Ireland was as Malthusian as a place could get. Thanks largely to potatoes, its population had grown faster than anywhere else in the Isles, from 5 million in 1800 to over 8 million in 1820. But rural poverty went well beyond what Cobbett saw in England (figure 8.10), and because England’s steam-powered cotton mills had undercut old-fashioned textile mills in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, Ireland was actually de-industralising by 1840. So when the fungus ‘Phytophthora infestans’ arrived from America in 1845, turning plump, firm potatoes into inedible black slime, the ensuing ‘positive check’ – Malthus’s euphemism for starvation – went beyond anything seen in centuries. Several thousand starved; typhus and dysentery killed a million; and even more took ship for England or America. ~ Page 352
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Dinesh said: