A Great Industrial Exhibition in the Shadow of a Great Famine

Liam Kennedy, Emeritus Professor of History, Queen’s University Belfast, discusses the 1853 Great Industrial Exhibition in the context of the Great Famine. The famine of the later 1840s had resulted in the abnormal death of about one million women, men and children, while emigration had denuded Ireland of another one million inhabitants. Some parts of the country, particularly in the West of Ireland, had barely begun to recover from the ravages of that catastrophe.