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What made the Irish famine so deadly

The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.

The two-volume work is called the “Tables of Deaths.” Because the census relied on the information given by survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose entire families had been wiped out or had left Ireland as desperate refugees, it actually underestimated the number of lives lost in the Great Hunger. William and his assistants were nonetheless able to build solid pillars of data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to represent sexes, ages, locations, seasons, years, and causes of mortality, which included starvation, scurvy, dysentery, cholera, typhus, and relapsing fever. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”

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