Social History:The fashion for "noun-colon" history books shows no signs of flagging. After Salt: (Mark Kurlansky), Britons: (Linda Colley), Fear: (Cory Robin), Fear: (Joanna Bourke), Rape: (Joanna Bourke again), Racism: (George Frederickson), and a string of others, there was an inevitability about Hunger.
Indeed, there is already Hunger: An Unnatural History (by Sharman Russell). The trouble is that such eclectic titles usually deliver less than they promise, even allowing for qualifying sub-titles. As the author of Famine: A Short History (forthcoming), I should worry about this.
James Vernon, formerly of the University of Manchester but now director of the Center for British Studies at Berkeley, has written a fine book that is full of interesting ideas, but that does not even try to tell you everything you should know about modern hunger. Instead, Hunger is a useful collection of loosely-connected essays in British social and cultural history masquerading as something more comprehensive.
NOT THAT 'HUNGER' here is narrowly defined. On the contrary, Vernon pays due attention to hunger in the strict sense, but he also ranges widely - perhaps too widely - from Charles Dickens to George Orwell, from hunger marches to hunger strikes, and from elite attitudes to British working-class poverty in the 19th century to domestic science in the early 20th.
Ireland plays a central role in the first half of the book, as it should in a book about pre-1945 British history. In chapter three, which is on the politicisation of hunger, the Great Famine is pivotal. Although Vernon's critique of elite opinion and Whitehall policy-makers resonates, his account of the Famine, bolstered by some powerful quotations from John Mitchel and high praise for the dated writings of the late George O'Brien of UCD, has a curiously "retro" feel. Mitchel is even credited with Sir Horace Plunkett's memorable quip that "Irish history is for Englishmen to remember and Irishmen to forget".
Ireland also features prominently in Vernon's account of the hunger strike as a political weapon. In 1913 suffragette Hannah Sheehy Skeffington was "the first to try out in Ireland" what would become a fatal weapon in the hands of Thomas Ashe in 1917 and Terence McSwiney in 1920. Some believed (wrongly) that McSwiney's survival for 74 days was linked to surreptitious food supplies, others (more plausibly?) that his endurance was powered by his convictions. Either way, it worked. In journalist Robert Lynd's emotional account of McSwiney's funeral in Cork, "London . . . learned more Irish history yesterday than it had ever learned before". Mahatma Ghandi also features - Vernon notes how one of his famous fasts was prolonged by an infusion of sweetened lime juice - and there is an excellent discussion of the early-20th-century controversies (echoes of Guantanamo) surrounding forced feeding.
Chapter two is about the humanitarian "discovery" of hunger, which Vernon dates to the 1840s. One can go further back. Although the massive Irish famine of 1740-41 - possibly more murderous in relative terms than even that of the 1840s - seems to have elicited no organised support from across the Irish Sea, in 1822 a "London Tavern Committee" raised funds to relieve a much smaller famine. Vernon highlights the humanitarian focus on Ireland in the 1840s, when several similar ad hoc groups were set up. By the time of the Great Northern China Famine of 1876-1879, when Chinese expatriates from far-flung corners of the world remitted money home, humanitarian relief had been truly globalised. In 1943, donations raised in London for Bengal included those of "a blind lady of 85", "a blind and bed-ridden pensioner", and "many small children who had sacrificed their pocket money". In none of these cases, alas, was philanthropy enough.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s and its associated political protests led to the re-discovery of "Hungry England" and the first scientific efforts at measuring the extent and geography of hunger and malnutrition. The Jarrow "Crusade" (October 1936) was the culmination of a mode of popular protest that began with a series of small marches in the 1900s. Ironically, the global war which soon followed, like the first World War, was good for the nutrition of ordinary Britons, since universal food rationing led to the poor being better fed. As infant mortality fell in wartime Britain, it rose in neutral Ireland.
British war efforts led to starvation elsewhere, however. The two million dead in Bengal were the unwitting colonial victims of a just war - but not one of their making. Vernon also notes how many Britons had campaigned for an end to the Allied blockade of Germany in 1918-1919 that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. He might have cited an early academic assessment of that blockade, which found that "no means could have been more effective" in breaking the morale of an enemy deemed a threat to European civilisation. For several months after the armistice the Allies allowed shiploads of food to spoil in Dutch ports rather than risk a recovery in German morale. Only the fear of Bolshevism prompted an end to the blockade.
Hunger, which makes effective use of unsettling and evocative illustrative material, also contains strong sections on the campaigns to educate the British public in what to eat, although little about food per se. Ironically, it comes at a time when about one Briton in six is clinically obese, and when "obesity" registers four times as many hits on Google as "malnutrition".
Cormac Ó Gráda is professor of economics at UCD. He has just completed a short global history of famine. His last book was Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton, 2006)
Hunger: A Modern History By James Vernon Harvard University Press, 359pp. €25.50