The Famine Essay: Ranking Causes Instead of Listing Them
A class is set the question: 'The Great Famine was caused by the failure of the potato crop. How far do you agree?' The limit is 400 words and at least two statistics must be used. Two plans are on the board. Plan 1 lists five factors - blight, subdivision of holdings, dependence on the potato, laissez-faire relief policy, poor transport - and gives each a paragraph of equal length. Plan 2 argues that blight was the trigger while the others were preconditions and aggravating factors, ranks them, and points out that potato blight damaged crops across much of Europe in 1845 while mass mortality was concentrated in Ireland. A third student objects that Plan 2 is unfair because 'every cause mattered'. Mortality in Ireland is usually estimated at about one million, with roughly a further million emigrating by 1851.
1. Which plan would you follow, and what does Plan 1 get wrong?
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Follow Plan 2. Plan 1 gets the genre wrong: it produces a list, and a list is not an argument.
- Equal paragraphs imply equal weight. Giving laissez-faire relief and the blight the same space silently asserts they matter equally, which the student has not shown and probably does not believe.
- Plan 2 distinguishes kinds of cause. Blight is a trigger - sudden, dated, necessary. Subdivision, monoculture and relief policy are preconditions that decide how bad the trigger's effects become. That vocabulary is what turns description into explanation.
- The comparison earns the most credit. If blight hit much of Europe in 1845 and only Ireland suffered mortality on this scale, then blight alone cannot explain the outcome; something about Irish conditions and the response must carry weight. Comparison works as a rough control: hold the trigger constant, and the difference in outcome points to the other variables.
- Statistics must do work, not decorate. The two figures (about one million dead, about one million emigrated) belong where they measure severity and connect it to a named cause.
Caution: the comparison is not decisive. Other European regions had different land systems, different relief arrangements and different degrees of dependence on the potato, so it narrows the field rather than closing it. A strong answer says so in one sentence.
2. Write the opening two or three sentences of the stronger essay and explain each choice you made.
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Model opening: 'The potato blight was the trigger of the Great Famine, but it cannot on its own explain why Ireland starved while other European regions hit by the same blight did not. The answer lies in the conditions the blight entered: a rural economy dependent on a single crop, land subdivision that left millions on plots too small to survive one failed harvest, and a relief system whose assumptions made slow and partial provision. Blight made the crisis; those conditions decided who died.'
Why each move is there:
- Sentence one answers the question immediately with a qualified judgement ('trigger, but not the whole cause'). It does not narrate the history of the potato.
- The comparison appears in the opening so the reader knows the essay has a method, not just a pile of factors.
- The list inside sentence two is ordered: economy, land, relief. That ordering previews the ranking the essay will defend.
- The last sentence states the thesis in eight words. Examiners can find the argument without hunting for it.
What to avoid: 'The Great Famine was a very important event in Irish history which had many causes.' It is true, it is empty, and it uses words the essay will need later to prove something.
3. A student writes: 'The government's response made the Famine worse.' What would you need to prove this, and what makes it hard to prove?
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What you would need:
- A description of what was actually done and when - relief schemes, public works, soup kitchens, the Poor Law - with dates and scale.
- A comparison of stated policy with capacity, so that 'inadequate' means something specific rather than sounding like a moral reaction.
- Evidence linking relief design to outcomes: wage levels on public works, whether food could be bought where it was distributed, how the Poor Law rate fell on small holders.
- A counterfactual, however rough: what a different policy could plausibly have achieved with the same resources and the same transport and administrative limits.
Why it is hard:
- The counterfactual cannot be observed. You are arguing about a road not taken, so the claim must be framed as 'could plausibly have reduced', not 'caused'.
- Attribution is tangled. Deaths have multiple proximate causes - disease, hunger, exposure, displacement - and relief policy touches some but not all.
- Motive and effect are different questions. Officials may have believed they were acting correctly; that does not settle the effect, but it does mean 'made worse' needs evidence rather than indignation.
- Survival bias in the record. The administrative archive is rich on what was done and thin on how it was experienced.
A defensible version: 'Relief design increased mortality in specific places by X, as the following evidence shows.' Precision beats volume.