ABSTRACT
This article utilizes the recently-discovered archive of a firm of Irish land agents to investigate landlord-assisted emigration from some of the firm’s client estates during the 1840s, and during the famine years in particular. Such emigration was not merely a response to starvation in Ireland: much of it was also a precondition for improvement of estates, especially in western parts of Ireland. It is concluded that landlord-assisted emigration during the famine was probably on a larger scale than modern historians have hitherto assumed: however, precise and verifiable estimates of the numbers involved will remain an impossibility.
