Book ID: CBB001421560

Famine: A Short History (2009)

unapi

Ó Gráda, Cormac (Author)


Princeton University Press


Publication Date: 2009
Physical Details: xiii + 327 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
Language: English

Famine remains one of the worst calamities that can befall a society. Mass starvation--whether it is inflicted by drought or engineered by misguided or genocidal economic policies--devastates families, weakens the social fabric, and undermines political stability. Cormac Ó Gráda, the acclaimed author who chronicled the tragic Irish famine in books like Black '47 and Beyond, here traces the complete history of famine from the earliest records to today. Combining powerful storytelling with the latest evidence from economics and history, Ó Gráda explores the causes and profound consequences of famine over the past five millennia, from ancient Egypt to the killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, from the Great Famine of fourteenth-century Europe to the famine in Niger in 2005. He enriches our understanding of the most crucial and far-reaching aspects of famine, including the roles that population pressure, public policy, and human agency play in causing famine; how food markets can mitigate famine or make it worse; famine's long-term demographic consequences; and the successes and failures of globalized disaster relief. Ó Gráda demonstrates the central role famine has played in the economic and political histories of places as different as Ukraine under Stalin, 1940s Bengal, and Mao's China. And he examines the prospects of a world free of famine.

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Reviewed By

Review Vanhaute, Eric (2010) Review of "Famine: A Short History". Journal of Global History (pp. 182-183). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001421560/

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Authors & Contributors
Alberto Luongo
Massimo Gargano
Mike Murphy
William J. Smyth
Lidia L. Zanetti Domingues
Erasmo D'Angelis
Concepts
Food and foods
Famines
Cross-cultural comparison
Nutrition
Environmental history
Disasters; catastrophes
Time Periods
Medieval
Early modern
Modern
Ancient
Renaissance
Prehistory
Places
China
Europe
Italy
Greece
Parma
Siena
Institutions
Cambridge University
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