Eating People is Wrong: Famine’s Darkest Secret?

Cormac Ó Gráda

No 201302, Working Papers from School of Economics, 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.

Keywords: Famine; Cannibalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-03
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http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4267 First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201302

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