The Colonization of Waste Land in Ireland, 1780-1845
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3294773 |
|---|---|
| Authors | K H Connell, Kate Connell (0000-0002-8219-9804, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1950 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 44 |
| Publication date | 1950-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2589942 |
| OpenAlex | W2088601663 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
I Ti s not enough to say', a French traveller wrote in the I 830's, 'that land is desired in Ireland; it is envied and coveted, it is torn to pieces and the fragments are fiercely contested: when it cannot be occupied by fair means, it is seized by crime.'2 With the land almost the only resource for a population that probably doubled in the sixty years between the I780's and the Famine, symptoms of land-hunger were starkly evident. The peasant's idling, in spite of his critics, hardly proved that he was innately indolent. It showed, of course, how an elastic rent deadened the incentive to labour, but it pointed also to the practical difficulty of being industrious when holdings were tiny and families large. A second sign of the disproportion between labour and land was the increasing attention paid to tillage in a country that was better suited to pasture farming. By I8I5 more land was tilled than ever before. Yet in the post-war years there was no widespread swing back to pasture: it is probable, in fact, that tillage remained the expanding element in Irish farming right up to the Famine.3 In the third place, the extreme fragmentation of the land pointed unequivocally to land-hunger: leaving out of account the not inconsiderable number of holdings of under one acre, 45 % of all holdings recorded in the Census of I84I were under five acres; in I846 54 % of all holdings were valued at under $5. The remarkable thing is that in spite of intensive farming and of surplus labour, in spite of the acute parcellation of the land, there remained idle at the time of the Famine nearly four million acres which agriculturists and engineers were convinced were capable of economic improvement.5 There are two possible explanations of this neglect of more than a fifth of the cultivable area of the country at a time of wretched living standards and
Archaeology · Colonization · Geography · Irish and British Studies
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,15 |
| Citation span | 1992 - 2026 (35) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |