Cormac Ó Gráda MRIA, economic historian
Professor Ó Gráda’s solo and collaborative research over a long, and much-enjoyed, career as an economic historian has seen him engage with topics ranging from the British industrial revolution and the civilian casualties of the two World Wars to the global history of famine and Irish emigration and immigration.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
Cormac Ó Gráda MRIA, is an economic historian and professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2010.
Aoibhinn beatha an scoláire
Bhíos ag déanamh léighinn;
Is follus díbh a dhaoine
Gur dó is aoibhne in Éirinn.
The first quatrain of that happy seventeenth-century poem still rings true for me. I am an economic historian—an economist by training and a self-taught historian. Over a long career, the focus of my work has shifted from an initial concentration on IrelandFootnote 1 to topics such as the global history of famine and the British industrial revolution. I have nearly always had a few irons in the fire at any one time.
As befits an economic historian, I have written several solo-authored monographs and published many papers—co-authored and solo-authored—in a broad range of journals. A major current preoccupation is seeing through to publication a new monograph The hidden victims: civilian casualties of the two World WarsFootnote 2. This is both a quantitative and a narrative account of the many ways in which civilians suffered and died during those conflicts. The calculations put the civilian death toll in the two wars at sixty million, or slightly more. Famines were responsible for more than half of the deaths; and half of those who died were civilians of Russia or the USSR.
The book ends on the downbeat note, not without its resonances in 2024, that ‘when push comes to shove, attempts to spare civilians by humanising war fall terribly short’. It is being launched in the Academy on 22 October 2024.
I am also approaching the end of a collaboration with two US-based epidemiologists about the impact of foetal exposure during famines on the prevalence of schizophrenia and Type 2 diabetes. This project is mainly concerned with correcting a common misconception, typified by claims that the high rate of mental illness in Ireland until recently, and of diabetes in present day China, were the product of foetal exposure during major famines in the 1840s and in 1959–61, respectively. While the evidence that foetal exposure makes people more vulnerable to those diseases is robust, its impact on their incidence in the broader population has been greatly exaggerated by some. So far, this project has yielded two papers, my firsts in medical journalsFootnote 3.
Two more ongoing collaborations refer to different aspects of Irish emigration and immigration. One is an analysis, using probate and infant mortality data, of how Irish immigrants and their descendants fared in England over the past century and a half. ‘Not great’ until recently, is the short answer.
The other is a study of Irish returnees from the United States over a century ago. It identifies a sample through their having co-resident, US-born children present in their household, as recorded in the online 1911 census, from which my co-author ‘scraped’ the data. The research addresses the selectivity of the returnees. Working draft versions of both studies can easily be found onlineFootnote 4.
Finally, for several years two co-authors and I have been working on a new history of the British industrial revolution for Princeton University Press. In a well-trodden field, the novelty lies in our heavy focus on the role of human capital in the form of artisanal skills, particularly skills associated with working with metals. In addition to other advantages, Britain was well endowed with such human capital and with the coal and iron that spawned it. Moreover, its higher living standards before industrialisation made for healthier and savvier workers. Such advantages, we argue, gave it a head start. A flavour of our work so far may be obtained in journal articles we have already publishedFootnote 5.
