IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/wpaper/201302.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Eating People is Wrong-Famine’s Darkest Secret?

Author

Listed:
  • Cormac Ó Gráda

    (University College Dublin)

Abstract

Cannibalism is one of our darkest secrets and taboos. It is the ultimate measure of the resilience or otherwise of civilizational processes to extreme conditions. How common was cannibalism in times of famine in the past? Both the nature of the evidence for famine cannibalism and the silences about it challenge the empirical historian to the limit. After a review of the global historiography, this paper attempts to assess the evidence for cannibalism during Ireland’s many famines, culminating in the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s.

Suggested Citation

  • Cormac Ó Gráda, 2013. "Eating People is Wrong-Famine’s Darkest Secret?," Working Papers 201302, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201302
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/WP13_02.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2013
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ellman, Michael, 2000. "The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 24(5), pages 603-630, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Cannibalism in Ireland
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2013-04-16 19:37:00

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Olesea Ghedrovici & Nikolai Ostapenko, 2013. "The Glaring Socioeconomic Meltdown in Post-Soviet Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus: A Distorted Mindset in Search of a Way Out," International Journal of Business and Social Research, LAR Center Press, vol. 3(5), pages 202-211, May.
    2. Matthieu CLEMENT, 2010. "Food Availability and Food Entitlements during the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine: A dynamic panel data analysis (In French)," Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) 2010-03, Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA).
    3. Polterovich, Victor & Popov, Vladimir, 2005. "Democracy and Growth Reconsidered: Why Economic Performance of New Democracies is not Encouraging," MPRA Paper 21606, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Matthieu CLEMENT, 2009. "Amartya Sen’s socio-economic analysis of famines: scope, limitations and extensions (In French)," Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) 2009-25, Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA).
    5. Polterovich, Victor & Popov, Vladimir, 2007. "Демократизация И Экономический Рост [Democratization and Economic Growth]," MPRA Paper 23012, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Polterovich, Victor & Popov, Vladimir, 2007. "Democratization, Quality of Institutions and Economic Growth," MPRA Paper 19152, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    : famine; cannibalism;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201302. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Nicolas Clifton (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/educdie.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.