ABSTRACT
“In some ways”, writes one historian (Freeman, 1957, p. 10), “the story of prefamine times resembles a tragedy rising to its devastating climax”. Irish economic history in the four or five decades before the famine seems in retrospect to lead almost inevitably to disaster. It is tempting to argue that the occurrence of the Great Famine was an inexorable consequence of poverty, overpopulation, and an overdependence on potatoes. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Mokyr, 1980c), such inferences are dangerous. Poverty does not lead inevitably to disaster, and disasters do not require a necessary precondition of poverty. At the most, we can hypothesize that poverty reduced the resilience of the economy and increased its vulnerability to exogenous shocks. The nexus between poverty and vulnerability is not self-evident, however, and requires careful testing.
