Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century has been immune. Its scars—economic, psychological, and political—can long outlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness, yet the twentieth century suffered some of...

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s.

The paper builds on media reportage of rice and other prices, political controversies, and food drives, to review the historiography of the Great Bengal Famine.