafferty (Ulster Bank, Maynooth), and above all the School of Irish Studies Foundation, whose generous grant has enabled publication to proceed. We also wish to record grateful thanks to Robert Ballagh, Margaret Crawford, Catherine Marshall, Mary Howard, Adrian Kelly, and of course to the Lilliput Press, who have produced the work to their usual high standard. For permission to reprint articles originally published elsewhere, we are grateful to the Economic History Review, The Irish Times, the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, and Nature.

Jacqueline Hill,
St Patrick’s College,...