Solanum tuberosum and its near destruction — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

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Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
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James Ripley

Solanum tuberosum and its near destruction

Name: Andrew Martin
Major: History
Hometown: Chicago
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Course project

Abstract

This paper is written to give the history of the potato and its importance in the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s due to the Potato Blight. This Blight, with its resulting famine, has been wrongly called a Malthusian catastrophe, when in fact it was caused by a freak accident a bacterial from the New World and was not an inevitable result of population growth, as the political economist Thomas Malthus proposed. The Famine’s destruction would have been lessened had not the cultivation of one species of potato dominated, and if the simple science of breeding had been applied. But the Great Famine was actually caused by the organization of agriculture in Ireland, which left a large part of the population with nothing to eat but potatoes while the country exported food to England. The paper uses statistics and first hand records as well as books by experts to support its clams. This paper traces the history of the potato and its role as an important food source, its use in Ireland, the Blight and the Great Famine that followed, and the controversy over the cause of the Great Famine raised by the work of Thomas Malthus.

Poster file