Mokyr, Joel

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Mokyr, Joel
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Mokyr, Joel

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  • Publication
    The height of Irishmen and Englishmen in the 1770's : some evidence from the East India Company Army records
    (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, 1989)
    Mokyr, Joel 
    ;
    Ó Gráda, Cormac 
    This article compares the heights of 1,000 Irish and English men recruited for service in India by the East India Company in the late 1770s and early 1780s. The height data serves as a guide to determining the economic conditions of various regions in Ireland and England. Despite the law against Irish recruitment, Robert Brooke, an Irish soldier, entrepreneur and administrator, "turned a blind eye" to recruiting Irish men for the East India Company. Many had native Irish surnames, suggesting a "strong catholic representation" among Brooke’s recruits. Included are various tables and graphs, which show the Irish in each age group to be taller and to have reached adult height at an earlier age than the English. Furthermore, the height data suggests that despite coming from a conventionally poorer socio-economic background, the Irish recruits were healthier than the English recruits. The article includes biographical background on Brooke, a letter from the East India Company to the British government asking for Irish recruitment, and statistics of deaths, desertion and transfers among Brooke’s men.
      325
  • Publication
    What do people die of during famines : the Great Irish Famine in comparative perspective
    (Cambridge University Press, 2002-12)
    Mokyr, Joel 
    ;
    Ó Gráda, Cormac 
    The Irish Famine killed over a million people who would not have died otherwise. The nosologies published by the 1851 Irish census provide a rich source for the causes of death during these catastrophic years. This source is extremely rich and detailed, but also inaccurate and deficient to the point where many scholars have given up using it. In this article we try to make adjustments to the death-by-cause tabulations and provide more accurate ones. These tables are then used to analyse the reasons why so many people died and why modern famines tend to be less costly in terms of human life.
      7123Scopus© Citations 59