Guest editorial: Colonialism and the Irish Famine

There are at least three sets of intellectual issues with which Nally engages in his book on the Irish Famine of 1845–1852. In the first place, Nally looks at how disasters are explained. Following the work on the social distribution of vulnerability (Blaikie et al., 1994; Sen, 1982), Nally looks at the longer- term effect of the colonial administration of Ireland and at the shorter-term management of the famine itself. In broad terms, Nally accepts that while the presence of a potato blight was to some extent an event from the realm of, admittedly humanly reorganized, nature, the famine itself was instead a matter of social and political choices, for grain that could have been used to feed humans was exported, or was used in distilling, or was fed to animals. Nally uses modern discussions of food security and food sovereignty to raise questions about the relations between commodification and food distributio