Irish Plantation and Famine
Colonization, export during starvation, and depopulation
English and later British rule in Ireland combined plantation dispossession with a famine policy that let a million people starve while food was exported. The island lost a quarter of its population in a decade.
Damage
Plantation dispossession and famine politics produced mass death and forced emigration.
Lives lost
About one million dead in the Great Famine; millions emigrated
Value lost
Land transfer to settler/landlord class; demographic collapse
Record Points
- Tudor and Cromwellian plantations confiscated Irish land and settled it with British colonists.
- Penal laws barred the Catholic majority from land, office, and education.
- During the 1845-1852 famine, grain and livestock continued to be exported from Ireland under armed guard.
- Around one million died and one million emigrated as London held to laissez-faire doctrine.
- Ireland's population never recovered to its pre-famine level, a demographic wound still visible today.